11 ms·

Giving up on Google

231 points by thaumaturgy 16y ago

seltzered 16y ago
Just wanted to vouch as well for yegg's amazing response. He fixed some l-key issues I complained about on duckduckgo within just a couple weeks, and responded to me within a day. Maybe yegg could drop a comment on how he manages his time to do all this?
- danielnicollet 16y ago
  There is so much that can still be done as computational linguistics makes its way into how search queries are understood and how content is indexed and retrieved. Faster machines will make some things possible that were not (like instant search) soon!
- epi0Bauqu 16y ago
  No magic bullet. Here's the process: --All feedback gets pushed to my personal email inbox--gmail :) --I try to do 0-inbox, i.e. keep my inbox at zero messages. This is usually not attainable, but means it functions essentially as a to-do list. --I respond to all feedback ASAP (unless anonymous). --If it is something simple that I know how to fix I try to do it that day. --If it is something a bit more complicated, I respond, and put it on the bug queue. I'm currently using http://speckleapp.com http://speckleapp.com for that, made by an HNer (http://elliottkember.com/ http://elliottkember.com/). --Every few days I set aside a large block of time to go through that bug queue. If easily fixable, I fix it and respond back: "Fixed!" If not, I put it in another category, and explain why it is a complex issue and how and when it might get fixed (or not).
frossie 16y ago
I also switched to DDG at the prompting of an HN commenter, and agree entirely with the points made in the OP. The only downside really is just in the formatting of the results - I can get 11-12 results in a google search in a full-height window and about 8 in DDG. Sure, some of that is due to the very nice "disambiguator" box (or whetever they call it), and the results are indeed generally higher quality, but it is also due to large title fonts and designey white space, so I personally would like a bit of that back. (No I haven't sent this to DDG feedback because for all I know it is a personal peeve and everybody else likes it this way)
- edanm 16y ago
  "(No I haven't sent this to DDG feedback because for all I know it is a personal peeve and everybody else likes it this way)" The way I see it, Gabriel's job is to decide whether it's a personal peeve or not. Your job is to ask for new features and "complain" about the old features, so that he can hear what real users think.
  - epi0Bauqu 16y ago
    Yes, please complain (although be nice about it) :) The design is continually in flux based on user feedback, but recently I've been stepping back to take a more holistic approach and really push it forward. I will be working with a professional designer on this and the duck.co community (if anyone wants to participate). I hope this will become evident (and useful) within a few months from now. So by all means, give design feedback!
- BCM43 16y ago
  You can change the font size in the settings, if you have not already done so.
  - antirez 16y ago
    yep this is the first thing I did, it fixes part of the problem, but the generated page is still "hard to scan". It's a shame as it is a not so hard problem to solve. It should just copy the search result google had in the early days :)
auxbuss 16y ago
I've been on duckduckgo for a few weeks. It's different in a very good way. The only time I reverted to google was to try instant, which I find a great improvement. It's brilliant that there is still quality innovation going on in the search space. It's an old industry now, after all.
andrewacove 16y ago
>> legitimate search results have become cluttered by old, stale web forums and mailing list postings. QFT. I spent the beginning of the year teaching myself Rails, and I can't count the number of times I cursed Google's search results. Multiple different copies of the same mailing list post, just from different mirrors. And almost everything pointed to some old version of Ruby or Rails that wasn't relevant anymore. And searching on Google Groups is worse.
InfinityX0 16y ago
I really think this is a case of confirmation bias. We see Google approaching this dominating mass that's impossible to stop, so we begin looking for ways to tear down big brother and look for holes. So, we notice every spam entry. I work in search and I can't recollect a time EVER having been frustrated with what Google gave me - and having to go to another engine. And I live, eat, & breathe the thing. I understand I have a notoriously small sample (as compared to the entire world of search - and I generally search for terms that have been optimized by similar search professionals), but the idea is that really, 10 good search results is pretty much impossible - what matters is that there is always three-four results on every page that are relevant. And without fail, Google continues to deliver this - at least for me. This process is what occurs for every monopoly. We hate the Yankees, Microsoft, whatever. It's natural to want to bring down something so dominating. But for me, Google is doing an absolutely incredible job. The only potential I see for something like DDG unseating them (or even gaining legitimate market share) is if Google loses the ability to pivot. If this occurs, the dilution of the algorithm is possible, which could turn their product to crap. BUT, given their history of 200+ algorithm changes per year, they have shown that not to be the case. Because of this, I imagine Google will be with us - & strongly with us - for the entirety of our lifetimes.
- blacksmythe 16y ago
  >> I really think this is a case of confirmation bias. We see Google approaching this dominating mass that's impossible to stop, so we begin looking for ways to tear down big brother and look for holes. I think that this is a case where we were comparing Google to what existing before (Yahoo, etc), and thought "this is great". Now we compare Google only to what we think it 'should' be.
  - birken 16y ago
    And we never imagine what the internet would be like without Google. You think spam is bad now? It's possible that in a world without Google web search just wouldn't work because Bing or Yahoo (or altavista, cuil, powerset, or whoever) just couldn't deal with the spam. Certainly Google isn't perfect, but they do a pretty good job combating web spam that is explicitly targeted at them.
zmmmmm 16y ago
