Ask HN: Why are DDG search results so shitty?

Can you please clarify on why you think they are so shitty? I'm not disagreeing, but you'll have to justify here.

For 99% of my searches I already know which websites I want the results from, and DDG is kinda pretty good at showing me those websites. Sometimes the results are not great, but I feel Google has not really been showing me better stuff once I switch to it.

The one thing Google has as a major advantage is being able to correctly guess the language I type in when I'm not typing English. I wish there was a way to specify "never show me results in Spanish, I'm never typing Spanish". But that kinda defeats the purpose of a search engine that knows nothing about me.

Also, there are some searches that I always make and always click the same result, and for those Google's ability to know about me and remember my history is kinda helpful.

I believe Google uses UX data to influence the search results.

- They have access to the entire internet stack: Android --> Chrome --> Google Analytics.

- Every major platform; YouTube, TikTok, LinkedIn, Instagram and Facebook use UX metrics to influence reach of content in the newsfeed.

- If you think about it, wouldn't UX metrics like time on-site, pages visited, bounce rate, etc be the best measure of whether one page is more helpful to Google's searchers than another?

- Google is considered the world's most innovative big data company. It doesn't make sense that all of their platform peers are using UX metrics to influence reach + Google's access to the UX data, that they would NOT use it.

DDG and Microsoft, nor any other search engine have access to this data, thus their search results can, and will never be as good.

I've been using DDG regularly since 2012 or so. For most of that time the results have been great. I sometimes read comments about how people struggle with switching from Google to DDG, and I always thought those comments were.. "nonsense" is a strong word, but "not at all my experience", anyway.

But yeah, in the last.. maybe a year, DDG results have gone to shit. I've actually started using the !g on occasion, which I had never been using before. (The !g results are not good either, but a lot of times they are bad in a different way at least.)

I don't know. Maybe searching is just terrible in general now.

Define "shitty", then define "so shitty"

I split my searches about 50:50 between DuckDuckGo and Qwant

Both seem equally good (or bad, depending on your perspective)

Then you have Bing

And at the bottom of the pile is Google

...in my experience and for my use cases

Maybe you're running into an area where another search engine does "better" (based on whatever highly-subjective personal criteria you're applying)

I get better results from DDG than Google.

I think you'll have to elaborate. For me the results are fine.

Monetizing and Marketing has shitterized all search engines.

It's Bing