It is not, many people are saying this.

Personally I find other search engines (DDG included) quite impossible to use, the results just are not what I was looking for, while Google is an always first page hit. Engines like Bing just give me straight up crap which isn't even related to (seemingly ofcourse; it somehow did find a relation obviously) what I am searching for.

I use web search almost exclusively for compile issues, coding searches and whitepaper searches. I would like to use something else but it would be very inefficient for the work I do at this moment.

What I noticed as well (and is sommewhat related); I work in China a lot and my colleagues there have no (real; they have it when they need to but they don't use it like we do) access to Google and, when solving hardware/software problems they are far less efficient than us. Thye have an advantage (I find) that they memorize a lot more than we do, but when we just need to solve something that they did not encounter before, Google always delivers while Baidu, Bing etc do not even get close.

You could just turn off autosuggest, but then unintended items (ex: typos, things that don't match the browser's "complete URL" regex pattern) would still be sent to Google. Best to not make Big Brother your default listener in the first place.

That said, I still prefer DDG because much of my searching is code, DDG seems less likely to snoop, and Google's handling of the Google Memo seemed sufficiently authoritarian to make me prefer suitable rival products where available.

I want 'amorphid', not 'amorphis'.

works. More tips under "duckduckgo search syntax".

This said, I think google is more accurate. But duckduckgo works well enough and is my default search engine now (Google lost me with THE ONE GOOGLE aggregation since quite a while ago)

I'm getting many sites that are missing one or more of my keywords listed above sites that do have all of them. I get this odd feeling an AI is trying really hard to draw inferences from my search patterns and is failing horribly to understand what it is I am asking for most of the time.

If that doesn't work I type "BING" and don't return for a while.

If Google's algorithm doesn't keep track of frustrated searches for BING I will eat my hat.

here's hoping some future intelligent system will be a lot smarter and more capable of tracking the breadcrumbs of my evidently-permanent log-trail of passive-aggression than the human UX-dillholes who are currently running things.

Same for me. I specially like their approach to technical documentation.

Search for some web development stuff and DuckDuckGo shows you the MDN site while Google points to some outdated (and low quality and spammy) w3schools site.

Ask a question that is answered on StackOverflow? DuckDuckGo points you to StackOverflow, and even shows relevant parts of the answer. While Google points to some spam sites that are a bad rip-off of the StackOverflow content.

I just wonder why this obvious tool is not account-level functionality that works across browsers and devices. If it is because the sites that people block bring revenue to Google, then Google truly is evil.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/personal-blocklist...

If Google really cared about user experience, they would already have downscored all those low-quality sites years ago. But they don't - neither now nor back then. So either they are profiting from those low-quality sites, or they simply don't care.

Just tried it right now - the top three search results for "html canvas" are all w3schools on google. They're still the top in DDG, but there's only one entry as opposed to three. Bing also only has one, but they also steal the "here's your answer" type card text from w3schools.

Congratulations on your SEO, but f' you for polluting search results.

html canvas -site:w3schools.com

Probably returns what you wanted.

https://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/35786/is-there-a...

* You have to navigate a half dozen pages to get to what you want assuming you can navigate the maze of links.

* Site search incompletely indexes the site.

* Site search has poor ranking. Twenty pages of press releases and other crap mentioning what you want before the actual info.

* Site search doesn't handle spelling mistakes so you get no results.

* Site search doesn't handle related topics so if you search for the wrong or alternate phrase you miss what you need.

* No site search feature at all.

So yeah, search engine is my first choice.

But let's assume you use a search engine only for stuff you aren't intimately familar with - how could you trust the quality of the results? If they are so bad at the topics you know much about - why should they be better at the other topics?

But now I have a better workaround which doesn't only work for mdn, but any other high-quality resource: I edited my browser settings to use a different search engine by default. (currently DDG)

Personally I noticed that a few years back there was always talk of changes to Googles' algorithms to de-rank automatically generated SEO/ad pages, yet this exact kind of site dominate search results in many topics. This makes Google virtually useless for them.

