15 ms·
That's strange. I've had the same feeling with Google for a long time: Why are the results so strange, and no improvement in sight for years? Then I discovered
by vog 9y ago
That's strange. I've had the same feeling with Google for a long time: Why are the results so strange, and no improvement in sight for years?
Then I discovered DuckDuckGo and never looked back.
For example, why do Google searches for HTML/JS stuff result in third-party crap sites instead of pointing me directly to the relevant MDN or W3C sites? Why do searches for company names result in tons of marketing crap (where their main web site would have been sufficient), instead of at least showing the Wikipedia article as well?
If you really want to embrace diversity, look beyond the two largest players.
For search engines, it's not Bing versus Google, there are DuckDuckGo, YaCy and so on.
For laptops, it's not Windows versus MacOS, there's MINT, FreeBSD, Ubuntu, etc.
For servers, it's not Windows Server versus RHEL, there's also Debian, FreeBSD, etc.
For smart phones, it's not iOS versus Google-Android, there's also LineageOS, Replicant, etc.
(For nitpickers: Yes, LineageOS is heavily based on Android, which is again heavily based on Linux. Still, a slick LineageOS doesn't even need GApps, which is a huge difference to the e.g. stock Samsung/Asus/... crapware Android.)
- nasredin 9y agoSo it's not just me that thinks Google lost the war to spammers? I limit my searches to com,org,net,io domains and the first pages are still full of spam. The UI is race-to-the-bottom terrible. Choosing "verbatim" takes 3 mouse clicks FFS! Google is becoming only useful with esoteric knowledge. E.g. you need to append site:stackexchange for the search to be useful.
- whatshisface 9y agoIt really depends what you're searching for - product reviews are an endless landscape of garbage, science-related stuff is pretty good.
- bobdole1234 9y agoGoogle might have just lumped you into the idiot bin, there are people who WANT their searches to look like spam. Google will happily show people what it thinks they want based on how they've interacted with the service (or sometimes, how the people on that IP address/machine have interacted with the service). I always have to start an incognito tab to find anything that isn't pure drivel on my mothers machine. Otherwise I get search results that look remarkably like the spam she forwards me. Try a search from an incognito tab and compare.
- Buge 9y agoShe might have malware. My parents' machine had a malicious extension that made all the search results terrible.
- IntronExon 9y agoDDG is a godsend. It’s painful when you first switch and realize just how skewed and weird Google’s results have been though. Sort of like waking up from a particularly disorienting dream.
- avinium 9y agoDDG results are great, but it still pains me that it's (relatively) slow compared to Google + Chrome, which is as close to instantaneous as far as I perceive.
- IntronExon 9y agoOn Firefox and Safari they seem the same to me, and either way I’d rather wait a few extra ms to get results that aren’t a bunch of SEO spam and ads.
- MaxBarraclough 9y ago> DDG results are great No, it's still far inferior to Google search. Try "D without garbage collection" in both, and get back to me.
- IntronExon 9y agoFirst result in DDG is from stack overflow: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/13574552/d-programming-without-the-garbage-collector#13575667 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/13574552/d-programming-w... Google: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/13574552/d-programming-without-the-garbage-collector https://stackoverflow.com/questions/13574552/d-programming-w... Same exact thing, so what is your point exactly?
- MaxBarraclough 9y agoCherry-picking, then. Real cute. Of the top 10 Google results, 9 specifically relate to the D programming language. Of the top 10 DuckDuckGo results, the number is 3.
- Kiro 9y ago> For search engines, it's not Bing versus Google, there are DuckDuckGo, YaCy and so on. DDG is just a wrapper for Bing.
- notheguyouthink 9y agoWait, really? Fwiw, I switched to DDG a ~year ago (can't remember honestly lol), and I've been quite happy. With that said, not a week goes by where I don't use the !g bang to run my search on Google. DDG just has terrible results. It's good enough a lot, maybe even most of the time, but frequently it's too terrible. I'm still happy I switched, the "good enough" results are heavily reinforced by privacy, and not giving Google everything. The fact remains though, DDG misses the mark for me frequently.
- chillingeffect 9y agoNo, GP post is inaccurate. As sources below state, DDG "generates those results from over 400 individual sources, including key crowdsourced sites such as Wikipedia, and other search engines like Bing, Yahoo!, Yandex, and Yummly.[6][7]" as well as DuckDuckBot. Also, more importantly, Bing, like google and facebook is building personal dossiers on everyone, while DDG is not.
- granitDev 9y agoThis is so wrong it's laughable. Please provide proof if this ridiculousness.
