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Comment by cwoolfe | Hacker News Reader

When this happened to me, I found better results on https://duckduckgo.com/

Duck Duck Go has similar problems for me. It's also recently started sometimes ignoring the "-" when you try to exclude a word.

We put out a partial fix for that recently and a more complete fix is forthcoming.

Partial fix for the minus or the double quotes? Both are such a critical part for searching anything these days, it’d be a real shame to lose either.

Both.

That'll be awesome. The parts of the web that don't respect operands feel awful.

Having a minus act like a plus has been particularly tough (for years now, I believe).

It's crazy how often you're in the comments of HN articles just waiting for a DDG shoutout haha it's appreciated!

Thank you! As a heavy DDG user, PLEASE don't become Google. Stay great and private.

I think the "-" is case-sensitive sometimes. So if you write "-honey" it'll still return "Honey" results, so you have to write "-honey -Honey".

No, it just doesn't work at all. Search /r/duckduckgo for "- operator" to see tons of threads.

I’ve used DDG exclusively for a couple years now and at least with my usecases have found it better than Google in every single way other than images (which I still use it for, but need to do !g to proxy Google maybe 1 in 5 times).

FYI: !gi on DDG for direct Google Images search.

I find better results on it in general.

I use Google as a fallback but these days it happens perhaps once every couple months, and mostly I don't get anything out of it.

Yes. IMO DDG has been better for general questions for a long time.

Google remained better for programming questions for significantly longer (I speculate this may be because Google's own programmers used it, and complained when the results sucked :-)), but now it's not. Not really.

Like you, I still use Google as a long shot, but that's become quite rare.

I sometimes use Bing for Microsoft-specific questions, if DDG doesn't give me what I want. I have the sense that Bing covers Microsoft a little better than the others do. I have no real solid evidence for this, but it seems plausible on the surface.

It depends on the usecase. If you're querying for something local like a restaurant or a store, google wins by orders of magnitude. If you're researching, duckduckgo is fine. Duckduckgo doesn't really compare to Kagi though.

What's wrong with DDG and local searches? I find it exceedingly good, especially with the country selector being so up and front. It's very easy to search for those kinds of things in other places, for example to plan a trip.

Kagi for me is a no-no. I mostly browse on temporary containers, and also have Firefox delete cookies on close. A search engine that requires me to be signed in would be a massive pain to use.

>What's wrong with DDG and local searches

Maybe its different in the US or just not optimised in Germany, but the quality of search results isn't comparable.

Query: "All you can eat Kiel"

Google:

1. a map with the top three restaurants for this context in the foreground

2: a list of restaurants, sortable by price/date/hours

3 to end of page: links to homepages of the top restaurants

DDG:

1. a completely random assortment of irrelevant links on the left

2. a semantic web box with a 3/5 rated irrelevant restaurant on the right

3. wild youtube-videos vaguely related to the query between text results

4. images

5. more wild links

that kind of thing. And Kiel isn't a small city, we even had DDG print ads here.

I'm not in the US. :)

When I try your query I only get a bunch of local German stuff (including a map with restaurants).

I admit, I don't even know what Kiel is so I can't validate the results but despite them being in Germany (and my search having had the country selector set to UK), it looks pretty good.

If I search something more generic like "all you can eat sushi" I get a neat map with a few restaurants that do that, plus a bunch of TripAdvisor and other directory and blog posts exactly about that, all local.

If I try your query again, setting the country to Germany, I get https://yummy-kiel.de/ as the first result, a map with top-three restaurants as the second, and again, a bunch of directories and blogs with all you can eat Kiel.

Seems pretty good to me.

With all respect, there’s not a lot of restaurants around here ) comparing to i.e. Hamburg. A couple of steak houses, some locals, 4-5 asian food and the Brunswik, which is always busy. There’s also Kiellinie, but it’s mostly a seasonal thing. Though there’s a lot of folks around sipping cocktails with ice in winter, crazy. Love this city.

DDG has started injecting completely untreated recent news stories to the results of a search with few hits. Like searching for a programming error with specific class names will give you several articles about the woes of the Democratic Party in recent days!!

Are you sure this isn't from SEO on the part of the news sites? I have not seen this at all.

Same for me, but with location-related stuff. I often see random Wikipedia articles or tourism websites for stuff near the city my IP address is from... Worst of all, sometimes there's a block of filler results between actual results, so I sometimes give up and don't see some of the results that might've been what I was looking for.

Same here, yesterday I searched for a very specific error message (don't remember exactly), and even on the first page there were local news stories. This was on Metager, which also uses Bing as one of its backends.

I think it's Tay v2.0 injecting itself into the conversation.

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