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Comment by triyambakam | Hacker News Reader

Honest question - why still use Google at all? Whenever DDG became good enough (seven? ten? years ago?) I used it exclusively. Lately I use a mix and have moved on from DDG, but I still never went back to Google and don't understand how people can tolerate it; I find the results really bad.

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> Honest question - why still use Google at all? Whenever DDG became good enough (seven? ten? years ago?) I used it exclusively. Lately I use a mix and have moved on from DDG, but I still never went back to Google and don't understand how people can tolerate it; I find the results really bad.

To me, DDG's results seem relevant-ish, while Google clearly knows my profile and what I'm looking for. I get more relevant results with Google than I do with DDG. That of course comes with the price of my search history and other behaviour online, but I'm okay with that.

Google also comes with some features that is convenient, when searching. Doing a "take away [town]" I get a minimap with pins, so I can see the take away places near me, the menu's are easily available as well as information about opening hours. DDG just gives me an (apparently) unordered list of restaurants in the town I put in, and with my sample search, the two first results doesn't actually provide take away.

Google to me is a convenient choice. I like convenience.

Odd. I don’t get relevant results using Google at all. Sometimes I get results that are in the same topic, but I can’t remember the last time a Google result gave me a result on the first page without a VERY specific query.

Kagi knows what I want (and don’t want) because I get to tell it. My preferences are what I tell it, not what it surmises from my activity.

yeah googles very relevant answers such as hiding reddit results that happen to be the best answer

For many of my searches DDG seems to completely ignore one or more of my keywords, usually giving me something more popular but less relevant. Almost every time when I try the same search on google it works.

I get the opposite effects on google. As an example, I tried to search for the documentation on watcom’s wasm assembler. It kept giving me results for web assembly no matter how I modified the query nor the Boolean search operators. To me it’s a symptom of search engines trying too hard to be smart and predictable.

Keep in mind that if you take only a specific type of searches to Google, in this case the ones DDG struggles with, it may just be that Google is good at that class specifically (like natural language or a query doing well with long literal string matching or something) and that makes it appear more competent while others, using Google all the time, are annoyed by it a lot of the time

DDG is not as good as Google. I made an experiment now. An Italian company I never heard about sent me a commercial email this morning (I'm in Italy.) I looked for it with Google: first result. I looked for it on DDG: not even on the second page, then I stopped looking.

DDG is ok-ish for technical searches, but I remember that I often run those searches again on Google. For anything else it seems confined to the USA. By the way, I'm not logged in into Google even if it probably knows where I am. If DDG knows where I am, it doesn't care or doesn't know how to serve more relevant results.

I've using ddg for years but I find myself unconsciously ending up appending "!g" to almost all my searches. DDG results are just really not good, especially if I'm looking up something local.

I switched to Ecosia, but I’m basically in the same boat. What I’m finding more and more often is that I need both Ecosia and Google results to actually find what I’m looking for.

Because both places give me so much useless crap in the results. Hell… I wanted to buy two nerf guns recently, and I ended up having to go to a 3rd party site called pricerunner.dk because both Google and Ecosia kept giving me shit results from 0 of the Danish toy stores I might actually use. That pricerunner site is terrible by the way, so it speaks volumes when it’s more useful than Google search. I’m not sure why Google search for instance will link me to Amazon.com or Amazon.uk and not an amazon front within the EU where I won’t have to pay import taxes as an example. I have German listed as a language I speak so Amazon.de would seem obvious. Not that I’d ever buy anything from Amazon if it was available from a Danish web store , but it’s an example of just how bad it is.

Finding information was the first thing to disappear from search engines, but now it seems that it may as well bookmark a bunch of stores and go directly to them to begin with. Maybe it’s better in the US but it’s ridiculously bad in Denmark.

Pricerunner is not great, but I'm in the same boat. I find myself using it more and more, because it's pretty much the only good way to find product while filtering out the most ridicules storefronts, like Fruugo or VidaXL, at least in Denmark.

I switched to Ecosia two years ago, from DuckDuckGo, and I really don't find myself going back to Google all that often. There are some search there I figure that something should have shown up, but mostly Google can't find it either.

Ecosia started mixing in Google results a few months ago, but I don't feel like it improved the results, if anything it's perhaps a little worse. That's anecdotal and not based on any actual tests though.