I've tried several times to give up my Google habit. Once for an extended period with DDG. However each time, despite the correctly mentioned issues with spam, gaming etc, I still experienced severe withdrawal symptoms (and I made myself use the alternatives for 2 weeks at least, so I wasn't just hankering for the familiar). Ironically, of all Google's services, search is the one I could most easily replace and would most like to replace, if an equally good competitor emerges. On the other hand, giving up Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs and even Buzz at this point would be hard as my life is interwoven into them in many complex ways. The fact that my whole life is stored in these accounts but the same account lets google track my searches and associate them to me scares me and actually makes me want to replace Google as my search engine.
- clofresh 16y ago
  I agree that Google search is the easiest to replace. I've been using DDG for a few weeks now and I've been happy with it. I tried to look for a good competitor to Gmail but every other competitor is just plain bad. It's like everyone just gave up on email after Gmail came along.
ggchappell 16y ago
> ... Yahoo really isn't in the search business anymore, at least among the tech-savvy. Was Yahoo! ever in the search business, among the tech-savvy? This is a serious question. I've been webbing since '93, but I never made any serious use of the Yahoo! search box. I thought I was typical. Am I wrong?
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
- megablast 16y ago
  One of the great aspect of Google, it has remained very useful to the tech savvy, but still managed to appeal to the majority as well.
danilocampos 16y ago
I am often annoyed by Google. Its word clustering is too clever by half. At one point I was debugging, I think, an NSTableView object. Google says "eh, fuck it, iPhone dev is much more popular, here's UITableView. Have fun with that." And so then I have to wrap NSTableView in quotes to force Google to use my input as I've provided it. I wish I could turn this kind of stuff off.
- studer 16y ago
  Hmm. I just searched for it. 46,100 hits. Not a UITableView within sight. Are you sure you didn't mistype? If I type in USTableView, it shows me two UITableView hits at the top, before the exact matches.
  - danilocampos 16y ago
    It was a specific phrase where it did this, because I tried again with just NSTableView and it was cool. I wish I could remember what was giving me trouble so I could search for it again.
    - pragmatic 16y ago
      Check your search history: http://www.google.com/history/ http://www.google.com/history/
      - danilocampos 16y ago
        Search history is one of Google's creepier features – I disabled it awhile ago. Not that I suspect it helps anything, but at least if someone finds my computer or something, that data isn't two clicks away.
        gaius 16y ago
        It's creepier than you think - ever since it began making suggestions, long before Google Instant, Google has been quietly logging things you didn't search for.
doubleyooexwhy 16y ago
Wow, that blog design is beautiful. Anyways, I'd love to switch to DDG, but too often it tells me "No more results. Try Google.", and almost every time a subsequent search on Google provides me with many more (relevant) links for the same query. If DDG could be configured to basically be a proxy and fetch all of its results from Google, that'd be cool.
- epi0Bauqu 16y ago
  Those are usually cases where Google is changing the query and I am using it as is.
- alecco 16y ago
  The text gets chopped for Chrome/OSX.
  - thaumaturgy 16y ago
    Argh. I will fix this. Sorry. edit: fixed.
    - deleted 16y ago
      [deleted]
    - alecco 16y ago
      On quick look it looks like this problem: http://developer.expressionz.in/blogs/2009/07/27/user-agent-style-sheets-mystry-margins-in-google-chrome/ http://developer.expressionz.in/blogs/2009/07/27/user-agent-... > Basically , It looked like Google Chrome ignored my CSS Resets > ( margin:0px). It actually was caused by the user agent > stylesheet (-webkit-padding-start:40px). So the solution > was to reset this style by setting padding:0 the misbehaving > elements . > A good way to prevent this problem from happening to any > element is use a global CSS Rest as follows > > *{ margin:0; padding:0; }
aantix 16y ago
This article inspired me to install the Duck Duck Go Search plugin ( https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/161971/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/161971/ ); I'm going to give it a week.
- spooneybarger 16y ago
  I would suggest more than that. After 1 week, I hadn't really seen what DDG added in value. My experience says, give it 2-4 weeks.
  - sorbus 16y ago
    I'm inclined to think that if you can't see why a product is useful to use after a week, it's probably not worth it. But then, my experiences with DDG have mostly consisted of comparing its results with google, and finding that the interface is a lot less usable.
moondowner 16y ago
Not going to comment on Google, but about Duck Duck Go, I really like the service! Especially the !Bang feature and the keyboard shortcuts. I'm using it as a secondary search engine (after Google that is ;)) If someone wants to add Duck Duck Go to search engines in Opera, here's how (my own screenshot): http://twitpic.com/24ex2e http://twitpic.com/24ex2e
- epi0Bauqu 16y ago
  Note, you probably don't want that &v=d part.
  - moondowner 16y ago
    You're right, with "&v=d" added to the URL it displays "I'm feeling ducky" and "relevant results" whereas without it displays more 'standard' results.
- balakk 16y ago
  >If someone wants to add Duck Duck Go to search engines in Opera, here's how (my own screenshot): No such hackery required - it's Opera after all! There's a "Create Search" context menu these days, and it works on any text box. In summary, just right click the search text box, click "Create Search". Even the DDG homepage says so! I've been using it for quite some time now, but my gripe about DDG still remains; javascript should not be essential for a search engine.
alanh 16y ago
Just last Friday, I was pleasantly surprised to find Duck Duck Go is the only search engine (of those I tried) that shows me a hex color when I search it, e.g. http://duckduckgo.com/?q=%23004499 http://duckduckgo.com/?q=%23004499 And not long before, I searched for my oldest still-surviving site (on Angelfire). I discovered that while Google returned 20 garbage sites, they didn’t include mine; my site was the only one DDG returned.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
