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Comment by Buildstarted | Hacker News Reader

It seems duckduckgo removed all the operators like

  -, +, and, intitle, inurl

and others

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Seems to have been a while ago.

Was swearing at it only a few days ago due to stupid results it was showing, while completely ignoring the "-" sign.

Search term:

  solar panel array concrete flat -roof -roofs

Notice how the majority of results still include either "roof" or "roofs" in it?

Fucking useless. :( :( :(

Had to switch to Kagi, which at least seems to honour the negative signs.

I'm not keen on paying for search, but this kind of behavior is exactly the marketing Kagi needs to sway me over.

Web search might be the most valuable single tool I use outside of my computer itself, or my vehicle.

If the only good option was paid, I would pay a lot. I think most other people would, too. But they'll keep using worse free options so long as those are passable.

I'm actually tremendously keen on paying for search, since it means (at least in theory and currently in practice) that I don't have to worry about a paid search engine catering to advertisers instead of me.

Like, it'd be nice if everything were free, but sadly everything has a cost, and we can see what the cost of "free" search is and it kinda sucks.

Please tell me this is an accident. How can you find anything when you can't filter out results you don't want?

Wait, so it's not a bug? Is it some new limitation from the bing API they use?!

I noticed similar on Ecosia so this could be shanigans on Microsoft's end.

  dogs -crazy -cute -sounds site:youtube.com

This seems to be working fine. Even though the search filter doesn't include them in the filters list, the results are getting filtered.

i mean, the search works but the first result I get is "Cute Dogs and Adorable Babies", so the something is weird. If change the search to

dogs -babies -crazy -cute -sounds site:youtube.com

Then I no longer get that as the top result but the fifth result mentions babies.

Yes, but its filters were always iffy. It will filter cute but not CUTE and eventually filtered duckduckgo results eventually get repeated or the exclusions get added with a little bit of filtering.

but why?

So that ignorant internet duckers don't know any good. Its for their own benefit. With the rise of ai, you don't need to feed search operators like a caveman, you just use NLP

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