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Comment by javajosh | Hacker News Reader

My experience with ddg has been very positive over the years. Although I think my eyes have gotten good at skipping over the noise in the search results. It might be nice to offload that effort to software.

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DDG has no idea of the intent of your search based on your previous searches and unfortunately this generates abysmal results for me when searching for something like `ruby xxx`. Those terms rarely return results about the programming language. I unfortunately end up using Google in these situations, always to immediate success.

>ruby xxx

Not sure if the X's were to denote wildcards or if you're after porn actresses named Ruby, but either way it might be worth adding a term to the query to clarify

Oof - muscle memory failure....

That's literally the conversation though. Google has enough context to know that you want programming language results, not porn or gemstones.

Pretty sure you’re using “xxx” as “some generic search term” but if you include literal xxx as a search term, you’re almost definitely going to get some skewed search results.

xxx ** ??? same thing, it's obvious by context

As I indicated in my comment, I was “pretty sure” from context, but fowkswe enclosed their whole search term in backticks. I’m not familiar enough with ruby to know if there’s some valid package called “xxx.” Based on fowkswes response to another comment, it’s clear they meant “some variable search term” and not literal “xxx.” Out of curiosity, I tried a few $language xxx searches on Google & DDG. I get mostly porn results for Rust, Ruby, Julia, Bash, Java in both engines with xxx appended. Interestingly, on Google, Python xxx returns mostly programming results.

I really like that it doesn't "know" me. I've come to appreciate starting from a well-known shared state, often quite empty, and then ranging out from there in my own unique way. I don't want my view of the world to change; I want my behavior to change, which ultimately yields a view of the world that is under my indirect control.

One of the biggest reasons to switch away from Google is to shed that "previous search" bias, and refine + refilter results till you hone in on what you want.

Leaving it to "the algorithm" to decide what to show you based on what it "thinks you want" from previous interactions turns the tool into no better than Twitter or Facebook optimizing engagement by showing you what they think you should see.

It's safe to say that most people searching for 'ruby <term>' have absolutely no idea what the ruby programming language is, and didn't mean to find results for it. If you're running a non-personalized search engine like ddg, which results do you show?

For reference, Ruby is only has 6% on the Stack overflow dev survey https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2021#most-popular-...

I'll take having to write verbose and specific searches over google guessing what I really want any day.

Google seems to have changed to using NLP + "what would the average person potentially mean by this", meaning anything actually specific is nearly impossible to find. I'll have half my search terms completely ignored

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