- ajkirwin 16y ago
  Jesus christ that's horrible (the hex color thing). It looks so NASTY.
- Matt_Cutts 16y ago
  The balance is between offering a cool feature and the danger that all those features accrete into cruft. If you wanted something similar for Google, you can create your own "Subscribed Link" to do this: http://www.google.com/coop/subscribedlinks/ http://www.google.com/coop/subscribedlinks/ I've created a subscribed links to mimic the UNIX cal command, for example: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/add-calendar-shortcut-to-google/ http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/add-calendar-shortcut-to-googl...
  - epi0Bauqu 16y ago
    It's a case by case thing. In this case, the query space is pretty segmented to avoid cruft.
ggrot 16y ago
Maybe a minor quibble, but isn't DDG powered by Yahoo BOSS with features added on top? Yet, Rob then goes on to say "Yahoo can't be taken seriously" and points out queries where Yahoo does a poor job of handing synonyms - DDG has the same problem for the exact same query if you try it. Furthermore, the other queries which he suggests give irrelevant results on Google seem to give me irrelevant results on DDG.
- epi0Bauqu 16y ago
  DDG is actually a hybrid of my own crawling/indexing and BOSS/Bing/others. Additionally, I don't use the others straight up. So for some queries they may look similar and for others they will look completely different. Wrt to spam sites, DDG often looks a lot different because I maintain a large database of spam sites that I remove from results. I see these crop up all the time in the API feeds I use. It's over 60M in just the main tlds (non country level domains).
- alecco 16y ago
  Among the differences, DDG blocks MFA content mills and junk sites. If you report one they add it quite fast.
  - moultano 16y ago
    Yahoo certainly tries to do that too, although I guess you're getting the union of yahoo/bing's spam-fighting and DDG's spam fighting. I suspect that of the two, yahoo's has a much bigger impact given the size of the teams involved.
    - epi0Bauqu 16y ago
      Actually I remove tons of spam from the Yahoo, Bing & other feeds.
      - moultano 16y ago
        What order of magnitude is tons? Not to take away from what you're doing, but historically 90% of new domains are spam.
fluidcruft 16y ago
Well, as a single sample, I tried the first thing that came to mind in google and duckduckgo. "breast shimming" which refers to the process of adjusting the magnetic field of a MRI scanner to obtain images of the breast (relevant to a project I'm working on). Every single duckduckgo result is irrelevant. Most of googles results are relevant. It's too bad because google is somewhat hit or miss for me. Someone needs to sic duck duck go on pubmed.
- sagarm 16y ago
  Did you turn safe search off on DDG? When I gave these queries a go, I noticed that DDG stripped "breast" out of the query. The results seemed much more relevant once safe search was disabled. Not that I'd want to go around with safe search disabled all the time...
  - epi0Bauqu 16y ago
    Yes, this is a safe search problem. Presumably http://duckduckgo.com/?q=breast+shimming&kp=-1 http://duckduckgo.com/?q=breast+shimming&kp=-1 is what you want. Edit: FWIW, I fixed this: http://duckduckgo.com/?q=breast+shimming http://duckduckgo.com/?q=breast+shimming should now work as well.
    - fluidcruft 16y ago
      Excellent! Safe search didn't occur to me.
diziet 16y ago
Really curious why the website cuts the right border of the text without allowing js for some external site...
- thaumaturgy 16y ago
  The external site is my business server, which hosts the JS package that the personal site uses. I wasn't aware of the border issue until just a bit ago. Sorry 'bout that.
  - diziet 16y ago
    You fixed it real quick, and I quite very much liked the scale tool.
sjs 16y ago
Giving up on a blog that can't display the article in full without JavaScript. Progressive enhancement folks! (Web apps get a pass, but if your site only needs to display text it should not require JS.)
- thaumaturgy 16y ago
  Thanks for the heads-up. Actually it is designed to gracefully fall back without JavaScript, but there appears to be a display bug I wasn't aware of. I'll fix it soon but right now I have a server down. (BTW, do you have any idea how much extra time you noscript guys add to web development efforts? Ugg.) edit: fixed.
  - pyre 16y ago
    > (BTW, do you have any idea how much extra time you > noscript guys add to web development efforts? Ugg.) I can't quite form words around the feeling, but this feels like a very backwards statement to me.
    - thaumaturgy 16y ago
      It's relatively easy these days to make sites that use JS in a smart way to dynamically load content. In the case of this personal site, if JS is on, then all the links do is request a "stripped-down" version of only the content of each post, and then swap that into the main content area. There are no http requests then for the images, background, css, and so on, which is nice for the server. That's all well and good, but then I have to go back and make that also all work for noscript users. So, for example, I can't just have a list of items on the left, and then on page load, have JavaScript just "click" the top item in the list. Instead, I have to put in extra effort to get the backend to handle the default home page, and so on. On this site, that wasn't really that hard. On more complex sites, it can be very hard. ...and I'm one of the "silly" web developers, that actually tries to work with the .5% or so of people that have JS turned off. With jQuery and everything else out there, most web developers don't seem to bother.
      - 16y ago
billmcneale 16y ago
Reminds me of "Close your Facebook account" day. Good times.
dasil003 16y ago
