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Comment by josteink | Hacker News Reader

Duck duck is barely usable

On the contrary, I find Google barely usable these days, with everything covered in layers and layers of horrible bloat, random UX mess of the week and constant pestering about G+.

DDG is nice and clean, has features Google is (still) lacking and just gets me the results. I may resort to other search-engines (like Google) once a week or so, but at this point, there's no way I'm going back to having Google as default.

That's just not worth it.

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Google's interface seems to have improved recently, now that they have removed the duplicate left-hand column and put the options on top.

As for search results: I tried DDG again last week, and was shocked by the poor quality of results compared to google, bing or yandex. Search for "html table tag" and you'll see no w3schools or MDN results. Instead a lot of other, crappier sites. Google, yandex and bing all show w3schools and MDN near the top, so DDG must be filtering these results (which is ironic, given that they say they don't put you in a "filter bubble").

I wouldn't consider w3schools a good search result, ever:

http://www.w3fools.com/

Why do you say that? (and please don't say you read it on w3fools)

In my own experience, w3schools is the quickest way of getting the information I want, which I guess is why it is at the top of google. I know it isn't cool to like w3schools, but then I'm not a cool programmer.

Lots of people complain about W3Schools. Some of those people say the Mozilla pages are a bit clunky.

Seems like a nice passive income project - man pages for HTML / CSS aimed at beginners but with advanced information too.

I'm surprised it hasn't already been done. Perhaps it has and I just don't know the URL.

http://html5index.org/

You can't fight the SEO feedback cycle. W3 schools was linked to by some people, so it shows up on Google, so it gets linked to by more people...

Some people? By internet standards, w3schools is ancient, and has been linked by many people over the years. Here[1], I present you their main page from close to 14 years ago. The copyright notice says 1999-2000, and I think I first visited it in 1999, but I could be mistaken. That's a long time for links to accrue.

[1]: http://web.archive.org/web/20000815210025/http://www.w3schoo...

Also, look at the exact match keyword text links and their site structure. They were SEO'd before there was such a thing

oh god, they used comic sans? No wonder every homepage in the early 2000s overused that font..

MDN search has an api,

http://paulrouget.com/e/mdnapi/

Sometimes I just need to confirm a particular attribute. I don't think W3S is very good, but I have been on the site enough times that I know I'll be in and out with what I need in about 10 seconds.

There is now the Mozilla Developer Network which provides much better information. It does not top google results, though.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/ta...

That is MDN, which is what I was talking about. MDN is one of the sites that is filtered out by duckduckgo for some strange reason.

My experience with exactly these and related terms has been almost opposite. Lately I needed to look up info on HTML and CSS a lot and not only am I constantly getting MDN results at the top, I usually get a snippet from the MDN page in the "instant answer" (or whatever it's called) box. Before searching for this stuff on DDG I never even realized how good of a resource MDN is (not that I actually needed much info on web related specs in the past).

Try logging out of your DDG account (if you have one), and searching for "html table tag" (without quotes) and you'll see what I mean. MDN is nowhere to be found. If you see it, then DDG must be showing us different results for some reason.

I find MDN and w3schools about equal, although I do find w3schools is a bit better laid out and quicker to get the info I'm looking for. MDN certainly isn't perfect...I just had a quick look for some html5 stuff (MediaElementAudioSourceNode) and the page is missing on MDN. I find that w3.org is the only place that has full specs for all the html5 stuff, but it's pretty difficult to navigate.

I don't have an account. You're right, for this particular query there's no MDN in results. I just tried "css box-sizing" (the first thing that popped into my mind) and MDN is the 3rd result. The quick answer thingy shows SO questions. So it can definitely be a hit or miss thing.

I agree with what you write about w3.org, it's almost painful to navigate when you just need a quick reference.

Deleted comment

What do you mean? The person you're replying to talked about MDN, which is the Mozilla Developer Network you linked to.

I'm surprised no one mentioned you can do !mdn "html table tag" and go straight to the mdn page.

The results seem perfectly usable to me, sorry your favorite sites are not top ranking[0]. Care to explain why you think DDG is explicitly filtering them?

[0] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=+%22html+table+tag%22

It's not that they're not top ranking - they don't appear anywhere in the first few hundred results. DDG must be filtering them because those sites are at the top of yandex and DDG says it is getting the results from yandex.

As for "perfectly usable", mountaindragon (result 2) and codesinhtml.com (result 3) are atrocious. And makemyownwebpage.com (result 10 or so) looks like a homepage from the 90s.

I think the issue is that DDG is getting crappy results from yandex, then filtering out the good sites to make the results even worse. Weird :)

Please explain this theory of filtering results out some more.

I don't know at all if this is true, but his argument seems to just be that DDG is pulling its results from yandex, yandex shows w3schools at the top, and DDG doesn't have it in the first few hundred results--therefore DDG is filtering or significantly reordering the yandex results.

I've been using DDG as my primary search from desktop for several years now, and I find its results to be equivalent to or better than Google's most of the time.

When I can't find something, I'll try a !g, but only rarely does that help any more.

I totally agree. In the beginning, I was !g a lot. These days, I mostly !g for more natural language kind of questions.

For more technical searches, Google has become next to useless for me. "lupdate.exe not working Qt" transforms to "did you mean 'Update not working'?" (lupdate.exe is part of the Qt translation toolchain and Windows forces it to run as admin only because there is "update" in its file name. The Google 'correction' of that is perfectly useless).

