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Comment by Beldin | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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