[0xcde4c3db]

I use DDG regularly. It's fine for casual "was that company's domain a .net or .com" kinds of searches, but it struggles for more specific or obscure content. My biggest problem with it is that the "advanced" operators are extremely buggy. Quotes and minus sometimes seem to be treated more as suggestions than requirements. Other times they return no results when omitting them returns results that should match. Sometimes a term with a minus is instead treated like there's no minus, i.e. ranking results with that word higher. This seems to have gotten worse over time. I don't have examples for this because the behavior is not consistent at all. The "inurl" and "intitle" operators exist but seem to only work for a single word/instance (e.g. "functional intitle:Haskell" works as expected but "functional intitle:Haskell intitle:reactive" returns a bunch of results without either of those words in the title).

[WarOnPrivacy]

> "My biggest problem with it is that the "advanced" operators are extremely buggy. Quotes and minus sometimes seem to be treated more as suggestions than requirements. Other times they return no results when omitting them returns results that should match. Sometimes a term with a minus is instead treated like there's no minus, i.e. ranking results with that word higher. This seems to have gotten worse over time."

This is the exact explanation of why I moved away from Google.

My searching trends toward very specific terms. >2 years ago, Google started ignoring my boolean operands. It became increasingly difficult to craft a boolean search that Google would actually respect.

I finally bailed 6 months ago. By that time, using a minus sign often returned nothing but the results I was trying to avoid.