[whalesalad]

A lot of DDG fans on HN blame the user or social conditioning and use that as a crutch. It’s BS.

You need to provide clear examples of the differences in order to really make this argument to someone who might switch.

What specifically are the differences? The last time this topic came up someone told me I was a total noob because I didn’t know how to use search and that was basically the extent of it.

[hedora]

Google gives me bad results. It ignores some of the words in my queries, and the context boxes are generally spammy and irrelevant. Even if the correct information is somewhere in the results page, I bounce before I can find it.

From what I can tell from the article, this might be because I type too much stuff into the search bar, and because Google’s manually curated semantic web stuff is not relevant to me.

However, I’m really not sure why I can’t use Google anymore. It was better when I switched away, so I definitely used to be able to use it (I didn’t log in back then either).

Ddg is fine, and more respectful to its users. I don’t have a practical reason to figure out what the problem is.

[godshatter]

I have this same problem. I use the same "subject sub-subject (...) specific query" tactic I've been using since forever and Google search has been becoming less effective for me over the years. I switched to DDG a couple of years ago I think, and it's better for handling that sort of thing.

Is there a search engine out there that respects quotes, and, or, case-insensitive when asked for, etc? In some ways I miss the days of altavista and similar search engines which had "advanced" tabs you could use to craft your query as closely as needed to find that one web page you know has what you need to find that you stumbled upon years ago.

The only time I use what the author refers to as "low intent searches" is when I've just heard a term or phrase I don't understand and don't know enough about it to ask specifically for something.

[redwall_hp]

What's going on is those of us who have been using the Web since Google was brand new (or earlier...remember AltaVista?) expect a search engine to find text on web pages.

What the average user in the post-smartphone world expects a search engine to do is deliver an answer to a question. These are basically incompatible, and it seems like a progressively smaller circle of the Web is being surfaced by Google these days, as they focus heavily on popularity and novelty.

[Eupolemos]

Just a heads up; post-smartphone means the era after the smartphone.

Maybe you intended to say this, then I'm really curious about your perspective?

[wolco]

Go into google search options and select verbatam to include all search terms.

[tracker1]

I switched for about a month... for most general searches ddg was as good or better... when searching for development terms as a programmer, I found that the ddg results were often worthless to me. The context that google has associated to you specifically adds value to the results.

Since most of my searches were for technical libraries, components, etc, I found myself searching again with !g more than half the time... after the month was up, I switched back. There are a LOT of things I like about ddg though.

It would be nice if DDG offered search roles, that could prioritize certain associated terms together for someone that is say a programmer, engineer, social media person, etc. This could be opt-in to maybe a dozen categories to skew results on one way or another, but not tied to a person per-se.

Also, a shorter domain name would help.

[mdaniel]

> Also, a shorter domain name would help.

I'm surprised your browser doesn't just search from the "awesome bar", making navigating to the domain a non-event

However, the answer to your question is ddg.gg (unknown if that's short enough, but it's only 3 keys to press)

[vinclou]

I use DDG for 2 years already, and I'm a developer, I've never experienced ur problem, and I do search for technical stuff all the time. I dont see how DDG can fail to show u a documentation or library result, especially if you know what u are looking for

[vitro]

duck.com :)

[user234683]

> Google gives me bad results. It ignores some of the words in my queries

This is the problem I've been having with DDG, where it will aggressively rewrite my search into something completely unrelated

[rhexs]

I've said this before, but I really don't get any useful results from Google at all anymore. I have to prefix Reddit for every search to at least try to get a vaguely human answer to a question.

Of course Reddit is still gamed and has plenty of other issues, but far less than Google at this point.

[chipperyman573]

Just to be clear, are you saying DDG gives you better results? I was just thinking about how google has this problem

[hedora]

I think, on reflection, the issue is that typing “harry potter sport” and clicking on the wikipedia article at the very top of the page (above the first ad) is a much lower cognitive burden than the Google way, where I guess people are trained to type “harry potter” and then skim an entire page of ads, search results and noise to find the word “Quidditch” (which doesn’t appear, I just checked).

If I google harry potter sport, it presents the Wikipedia article in a context box, then the same article in a differently formatted context box, an ad, and then a third link to the same article at the top of the organic results.

Duck duck go displays the same link twice (once in a big context box). This seems better, though arguably not great.

[dagenix]

A Google search for me produces the word "Quidditch" in a box along with a link to the Wikipedia page for Quidditch and the first paragraph of that article. The box appears at the very top of the results. I'm not sure how a search result for that query could be much more useful.

[gjm11]

I can confirm that I also see this, both in my regular Firefox instance where I do everything and in an incognito Chrome window. Specifically, I get, in order from top to bottom, with only trivial differences between those two cases:

A box with "Quidditch" in big letters, a picture and a brief description.

