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Comment by kodzoman | Hacker News Reader

I started using DDG a week ago instead of Google, and honestly I don't see that much of a difference. If I don't get a good result I go back to Google only to find it doesn't give me anything better than DDG. Might it be that people are just used to Google and not that it really produces better results?

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I've been using DDG for years. Always hear about how it's so bad compared to Google, but that's definitely not been the case for the searches I do. I suspect it's heavily contingent on the types of searches you're doing.

I've been trying to use DDG for years and I really want to like it. At first it seems as good, but at some point it just doesn't cut it. Yes for most clear cut searches it's fine, but I still have to !g (use Google) enough that I haven't bothered changing for any other device. Especially not my work laptop where I have to do actual work. DDG/Bing is just not as good with programming questions.

With !g being right there when you need Google, it doesn't need to be all-or-nothing.

I started out resorting to it every day. Now it's only maybe every couple or weeks.

> Might it be that people are just used to Google and not that it really produces better results?

Maybe, but for me it struggles to recommend relevant reddit articles, copy+pasted error messages were hit/miss. It just feels like it sometimes misses obvious things, even word for word things, and I type it into google and it's right there. I apologize I dont have any good examples off hand

I've tried using DDG for years, on and off, and it's been a terrible experience.

Local searches simply don't work. My favorite example is searching for "restaurante" and getting Spanish results, even though I'm from Romania. By comparison, Google understands what I want and delivers a list of "restaurants near me", alongside websites in Romanian.

But it doesn't stop at local searches. Programming-related searches are terrible too. I have to second-guess DDG on every search. The Google search doesn't always yield better results, but it does so enough that it's making me not trust DDG.

Honestly, even the ads on Google are better than DDG's search results. As far as alternative search engines go, Brave Search delivers better results for my search patterns. They are still terrible at local searches, but I'm not noticing the DDG-like blunders. When Brave Search isn't delivering, it's probably due to the size of their index, but at least it's their own index.

"Works for me" doesn't cut it. First, because nobody cares. You all should spend more time with the normies to see how they are using tech. They don't refine the search phrase to make it more specific (even though that doesn't help much with DDG either).

It's also worth considering that DDG is basically just a Bing shell, so I wouldn't consider it competition. If it doesn't have its own crawler, index and ranking algorithm, it's not competing with Google.

Yeah, DDG in my personal experience stinks. I've tried it several times over the past couple of years, and it always gives midgrade results (at best).

Maybe I've just trained myself to phrase questions that return better results on Google than other sites, I don't know.

I do know that I have never, ever gotten a result from DDG that meets or exceeds the same Google search.

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