I don't understand the Gmail complaint at all. Sure it has its weaknesses such as the policy to not spend the resources stemming emails causing search to suck, but Gmail pretty much defined the usable webmail interface for power users. The interface on my webmail software feels like a mail client should -- easy navigation, threaded conversations, multiple window panes, and it's fast. Google on the other hand took years before they could be bothered to add buttons to Gmail, and even now Gmail's interface is an ugly monument to 90's era design principles. Uh, in 2004 when Gmail launched it was one of the first widespread AJAX apps. It made Hotmail / Yahoo feel like molasses, gave you 200x storage, and added the idea of labels instead of folders. They obsessed tremendously over performance to make it usable by people who hitherto had only been able to tolerate desktop mail clients. Now I realize a lot of things change in 6 years, but hell, Dreamhost is still using SquirrelMail. The author just throws it out there like amazing webmail is a foregone conclusion, yet I've not seen any webmail that beats Gmail even by a little bit. Can someone enlighten me?
- danilocampos 16y ago
  I think the big deal there is yeah, Gmail works but it doesn't $50 a year work.
  - RexRollman 16y ago
    Personally, I wish someone I like, like Colin Percival, would start an email service. I like the way he runs Tarsnap.
    - petercooper 16y ago
      The problem with starting an e-mail service is the crazy level of administration and sysadmin headaches it induces merely to be able to reliably send e-mail to 90%+ of endpoints.. let alone anything else. The engineering problem is a pretty interesting one, but the headache of ensuring your users can actually get their mail someplace makes it seem dull or insurmountable to solo developers.
patrickaljord 16y ago
Someone needs to tell him instant can be turned off.
GrandMasterBirt 16y ago
Amen brother. I found instant to be uncomfortable. Sometimes DDG results were not as good as google's, but pretty good. Gabriel is also incredibly responsive and tries to solve problems quickly, every problem I've asked about has been solved or had a serious effort to try to solve. Its so "personal" that I just feel like its a search engine that cares about me, vs me being just another face in a crowd. In any case, I still love gmail, everything else has been crap. Also try replacing google EVERYWHERE on an android device, quite well embedded and hard to change in 100 places and still browsers use google as the search engine.
Alex3917 16y ago
As far as I can tell Google is basically giving up on the search business. About a month ago I reported a couple spam sites that were in the top ten results for a fairly popular search phrase. Over a month later they're still there. These are sites that are literally just a list of keywords with no actual content of value on the site, and Google does nothing even though they come up at the top of the results for a phrase that gets several hundred searches per day. That has to be in the top .1% of all searches, and while I realize they probably get tens of thousands of complaints per day this one would have literally taken less than 20 seconds to recognize it was a scam site and delete it from the index. And since clearly any algorithm should have moved this to the front of the queue based on both the popularity of the term and also the good standing of my account, the only real conclusion is that Google has basically just given up on trying completely.
- Matt_Cutts 16y ago
  Alex3917, do you remember the sites (or the query) you did?
  - Alex3917 16y ago
    "learn to hack" The top result (cyber-trace.com) is just a list of keywords if you scroll down. Also on the next page of results, learn-to-hack.com is the same thing. For what it's worth, the reason why I submitted this is that I have the page squidoo.com/hacking which seems to alternate between being on the front page of Google's results for that search and being completely missing from the index, depending on what week it is. That might have to do with Squidoo's sitemap and not just Google, but it's certainly peculiar.
  - three14 16y ago
    I'm curious if Alex3917's response to this was set to dead as a result of automated spam filters or if there's something else going on.
dRother 16y ago
I have seen a blank page on Google, too within the past couple of days. Never saw anything of the sort before. It was when I clicked to try a search on News, and I couldn't get that search to come up with anything different - until I turned of 'Instant'. Oh well, whatever. I'm sure they logged an exception and will fix that soon. As for people gaming the results, it is a huge problem, but it's a problem that is bound to plague any market leader in search.
jsz0 16y ago
My biggest peeve about Google is how subpar their search is outside of Web & GMail. YouTube is the one that burns me the most. I often have to go to web search and append youtube at the end of my query to find the relevant result. The same exact search on YouTube gets me nothing relevant. The same is true of Android Market. A simple misplaced space, typo or misspelling breaks your search. It's like time warping back to web search circa 1996. I've never understood why Google doesn't apply all their knowledge about search to these other services.
Goladus 16y ago
I can't recall ever being seriously annoyed at google search until instant search. There have been times when I've been disappointed with the results. I've shared many of the experiences he mentions in the article. Instant search has not saved me any time and a couple times it has gotten in my way.
known 16y ago
Google "search engine"
- tristanperry 16y ago
  Oh. Wow. EPIC, EPIC FAIL. Actually, they're doing it for other things too: [web based email] [adverts for publishers] [traffic analytics] I'm sure there's more. Wow. That truly is an epic fail. Google have removed Google from the SERPs. LOL! I love(d?) Google, but they are definitely screwing something up somewhere. These rubbishy results occur when I'm logged out too (well, I don't have Web History or personalized search enabled so I guess that's n/a)
Matt_Cutts 16y ago