Some "People also ask:" with questions that do seem to be reasonably relevant.

The Wikipedia page about Quidditch.

Some video links, all relevant.

Some images, all relevant.

Another Wikipedia page about Quidditch.

A page about the "Department of Magical Games and Sports" from some Harry-Potter-specific wiki.

Same wiki's "games and sports" category.

"Beyond Quidditch: games and pastimes in the wizarding world" from www.wizardingworld.com.

NPR article about real-world quidditch games.

Quora question about other sports in Harry Potter.

Related searches: a bunch of Harry Potter things which seem pretty relevant.

Related search: "Quidditch teams".

A bunch of "Searches related to harry potter sport" which mostly also seem relevant.

So ... the organization of the page is a little weird in places, but this seems like an excellent set of search results for that query. The DDG results are also perfectly fine, though they feel slightly worse than the Google ones to me.

[lostgame]

Might have wanted to try this, before using this example. As other commenters have noted, this immediately offers up ‘Quittich’ at the first result.

[jstanley]

An example of a difference: I live in Bristol. If I search for things like "car mechanic bristol", DDG comes up with lots of results from Bristol, Tennessee. It's not that DDG is worse than Google, it's just that DDG isn't tailoring the results to what it knows about me. The solution is to be more specific: "car mechanic bristol uk", for example, does the job.

[aembleton]

Have you tried switching `United Kingdom` to on?

https://imgur.com/6ydSWAF

[berkut]

I have exactly the same issue with it in Wellington, NZ.

Even with "New Zealand" turned on at the top, it gives me quite a few results for things in Wellington, Florida.

If I don't specify "Wellington" or "NZ" in the search terms, results are even worse, even with "New Zealand" turned on: I get results from Australia, Dubai, even the UK for various search terms. (and some of the TLDs are things like "com.au" or ".co.uk" so it should be trivial to filter those out.)

Google's not perfect in this regard, but it's an order of magnitude better in my experience for localised queries, even with both in Incognito/Private mode.

[copperx]

Couldn't DDG use the users location in a non evil way instead of not using it at all, like 1998 Google?

[thaumasiotes]

> If I search for things like "car mechanic bristol", DDG comes up with lots of results from Bristol, Tennessee. It's not that DDG is worse than Google, it's just that DDG isn't tailoring the results to what it knows about me.

If I wanted a car mechanic in San Francisco, I would usually search for "car mechanic 94105" rather than "car mechanic san francisco". Regardless of search engine.

Do postal codes not work to refer to particular areas of the UK?

[notahacker]

The Bristol postcode is the letters 'BS' followed by a one or two digit number, so it's not particularly good for finding a service provider in a large area.

UK postcodes are somewhat more useful when you want to narrow a search to a small area, especially for small towns and London districts where the number is a useful identifier and the area itself might have multiple or non-unique names

[thaumasiotes]

> it's not particularly good for finding a service provider in a large area.

Unless I'm misunderstanding something, this doesn't make much sense.

For example, running a search for "car mechanic 94105" doesn't restrict your results to car mechanics that are located inside the 94105 zip code. It restricts your results to car mechanics that are near the 94105 zip code, where "near" is a fuzzy term. I just ran this search myself, from outside San Francisco, and there's just a single result in the 94105 area. But there are plenty shown in 94107, 94103, 94102, 94111... (primarily 94107).

The zip code is a cheap, easy, and unambiguous way to tell the search engine what you want. It's on the search engine to decide how to respond.

[XelNika]

> For example, running a search for "car mechanic 94105" doesn't restrict your results to car mechanics that are located inside the 94105 zip code

I am seeing literally that issue with both Google and DuckDuckGo so maybe that depends on the region. My search results, both logged-in and in a private window, are limited to car mechanic websites that mention the zip code. The Google Maps search is not limited, but it's not very good in general, so I usually avoid it. DuckDuckGo finds practically no results in the map view (Apple Maps).

> The zip code is a cheap, easy, and unambiguous way to tell the search engine what you want. It's on the search engine to decide how to respond.

So is "car mechanic bristol uk". The parent's entire point is that DuckDuckGo doesn't consider context for natural language searches and claiming that everyone else is searching wrong is completely missing the point.

[Symbiote]

Lithuania, Slovakia and Indonesia also have 94105 as a valid post code.

Post codes are not particularly human friendly (though British ones like N1C 4AG are a bit better than just numbers; it's easy to see the N, N1, N1C prefixes in that).

[gonehome]

Have you tried it recently?

I generally agree that people made excuses for DDG when it was clearly worse and unusable, but today it’s good enough to use instead (I think it’s better).

I’d try it again if you haven’t for a while. Maybe your needs are different than mine, but since we’re both on HN there’s probably pretty good overlap.