On the other hand, sometimes Google still manages to dig up some information that I'd never expected to find. For example, sometimes when searching a part number Google will direct you to a page that doesn't even mention that number, yet is still about the same part (under a different label) or mentions it - rather impressive. However, most of the time the majority of search results are useless sites that just have endless lists of everything to get traffic and show ads.

Google also became notoriously bad in discerning (or rather susceptible to manipulation?) which page(s) are "official" (which should rank very high for certain terms) and which are not.

"Dear Google AI. Why do you think I wrote that word into my query? Best Regards, Beefield."

(Second one is that there is no way to make specific queries to return results only in a certain language (and even adding words in a specific language does not help because it tries to translate them), but you need to change the settings for the whole google search)

It's a little hidden away but advanced search can do this.

For example: https://www.google.com/search?as_q=猫&lr=lang_en

I've almost become accustomed to always putting my queries in quotes, just because it would otherwise mean completely useless results.

The other thing that's gotten worse results is... adult content, especially when searching for very specific terms; and even with "SafeSearch" off, which is supposed to mean no filtering.

To add insult to injury, repeating minor variations of a query, combing through "all" the results (or as many as Google is willing to show you), and in general trying to extract what you're actually looking for also tends to get you blocked with a CAPTCHA or just completely banned for a while.

Oh yeah. When Google proudly proclaims that there are about sixty quintillion results. And the thing you want isn't on the front page, but you know it's there somewhere if it was ever indexed. You start combing through the results. 25 pages in, no more results.

To make an analogy, it'd be like going into a pet shop, looking for a specific breed of dog, and the owner trying to convince you to buy cats instead. "But you were just looking for a pet, right? What's the difference?" A pretty idiotic situation.

Google needs to get back to its minimalist beginnings. It's really apparent that the advertising department has taken over while the search department atrophies.

In retrospect, I think the turning point was when they murdered Labs and Reader.

However it's still the best search engine hands down. There is no way a search engine like DDG could provide better results. If Bing can't do it there is no way DDG can.

It would like it if there was a comparable alternative to Google but there really isn't.

I think it would be cool if some system or protocol (eg. IMAP, RSS, OStatus) came along to provide a way to create a user programmable search engine, that's decentralized but comparable to Google.

This database could be made freely available (see CommonCrawl) but without a datacenter big enough to store and run queries on it, it's meaningless as a "open" search engine.

A distributed search engine runs into all of the scalability and quality of service problems that researchers of Peer-to-Peer Information Retrieval have been trying to solve since the early days of the internet.

For me the biggest disappointment is when they turned off the ability to search for "an exact match within quotes", as well as the ability to use +plus and -minus to refine results. (EDIT: could be wrong about that, I thought it was disabled at some point)

But the most dumbfounding is the fact that you still get several year old results whenever you search for a bug, hardware/driver issue, or even simple programming questions related to a not too old framework or API. Every time I have to go into the advanced options to restrict the results to one year, or one month.. you'd think they would make recent activity the default and then let the user know they can "search older results".

The + operator was retired when Google+ was launched, because + was needed as a searchable character rather than an operator.

When did it stopped being supported?

A quick test reveals maybe the change is that you can't do an exact "ascii" search, ie. google searches for an exact sequence of words, but the casing may be different , there-may-be-dashes and so on.

  mars +landings +failures

  mars “landings” “failures”

Quotes still work, and also have an effect like +

That said, it would be nice if it wasn't buried and was exposed as a slider but I'll take what they're giving.

Anyway, I also use DDG, but I always end up using "!g". At least this gives DDG some metrics on how well they are doing.

This behavior completely derailed my mom when her search bar was hijaacked by some just-barely-not-malware addon installed in the browser. Suddenly, she couldn't reach any of her sites.

Frustrating as hell, but at this point there's nothing I can do to change her behavior.

