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by maxwell 2425 days ago
Duck keeps improving since I ditched GSearch. Duck feels more like the old Google, the one I used for almost 20 years, the authoritative search engine.

Now when I hit a GSearch SERP (when in Chrome for a moment testing something), it feels like spam, and I close it faster than a Pinterest tab.
2 comments
iamnothere 2425 days ago
I agree, but lately I've noticed that DDG's results have been trending in the same direction. Maybe I'm just imagining things? (To be clear, I still find it generally better than Google for day-to-day search.)

I long for the return of an Altavista-like "dumb" search engine with proper "hard" boolean support. My brain is hardwired to think that way and I strongly prefer it. I understand that this wouldn't be useful for everyone, but I don't care. How on earth does it make sense to have only one kind of search engine for all of humanity.

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fileeditview 2425 days ago
I could imagine that the future of search engines is more specialization in different topics. As the content in the web keeps growing it only makes sense to only "search in a specific corner".

Maybe it's a good time to be innovative here..

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repolfx 2424 days ago
It makes sense because a search engine is a vastly expensive thing to run, there aren't enough users like you to be interesting to advertisers, and you aren't willing to pay the huge sums it would require to make such a niche (useless) search engine sustainable.
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username90 2425 days ago
> Duck feels more like the old Google, the one I used for 20 years

That is the whole point, old Google was easy to replicate and therefore didn't cement their market position, if they still had that then why not just switch to Bing or DDG? New Google requires thousands of top level experts to tune and test things until it gives sensible results to stupid queries and is therefore impossible to compete with.

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technofiend 2425 days ago
Unfortunately it also sometimes gives stupid answers to sensible queries but Google removed most knobs that let power users tune results. Instead they should leverage that expertise to better inform non-tweaked queries and results.
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