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Comment by mattkevan | Hacker News Reader

I've used DDG as my main search engine for about 4 years now. Until recently I found I was still having to go to Google for specific queries, mainly answering coding problems.

But in the last 6 months or so, Google's results have gotten so bad and DDG has continued to improve to the point where I no longer bother with !g.

When I do use Google I often find myself in the strange position of not actually being able to find what I'm looking for. It's a very unsettling feeling, and not one I've experienced in a long time, possibly not since the pre-Google days of Yahoo, Lycos and AltaVista. Amazing that Google have let their core value proposition of 'we are much better at finding what you're looking for than everyone else' rot quite so much.

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> But in the last 6 months or so, Google's results have gotten so bad and DDG has continued to improve to the point where I no longer bother with !g.

One place that still consistently gives me trouble is Stack Overflow. More often than not, I DDG my search, get two SO links, one irrelevant and the other bad, repeat the search with "!g" and get a half-dozen SO links, 3-4 of which are relevant, and 1-2 of which are good.

I wonder how much this can be explained by Google having a larger sample size of outgoing clicks to measure.

Could be that, but it feels like it weights search-term-proximity higher, and/or tracks more dimensions related to word-connectedness. Like, DDG is more likely to find me a page with all the words but with them scattered about, while Google will get more hits where the words are closer to one another, which is often better specifically for technical searches. Quoting rarely seems to help much, in either case.

[EDIT] Another poster mentioned searches for "X reddit" seeming to have a very-small cap on the number of results from Reddit that it'll display, and that might be part of my problem with SO results, too: maybe their algo prefers to avoid having too many results from one source, which is bad if you expect or want most results to be from one source. That would explain why Google sometimes finds me results with the exact language of my search, that were absent from DDG's listings—maybe it found them, but they got filtered out by a max-from-one-source preference.

And Google groups the SO results, which is very handy. I find myself adding g! after I've seen the limited SO results in DDG just knowing I'll see them grouped and I can click "More from SO"

Isn't DDG a Bing front-end? So did Bing improve recently?

No, we're not. See my comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35980451

But more to answer the OP, we've been making a lot of investments to improve our results (along with other things) -- high-level updates posted quarterly at https://duckduckgo.com/updates

Thank you, I'be been using ddg for last 3 years as default in my phone and pc and its been awesome, dont need google anymore.

I use ddg as my daily driver for about 3 years as well. I do find that searching things like exact error messages from programs are a bit better with !g, but almost all other searches are comparable or better.

Please change the search results so that when I search "X + reddit" all of the search results are reddit, not just the first two.

Actually, now that you mention it, maybe that's my problem with SO searches I called out in another post. Maybe they've got some kind of same-source limit that becomes a major hindrance when you expect most results to be from a single source. I almost never get more than two SO links for a search on DDG, and very often neither is what I need—Google gives me a bunch more, and usually at least one is helpful. And it hadn't occurred to me, but I often end up tossing in a "!g" to reddit searches for a similar reason: not enough results are from Reddit, on DDG. (yes, I could probably do some kind of "site:reddit.com" or something, but "!g" is faster to type and gets the job done)

Have you been using the new button we put there to do that? (I realize you still have to press the button, but curious if you are liking it.)

what button? I must be blind...

This would be very useful because "x reddit" is probably my most common search

Sorry, looks like this new feature is being re-tooled today, but should be up again within a few days!

I personally just use "X site:reddit.com". It's more verbose, but it does what you want.

EDIT: There's also a !bang that does the same thing: !ddgr

what's wrong with site:reddit.com $search1 $search2 ?

If you are not a Bing frontend, do you think it would be please possible to unblock our Fortran webpage at fortran-lang.org?

See here for details:

https://fortran-lang.discourse.group/t/fortran-lang-no-longe...

Bing decided to remove it for some reason and DDG now also removes it from search results, presumably because it uses Bing underneath. For Google it's #1 page when you search "fortran".

Yes, I'll look into it.

Thank you, we really appreciate it!

Why did you remove the page that showed your historical traffic?

