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Comment by PragmaticPulp | Hacker News Reader

I have the opposite experience most of the time. I’ve been trying to use DuckDuckGo as my default search engine but I end up clicking my Google bookmark a lot of the time because the DDG results are so low quality.

I have no doubt there are edge cases where Bing/DDG outperform Google, but most of the time I have better luck with Google.

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Yeah, Google is still my default browser, though I haven't used other engines enough to develop a strong opinion here.

I'll add that I could have been more clever with my query. For instance, if I surround the lyric in quotes, Google returns the right result first.

Original query: like you didn't care I don't know why lyrics r&b

Improved query: "like you didn't care I don't know why" lyrics r&b

At the end of the day, I'm not frustrated with Google. I use it every day and it saves me lots of time. It just amuses me that in some cases, other engines that probably use simpler search algorithms are objectively better. And in this case, I think it's fair to expect Google to produce the right result on page 1.

Most of the time duckduckgo doesn’t even acknowledge quotations. I can’t tell if it’s because there aren’t results for when the query contains quotations or if they simply don’t acknowledge them most of the time. Either way it’s annoying and it makes me go back to google every time.

Do you have an example query?

These are some I found in my search history, where I then switched to !g. Not sure if all these examples still fail to produce results with the matching string (but they still seem to have issues, upon a quick glance):

"packages not in the aur"

rake "invalid session id"

"pacman -Qm"

arch "The pgAdmin 4 server could not be contacted"

"previous definition of HTML_NAMESPACE was here"

illustrator "print preview" is darker

systemd Loaded: bad-setting "has a bad unit file setting"

I think you also need to put a + in front, for ddg to pay attention.

I'm still on dogpile. It gets me where I need to go most of the time.

I'll check it out!

Funny enough, when I search for your second query on Google right now, the top result for me is your comment right here.

I’m now using Kagi (beta paid search engine), but I have used DDG for some years and rarely had to fall back to google. Most of the time it was only to make sure there really is no result, as DDG ignores what you searched for even more aggressively than Google.

Same here, one thing I find especially annoying with Bing/DDG/Brave is that they not only return worse results, but sometimes completely nuke certain search terms, e.g. try "aoi jav" (NSFW) in Bing image and video search. It gives zero results. Regular text search gives a few, but also looks heavily censored. Try the same thing in Google and you get millions of results.

Don't fully understand what is going on here. Safe search is disabled. Worse results would be expected, but zero results seems like an excessive amount of censorship. Other similar search terms work fine.

I have found that for technical results, and niche programming, and anything really to do with IT, google gives top results. For just about everything else, use any other search engine.

Maybe they get the most of their user feedback from their own engineers.

Has to be pretty niche for that still to be the case in my experience. If I search for help on, say, a bit of python syntax I get endless low quality webpages from Google.

Absolutely opposite of that in my experience. Search for anything technical and Google gives me pages selling programming courses, or it just omits the technical part of the query(like the name of the class) and serves pages upon pages of generic results that have absolutely nothing to do with what I'm searching for. It used to be the top engine for programming-related searches, now it's easily the worst.

Its possible that the VPN I am typically on changes my results from yours, as my VPN is quite specific to a research institution, and it is known how google curates results based on that information.

have you tried Bing recently? I tried DDG for almost a year and in every other search I had to switch to Google. I started using Bing a couple months ago and now I only try Google as a last resort (and most often than not I end up not finding what I want)

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