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.
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.
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.
Maybe you intended to say this, then I'm really curious about your perspective?
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.
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)
This is the problem I've been having with DDG, where it will aggressively rewrite my search into something completely unrelated
Of course Reddit is still gamed and has plenty of other issues, but far less than Google at this point.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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
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.
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.
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).
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.
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>
"the program gimp received an x window system error"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.
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.
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.
Wasn't google criticized here on HN for downranking specific results? If I'm looking for something, probably I'm looking for the most common, I think
I can appreciate your thought on that but we're not necessarily geared towards the most common per se (though this might be me misunderstanding what you mean) as we have experienced multiple times the most common result being wrong or outdated and the way things are now it takes a long time for those to slide out of the rankings.
We've been asking around for a while now to flesh out what our actual thought is and the description for the problem we're solving right now is "information staleness", you search for something and it leads you to a reddit post but that's outdated by 5 years and then you wind up actually having to do a deep dive and it turns out there was actually a more accurate post from a year ago but it just hasn't crept up to the top yet because everything references the 5 year old post.
With our alpha we actually think we went too much in the other direction we focused on it all being super super new but the reality is there is nuance between different topics for what timeframe information decays in, if that makes sense, and now we're for the beta trying to strike a better balance.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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&...
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.
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.