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Comment by mirkules | Hacker News Reader

I started using DDG around 2011. The progress they made is nothing short of incredible. I've completely switched to them around 2015 or so. I've used Google exactly twice last year. I'm curious what kind of queries yield you 30% garbage results?

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I'm not the person you asked, but my experience seems mostly tied to the lack of depth on the indexer they (use/inherit from bing). GitHub issues are #1 on that list, mailing lists and other esoteric backwaters of the Internet are another.

I try very hard to always use the "Report Bad Results" in those circumstances

I agree. I !g for about one search per month; otherwise, garbage results are far less than 30% for me.

Here is an example:

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=web+worker+message+transferable&t=...

vs actual content on YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=web+worker+mess...

Bing is for some reason pretty bad at indexing programming related queries.

DuckDuckGo is awesome, I advocate for DDG as much as I can, and I switched completely a few months ago both on my phone and my PC, but I'm genuinely curious about how you were able to completely switch. Unless you also use the !g command?

I'd love for there to be a "permanent !g" option, because Bing (DDG's default engine) just doesn't cut it. Like, at all. And it's not like I do fancy searches all the time, or ever really. But unless I am searching for a very popular, basic term, most of the time DDG's results either show nothing relevant at all on the first page, or there's one or two results that are relevant, often times the most relevant (like, say, a product page for a product I'm searching for) being shown pretty far down on the page, with third party sites being up top.

In either case, I try !g and immediately find what I'm looking for on the front page. Like it's a whole new world. At this point I am using !g 90% of the time and it gets frustrating; I have half a mind of switching back, but I really don't want to do that, because Google needs to go.

Even when I add "site:xyz.com" or (gag) "site:reddit.com", while DDG's results are better in these cases, just in case I'll try "!g" to see if I missed anything and... bam, even more relevant results I never saw before.

I think Apple needs to enter the search engine business. Bing is just not good enough, and Google is evil. I've moved away from Google Maps, Gmail, Chromecast, and anything else Google I can move away from... but it's the best search engine by far and it's the one instance where it really does make me less productive if I use the alternative.

Why would you need permanent !g, that defeats the purpose of DDG? Use google if you like it so much.

My DDG experience is awesome and Google could die tomorrow for all I care. Not sure if my experience is due to the domains I typically search for though, which are highly scientific/engineering related.

> I think Apple needs to enter the search engine business.

Relevant: https://www.macrumors.com/2022/01/05/google-pays-apple-stay-...

When I search for super technical things I sometimes get less relevant results. Also when I remember Something I read years ago and try to find it (in other words it’s not widely linked anymore) I get better results from Google. Not overall I vastly prefer DDG.

I find that startpage(google) tends to do a bit better with very specific warnings, serial numbers for chips, etc. I get SEO spammers aren't really looking for people who are looking for why an obscure arm processor has just failed.

Any time I get garbage on DDG, the same garbage is on Google with identical query.

Only reason to use Google for me is some extra features like site:xxx (it looks like they added this one to DDG finally).

I am honestly very happy that DDG is so great and I can't stop supporting dark Google patterns.

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