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Comment by supriyo-biswas | Hacker News Reader

Unfortunately, I have to take the contrarian view and agree with some of the grayed out (presumably downvoted?) comments here that DDG's search featureset has stagnated and they're solely relying on the narrative of "Big Tech Bad!" to carry their brand and product forward.

"Big Tech Bad!" isn't in of itself an issue and can be a viable marketing message for ad blockers, VPNs, and products in that space. However, I'm afraid the real innovation in search is happening elsewhere; either in the form of traditional search engines (Kagi, you.com) or large language models (ChatGPT, LaMDA etc.)

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We have actually been continually working on improving our search results. We're working on a new page to detail major updates on a quarterly basis, which should be live in a few weeks.

At the same time, we've been continuously developing our Web Tracking Protections for our browsers and extensions. We also made a page for that here that is already out: https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/privacy/we...

I can't seem to remove terms from search results any more, and I've tried every syntax I could think of. The reason I tried every syntax I could think of is because I couldn't figure out anywhere on DDG where search syntax is explained (other than !bangs.) I could have sworn there was an easily accessible page in the past that explained that.

I strongly second this. Bring back manual control of search results and allow me to exclude words!

You open the DuckDuckGo website, select "Help" from the sidebar and write "syntax" into the search box: https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/sy...

The main problem I have with the syntax is that "-" doesn't remove that term from the search results. In fact I'm not sure what it does.

For example, search "cats" and "cats -adopt". The second result for me in both cases is "Cats for adoption".

That is true, no arguments against that. I merely wanted to point out that it is relatively easy to find the mentioned help page.

Wishlist:

1. Make quoted words and phrases work as intended, please. When I say: elixir "ecto.schema" tutorial, that's exactly what I mean and I want search results to reflect that.

2. Respect the minus sign. Almost every time I use it it's completely ignored.

Serious question: what's the alternative? I've been using DDG for 1-2 years now (switched away from Google), but I'm open to trying alternatives.

My rough requirements are:

1. Ads are served based on searches, not tracking me across the web (I could also probably be convinced to pay a reasonable price for an ad-free search engine, but the search better be _really_ good)

2. Something similar to DDG's bangs. And yes, I know I can replicate the effect myself in browser, but that's not what I want - I want the pre-existing library of them.

3. Ability to search a specific site, (i.e. Google's/DDG's site:example.com)

4. Image search (bonus points for a reverse image search)

Kagi. Search results are far better than DDG, and all the customizations they offer bump the quality higher than Google for me.

I took a look, but I am _very_ worried they will drop my account for (as their ToS puts it) "our provision of the Services to you is no longer commercially viable".

It allegedly costs them $1 for every 80 searches. On the 5 days of the week I do my day job I probably average 60-80 searches per day.

Interesting. I have a horrible habit of typing just the beginning of a domain name and then letting the search engine find that website for me. So I end up searching hundreds of times per day. Kagi has not complained to me so far.

I think that clause is in their ToS to prevent actual misuse of the service, e.g. building a scraper. Saying that, I agree that it's a concerning provision.

I don’t think this is that contrarian of a view.

I, for one, assumed that at least half of HN would agree with you. HN has a skew of people that are pro DDG, but not so much that this is all that contrarian of a view

> they're solely relying on the narrative of "Big Tech Bad!" to carry their brand and product forward.

I don't know, that is kind of the whole purpose of DDG to begin with.

Every company can market themselves the way they want. I’m simply lamenting the choice that DDG has made, in the same way Steve Jobs lamented the marketing-heavy PepsiCo for a lack of attention towards their products.

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