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Comment by wsdrdsw | Hacker News Reader

I went to set DDG on all my devices a few months ago because it was the "right" thing to do but expecting to get inferior results and needing to use the g bang a lot, surprisingly it turns out I never had to use it. Ordinary search has changed with the siloization of the internet: twitter, subreddits, stackow, github, official pages, all the big silos are easy to find and offer superior internal discovery, the fact that google might (or not) be better at ranking the long tail is losing relevance fast.

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It's been my experience that Google has heavily deranked or outright delisted the long tail anyway. Almost all results are either major media sites, reddit, github, similar large sites, or blogspam. Older sites are often outright delisted, newer sites usually just have some sort of huge deranking penalty that often makes their results unfindable, unless you are able to search for an exact quote on that site. It's really bizarre, there are a TON of extremely valuable content-rich niche sites out there that are far better than, for example, the Wikipedia treatment of their subject, but Google search hates them.

I am actually quite puzzled by what they choose to index now or not - for example, you'll find that a lot - but not all - of HN comment pages are not indexed or delisted.

So it really doesn't seem surprising to me that Google search can fairly easily be beaten nowadays.

EDIT: Well, in my quest for an example of a delisted HN comment page, which I have run into before, I found something even more curious: a page that does appear in the index if I search by title, but not if I search by some of the page contents (eg site:news.ycombinator.com my username and the word 'eliding') reflected in the Google cached version of the webpage.

EDIT2: I checked on DDG and searching on site:news.ycombinator.com for amezarak eliding does turn up the comment that Google can't find.

I find image search to be almost entirely useless but the normal search is generally sufficient. The last time I used DDG the geographic results were frustratingly inconsistent. I’d get restaurants in different countries and whatnot.

Actually when you are searching for something to print (like coloring pages) DDG is much more useful as you can actually open the image as an image. Google seems to have stopped doing that.

I’m not a big fan of leeching people’s content like that. Though it’s very convenient for the consumer.

I agree, and probably I may buy more coloring books if it weren’t for ddg. Although we have many and still my daughter wants a specific one with a unicorn and a princess and spends a lot of time picking one. The alternative to this is “take on from you coloring books you already have.” So I guess nobody is really losing anything in this case, except me, I pay for the toner in the printer as well as for the coloring books ;)

I do the exact same with my kids. I’m not “innocent” of my own perspective either. :)

> I’m not a big fan of leeching people’s content like that. Though it’s very convenient for the consumer.

Except the internet was built to let us leech content from eachother.

If there would have been a capitalistic mindset behind it, I guess they would have started with taking your credit card number back in 1960.

Whatever you think the Internet was built for doesn’t matter. Copyright exists and some people want to retain their rights to share an image without people just wholesale scraping it without even visiting the website.

This antisocial behaviour of walking in and taking whatever isn’t bolted down leads to an unfortunate arms race of watermarks, other technologies, and crappy laws that attempt to stop consumers from disrespecting the rights of producers.

Whether intended or not, Google at least makes you visit the website before taking the images. (Which is contrary to all the times google does this for its own benefit.)

The number of people who produce desirable content are drastically outnumbered by the number of consumers, so I’m very guarded about any rhetoric that fixates on consumer rights at the cost of producer rights. Naturally they don’t get an equal voice.

Same here. DDG is also superior if you are searching for controversial information which Google bans.

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