[zrobotics]

I'm just curious, since I see this brought up all the time- what is painful about DDG? The only times I have poor DDG results is for anything that leverages Google maps, such as a local business. Considering even Apple can't touch gMaps I don't find this surprising, but for general search I switched to DDG because the results were better. For example, my last search was "mdd 3754" to find the data sheet for a mosfet. DDG links to the result as the first click, whereas Google serves an ad so large I need to scroll down on mobile to even see a result, and the first 3 results aren't even in English. I'm genuinely asking, what sort of search queries does DDG return painful results for?

[Eric_WVGG]

I find their first result is usually as good as Google's, but what I am looking for is invariably #3+ and DDG just falls off a cliff.

And their image search is far inferior.

[zrobotics]

Interesting, perhaps my Google results are just exceptionally poor then, as if I don't see a result in the top 3 on Google then it won't be anywhere in the results. FWIW Google doesn't provide a single direct link to the data sheet for the query I posted in the first 3 pages for me. Even if I append "datasheet" to the query, the data sheet is still pushed to page 2. The only way I get the result on page 1 is to search "mdd 3754 mosfet datasheet".

Same applies to the query "c++ hash map", first page of Google is medium posts & unrelated stack overflow questions, DDG serves https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/container/unordered_map as the first result. I assume Google is serving better results for other people, I just don't know why my results are so poor, possibly its due to adblocking & tracking protection. FWIW these searches were performed on brave Android with 1.1.1.1 DNS.

Edit: the hashmap query is to provide a slightly malformed example, since what I really want is unordered_map. If I already know exactly what I want then Google can serve results, but that kinda defeats the point.

[Eric_WVGG]

When I'm searching on my phone, it's usually something not very hackery. "heirloom vegetable seedlings Manhattan" is a pretty typical example.