[saidajigumi]

Say all you want about DDG and alternatives, but they still can't hold a candle to Google's search quality.

I'm rather torn on this point. On one hand, yes, DDG for example feels some years behind Google in its relevance ranking. On the other, Google itself has been degrading the quality of its own results with ads, etc. so badly that they've seriously degraded their own "above the fold" relevant results.

[byuu]

I've always written off Duck Duck Go in the past, but lately after not being able to find relevant info on Google, I've been giving them a go and have been rather impressed. Especially on image results, which are way nicer to use and give you direct image links. Plus they don't obfuscate all the URLs with tracking redirects, so I can copy a link without visiting a page (that might redirect the URL on me again.)

There's still some things they miss, and my main complaint with DDG is it's too aggressive in taking the search you asked for and substituting in results it thought you meant. I suspect that problem comes from their upstream providers like Bing, which has similar issues.

[thirdtry]

I start with DDG now, and switch to Google if their results are not good enough. 90% of the time its fine. Google intentionally broke image search, and their top search results are getting very bad. Its as if my question was "show me links to as many ads as possible that might be related to my search terms." Do Google advertisers realize I see their ad when it matches only one of my search words? If they read more than one of my words, they know that was a wasted advertisement.

[icebraining]

> Especially on image results, which (...) give you direct image links.

Google removed that after pressure from the copyright lobby (they got sued by Getty). It'll happen to DDG too if they ever become big enough.

[byuu]

Oh, I wasn't aware of the lawsuit. That's ridiculous. Well in any case, I wrote a Userscript to restore direct links to Google image results, and also to filter out spam site results (cough e...-e...com), if anyone were interested: https://byuu.org/other/script/google

Middle-clicking or control-clicking will load the original images.

Bing direct links images as well so they'd probably go after Microsoft well before DDG, so I think we're safe. But I can always do the same for DDG if need be.

[saidajigumi]

Agreed. I've given DuckDuckGo a try a few times in the past, and it never stuck. With the latest rounds of Google-being-Google, I gave DDG another go and so far haven't looked back.

[BMorearty]

The thing I've been enjoying since switching to DuckDuckGo on mobile for the last couple months is not having to deal with AMP.

[CodeMage]

I still remember the old days of Altavista, Yahoo, Lycos and Infoseek, to name a few. I would usually have to try several and comb through their results to find what I wanted.

These days, I'm getting a sense of deja vu, because Google is slowly getting worse and DDG is slowly getting better. Most of the time, I'll get the desired result right away, regardless of the engine I use. But sometimes, I'll be surprised at how bad the results are on one and then I have to try the other. And although it's not happening very frequently, I have to do it more and more often.

I guess that's good, in a sense. Sure, it's nice when things just work and you don't have to think about them, but we've all seen that lack of competition is, in the long run, bad for the users.

[littlestymaar]

I feel exactly the same: I've been using DDG for 7 years now for privacy reasons, but I have been using !g (ddg's shortcut to search on google) a lot because ddg was often lacking useful results. But I've now noticed that Google itself has become a poor search engine too!

Nowadays, I still use !g when out of luck with DDG, but 90% of the times, Google don't give me the answer I'm looking for either. And I don't feel it's because DDG improved that much but because Google declined.

[magicalhippo]

DDG is just so bad. Yesterday I found a website on my desktop. I wanted to view it on my Raspberry Pi so I could copy/paste the commands. So I typed in some keywords from the title and the name of the site. By default the Raspbian image uses DDG apparently.

The page I was after was not to be found.

Well at least on the first page, I didn't bother checking beyond. Did the !g thing and got the page I wanted straight up first hit.

Here are the searches for reference:

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=maker+pro+install+tensorflow

https://www.google.com/search?q=maker+pro+install+tensorflow

I've tried DDG so many times, but it just doesn't find relevant stuff. Sad, because I don't want to rely on Google.

[smichel17]

The top result is the same (for me) in both searches (<https://www.tensorflow.org/install/>). What is the page you were trying to find?

[magicalhippo]

Interesting, I guess Google used the fact that both searches came from the same IP to prioritize the one I wanted[1].

In any case, I just connected to my work PC and did a search from a clean VM there, we don't do anything remotely Raspberry Pi or TensorFlow related there. The link you posted was the first hit at work, but the one I wanted[1] was the third hit.

Yet for DDG the results were the same, no hits. I even tried pressing "more" once, still nothing. I even tried "maker.pro install tensorflow" (without the quotes), and similar result. I tried "maker.pro tensorflow raspberry pi", still not finding it.

Maybe I just need to learn what DDG focuses on in a search string, and I've been trained to what Google weights.

But the reason Google got big was because it was the first search engine where, for 99% of the time, I didn't have to spend several minutes optimizing search terms just to find the right thing.

I don't want to go back to that.

[1]: https://maker.pro/raspberry-pi/tutorial/how-to-set-up-the-ma...

[wolco]

They both return the site tensorflow. What were you going for exactly a specific page?

[jrochkind1]

It doesn't sound like your torn at all, if you think DDG still feels year behind Google, despite Google's results degrading. Sounds like you still think Google is a lot better.

[saidajigumi]

No, quite the opposite. To clarify: this is the first time I've started using DDG on multiple devices and it's stuck. I'll rephrase: I think that DDG is still a few years behind Google's unadorned best-effort result set, but not that far behind Google's actual presentation today. I.e. Google's degraded itself so much as to make the competition viable for this search user.