Another person notes that ddg is inferior. Maybe people get used to a certain way of searching with Google that doesn't translate to ddg. Haven't noticed a drop in quality myself and I think I might have been retrained to use different patterns and techniques in structuring my queries.
DDG results are so much worse for me, especially anything longer tail or in Spanish, that I switch to Google when I'm actually getting work done. I find myself adding "!g" to an important search just to check for any results that DDG doesn't know about and it's almost always an upgrade to see Google's results.
Search is hard.
I don't like to chime in to say something negative about an underdog like DDG, but I see this "people probably just don't know how to use DDG" suggestion a lot and it's quite the opposite: Google feels like it can practically read my mind with minimal context, like knowing I also may be talking about a recent event that shares the name with a generic search term. And I'm not talking about personalized search.
I know you're probably annoyed that I'm telling you that you're using ddg wrong. That's not exactly what I'm saying. It's more like: we're trained to expect certain things from the search engine, and so it's hard to switch.
I assume it's the same because ddg is claiming not to affect search results by anything except time and user configuration.
Google's results (for me) are a full page of references to every different version of elm's documentation for dict. Not exactly a wide net, and frankly pretty redundant. To see anything else, I have to click at the bottom of the page. It doesn't show me the source code. I went through the first ten pages and didn't see any link to it.
For ddg, I just use the arrow key to scroll down, and I can press enter to follow the link I want, changing the meaning of "first search page" for me quite a bit.
> DDG results are so much worse for me, especially anything longer tail or in Spanish, that I switch to Google when I'm actually getting work done. I find myself adding "!g" to an important search just to check for any results that DDG doesn't know about and it's almost always an upgrade to see Google's results.
I have a completely different experience in italian. They're actually pretty good, which is surprising given the small audience.
For work, usually I directly search for documentation in reference systems (e.g. en.cppreference.com). Neither ddg or google will consistently direct me to the "best" documentation. YMMV.
A comment on my comment. It is really true that Google indexes the deep web of generated content (like AliExpress, eBay, and others) better than ddg. That's part of the long tail that's costly to cover.
Sure, but 90% of the time, I and most people I know don't do very sophisticated searches. I'm actually mostly using google as a billion dollar search engine for wikipedia / stackoverflow / arch wiki / bbc / nyt / ft / whatever big site there is in a given domain. Because these sites happen to have 90% of what i'm looking for. For the rest, we all have our own little forums we follow: fb, hn, email etc.
So instead of trying to beat google on full web searches, the trick might actually be to index all 100 best ranking websites according to some metric (alexa rank for instance) and do it better than google. Then, maybe you can grab over 50% of the search traffic. For broader queries (in the search knowledge graph sense), in this scenario, people would fallback to google.
Search is ripe for disruption, and ddg is the lead candidate right now. One wonders if such a strategy could give rise to more challengers more quickly. I’ve certainly considered it myself (alexa top 10k though).
> Google feels like it can practically read my mind with minimal context, like knowing I also may be talking about a recent event that shares the name with a generic search term. And I'm not talking about personalized search.
I wish there was some compromise, because Google regularly seems to read another mind than my own, automatically "correcting" search terms to terms with similar spelling that are totally irrelevant to my search or including what is superficially synonymous but for my purposes irrelevant in the results. I frequently feel like I have to convince Google to stop second-guessing me and actually consider what I wrote rather than what it assumes I meant.
A few more knobs and switches to adjust that behavior would be helpful at least for power users.
I'll agree with this too. Thing is, 99.XX% of the time DDG works fine. 1% of the time if I can't find a thing, I try with google and probably 50% of the time I can then find what I wanted. E.g. DDG has a 99.5% success rate, Google has a 99.75% success rate. Not too bad by DDG, as I know that last .25% is REALLY hard.
Either way, google is seeing only a tiny % of my search queries, so I'm happy.
Of note, I switched to DDG earlier this year. I've tried to do it in the past and found that the DDG/Google ratios were like 80%/99+% in the past, which is WAY too much of a tradeoff to make. DDG has MASSIVELY improved, I'm using google search <1/day now.
Same here: 99% of the time. If I want to dig -more specifically- than DDG wants to go in some cases, I just add a !b in front (for Bing). I do a lot of research; haven't used Gargle for 10 years.
What many people don't realise (especially in HN) is that DDG is not as good as Google, in my experience, in looking for non-English content. One of the things that stopped me was the lack of good Dutch results that Google can pick up easily with its internal translations and whatnot.
I use DuckDuckGo when I know what the first result is likely to be. If I'm actually _searching_ for something (i.e. the majority of the time) I add !g. I can feel myself flinch every time I submit a DuckDuckGo query. It's just much, much worse.
During my first 2 weeks I definitely noticed a difference in quality,
but I guess over time you get an intuition for how to combine search terms when
it comes to less common queries.
Now I prefer DDG over Google, even without all the nice shortcuts.
I think Google's results have become dramatically worse, and I've become better at DDG. I now often find it difficult or impossible to find what I want on Google, and straightforward on DDG. I also use the bangs all the time now, they're great.