I left a few comments below, but I wanted to say thanks for mentioning some searches that Google didn't do well on. They're interesting searches, so I thought I'd break them down: - [avaya 103r manual] It's a fair complaint to say some low-quality results are returned, but there's a reason. Do that search and Google says "About 1,510 results." That's a minuscule number of results--it usually means the web has very little content that matches that query in any way. That's why the lower-quality and foreign results show up: we're scraping the bottom of the barrel of the web to find any results at all, and there's not many pages that have that those words. If you go to avaya.com and search for [103r], they don't find any results either. It's hard for Google to return useful Avaya results when avaya.com doesn't have that word anywhere on the site. :) - You were looking for specs on a Gateway mt6840 motherboard, specifically the socket. Instead of trying to solve that in one query, I'd go for doing it in two steps. I did the query [site:gateway.com mt6840] to see if there was any authoritative result, and the #1 result was http://support.gateway.com/s/Mobile/2007/Oasis/1014554R/1014554Rsp2.shtml http://support.gateway.com/s/Mobile/2007/Oasis/1014554R/1014... which has specs for that motherboard, but not the socket. But that spec sheet mentions that the motherboard uses a Intel® Core™ 2 Duo processor T2450. So then I searched for [T2450 socket] and got a Wikipedia page that says the T2450 uses Socket M. Just to be safe, searching for [MT6840 "socket m"], which returns a page on computing.net that's a forum with some ads, but the page mentions "945GM-based laptops support Socket M Core 2 Duo CPUs." The Gateway spec sheet says the MT6840 uses a 945GM chipset, so Socket M seems like a safe bet. - The last search was about an OpenSolaris machine that wouldn't boot and that said "Error 16" instead. The complaint was that the results were stale/old. I did the search [opensolaris boot "error 16"]. Then over on the left-hand side, click "Show search tools" and click "Past year" to get results from the past year. The #1 result shows a long discussion about debugging this (which implies it's not a trivial issue). The #2 result is a discussion that points into opensolaris.org, which then points to this bug: http://bugs.opensolaris.org/view_bug.do?bug_id=6774616 http://bugs.opensolaris.org/view_bug.do?bug_id=6774616 . My point on this query is that you can use the left-hand search bar to restrict the results to a certain time range (e.g. only results from the last week, month, or year). We do try to provide tools (e.g. estimated number of results, or the ability to restrict results by date) to help find the answers--or to find out if there aren't good answers on the web. And in some cases like your #2 search, we could do a better job of synthesizing information. If page A says that a motherboard uses this chip/chipset and page B says that this chip/chipset uses this socket, then we could infer what socket the motherboard uses. Inferring information like this is really tricky though because the web can be really noisy. I'm not saying Google shouldn't do better on these searches. You're clearly a power searcher, and I share your frustration when it's really hard to find what you want using Google. I'll pass this article around within the search quality group at Google and see if we could do better on searches like these--thanks for the feedback.
mkramlich 16y ago
Google may be becoming more optimized for the larger number of non-tech/non-elite users, while becoming less optimized for the smaller number of elite users. If so, we've seen this phenomenon happen with other businesses in the past, nothing new. A side effect of becoming popular with the masses.
poundy 16y ago
One of the issues with Duck Duck go is that it does filter results to the country of the user. As an UK user, when I put in the word flowers or "local programmers", I expect the results to be inclined towards UK pages as this is what will help me. Google does this well! There is no point in showing me stuff in NJ or Canada.
nadam 16y ago
A comparison article on search not mentioning Bing? Yahoo and Duck Duck Go both use Bing as far as I know. Of course there are cases when Bing is weaker than Google. For example your 'streamline/streamlining' example. (As Duck Duck Go also uses Bing of course they have the same problem). On the other hand in other cases Bing is better than Google. I searched for this a while ago: 'impact of basic research on GDP' There were no relevant results on Google, and the first result was relevant on Bing. (and of course on Duck Duck Go and Yahoo, which use Bing.) Edit: It seems that now google also gives back relevant result on my search query, so this example is not relevant anymore.
- epi0Bauqu 16y ago
  DDG uses Bing, but usually not straight up. In this case, the first result is the same but others in the top ten are either different or in a different order. Not that they're necessarily better though :)
clyfe 16y ago
I don't yet use duck duck go because of the tiny lag (couple ms) that takes to display the results. The google results are almost instant, and i'm relly annoyed by the ddg small lag.
protomyth 16y ago
My biggest complaint is that queries with something like OpenBSD don't have the word OpenBSD on the page. I have resorted to adding the names of configuration files I know need to be changed in my queries (e.g. pf.conf). I do really wish I could have a "NO" button when it asks "Did you mean this?". It might give some feedback.
all 16y ago
This article prompted me to do likewise. For the past 24 hours and running, I have used Duck Duck Go exclusively instead of Google. It is like a breath of fresh air. I tried DDG a few months back and it was a bit on the rough side. It has made tremendous strides in the intervening time. As for Google, they have gone past their prime. As the other comments note, 2008 was the peak. Yahoo is in the midst of what may be the longest running identity crisis ever to hit a company. And the name of the game for both Google and Bing is to keep you on their site with their advertisements for as long as they possibly can. Like some tentacled monster, they don't want to just serve you and let you go. The cheap tricks masquerading as a flashy UI ruin the user experience and make me not want to go back. Duck Duck Go actually keeps you coming by serving salient information (aka 'value') and then lets you get on with life. Kinda reminds me of the difference between the personality ethic and the character ethic from Covey's 7HHEP. This was a great post. Thanks for putting it forward.
exportgoldman 16y ago
It's almost like you need a anti-spam filter program for google to remove all the spam/farm sites from the results. I wonder why google can't store a list of results I simply never want returned.
Sid_ram 16y ago
I love the privacy policy on DDG - so elegant and clear. If google wants my business, I need to be able to u derstand their privacy policy. I am too suspicious.

