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by tomatofrank 1593 days ago
Yeah, Google is still my default browser, though I haven't used other engines enough to develop a strong opinion here.

I'll add that I could have been more clever with my query. For instance, if I surround the lyric in quotes, Google returns the right result first.

Original query: like you didn't care I don't know why lyrics r&b

Improved query: "like you didn't care I don't know why" lyrics r&b

At the end of the day, I'm not frustrated with Google. I use it every day and it saves me lots of time. It just amuses me that in some cases, other engines that probably use simpler search algorithms are objectively better. And in this case, I think it's fair to expect Google to produce the right result on page 1.

3 comments

Most of the time duckduckgo doesn’t even acknowledge quotations. I can’t tell if it’s because there aren’t results for when the query contains quotations or if they simply don’t acknowledge them most of the time. Either way it’s annoying and it makes me go back to google every time.
I think you also need to put a + in front, for ddg to pay attention.
Do you have an example query?
These are some I found in my search history, where I then switched to !g. Not sure if all these examples still fail to produce results with the matching string (but they still seem to have issues, upon a quick glance):

"packages not in the aur"

rake "invalid session id"

"pacman -Qm"

arch "The pgAdmin 4 server could not be contacted"

"previous definition of HTML_NAMESPACE was here"

illustrator "print preview" is darker

systemd Loaded: bad-setting "has a bad unit file setting"

Funny enough, when I search for your second query on Google right now, the top result for me is your comment right here.
I'm still on dogpile. It gets me where I need to go most of the time.
I'll check it out!