Small thing, but I really like how DDG results are primarily links to websites and I can see a bunch of links on the first page without scrolling. I think with google the last search I did had 3?

I suspect the article is right about google being better about low intent searches (and just generally bad search queries from regular people which probably make up the vast majority of users), but I don’t care about that. I think DDG is probably better for more technical users.

[azinman2]

I’ve always had the opposite experience with DDG. Technical queries gave just garbage results, where as I got meaningful hits on google each time. </anecdote>

[Schlaefer]

<anecdote>This thread made me change to DDG (again). A few minutes later gimp was crashing on me, so I did the lazy thing: C&P some of the error into the search engine.

This is the result of my fist search switching to DDG: https://i.imgur.com/05LxLDv.png

DDG results are utterly useless, while google gives three highly relevant results solving my issue within a few seconds. Happens all the time. DDG: I want, I just can't.

PS: And I'm not a person searching for anything gimp all the time, my browser history shows three prior "how to x in" gimp searches over the last year. Adding to that this is google.com not logged-in in a Firefox container solely for google searches where storage is scrapped somewhat regularly. </anecdote>

[spurgu]

This query seems to work a lot better:

    "the program gimp received an x window system error"

[ckosidows]

Agreed. Each time I see something about DDG on HN I try to switch and it never lasts. I don't like the results on DDG and as much as I'd like to move away from Google they've got search on lock.

[azinman2]

I don’t fully buy the whole “need to move away from google” part. Yes privacy, yes ads, yes SEO gaming, yes monotechopocolpyse. But the reality is they don’t sell my data, they’ve been a good steward of my search queries over the years (and have tools to clear my history or log me out and not save them), and their product is still the best over two-ish decades.

If you’re going to convince me to move away from them, you gotta 10x it, not give me a poor clone with ! tools to force me to compensate for a not great search engine. Give me a fundamentally different experience that actually innovates in this space. I’d love to see the competition, but somehow it hasn’t materialized in all these years.

[visarga]

> If you’re going to convince me to move away from them, you gotta 10x it,

The fact that you don't start all your searches in Google is sufficient reason. You could always jump to Google if DDG has bad results, but for many searches you don't need to leave Google traces.

[azinman2]

Why is that sufficient reason? I'm not particularly concerned about Google having my search history. As I've said before, they've been good stewards with it over 20 years.

[gonehome]

The same thing was true for me until it wasn’t, I stayed on DDG after trying it again probably three months ago.

[ianbutler]

I have tried it recently and my co-founder and I are literally building a new search experience because we are deeply unsatisfied with the current ones.

[ampdepolymerase]

Any links to your new project?

[Grimm1]

Yup there is (alpha.whize.co) the question mark at the top links to a blog post with our broader goals though we've refined them a bit since that post.

I'll warn you though, the alpha has a really limited index (github results) but was meant to showcase how we think we'll initially prioritize results and gauge people's interest versus this is the final version because as you can imagine crawling the larger internet is a bigger task and if no one was interested we weren't going to do it.

That said we did have a healthy amount of people try it out (over 2000) and are still seeing people use it now over a month out so we've been full steam ahead on our generic crawler, plus a few social media specific crawlers and we expect to have our beta available mid May.

[xigency]

No offense, but I literally cannot find anything on GitHub with this search engine.

[Grimm1]

It's tuned towards discovery, so if you search a topic you'll get results for smaller, new repos that do something around that topic. We deliberately hard downranked common repos but it's also 2 months out of date now since that was to test the waters and we didnt set up recrawling at the time. That said we shared your concerns and have changed things up with how we are approaching it for the beta

[chapium]

DDG used to have issues with responsiveness on their page. Years later I tried it again and it actually feels right. A lot of work has gone into performance optimization and it has sucked me in.

[jt2190]

> A lot of DDG fans on HN blame the user or social conditioning and use that as a crutch.

The tools are different, though, so searching the same way on DDG and Google will lead to different outcomes. This is no different than adapting you speech when speaking to an infant or speaking to an adult. [1]

For example, I use DDG as my primary search tool, and I have a habit of using "keywords", rather than natural language, when I search DDG. (This may be an outdated habit from my long exposure to search tools.) With modern Google though, I find that if I follow my habit and use keywords, my search results are poor. I have better results using natural language. As others have noted, I have better results when searching Google when I don't know what the thing I'm looking for is called, or when I'm looking for esoteric content (like code samples.)

[1] I'm not saying that switching is easy or even ideal, I'm just underscoring that different tools are... different. ;-) And "knowing" how to use search well is kinda hard these days, as everything keeps evolving, and we're all busy doing other things.

[hombre_fatal]

I have a hard time believing there's actually much google-specific adaption going on for anyone except the biggest HN nerd.

