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Comment by voiceblue | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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!

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.

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."

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.

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