Comment by russellbeattie | Hacker News Reader

Comment by russellbeattie | Hacker News Reader

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Google defines what good search results are. Any company trying to compete with them is just tilting at windmills. They'll always be a step behind, forever. "Hey, why does Google show me x and DDG doesn't?", "Why is it so hard to find x on DDG, it's on the first page of Google." Etc. It will never be the reverse for 99% of users.

And face it, for all its flaws, Google's index is larger, it has more servers, has way more signals to use - including its own web browser, DNS and ads - more money to spend and actual computer scientists who've been banging away at the problem for decades. Bing is just Microsoft's way of siphoning off some search revenues from the most technically illiterate users who don't know better and never change their defaults on their Windows box they bought at Walmart. MS has zero incentive to improve the results.

DDG is a cute little boutique web site. Good for them. But their impact on Google Search is so small as to be non-existent.

That used to be the case. It's why they rose to dominance (that and the "no extra crap on the page"). Nowadays, Google's search results are pretty meuh. However, the domain has become much more adversarial with many companies devoted to manipulating search results for a fee. Not sure, perhaps "meuh" is the best we can hope for nowadays.

If a service can consistently deliver good results on the first page (like Google used to, 20-odd years ago), they could definitely dethrone Google. Of course, the moment that appears to be the case, all SEO spammers start focusing on the new rival and the newcomer's job becomes a lot harder.

google results seem meh when you compare them to google results. go and try and use duckduckgo or brave search for anything more than basic one or two keyword searches, and you’ll be back to google like a shot

That's just not true. I switched from google at least two years ago (first to cliqz now DDG), and haven't looked back ever since. And I run pretty technical queries. When I try google again, it's not better, and many times it's worse.

I've been setting DDG as my default search engine on all browsers for at least 4 or 5 years.

Sometimes I get terrible results and add a !g to my search query to see if le gouglè gives me something better. Almost every time it's just as bad. Usually because of SEO crap.

lack of quote search is a huge downside for me

I find DDG to be better than anything other than finding local stores, but I just use (google) maps for that anyway.

When was the last time you tried. It is somewhat topic dependent but I've been using brave for a couple of month and have not missed any (except for significantly less content farm results). I sometimes revert back to Google, but at the same time I also used other engines for better results when on Google.

I tried a couple of weeks ago. my conclusions were solidly in favour of google, despite reluctance on privacy concerns

I felt that for technical searches past a certain number of keywords (2 or 3), ddg and brave tend to lose focus where google doesn’t, a problem exacerbated by the lack of quote search on either

google also much better answers local questions, like “[supermarket] [location] opening times”, and indexes wikipedia more usefully, plus ten other integrated features you don’t miss until they’re gone (e.g. imdb)

I didn’t notice a change in SEO spam between the alternatives. I would imagine brave have made an effort here, but as far as I know, duckduckgo filters their content less than google does

finally, brave lacks maps, which is incredibly annoying

Would love to hear from you if we succeeded with both at you.com - we've worked a bunch on these issues you outline.

I started using DDG a number of years ago out of principle, even though its search results were clearly worse than Google's (but still mostly acceptable). Quite often I fell back to Google to get better results.

After a while, things started to change. I don't feel the need to fall back to Google nearly as often anymore, and when I do I'm very unhappy with the results from Google. They're often worse than what I get from DDG.

YMMV of course. And yes, DDG's impact on Google Search is probably negligible, but market share is often only verly lightly related to quality.

Good morning! Always fun to come back and see a pretty straightforward comment getting downvoted to oblivion. :-)

To be clear, I wasn't saying the current state of affairs was a good thing, I was simply stating in detail that Google is still a gargantuan machine. Unless a competitor is somehow able to fire a couple of torpedoes down a hidden exhaust port, they're all going to be outgunned for the foreseeable future. But sure, the unpredictable vagaries of public sentiment could somehow turn against them, I guess. I mean, it's going to be a while. Their company name is a verb.

Yeah, I'm going to have to disagree with you on that. I was part of the Kagi beta test and I think the results were on average better than Google, and not just for lack of ads. I'm not a Google hater either, but their systems are just not as far in front as they used to be.

What's the fundamental rule to get users to switch products or services? Answer: 10x.

When a competitor's results are 10 times better than Google's - not a little better, or sometimes better, or better if you add a special character to your search, or subjectively better based on your personal preference, but an actual order of magnitude better - then and only then will Google even begin to start worrying about its dominant position in search.

"But Russ," I can hear you say, "How can a search result be 10x better? That's a straw man. What does it even mean to be 'better'? Faster? More accurate? More contextual? More personal? More predictive? Less spam? More niche sites? Less niche sites? More photos? More videos? More news? Less photos? Less videos? Less news? More languages? Less languages? More international? More local? More convenient? More customizable? How can you even measure something like that?"

Exactly.

For me, not feeling spied on was the big part and the search results were also much more consistent and less frustrating. The final parts were the ads, and that I simply try to avoid Google products. 10x sounds like a lot but for me personally Kagi is probably like 30x when you take all the factors into consideration.

> but an actual order of magnitude better

Well, when you can't get the result on Google no matter how you finesse your query, but you can get it on another search engine, is that infinity better?

Because that's the situation.

Disagree. I use DDG because I'm frustrated with Google search results. And granted, sometimes Google is better, so I just add "!g" to my query and let DDG redirect me to Google.

for me I’d be very happy to just use google through a proxy service. google now hides images and maps behind a cookie consent page, so if you’ve got their cookies blocked, you can’t access then

Have to disagree. I've tried DDG and was never impressed enough to switch from Google, but I have found Yandex to increasingly give better curated results, especially for stuff originating in Europe. Bing has also gotten much better, but I don't find it adds anything to Yandex+Google.

Sorry, but as critical as I'm of Google I'm not going to exchange it for a Russian propaganda instrument.

I agree with you, but I also think that it's bad that they are unbeatable. It can only lead to complacency and monopolist behavior.

I think as a society we need to think what it means to have one private company control access to all information.

Thanks. I don't think it's a good thing either. Was just pointing out that their dominance is pretty unassailable.

Maybe, I'm fine over here though, using both ddg and brave search

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