1. a clearly marked relevant ad at the top, for the circleci github plugin

2. an infobox at the right with details of the company, their web address, a link to their twitter account, and some related search queries

3. (first full-width result) link to github.com and summary text

4. a sub-search box to continue searching only on github.com

5. a short two-column list of six links to github.com sub sections

6. a link to the github twitter account and three square boxes across the page with its most recent tweets

7. the github wikipedia page

8. github youtube channel

9. github app for slack

10. github linkedin profile

11. github facebook page

Apart from this inconsistent and confusing presentation, there is not much difference in actual results: duckgo offers results all with the same consistent appeareance:

1. github's homepage

2. wikipedia page about github

3. github's twitter

4. github desktop homepage

5. github's facebook

6. github's youtube

and then a load of github related results, as you can see here: https://i.imgur.com/bpDlNT1.png

https://i.imgur.com/c8THJcm.png

https://i.imgur.com/zdAQrIB.png

[1]: https://www.qwant.com/ [2]: https://framabee.org/

That’s also the very reason I switched to ddg: getting non local, non trending results in Google is a PITA. It’s a constant fight against the AI that tries to steer the results towards what 90% of the people in that country are looking for.

  void foo() {
    cout << "global\n";
  }
  
  struct Foo {
    void foo(int i) {
      cout << "method " << i << "\n";
    }
  
    void bar() {
      foo(); // <-- compiler error here
    }
  };

There's a stark difference if you try to search for something where Google can net a big cut of the outcome. Try searching for "vegas hotels". Once upon a time, google returned a healthy mix of results that directly benefited them, and ones that didn't.

Here's the portion of the page (yellow rectangle) that now appears to be presented to actually help visitors, and not directly pay Google: https://imgur.com/a/hAFas On my PC, you have to scroll down 2 pages to see that.

Of course there's some synergy between helping visitors and profit to Google, that's how business models work. And if you think that following the links to hotels.com and tripadvisor.com will get you more altruistic and unbiased information than the Google links then I'd like to sell you this fine bridge with air conditioning, great views and swimming facilities, which 93% of visitors rated as 4 stars or higher.

Back in the "10 blue links" day, the organics that showed, above the fold, were driven by factors that didn't include "Google's cut".

Similar for Google shopping. It's predecessor, Froogle, weighted on consumer factors. The replacement does not.

If the organics are basically bad now too, the blame goes to the same place. In fact, crappy organics encourage more ad clicks.

I don't know how to make such search terms useful again. Maybe by aggressively delisting anything that reeks of SEO, has ads or otherwise wants to sell something. If that filters out everything but the personal homepage of Johnny S. Hotels of Las Vegas, then so be it.

What about the business itself ? Would it survive if google told people it's closed when it's open ?

I'm asking because this is one of the high profile case that has been proeminently featured to showcase how the maps can have devastating effects.

https://www.wired.com/2014/07/hacking-google-maps/

I feel like you've posted this comment mid-thoughtstream. How is the compiler error relevant to Google Search?

Edit: > Even a few years ago, answering an arcane question like this, where it is not clear what keywords you need to search for, would take you hours of googling. Most people would just not bother. But in this case, it took me literally 30 s to find an answer on Stack Overflow.

Makes a bit more sense now you've edited that in.

Yeah, I'd totally agree. I've noticed it can help you find films based on description ("film with adam sandler and kate beckinsale") or code syntax ("c++ io operator") using terms that aren't really at all obviously connected to what you're trying to find out.

However for me that's fine, it removes most of my use of Google search.

But also the !g search is less personalised than the regular google search so you'll get less of the search bubble.

Even better is to always do the !g searches in a private browsing tab or use the Firefox containers addon to keep the tracking cookies separate. Then you're even less likely to get search bubble results.

But now we are back at the greater discussion... the feeling that your searches happen within a bubble. The odd realization that you haven't discovered anything new in a long time.

This has been discussed on HN many times. But usually people talk about how Google doesn't index the sites the same way.... But here we are pointing out a much more specific culprit: Google actually tries to help you, but does it? (I mean, with the SAME index it will show different results to different users. So the INDEX itself is affected by their algorithm, and then on top of that, Google filters and tweaks results to fit your own bubble.)