- nxc18 9y agohttps://web.archive.org/web/20150124074006/https://duck.co/help/results/sources https://web.archive.org/web/20150124074006/https://duck.co/h... “Just a wrapper” is misleading, but DDG returns bing results at least some of the time.
- lugg 9y agoI suspect they're referring to the fact that it is? (Well, Bing and 400+ other engines) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DuckDuckGo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DuckDuckGo https://web.archive.org/web/20150124074006/https://duck.co/help/results/sources https://web.archive.org/web/20150124074006/https://duck.co/h... https://www.theregister.co.uk/AMP/2017/08/15/bing_microsoft_duckduckgo_outage/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/AMP/2017/08/15/bing_microsoft_...
- krylon 9y ago> Then I discovered DuckDuckGo and never looked back. Well, the quality of the search results is not always as good as with Google. I do look back. But DuckDuckGo improved a lot over the last couple of years. Nowadays, DDG is my go-to search engine, and Google is the fallback when I hit a really hard problem; the more obscure the question, the more like it is in my experience that Google will yield more helpful results than DuckDuckGo. In some way, DuckDuckGo is even better than Google. For specific questions, it often replies with a short snippet from stackoverflow or some other site that answers my question before I ever click on a link. That is just brilliant! Google does that, too, sometimes, but for coding questions, DuckDuckGo seems to be better at it.
- chillingeffect 9y agoI actually forgot about google until this thread came up. I basically never have to use !g anymore, bc DDG does everything I need so well! I've done a few googles over the last year, like on my girlfriend's computer, but I really find their results are so commercially-oriented that when looking for information it all gets in the way.
- krylon 9y agoI envy you. A little at least. I had to make a conscious effort, and eventually I just switched my default search engine from Wikipedia to DDG and forcefully acquired the habit of just typing my search in the adress bar instead of calling up my search engine of choice. And still I find myself typing goog^H^H^H^Hddg.gg on a regular basis. The habit is just so deeply ingrained. ;-)
- chillingeffect 9y agoWell I admire Wikipedia as a default search engine. That's fairly hardcore. Krylon, eh? Are you a painter?
- krylon 9y agoFor a long time I was in the habit to explicity open a search engine, i.e. type "google.de", or these days "ddg.gg", and then enter my search terms into their input field. But at home I tend to look up stuff on Wikipedia more often than I search things on Google/DuckDuckGo. At work, I have used Google until I made an effort to switch to DDG. The best I can paint are stick figures. ;-) I came across that word long before I had any idea what it meant. I remember being very confused, though, when somebody showed me a picture of some rapper wearing a T-shirt that said Krylon. (As so often in life, it was a lot less funny when I was told what it meant... :-/ )
- Kurtz79 9y agoMy relationship with DDG for the last few years has been the following: - I read somewhere (mostly always on HN) how great it is. - I set it as the main search engine on my browser. - I use it for a while, but I notice how slow it feels compared to Google, and how the results (especially local, non US ones) are somehow off in some cases. - I go back to Google after a few days, and I forget about DDG for a few months/years, at least until the next comment on HN about it. ...and the cycle begins, again.
- username223 9y agoThe key to switching from Google to DDG is memorizing a few shortcuts for fallbacks, like "!g" (Google), "!gi" (Google images), and "!gn" (Google news). It can be annoying at first to have to type the few extra characters, but over time you'll find yourself using them less and less. They will never completely disappear, but one day you'll realize you're only using them in a few percent of your searches. In most cases, you will know in advance that you specifically want "Google results" instead of "search results," and can add them on the first query. From a privacy perspective, using DDG like this denies Google 95+% of the information it would be gathering about you. Caveat: I have never wanted "local" or "personalized" search results. I'm willing to type "Chinese food near ZIP code" or "Chinese translation" instead of relying on opaque algorithms to use my location and personal data to decide whether I'm hungry or confused.
- cdancette 9y agoFor me it was exactly the opposite: It ended becoming an automatism, I used the flag 100% of the time, by default without looking at the ddg results. That's when I switched back to Google.
- amelius 9y ago> It can be annoying at first to have to type the few extra characters, Especially on mobile. Can't they use something more mobile-friendly than "!g", such as "gg" or "/g" for example?
