[jplayer01]

DDG's search results seem consistently terrible whenever I try to use it for an extended period of time. It's fine for really basic searches, but anything more specialized or niche is terrible (considering my interests, that's all of my searches). I mostly use Startpage nowadays instead, which seems to give me good enough results most of the time.

[FabHK]

These sorts of posts make me feel a bit stupid - I use search engines other than DDG less than once a week. Are my searches so banal and obvious? Do I not encounter tricky technical problems?

However, in the rare cases that I do switch to Startpage (!s), I get "better" results only sometimes. Conversely, on Google I miss the bangs, the capability to scroll through the results using up/down cursor key (and enter to go to a result), the simple way to specify country specific results (I don't care about Moscow, Idaho and its 23000 inhabitants very much, sorry).

[everdev]

DDG uses a combination of Bing, Yahoo and Yandex results. From what I can tell they don't index SPA sites very well:

https://www.reddit.com/r/duckduckgo/comments/90ypqz/ddg_craw...

A comment from July 2018:

> We get our results from various sources, mostly Bing, Yahoo and Yandex (more info: https://duck.co/help/results/sources ) so if/when they introduce support for SPAs, we should get that too. I don't know what their plans are for this, however.

[gatherhunterer]

As an example of this that can be demonstrated right now (and potential insight into why this is the case), search for "HTTPS tutorial" in DuckDuckGo[1].

This search is expected to return results that provide a tutorial on the implementation or usage of the HTTPS protocol. The first three results seem decent enough, then things get weird. What follows on the first two pages or so are (in order) tutorials for: Ubuntu, PARCC, HTTP (relevant), VPN, React, R (language), Windows 10, Shiny (related to R?), Matplotlib, scratch.mit, AutoHotKey, Quickbooks, Node.js, Java, Python and Kubernetes. As far as returning results for HTTPS tutorials DuckDuckGo has seemingly not done very well. Many of these results are related to software so one would expect these sites to have well-executed SEO. It looks to me like DuckDuckGo has confused the "https://" in the URL for an indicator of content related to HTTPS. But does Google's search algorithm do any better?

Try the same search in Google[2] and it seems to have similar problems: if you go several pages deep the results still do not acknowledge that "https" is missing from the actual content of the result. But the fact that Google is used more frequently has allowed relevant results to bubble up to the top because people click on them. Only one result on the first page does not pertain to HTTP, HTTPS or SSL. Google's advantage seems to disappear after the first page and that makes sense because anything beyond the first page of Google search is rarely clicked.

I don't see DuckDuckGo's problem as being one of how it searches but rather its lack of usage. Maybe if we use it and talk it up to people we can work our way towards a powerful search engine that respects privacy. I could put up my own search engine and try to do better but I would be a decade behind DuckDuckGo's name recognition and that much farther from solving the actual problem.

1. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=https+tutorial&t=ffab&atb=v144-1&i...

2. https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=https+t...

[Timucin]

I believe having privacy puts the user at disadvantage since DDG doesn't keep your history or track who you are. i.e. Google knows definitely knows I am a developer and shows the tech related things first even when I search for super generic words. That's why people think DDG doesn't do a good job but I think it does if you can be more specific.

Yet I agree it's not better than or equal to Google when it comes to image search. I guess Google is doing a better job on classifying images.

[mosselman]

I believe privacy, to me as a user, is a huge advantage. I have been using DuckDuckGo for years now and I when I run into something I can’t find on it, which happens sporadically, I use !s to jump to anonymous google results on start page and it turns out I can’t find it with google either. So either DuckDuckGo has gotten better or I have gotten better at telling it what I want, or both. Either way, I don’t feel that privacy puts me at a disadvantage.

[Timucin]

Oh, no. Don't get me wrong. I wasn't trying to say privacy is bad, I was trying to say Google has a clear advantage since it knows more about the user. Don't think it's worth to compromise your privacy though.

Another advantage of Google is having the vast resources they have but again, it works because they know who you are.

I also agree with what you said. People just need to be more specific with their search and yes, DDG is going better by the day.

[dontbenebby]

>I believe having privacy puts the user at disadvantage since DDG doesn't keep your history or track who you are. i.e. Google knows definitely knows I am a developer and shows the tech related things first

One way to compensate is to be very specific.

Ex: "python programing language string slice" not just "python slice".

Most people have (without consciously thinking about it) learned to treat search terms as labels on a venn diagram with the center being the search results.

To get the most out of DDG search like it's 1999 - be specific and use operators

https://help.duckduckgo.com/results/syntax/

[neurobashing]

I've been using DDG exclusively for a few years now. I don't want to get into anything personal, but just what the heck are you searching for, my man?

I hear this complaint from time to time and it just baffles me. I mean one day I forgot how to spell "guillotine", typed in "french beheading thing", and it was on the first page somewhere.

[jaggirs]

That query is essentially a textbook example, not hard at all.