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Comment by zecho | Hacker News Reader

I think it's funny that people argue Google's more relevant. One of the reasons I got fed up with Google was the constant link spam in it from the content mills like Demand Media. Which is why I gave DDG a go. Maybe things have changed at Google, but they lost me as a heavy search user. Habits have completely changed.

I've been using DDG for quite some time (months) as my main search engine and it's been great. I'd say I only need to hit Google once every 50+ searches.

The inline results from Stack Overflow, Youtube and Wikipedia are excellent. That and the keyboard shortcuts are more natural to me (specifically j/k) than Google's (tabs and arrows).

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"One of the reasons I got fed up with Google was the constant link spam in it from the content mills like Demand Media."

Exactly. Half of the results for most Google searches I do are mostly garbage. DDG consistently returns far higher quality results than Google for me.

The litany of pro-Google posts in this thread really make me wonder if there are conflicts of interest the posters aren't disclosing (ie. how many of them work at Google?)

(Since I brought it up - in the interest of disclosure I'll say that I have no financial interest in or association with any search engine or web site.. or any company whatsoever, to be honest)

Or you know, the fact that it's the most popular and widely visited website in the world.

I don't work at Google in case you're wondering. But you say you have no financial interest in DDG which makes me wonder if there are interests you do have in them that you aren't disclosing.

The only interest I have in DDG is that of a satisfied user.

I bet that's not the case for a lot of the other people commenting here on Google. More than a few of them are probably Google employees and/or have some other financial interest in Google and aren't disclosing it.

"I don't work at Google in case you're wondering."

Working at Google is not the only way you could have a financial interest in them.

After Panda and a few other search ranking improvements were implemented, the spam you're referring to has pretty much disappeared.

It's still pretty bad for mailing list archives. Archiveorange, ugh. Markmail, nabble (the one that is actually decent), the fact that I can name these sites from memory proves how truly badly deeply Google has let these duplicate content sites infect results.

I agree, for about 95% of my searches the results are vastly improved, but I still run into the occasional search that's just a spam minefield. Recently my boss asked me to look into purchasing windows licenses, and between the google spam and the awful microsoft.com experience (everything requires silverlight, which I can't install, and half the links opening .docx instead of just a webpage) it was far too difficult. /rant

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