231 points by thaumaturgy 16y ago

Just wanted to vouch as well for yegg's amazing response. He fixed some l-key issues I complained about on duckduckgo within just a couple weeks, and responded to me within a day. Maybe yegg could drop a comment on how he manages his time to do all this?

danielnicollet 16y ago
There is so much that can still be done as computational linguistics makes its way into how search queries are understood and how content is indexed and retrieved. Faster machines will make some things possible that were not (like instant search) soon!
epi0Bauqu 16y ago
No magic bullet. Here's the process: --All feedback gets pushed to my personal email inbox--gmail :) --I try to do 0-inbox, i.e. keep my inbox at zero messages. This is usually not attainable, but means it functions essentially as a to-do list. --I respond to all feedback ASAP (unless anonymous). --If it is something simple that I know how to fix I try to do it that day. --If it is something a bit more complicated, I respond, and put it on the bug queue. I'm currently using http://speckleapp.com http://speckleapp.com for that, made by an HNer (http://elliottkember.com/ http://elliottkember.com/). --Every few days I set aside a large block of time to go through that bug queue. If easily fixable, I fix it and respond back: "Fixed!" If not, I put it in another category, and explain why it is a complex issue and how and when it might get fixed (or not).

frossie 16y ago

I also switched to DDG at the prompting of an HN commenter, and agree entirely with the points made in the OP. The only downside really is just in the formatting of the results - I can get 11-12 results in a google search in a full-height window and about 8 in DDG. Sure, some of that is due to the very nice "disambiguator" box (or whetever they call it), and the results are indeed generally higher quality, but it is also due to large title fonts and designey white space, so I personally would like a bit of that back. (No I haven't sent this to DDG feedback because for all I know it is a personal peeve and everybody else likes it this way)

edanm 16y ago
"(No I haven't sent this to DDG feedback because for all I know it is a personal peeve and everybody else likes it this way)" The way I see it, Gabriel's job is to decide whether it's a personal peeve or not. Your job is to ask for new features and "complain" about the old features, so that he can hear what real users think.
- epi0Bauqu 16y ago
  Yes, please complain (although be nice about it) :) The design is continually in flux based on user feedback, but recently I've been stepping back to take a more holistic approach and really push it forward. I will be working with a professional designer on this and the duck.co community (if anyone wants to participate). I hope this will become evident (and useful) within a few months from now. So by all means, give design feedback!
BCM43 16y ago
You can change the font size in the settings, if you have not already done so.
- antirez 16y ago
  yep this is the first thing I did, it fixes part of the problem, but the generated page is still "hard to scan". It's a shame as it is a not so hard problem to solve. It should just copy the search result google had in the early days :)

auxbuss 16y ago

I've been on duckduckgo for a few weeks. It's different in a very good way. The only time I reverted to google was to try instant, which I find a great improvement. It's brilliant that there is still quality innovation going on in the search space. It's an old industry now, after all.

andrewacove 16y ago

>> legitimate search results have become cluttered by old, stale web forums and mailing list postings. QFT. I spent the beginning of the year teaching myself Rails, and I can't count the number of times I cursed Google's search results. Multiple different copies of the same mailing list post, just from different mirrors. And almost everything pointed to some old version of Ruby or Rails that wasn't relevant anymore. And searching on Google Groups is worse.

InfinityX0 16y ago

I really think this is a case of confirmation bias. We see Google approaching this dominating mass that's impossible to stop, so we begin looking for ways to tear down big brother and look for holes. So, we notice every spam entry. I work in search and I can't recollect a time EVER having been frustrated with what Google gave me - and having to go to another engine. And I live, eat, & breathe the thing. I understand I have a notoriously small sample (as compared to the entire world of search - and I generally search for terms that have been optimized by similar search professionals), but the idea is that really, 10 good search results is pretty much impossible - what matters is that there is always three-four results on every page that are relevant. And without fail, Google continues to deliver this - at least for me. This process is what occurs for every monopoly. We hate the Yankees, Microsoft, whatever. It's natural to want to bring down something so dominating. But for me, Google is doing an absolutely incredible job. The only potential I see for something like DDG unseating them (or even gaining legitimate market share) is if Google loses the ability to pivot. If this occurs, the dilution of the algorithm is possible, which could turn their product to crap. BUT, given their history of 200+ algorithm changes per year, they have shown that not to be the case. Because of this, I imagine Google will be with us - & strongly with us - for the entirety of our lifetimes.

blacksmythe 16y ago
>> I really think this is a case of confirmation bias. We see Google approaching this dominating mass that's impossible to stop, so we begin looking for ways to tear down big brother and look for holes. I think that this is a case where we were comparing Google to what existing before (Yahoo, etc), and thought "this is great". Now we compare Google only to what we think it 'should' be.
- birken 16y ago
  And we never imagine what the internet would be like without Google. You think spam is bad now? It's possible that in a world without Google web search just wouldn't work because Bing or Yahoo (or altavista, cuil, powerset, or whoever) just couldn't deal with the spam. Certainly Google isn't perfect, but they do a pretty good job combating web spam that is explicitly targeted at them.

zmmmmm 16y ago

I've tried several times to give up my Google habit. Once for an extended period with DDG. However each time, despite the correctly mentioned issues with spam, gaming etc, I still experienced severe withdrawal symptoms (and I made myself use the alternatives for 2 weeks at least, so I wasn't just hankering for the familiar). Ironically, of all Google's services, search is the one I could most easily replace and would most like to replace, if an equally good competitor emerges. On the other hand, giving up Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs and even Buzz at this point would be hard as my life is interwoven into them in many complex ways. The fact that my whole life is stored in these accounts but the same account lets google track my searches and associate them to me scares me and actually makes me want to replace Google as my search engine.

clofresh 16y ago
I agree that Google search is the easiest to replace. I've been using DDG for a few weeks now and I've been happy with it. I tried to look for a good competitor to Gmail but every other competitor is just plain bad. It's like everyone just gave up on email after Gmail came along.

ggchappell 16y ago

> ... Yahoo really isn't in the search business anymore, at least among the tech-savvy. Was Yahoo! ever in the search business, among the tech-savvy? This is a serious question. I've been webbing since '93, but I never made any serious use of the Yahoo! search box. I thought I was typical. Am I wrong?

deleted 16y ago
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megablast 16y ago
One of the great aspect of Google, it has remained very useful to the tech savvy, but still managed to appeal to the majority as well.

danilocampos 16y ago

I am often annoyed by Google. Its word clustering is too clever by half. At one point I was debugging, I think, an NSTableView object. Google says "eh, fuck it, iPhone dev is much more popular, here's UITableView. Have fun with that." And so then I have to wrap NSTableView in quotes to force Google to use my input as I've provided it. I wish I could turn this kind of stuff off.

studer 16y ago
Hmm. I just searched for it. 46,100 hits. Not a UITableView within sight. Are you sure you didn't mistype? If I type in USTableView, it shows me two UITableView hits at the top, before the exact matches.
- danilocampos 16y ago
  It was a specific phrase where it did this, because I tried again with just NSTableView and it was cool. I wish I could remember what was giving me trouble so I could search for it again.
  - pragmatic 16y ago
    Check your search history: http://www.google.com/history/ http://www.google.com/history/
    - danilocampos 16y ago
      Search history is one of Google's creepier features – I disabled it awhile ago. Not that I suspect it helps anything, but at least if someone finds my computer or something, that data isn't two clicks away.
      - gaius 16y ago
        It's creepier than you think - ever since it began making suggestions, long before Google Instant, Google has been quietly logging things you didn't search for.