This seems incredible to me. The raw results are obviously very close. I get the same results in the same order for searching 'uefi hack':

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=uefi+hack https://www.bing.com/search?q=uefi+hack

And the exclusion filters fail identically, on "uefi hack -bootkit": https://duckduckgo.com/?q=uefi+hack+-bootkit https://www.bing.com/search?q=uefi+hack+-bootkit

And partially succeed identically: 'uefi hack "absolute computrace"': https://duckduckgo.com/?q=uefi+hack+%22absolute+computrace%2... https://www.bing.com/search?q=uefi+hack+%22absolute+computra...

The only differences seem to be the suggestions, infoboxes and similar "value adds."

Reading between the lines it sounds like they are only using their own crawlers and other partners for things like widgets, while all their regular search results are still just Bing.

I was going to say that if the two search engines index and rank in a similar way, you would expect the search to be similar. But, for the `uefi hack` search, the results really are pretty close to identical, and when I do the same search on Kagi and Google, I get different results. I still don't know if it proves anything, but it's a little suspicious.

Check out Phind (https://www.phind.com/) for your coding searches. I’ve been happy with the handful of times I’ve used it. It’s nice to have options beyond Google.

The main thing I still use Google for is when I want to look up offline stuff near me. DDG uses a rough location, but even if I zoom in on their maps near me it's missing a whole lot of local stores etc.

For other searches I usually try DDG first and only fall back on !g when the results are bad, and often the Google results are also bad in those cases.

We have precise user location that is still anonymous to us (by sending a nearish location based on the browser location). Have you tried turning that on? More info at https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/privacy/an...

Thanks. That did help a bit.

I was just using Google maps yesterday to find a restaurant I knew was there. But it wasn't showing up on the map. Then I noticed it was omitting about half the restaurants in the area. The place I was looking for finally showed up when I zoomed almost all the way into it, and then clicked "search this area." I don't know why they are leaving out so many search results on maps these days.

Just a few weeks ago, I was on Capitol Hill in Seattle. Looking for a weed shop. The only ones it would show me were miles away, and I knew there were multiple near me within walking distance. It literally gave me 2 weed shops on the map across the entire city. None anywhere near by.

Their map search has started to really suck balls too.

Absolutely agree Google Maps is also awful. For transit I've completely ditched google for Citymapper (I'm in London). I think at this point Google is a reasonable fallback mostly when you expect to want someone you think would be paying Google.

Remember Goto [1]? The search engine that at the time was much maligned for letting people ... buy sponsored results and arguing it made their results better...

Goto became Overture...

Overture was bought by Yahoo.

But where Yahoo faded away, Google has largely become Goto 2.0.

There are narrow niches where that model works for users. When you're specifically searching for a shop for example, it's often ok.

But for everything else it's absolutely awful.

[1] https://thehistoryoftheweb.com/goto-forgotten-search-engine/

For coding problems that DDG can't answer, I've been falling back on phind.com instead with reasonably good results.

I use chatgpt, the version with web browsing, instead of Google search some of the time and it does pretty well.

Yeah ChatGPT is pretty good at solving coding problems - 'My apologies for the confusion, I misunderstood your requirements earlier. Let's try another approach...' is much better than 'Never mind I fixed it' on a four-year-old Stack Overflow post.

And takes 10x as long. It's good, but it's gotta get a whole lot faster (which I'm sure it will.) It would be really nice if it would in-line the source links it summarized piece of info from too.

The Bing version of ChatGPT does exactly this. It shows you the keywords on your prompts as well.

Actually so does ChatGPT with browsing.

I recently used it while traveling in rural NZ. When I had poor cell signal it was actually way faster because all of the web page loading was taking place in a datacenter, and I only needed to load a websocket response (with cited sources!).

Is this available to "normal" people yet?

Normal people with $20/month to spend and maybe a few days of patience after asking for access.

Can you give some examples of queries Google is unable to find desired results for?

I still have to use !g daily.

same

As I understand it, the problem with Google's search results is that they made SEO the primary determinative factor and didn't publish how their page ranking system worked.

However, it seems that businesses have figured out how the system works, and since there is big money in being the #1 result, people are constantly cramming every technique they can get into their sites to get to that #1 result location, even if it means that humans can no longer find what they are looking for.

Google needs to rework their search algo or they need to die.

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