- 9y ago
- jacksmith21006 9y agoI have tried to use Google alternatives a few times and always go back. Now I also been using Google for a long time and so they have my data and I probably have learned how to use Google efficiently. One of the biggest difference is something that happened very recently. Google is much faster at updating then the alternatives for some reason. I suspect it is about event driven versus polling. That Google is given update when things happen from trusted news sites instead of having to poll or crawl for new things. Would not be surprised Google just has a lot more of these connections than MS has. But I am probably unusual in that I now just try to keep all my data at Google instead of it being spread around. A big one is my ISP is allowed to sell my data without even me knowing. So I use Google DNS instead of my ISP and also use YouTube TV. All to try to keep my data away from my ISP. My biggest issue is companies being hacked and people getting my data like what happened to Yahoo. I just trust Google better able to protect.
- username223 9y ago> But I am probably unusual in that I now just try to keep all my data at Google instead of it being spread around. I made just the opposite choice, instead trying to offer different parts of my data to different companies. That way, when one company gets hacked, changes its terms of service, gets bought, etc., my losses are limited.
- ocdtrekkie 9y agoThis is key. You can't keep all of your data off the Internet, but you can guarantee nobody can see all of it by trying to prevent your various internet identities from being linked or associated, and keeping data siloed in different, disconnected services. There's a couple things I do still use Google for, like YouTube. But since they no longer have 95% of my personal data, the impact of them having my YouTube history is drastically reduced.
- sigmaml 9y agoFirstly, it is quite difficult to manage so many usernames and passwords, for non-tech-savvy people such as my parents. Secondly, don't you think that actually maintaining it is very difficult? One inadvertant click could expose one of those accounts to another with a different service provider, etc. Arguably, it can work should you define a different browser profile for each of those accounts!? Nonetheless, it is neither easy nor smooth, in my opinion.
- aiCeivi9 9y ago> Why are the results so strange, and no improvement in sight for years I don't currently have any issues with Google search result but I won't be surprised if underlying PageRank is slowly crumbling away. After all forums died off, blogs popularity has drastically dropped and most links between users are exchanged on closed platforms (FB) / communicators. Wisdom of the crowd might no longer be available in open web.
- leggomylibro 9y ago>For example, why do Google searches for HTML/JS stuff result in third-party crap sites instead of pointing me directly to the relevant MDN or W3C sites? Why do searches for company names result in tons of marketing crap (where their main web site would have been sufficient), instead of at least showing the Wikipedia article as well? I gotta be honest, from my perspective, that feels like a weird thing to say. It's totally different from what I've seen. I always get sites like MDN/W3C when I search for HTML/JS stuff, usually there isn't any blogspam at all on the first page of results. I always get Wikipedia articles and main company websites when I search for a company's name. I have a lot of problems with Google, but I almost never see 'spammy' search results. It's weird that our experiences are so different.
- craigds 9y agoI agree, I always get w3schools at the top of html/js results. I actually installed a Chrome extension to allow me to manually block google results from certain domains, to prevent me ever clicking on a w3schools link. It just hides the result as soon as the page loads. Another annoying one is Postgres ('postgres add primary key'), which always has an ancient version as the first result, sometimes as far back as 7.x.
- Kagerjay 9y agoYou can use devdocs.io for MDN searches. It just parses and scrapes MDN among many other authoritative doc sites into an easy, searchable reference manual I'd actually prefer the 3rd party searches on google over duckduckgos, because I could easily refine the search on google by appending "MDN" in search and get the result. Not only that, I know I can find the MDN and W3C doc easily, so I want to broaden my search horizon normally when doing a google search anyhow DDG doesn't give you as much of an oppurtunity to see the 3rd party sites though, so its more limited Finally, biased searches. I actually prefer biased searches the vast majority of time, partially because I'm too lazy to bookmark sites I visit a lot. If I wanted an unbiased search result DDG is my go to tool
- grey-sunshine 9y agoCan confirm, using DDG, Fedora, Lineage, never looking back.
- acct1771 9y agoFans of LineageOS and Replicant absolutely must look into CopperheadOS - the most stable version of Android I've ever used.
- bringtheaction 9y ago> For example, why do Google searches for HTML/JS stuff result in third-party crap sites instead of pointing me directly to the relevant MDN or W3C sites? Probably because you either haven’t searched often enough, or because you’ve been clicking on too many irrelevant links when presented with results. I consistently get MDN and StackOverflow results in the top when I search because those are the links I click the most so Google has learned that I prefer those sites. Speaking of W3C, in case you are not aware the site W3Schools has nothing to do with W3C, and W3Schools used to be filled with a lot of outdated information. I’ve heard they’ve gotten better but I still never intentionally click on W3Schools links and when I do by accident I immediately navigate away. Even though they’ve allegedly gotten better I don’t like them and I urge others not to use W3Schools. Use MDN, StackOverflow and the real W3C resources instead.