I've seen this a lot more with Google search actually. Google tries to outsmart me and show me what they think I want instead of what I'm searching.

And I can't believe that you would get thousands of non relevant results. Please show an example.

Use +"quotes and a plus sign".

It's actually weird to see that in a DDG x Google comparison... But yes, DDG has started giving me results with entire terms removed from the search since recently, and I have to add quotes all the time to get them back.

But at least with DDG we have to option of quoting the terms. Google is much worse at this in any way you care to measure.

No, they actually started removing even quoted terms from search like 2-3 months ago or so; as a consequence I am now looking for DDG alternatives. First Google results became bad, now DDG seems to copy the same "failure" of the "dominant player" instead of standing out and being useful.

Yes, I've found this to be the case. Today I was searching for "DVD-RAM" and most of the results from DDG did not contain the term at all, with or without quotes.

When you run across broken searches like that, you can report them to DDG and they'll fix them.

Duckduckgo uses Bing search in the back end, which is dogshit.

Alternatively, you can use Startpage, which uses Google results, but anonymized.

Duckduckgo claims to use 400 sources [0], so you’re probably not totally spot on.

Edit: However, that includes their Instant Answers feature, and the numbers are outdated, it’s 1600 sources, most of which are catering to an specific and tiny niche (like angular.js docs, or a dictionary of accounting terms). Main sources are Bing, Yahoo, Wolfram Alpha and their own crawler (according to Wikipedia).

[0] https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/so...

They say: 1 source = 1 widget/instant hack That's not for the SERP ;)

It's mostly Bing/Yahoo/Yandex rebranded depending on the country.

> Duckduckgo uses Bing search in the back end, which is dogshit

Bing seems fine to me.

When I got a Surface Pro 4 three years ago, I decided to give Edge a try to see if it would do as my main browser, and left Bing as its default search.

Three years later, I've not felt the need to change that.

Is Startpage still anonymous? I thought they got bought by an adtech firm

Link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21371577

Startpage.com is and always has been anonymous, according to Wikipedia and without any credible sources denying this.

Where did you get your suggestion?

This is linked from another comment here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21371577

On the other hand, Wikipedia isn’t a “creditable source.” I have no dog in this fight, but the tendency to use Wikipedia to prove things is annoying.

I use Bing everyday, get points towards gift cards, and literally never have any issues finding anything I search for, personal or technical.

I too have enjoyed Bing more these days. I've always enjoyed their daily travel images especially, and the search results have been decent.

It also doesn't have the good locality of Google search. It's like a timewarp back 15 years ago when I had to put "Canada" into every Google search query to tell them I want the Canadian version of the site.

This used to annoy me as well until I realized it's a very minor inconvenience compared to the benefit of not having my location data collected every time I search.

You can enable localization on DDG, but by default it's off. Personally, I think that not tracking location is a saner default, but it is an option that you can enable.