My girlfriend types whole sentences into it. People in this thread have search examples like "harry potter sport". I look at my google search history and it's just generic search strings that DDG has no excuse to struggle.

Having to "tweak your language" just sounds like a cop-out to me. And I think people really just mean you have to add more context to DDG queries because it's easily confused. Like how "elm list" gives great results in google and bad results in DDG.

[jt2190]

> Having to "tweak your language" just sounds like a cop-out to me.

Totally agree. But even Google is nowhere near perfection here, so we’re left with the same two strategies we all use when searching:

* try over and over * continually tweak queries

It’s especially easy to forget that we often actually search multiple times, because we do it so quickly that it’s an ingrained habit.

[pingyong]

Considering the base idea isn't that DDG's search is better, but that their privacy is better, it's kinda the opposite. The people not using DDG would have to provide clear examples. (Or just say that they don't care enough about Google's privacy issues to switch.)

[gameswithgo]

One could ask that you provide clear examples of searches that don't work right for you, then maybe we can provide advice.

[ravenstine]

> A lot of DDG fans on HN blame the user or social conditioning and use that as a crutch. It’s BS.

That's no more or less BS than people saying that "DDG results are shit". I don't see anything wrong with trying to guess why DDG doesn't work well for some people, even if the conclusion happens to offend someone's personal choices.

[LeftHandPath]

I agree. I’ve been in the DDG camp for a little while, but I finally had to switch back to google as my primary search engine on my laptop - fixing searches was taking too much time. That’s after two or three months of using DDG and Bing exclusively

[gonehome]

Funnily enough I just got an example of this from a friend who is trying DDG this week.

Her example query that did better on Google than DDG:

> why did robinhood go down feb 29 2020

What I would search for the same question that does better on DDG:

> robinhood down

She's 24 and I'm 29 so it's possible that difference is real, people who are younger may be tailoring searches in a way that benefits Google (in which case they may not benefit as much from DDG or really would have to change behavior).

[NicolasGorden]

For me the differences are:

Google is better at dealing with topics that are trending and providing data right on the SERP without having to click through. If I want to look up the latest Corona Virus stats, I'd do so on google. As the article states, things like Google's stock panel are just superior to other options.

But DDG is better at historical searches. It's like they try to 'understand' you less and want to provide you with all possible things you could be looking for. Like Google used to do and like I prefer. I've looked up old articles I had read and wanted to reference when writing an article. On Google and they just don't come up. No matter what I do: use the date tool, use quotes, etc, it's like Google thinks it's too old/irrelevant for me, so no matter what I search, it won't give it to me. But on DDG, they are there and will come up with the right set of keywords.

[troyvit]

Actually the article in this post provides exactly that. https://www.bitlog.com/2020/03/06/duckduckgo-is-good-enough-... Look for the bit about Harry Potter.

[atoav]

I uaed google the last 3 years on my desktop while I used DDG on my phone, so I have a pretty good feeling about the differences. I started using duckduckgo because I accidentally set the default search engine to it and thought: OK I might as well use that for a while.

The question you ask is hard to answer because the differences depend on the thing you are searching for. My feeling: for searching code stuff google is a tad better, while for everyday stuff duckduckgo seems to display more relevant results.

It is definitly worth trying, just to notice the subtle things google does sometimes.

[dhimes]

It might be more effective if you try it yourself. Google something you normally google, then repeat the search with &pws=0 at the end of the query string.

[akavel]

Interesting, what is the pws arg?

[dhimes]

I think it's something like 'personalized web search' so you turn it off. That used to be the way to do it anyway.

[shrikant]

It turns off personalised (based on your browsing/search history) search results.

[chuckgreenman]

Let's say there's a new can opener in the drawer [1], it's the same size and shape as a can opener but because it's not what you're used to you try to use it in the normal orientation and it doesn't work.

Even though the tool can open cans, rounds off the sharp edges and requires less grip force you reply with: a lot of OXO folks blame the user or social conditioning. It's BS.

Is that a reasonable response?

I'd argue that it isn't.

But to answer your question I use more precise language for what I'm looking for, specifying the city and state I want results from, specifying the type of thing that I want.

A lot of my searches are !bangs,

!godoc - for searching Go packages !gems - for searching ruby gems !sx - for getting only stack overflow results !w - for jumping to a Wikipedia article !gh - for searching github

- [1] https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000079XW2?tag=duckduckgo-ffab-20&...

[forkexec]

GP isn't a peer-reviewed journal, it's an opinion insight.

[_jal]

> You need to provide clear examples

Nope, I don't. I don't care what search engine you like. I do want to see Google knocked down several pegs, but fan rants aren't going to do that.

I just keep using DDG as it gets better while Google gets worse and sometimes think a little about the variety of the human experience.