   For more technical searches, Google has become next to useless for me.

Same here. I used to have corrections for java -> javascript but that seems to have been fixed.

Just this morning I tried searching for this:

   µC/gui button detach

... "detach" gets corrected to "remove" and "disconnect", resulting in useless links. The top 2 links are general features overview pages.

Which is odd, because googling this:

   button detach

results in lots of uncorrected queries for event delegation. You'd think that adding "µC/gui" would narrow the context, but no.

The second huge fail of google with technical queries is when it starts substituting synonyms for words in your query the make the search useless. It makes you not want to name commands in a common sense style.

Yeah but DDG does this as well. Try searching for NSString. It'll actually search for strings.

It seems to be all NSString for a while. Am I missing something?

I use an extension to always set google to Verbatim search results. It works very nicely.

I agree completely. In fact I'll also say that when I first switched I used the !g pretty often - maybe even as much as 20%-30%.

These days I rarely use !g - the results have improved considerably and the bang searches are a very clever way of not requiring me to change search engine to search another site specifically.

Im not sure where all of these cluttered Google search UI comments are coming from, this is what I see. Maybe a reality distortion field due to pent up HN Google hate? Just a few icons in the top right off screen with my profile pic and configuration wheel icon you can't see.

Things look fine.

http://i.imgur.com/J9AqaQK.png

Using a term like 'hn' isn't really a representative example, since it's unlikely that any advertising would be purchased for such a term or have any custom "knowledge panels". So, first, turn off AdBlock (if you hadn't already done so), then try a more representative query like "flowers":

http://i.imgur.com/jsx1feJ.png

It's a big difference, and these different experiences with Google could just be a matter of which keywords people tend to use (e.g., very general vs. very targeted searches) and what extensions they chose to install in their browser.

What result do you expect for something as vague as "flowers"? Try something like "flower delivery <your city>" or "hydrangea" to see a useful search result page.

I would expect a glorified redirect to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flower That is what I expect for any search that is vague or generic. The results for "RTG" are pretty much my idea of what a set of results should look like.

(Note that while DDG's results page for 'flowers' is cleaner, the actual results are similarly shit.)

When I search google for "flower" the first result is the wikipedia page for flower.

While you might want the wiki page for flower when you search "flowers" I think most people might actually want to order flowers.

That plural/singular makes a difference there is something that I would consider to be a fault. "Llamas" gives me the page for "llama". Why should "flower" and "flowers" give me radically different results?

If I wanted to buy flowers I'd search "florist" or "online florist". The wiki page for florists is surely of far less interest than the page for flowers.

I suspect the google/ddg results for "flowers" are a result of florists SEO'ing out the ass, not a reflection on what people are actually looking for when they search for things.

More likely: Google have noticed users that search for "flowers" typically go on to search for "flower delivery", and started showing them results relevant to their intent.

The Google result page for "flowers" also includes the wikipedia page for "Flower", btw.

> "The Google result page for "flowers" also includes the wikipedia page for "Flower", btw."

Yeah, but it is farther down the list. I have to search for it.

Father? It's the second item on the list for me (and I use incognito)

In incognito mode, it is 16th down the list for me, including ads and local results. Do you have an adblocker turned on or something?

>>I would expect a glorified redirect to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flower That is what I expect for any search that is vague or generic.

If they wanted the wikipedia page, they would have performed the search directly on wikipedia.

The question you have to ask is: what is the most likely thing they are looking to do? Is it to learn more about flowers (wikipedia) or is it to buy flowers (regular results with ads + map of nearby flower sellers)?

I've already said that I believe the most likely thing they are looking for is the wikipedia page. How many times do people actually buy flowers? Once or twice a year? If they are doing it any more often than that, then they shouldn't need to google "flowers" each time....

> If they are doing it any more often than that, then they shouldn't need to google "flowers" each time....

Why not? Computers are better at memorizing things than people; it shouldn't be a human's job to remember a site URL (and browser bookmarks are less useful than intelligent search engines).

I imagine after a few times they would have a particular business or location in mind, and use google to search for that instead. For instance, if I googled "flowers" a few months ago and found "Joes Flower Shop in Seattle", if I wanted flowers again I would google "joes flowers seattle" instead of "flowers".

That's not how most people use computers. If they found the flower shop last time by typing "flowers", then they're going to type "flowers" the next time.

I dont think I've ever used wikipedia's search. I just google "term wiki"

why don't you set your default search engine to wikipedia?

Because I want to see what I am missing.

Just an example: The tabs with Images, Videos etc. to the right of Web seem to be randomized. Sometimes Shopping comes before Images even. And then ofcourse the minor detail that the search results do not contain the actual fucking links of the results! I'm now using a greasemonkey script that fixes that. And thats not all I could go on and on, and don't even ask me about Youtube, Google sites have become just godawful.

The think I hate most about the UI is URL hijack, URL hijack everywhere!

The second most stupid thing is if you are behind or corporate LAN/VPN you have to type CAPTICHA to search.

The last stupid thing is its UI design, where's the page cache link? how to limit search time range and order results by time?

To be fair, most search engines do not support filtering by date range and ordering. I know it was added to Google but then most features seem to be jumping around there.

Agreed. It took me a little time using DDG before I could reliably tell the difference between "poor results" and "results that don't feel like Google results".

Google + Adblock is your friend. All results are now relevant :D

I find the infinite scroll annoying, taking away from its otherwise clean feeling.

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