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Comment by yegg | Hacker News Reader

Hi all (CEO & Founder, DuckDuckGo here). Looks like something may have broken in a release that went out today -- it is triggering a JS error. We're looking into it now and should have it resolved soon.

UPDATE: this should be fixed now.

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Fixed for me (UK), would be interesting to hear what the error was. I did so love the time when you were developing DDG and posting to HN about your progress and getting suggestions from the community and whatnot. So glad it worked out for you.

Thanks! It was a regex error.

Similarly to DNS, its always regex.

Why doesn't DDG return consistent results?

If I search for something, I'll get a list of results, potentially even a featured wikipedia entry or whatnot on the right. If I click on one of the top ranked links and realize it's not what I want, the results page is completely different when I return to it via the back button. e.g. just now I wanted to go back and click on that featured wikipedia link but it's gone now.

FWIW this is the sort of behavior that means I just append '!g' to most queries.

Thanks for acknowledging it and sharing helpful info. It seemed bizarre for a short moment.

Hello! Why has DDG gotten so worse lately? I thought it was just me but I keep reading the same experience on HN. There is no way you don't know about this?

Asking as a long time user and at a time even DDG evangelist.

Cheers!

I signed up for Kagi finally. Still figuring out if it's worth it, but the more important thing is that I was moved to even consider it and do it.

The mighty yegg does not answer such questions.

But if you must know: it's talent exodus coupled with deteriorated market share.

Probably because they've been piggybacking off other's search indexes for a while, and the Western World seems downright opposed to actually providing an accurate index of the actual content of the Internet.

There's only so much you can do when your primary index builder's search indexes are probably more accurately reconstituted from https://www.lumendatabase.org/lumendatabase

than their live index.

But hey, that's the price of innovation, right? Can't denormalize access to frigging anything. Have to maintain the info asymmetry.

I feel like the crowd of e-rubberneckers that gathered here made it seem like a bigger bug than it was...

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