You know I may be walking around the block to look for new appartments... and maybe I stumble on a nice bookstore. With this "help" from Google, this doesn't happen anymore.

Anyone know if you can turn off this profiling entirely while reamining signed on?

( I have the same issue on YouTube... With YT I have got into the habit of using Incognito (ctrl shift N) for random youtube browsing.. that way when I go to the home page I get recommendations I tend to like, because I only allow certain content in my youtube history. )

You ask for django and you get results for django[1]. When what you search has several possible meanings duckduckgo allows you to choose which one in the "meanings" top bar[2]. Thus preserving your freedom of choice and your privacy.

This is actually the whole point of duckduckgo, it has no filter bubble.

Then you also have all the usual search engine options: adding keywords, filtering out by keywords, etc.

[1]: https://i.imgur.com/2NoPc2r.png [2]: https://i.imgur.com/Pw9Eete.png

Other than those I can confirm that google is bad at providing relevant results for this keyword, and instead only focus on one possible meaning.

Yes! It's foolish to simply trust what you read. And that's especially so for contentious issues. Every source is biased, intentionally or not. And expecting Google to do the heavy lifting, and just trust what they give you, is just as foolish.

Ha! My exact experience shows the same. I'm not finding something using DDG and think "well google will find it, surely", use !g and bam! I've got the same irrelevant results. The correct approach is to adjust the query but it's hard to fight the habit of trusting that Google knows better...

"american inventors" "european people art" "white couple" "white man and white woman" "european history people" "white woman with children"

Its to the point I just go to a certain few sites directly to search within these sites instead of Google.

This had been going on for over 15 years now, I remember a time where you could have over a dozen pages of relevant results then focus was put on first page and it was over.

DDG just provides the best results.

I'm not interested the best results for you, I'm not even interested in the best results for me. I have no use for dictionary that removes the words I don't like, I want both sides of the coin.

In what way is DDG better here exactly? I'm not buying it.

Use the !s bang instead, which uses Startpage. Startpage is Google results but with user confidentiality, IIUC.

It's not just google search. It's the entire alphabet ecosystem. Google news, youtube, etc all are getting worse. Google news was "cleansed" and now just peppers everyone with nytimes and wapo articles. If you have the time, waybackmachine and see how different googlenews is now compared to just a couple of years ago. And youtube trending is just awful as well. It doesn't reflect what people are watching. It's just a advertising platform for established news channels and late night shows.

It's the direction the internet is going. From user directed (bottom-up ) system to a moderator driven ( top-down ) system.

The government and establishment media has put so much pressure on social media/internet companies that they finally have given in.

Essentially, the age-old tactic of blaming someone of aiding the enemy ( aka russians/fake news/propaganda ) and "we must protect the children" was used to intimidate and cow tech companies.

I wanted to look up a translation and tried !wr word on bing and it did not load the wordreference.com page for word

I wanted to find a pizza for tonight and I'm not familiar with my current location, so I typed pizza near me in bing and it returned results for pizza chain store in US, Canada and India while I'm in western Europe. Same search in duckduckgo gives me an openstreetmap based map centered on my location with addresses of places to get pizza and yelp reviews.

I could go on for a while with other examples showing that duckduckgo is definitely not a limited version of Bing.

Older still (2013), but more detail: http://highscalability.com/blog/2013/1/28/duckduckgo-archite...

https://duck.co/help/results/sources

Turns out DDG is not "just Bing wrapped in incognito"[1] so you actually answered your own question here. But even if it were, the incognito part is enough to make much much better.

Then again each has his own preferences[2]

[1]: https://duck.co/help/results/sources [2]: https://twitter.com/ganeumann/status/268389572533170176

So basically they don't have their own crawler but aggregate results, mostly from Bing which is (or was) clear from comparing search results. However, a sibling comment claims they run their own spider now so my info may be outdated (quote from Wikipedia).