Kagi does look more and more interesting, because the issue seems to be the focus on ads and pushing stuff for people to buy. I just feel like Ecosia should be doing more to limit purchasing, given their environmental focus.

You can also use https://startpage.com a proxy for google.

Kinda like the DDG -> Bing, StartPage -> google type of deal.

It is with recommended by EFF. Seems like a good way to search google without giving up privacy.

I think you're right about local because small business owners have an incentive to optimise for Google local results in a way they don't for DDG or any other search engine.

Generally though, I find DDG good enough for everyday use. However, a friend of mine once told me she looked up a breed of bird on google for more information and I could barely contain my laughter when I suggested she should have used Duck Duck Go instead. The strange look I got in return reminded me that, for 99.9% of people, Google is 'Search' and that's the end of it.

Weird, I never ever use Google. When I do out of desperation (like when DDG was down two days ago) I find its results atrociously bad to the point of being almost useless.

Outside of the US your mileage may very much vary with other search engines, unfortunately.

This.

I may yet pay for Kagi because the ability to block certain domains is suuuuper useful.

Looking at you Pinterest.

Not to discourage you from paying for Kagi, but I use https://github.com/iorate/ublacklist to remove Pintrest and some other domains from my search results and it works perfectly.

Never seeing Quora in my search results sounds wonderful.

DDG is my default search engine, but there's some categories of things it's still not great at and I fall back to google (with some ublocking to disable "features" I don't want) for that.

`||google.*/complete/search$xmlhttprequest,important` turns off the autocomplete, for example.

DDG is subpar quality for any other language than English. It's not even that good in English.

Try using Google like an average person. I Googled "best places to visit in Peru", and Google gave me a little drop down right there on the page that listed a few, without me having to go elsewhere. DDG did not.

Google wins. Even if it didn't, at this point DDG would have to be a lot better for the average person to switch (with that name, especially)...it just isn't.

HN is such an echo chamber with this that sometimes you might forget that Google is the best search engine for a normal person. Maybe they will footgun it with AI, though.

You're better off using Google Maps for this use-case. At some point, the heavy query rewriting becomes unbearable.

The end result of the algorithmically generated SEO spam which Google keeps indexing is that fewer people in enterprise environments will ultimately jump through the hoops to change their default search engine in edge.

you are just used to google, it doesn't mean it's better than others. I switched to DDG several years ago, now I'm used to it. Sometimes when I go back to google i think the results are just bad, because I'm used to how DDG works now. Google just shows you always what you'd like to see, this is not good at all, you just live inside a walled garden.

>you are just used to google

Worth emphasising IMO. People are conditioned to using Google and its quirks, that can make alternatives engines a little less intuitive. Also they're often criticised for overrunning verticals with their own offerings. My favourite example being celebritynetworth.

> Also they're often criticised for overrunning verticals with their own offerings. My favourite example being celebritynetworth.

Sorry didn't get this, what do you mean exactly?

Beyond 10 blue links, certain niches organic results have been pushed down the page and placed under G specific results (when I say certain, nowadays it's most).

Celebritynetworth is an example of this where a site had some unique content, G apparently realised that lots of people search for such stuff, asked the owner for an API and then eventually scraped it. A rough version of events, more details below.

There are lots of examples of well performing sites/niches where similar has happened.

https://docs.house.gov/meetings/JU/JU05/20190716/109793/HHRG...

Very interesting, thanks for the link!

Yeah recently I was researching some articles on the Beatles, and I used Google search to find the lyrics - they were wrong, which I knew because I knew the right lyrics I just needed to copy past them.

I wrote a humorous little article about it and why they were wrong https://medium.com/luminasticity/artificial-stupidity-and-th... (sourcing lyrics through third party, returned Lennon's original draft lyrics)

But really I think the day that Google is the best search engine for the normal person are gone because Google will return stuff authoritatively that is wrong.

The normal person is by definition not a subject matter expert and cannot know if what they got from a search is wrong without further research.

It is the same thing discussing BSD/Linux distributions as alternatives, that same average person is going down to the shopping mall on the city center, and buy whatever is on display on the computing stores, after getting some counseling from an high school student working part-time on the store.

The entire article is about how there is a new and easy way to get rid of Google's "little drop down right there on the page that listed a few, without me having to go elsewhere."

Not to mention that Google is also becoming hostile to VPNs. I always run my phone through one and Google w/ FF Mobile has just been putting me in the captcha loop.

And fucking reddit...

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