doubleyooexwhy 16y ago

Wow, that blog design is beautiful. Anyways, I'd love to switch to DDG, but too often it tells me "No more results. Try Google.", and almost every time a subsequent search on Google provides me with many more (relevant) links for the same query. If DDG could be configured to basically be a proxy and fetch all of its results from Google, that'd be cool.

epi0Bauqu 16y ago
Those are usually cases where Google is changing the query and I am using it as is.
alecco 16y ago
The text gets chopped for Chrome/OSX.
- thaumaturgy 16y ago
  Argh. I will fix this. Sorry. edit: fixed.
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
  - alecco 16y ago
    On quick look it looks like this problem: http://developer.expressionz.in/blogs/2009/07/27/user-agent-style-sheets-mystry-margins-in-google-chrome/ http://developer.expressionz.in/blogs/2009/07/27/user-agent-... > Basically , It looked like Google Chrome ignored my CSS Resets > ( margin:0px). It actually was caused by the user agent > stylesheet (-webkit-padding-start:40px). So the solution > was to reset this style by setting padding:0 the misbehaving > elements . > A good way to prevent this problem from happening to any > element is use a global CSS Rest as follows > > *{ margin:0; padding:0; }

aantix 16y ago

This article inspired me to install the Duck Duck Go Search plugin ( https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/161971/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/161971/ ); I'm going to give it a week.

spooneybarger 16y ago
I would suggest more than that. After 1 week, I hadn't really seen what DDG added in value. My experience says, give it 2-4 weeks.
- sorbus 16y ago
  I'm inclined to think that if you can't see why a product is useful to use after a week, it's probably not worth it. But then, my experiences with DDG have mostly consisted of comparing its results with google, and finding that the interface is a lot less usable.

moondowner 16y ago

Not going to comment on Google, but about Duck Duck Go, I really like the service! Especially the !Bang feature and the keyboard shortcuts. I'm using it as a secondary search engine (after Google that is ;)) If someone wants to add Duck Duck Go to search engines in Opera, here's how (my own screenshot): http://twitpic.com/24ex2e http://twitpic.com/24ex2e

epi0Bauqu 16y ago
Note, you probably don't want that &v=d part.
- moondowner 16y ago
  You're right, with "&v=d" added to the URL it displays "I'm feeling ducky" and "relevant results" whereas without it displays more 'standard' results.
balakk 16y ago
>If someone wants to add Duck Duck Go to search engines in Opera, here's how (my own screenshot): No such hackery required - it's Opera after all! There's a "Create Search" context menu these days, and it works on any text box. In summary, just right click the search text box, click "Create Search". Even the DDG homepage says so! I've been using it for quite some time now, but my gripe about DDG still remains; javascript should not be essential for a search engine.

alanh 16y ago

Just last Friday, I was pleasantly surprised to find Duck Duck Go is the only search engine (of those I tried) that shows me a hex color when I search it, e.g. http://duckduckgo.com/?q=%23004499 http://duckduckgo.com/?q=%23004499 And not long before, I searched for my oldest still-surviving site (on Angelfire). I discovered that while Google returned 20 garbage sites, they didn’t include mine; my site was the only one DDG returned.

deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
ajkirwin 16y ago
Jesus christ that's horrible (the hex color thing). It looks so NASTY.
Matt_Cutts 16y ago
The balance is between offering a cool feature and the danger that all those features accrete into cruft. If you wanted something similar for Google, you can create your own "Subscribed Link" to do this: http://www.google.com/coop/subscribedlinks/ http://www.google.com/coop/subscribedlinks/ I've created a subscribed links to mimic the UNIX cal command, for example: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/add-calendar-shortcut-to-google/ http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/add-calendar-shortcut-to-googl...
- epi0Bauqu 16y ago
  It's a case by case thing. In this case, the query space is pretty segmented to avoid cruft.

ggrot 16y ago

Maybe a minor quibble, but isn't DDG powered by Yahoo BOSS with features added on top? Yet, Rob then goes on to say "Yahoo can't be taken seriously" and points out queries where Yahoo does a poor job of handing synonyms - DDG has the same problem for the exact same query if you try it. Furthermore, the other queries which he suggests give irrelevant results on Google seem to give me irrelevant results on DDG.

epi0Bauqu 16y ago
DDG is actually a hybrid of my own crawling/indexing and BOSS/Bing/others. Additionally, I don't use the others straight up. So for some queries they may look similar and for others they will look completely different. Wrt to spam sites, DDG often looks a lot different because I maintain a large database of spam sites that I remove from results. I see these crop up all the time in the API feeds I use. It's over 60M in just the main tlds (non country level domains).
alecco 16y ago
Among the differences, DDG blocks MFA content mills and junk sites. If you report one they add it quite fast.
- moultano 16y ago
  Yahoo certainly tries to do that too, although I guess you're getting the union of yahoo/bing's spam-fighting and DDG's spam fighting. I suspect that of the two, yahoo's has a much bigger impact given the size of the teams involved.
  - epi0Bauqu 16y ago
    Actually I remove tons of spam from the Yahoo, Bing & other feeds.
    - moultano 16y ago
      What order of magnitude is tons? Not to take away from what you're doing, but historically 90% of new domains are spam.

fluidcruft 16y ago

Well, as a single sample, I tried the first thing that came to mind in google and duckduckgo. "breast shimming" which refers to the process of adjusting the magnetic field of a MRI scanner to obtain images of the breast (relevant to a project I'm working on). Every single duckduckgo result is irrelevant. Most of googles results are relevant. It's too bad because google is somewhat hit or miss for me. Someone needs to sic duck duck go on pubmed.

