Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwaway67743 | Hacker News Reader

I really want to like ddg but it's just awful - not only are the results completely irrelevant but now it's started showing me russian language results, I'm in a country that uses the Latin alphabet.

View on HN

Google is catching them on the way down in my experience these days. I'm doing less and less !g, not because I like the DDG results, but because I'm just not confident in Google showing me anything useful either.

This might be just a consequence of cutting the feed of data into Google to personalise from other sources, though. Perhaps people who've thought they've been equivalent for a longer period were ahead of me on that one.

How strange, I've been using DDG for a few years now and only rarely do I need to go to Google. Do you have examples of searches where Google is definitely superior (just out of curiosity, not challenging the notion)?

Can't recall a particular one at the moment but pretty obvious searches return results that aren't really relevant enough, maybe I just need to change my query language though, but exact matches really should just work

Recent one from me: "Hibernate window function"

Google showed results that explain Hibernate's expression language isn't sufficient to express them and explainers on how to drop down to native queries.

DDG showed me how to hibernate my windows PC.

I tried the same test, in a clean browser that should have nothing for Google to grab (beyond IP address) to correlate with my browsing habits. Of the top 10 results, Google got the right context in 7, while DDG got it in only one (the 10th in fact). I guess if you work with that particular piece of software, maybe you hit this sort of thing a lot. Thankfully, my experience is more like GP's: I only rarely try sending queries to Google, and for me at least, often those rare cases don't yield anything from Google beyond the realization that I need to figure out a better query.

Yeah, enterprise java tech in general (not just hibernate) seems to be some of the worst. There's enough terminology collision and incentive for blogspam with the number of corporate users, but not enough interest in people using it for personal reason to have high quality blogs, and core pieces of it (Hibernate, Spring, Jackson for example) have shockingly poorly organised documentation.

i also checked bing, and it's the same as DDG, but if you add "SQL" to your search query they turn up a lot of the same stuff as google. Since my goal is getting rid of Google, and it's the first thing I thought to do, it works fine for me

For me, it’s sports schedules and scores. If I type MLS or NHL into Google, I get a schedule with todays games, standings, etc. DDG simply provides search results.

It’s honestly the only thing I still use Google for at this point.

That matches my experience. DDG is only useful if I'm typing in English. If I type in my native language then DDG thinks it's Spanish and shows me a bunch of crap I can't read.

> I really want to like ddg but it's just awful

I use duckduckgo almost exlusively and I don't have any trouble finding what I'm looking for

Just use !g on your query whenever you wanna go to actually use google. Don't trade slightly better search for censorship and privacy invasion.

I just recently started seeing these results too, particularly when doing foreign (latin) non english searches.

I thought at first it was russians talking about hacking foreign banks, supermarkets etc. Then i started noticing links about doctors, etc and i realized something is off.

This is a very recent development. I'll prob have to drop ddg for something else...

Been using DDG for years now, rarely ever have trouble. I mean, sometimes there is a tough query - but the cases where Google is more useful now measure in "less than once a couple of months". Non-English is a bit tougher, I guess - I mostly search in English these days.

I think though, the irrelevancy of results is worse as sometimes the Cyrillic results make sense once translated

try brave search

Fair enough! That’s rough. Apologies I assumed English :)

Well I am a native English speaker but in a Slavic country so I'd expect some results, but they're not they seem to assume russian which means Cyrillic which I cannot read

Reply on news.ycombinator.com