[Pxtl]

Honestly, I've been using ddg daily and I find I'm having to hit !g more than I'd like. Google in particular seems better at finding matches that come related to the ordering of the words, whereas ddg I have to quote them (and risk getting no results because I misremembered one word) when searching for a specific phrase.

[fiblye]

My experience is that google gives me results assuming all of the words I searched aren’t the words I’m looking for, and it uses tangentially related words in place of everything. Even quotes are useless now.

Ddg is useless when I’m searching for local things like restaurants and whatnot, but for general searches, it gives me what I’m actually looking for at least 75% of the time. With google, I’m barely hitting 25% these days unless it’s a very well established phrase/concept that I’m searching. In which case, it’s basically functioning as a Wikipedia search engine.

[leokennis]

In my experience Google is a lot better if you don’t know what your searching for (the search “movie head box” returns the movie Se7en in Google and some old movie called “Head” on DDG) but infuriating if you do, as it will provide 6 ads, 8 different “answer boxes” and then link to low quality spam sites below that.

[bishalb]

Can confirm that Google doesn't honor quotes as it used to for exact match search these days. It's a hit and miss.

[skinkestek]

Can someone who knows about the inside of Google tell us why this happened, and especially why it happens when verbatim mode is used alone or in addition to double quotes?

I can kind of see why double quotes could be confusing for people pasting without being aware of the double quotes rule, but ignoring verbatim outright as has been the standard for years now is even more confusing to me.

[londons_explore]

Usually when people have this concern, it's because the page they are looking for does not exist.

I'd like to see examples where you do a search looking for a specific page, either with or without verbatim or double-quotes, and then find it via some other query. Sure, it happens, but it's very rare.

[fiblye]

>it's because the page they are looking for does not exist.

I could see that argument holding water if other search engines didn't give me precisely what I searched for. Google just simply tries to be smart and assume I'm looking for something other than what I input, while completely ignoring my input and replacing it entirely.

[londons_explore]

Give a few examples of it.

Theres a good chance whatever page you were after had a robots.txt excluding googlebot.

[eitland]

Would this count?

https://www.google.com/search?q=%22vulnerable+over+and+over+...

The page it is taken from is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22032966

It is clearly indexed as it shows up in this search: https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-m&biw=414&bih...

[londons_explore]

I think it shows up now?

Yes - I think you've hit a case where fresh content isn't indexed for phrases only keywords. That latter indexing usually takes a few hours, depending on which data center you hit and load.

[leokennis]

In my experience Google is a lot better if you don’t know what your searching for (the search “movie head box” returns the movie Se7en in Google and some old movie called “Head” on DDG) but infuriating if you do, as it will provide 6 ads, 8 different “answer boxes” and then link to low quality spam sites below that.

[lordgrenville]

Exactly this. I use DDG by default but if I have any ambiguity in my search term, I'll automatically do !g

[vzidex]

Same here, I switched to DDG as my default engine at work and find it returns mediocre results for anything tech related and sufficiently niche.

On the plus side, it does work fine for everything else - i.e. the typical searches a normal person might do - so I might switch my personal devices to using it soon.

[surround]

Try !s (Startpage, which is based on Google’s index)

[gdfasfklshg4]

Didn't Startpage change ownership recently?

[surround]

Yes, which is why I’d recommend using DDG primarily and only using !s when you need better results. Using Startpage is probably better than using Google directly.

There is debate over the legitimacy of Startpage, see: https://github.com/privacytoolsIO/privacytools.io/issues/156...

[m-p-3]

Now I'm wondering if DDG uses those !g search queries to understand where it falls short and why their users decides to use it.