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I'm trying to use DuckDuckGo, but for now the local search results are really, really poor. I can't blame them much though, because Yahoo and Bing suck as well.
by bad_user 11y ago
I'm trying to use DuckDuckGo, but for now the local search results are really, really poor. I can't blame them much though, because Yahoo and Bing suck as well. But then Bing's index is in fact the only competition Google has and DuckDuckGo cannot improve as long as they depend on Bing.
One favorite example that I've been using for feedback is when I'm searching for "restaurante" (the Romanian word for "restaurants"), in Google Search I'm getting links to nearby restaurants. Which is normal since they've got my location and so on. But they also know that in my country (Romania) the people are speaking Romanian and so they are showing me results in the Romanian language of restaurants from my city.
On the other hand in DuckDuckGo:
1. The instant answer is terribly wrong, mistakenly identifying a plain vocabulary word from at least 3 romance languages (!!!) as being the name of some insignificant 1-star GitHub project that nobody cares about. Ouch!
2. Even though the region selected is Romania, aproximately the first eleven results contain the translation of the word "restaurante" from Spanish, a link to some "el Restaurante" magazine I've never heard about and a link to some latin restaurant named Kuuk from Mexico, plus a "Top 10 Berlin Restaurants" (needless to say Berlin is not in Romania)
3. Out of 30 links I get, none of them is related to Romanian restaurants, Romanian cuisine, or anything related to Romania, even though the selected region is Romania and that word is a Romanian word.
4. OK, lets assume that some users searching for "restaurante" are interested in Spanish results. Well, one problem would be that Mexico is different from Spain, but lets ignore that as well. The biggest problem is that this set of results is completely useless for Spanish speakers as well.
- temp 11y agoI can only reiterate those same experiences for another locale. Google provides an almost seamless experience when I do searches in English and in my local language. I don't feel like I've downgraded when doing a search locally. None of the other search engines even bother. Which means that despite being incredibly privacy-conscious, and trying to avoid Google services like a plague, there's literally no alternative for me whatsoever to Google when searching online.
- realusername 11y agoIf it can reassure you, it's about as terrible as this in French, in English it kind of works but for other languages, it's not even worth thinking about for now. I hope they are going to improve this part, otherwise they will never get those users.
- castell 11y agoDDG depends on Yahoo Search API (BOSS) which depends on Bing. And Yahoo Search will be no more according to the news. As far as I know neither Google nor Bing offer a Search API for third parties. DDG already uses Yandex (RU) for certain markets, maybe that's where they are heading. Or DDG starts using their own crawler as main data source.
- panglott 11y agoThanks, it's hard for me to understand why people complain about DDG's search results, which are generally fine for me (in the US), without elaborating on specific kinds of problems they have.
- AdamSC1 11y agoHi Bad_user Thanks for the detailed feedback - have you tried toggle on regional settings and language selection from the settings menu? These are a big help in regards to local results outside the US and especially in cases where the word may be a common term.