sagarm 16y ago
Did you turn safe search off on DDG? When I gave these queries a go, I noticed that DDG stripped "breast" out of the query. The results seemed much more relevant once safe search was disabled. Not that I'd want to go around with safe search disabled all the time...
- epi0Bauqu 16y ago
  Yes, this is a safe search problem. Presumably http://duckduckgo.com/?q=breast+shimming&kp=-1 http://duckduckgo.com/?q=breast+shimming&kp=-1 is what you want. Edit: FWIW, I fixed this: http://duckduckgo.com/?q=breast+shimming http://duckduckgo.com/?q=breast+shimming should now work as well.
  - fluidcruft 16y ago
    Excellent! Safe search didn't occur to me.

diziet 16y ago

Really curious why the website cuts the right border of the text without allowing js for some external site...

thaumaturgy 16y ago
The external site is my business server, which hosts the JS package that the personal site uses. I wasn't aware of the border issue until just a bit ago. Sorry 'bout that.
- diziet 16y ago
  You fixed it real quick, and I quite very much liked the scale tool.

sjs 16y ago

Giving up on a blog that can't display the article in full without JavaScript. Progressive enhancement folks! (Web apps get a pass, but if your site only needs to display text it should not require JS.)

thaumaturgy 16y ago
Thanks for the heads-up. Actually it is designed to gracefully fall back without JavaScript, but there appears to be a display bug I wasn't aware of. I'll fix it soon but right now I have a server down. (BTW, do you have any idea how much extra time you noscript guys add to web development efforts? Ugg.) edit: fixed.
- pyre 16y ago
  > (BTW, do you have any idea how much extra time you > noscript guys add to web development efforts? Ugg.) I can't quite form words around the feeling, but this feels like a very backwards statement to me.
  - thaumaturgy 16y ago
    It's relatively easy these days to make sites that use JS in a smart way to dynamically load content. In the case of this personal site, if JS is on, then all the links do is request a "stripped-down" version of only the content of each post, and then swap that into the main content area. There are no http requests then for the images, background, css, and so on, which is nice for the server. That's all well and good, but then I have to go back and make that also all work for noscript users. So, for example, I can't just have a list of items on the left, and then on page load, have JavaScript just "click" the top item in the list. Instead, I have to put in extra effort to get the backend to handle the default home page, and so on. On this site, that wasn't really that hard. On more complex sites, it can be very hard. ...and I'm one of the "silly" web developers, that actually tries to work with the .5% or so of people that have JS turned off. With jQuery and everything else out there, most web developers don't seem to bother.
    - 16y ago

billmcneale 16y ago

Reminds me of "Close your Facebook account" day. Good times.

dasil003 16y ago

I don't understand the Gmail complaint at all. Sure it has its weaknesses such as the policy to not spend the resources stemming emails causing search to suck, but Gmail pretty much defined the usable webmail interface for power users. The interface on my webmail software feels like a mail client should -- easy navigation, threaded conversations, multiple window panes, and it's fast. Google on the other hand took years before they could be bothered to add buttons to Gmail, and even now Gmail's interface is an ugly monument to 90's era design principles. Uh, in 2004 when Gmail launched it was one of the first widespread AJAX apps. It made Hotmail / Yahoo feel like molasses, gave you 200x storage, and added the idea of labels instead of folders. They obsessed tremendously over performance to make it usable by people who hitherto had only been able to tolerate desktop mail clients. Now I realize a lot of things change in 6 years, but hell, Dreamhost is still using SquirrelMail. The author just throws it out there like amazing webmail is a foregone conclusion, yet I've not seen any webmail that beats Gmail even by a little bit. Can someone enlighten me?

danilocampos 16y ago
I think the big deal there is yeah, Gmail works but it doesn't $50 a year work.
- RexRollman 16y ago
  Personally, I wish someone I like, like Colin Percival, would start an email service. I like the way he runs Tarsnap.
  - petercooper 16y ago
    The problem with starting an e-mail service is the crazy level of administration and sysadmin headaches it induces merely to be able to reliably send e-mail to 90%+ of endpoints.. let alone anything else. The engineering problem is a pretty interesting one, but the headache of ensuring your users can actually get their mail someplace makes it seem dull or insurmountable to solo developers.

patrickaljord 16y ago

Someone needs to tell him instant can be turned off.

GrandMasterBirt 16y ago

Amen brother. I found instant to be uncomfortable. Sometimes DDG results were not as good as google's, but pretty good. Gabriel is also incredibly responsive and tries to solve problems quickly, every problem I've asked about has been solved or had a serious effort to try to solve. Its so "personal" that I just feel like its a search engine that cares about me, vs me being just another face in a crowd. In any case, I still love gmail, everything else has been crap. Also try replacing google EVERYWHERE on an android device, quite well embedded and hard to change in 100 places and still browsers use google as the search engine.

Alex3917 16y ago

As far as I can tell Google is basically giving up on the search business. About a month ago I reported a couple spam sites that were in the top ten results for a fairly popular search phrase. Over a month later they're still there. These are sites that are literally just a list of keywords with no actual content of value on the site, and Google does nothing even though they come up at the top of the results for a phrase that gets several hundred searches per day. That has to be in the top .1% of all searches, and while I realize they probably get tens of thousands of complaints per day this one would have literally taken less than 20 seconds to recognize it was a scam site and delete it from the index. And since clearly any algorithm should have moved this to the front of the queue based on both the popularity of the term and also the good standing of my account, the only real conclusion is that Google has basically just given up on trying completely.

Matt_Cutts 16y ago
Alex3917, do you remember the sites (or the query) you did?
- Alex3917 16y ago
  "learn to hack" The top result (cyber-trace.com) is just a list of keywords if you scroll down. Also on the next page of results, learn-to-hack.com is the same thing. For what it's worth, the reason why I submitted this is that I have the page squidoo.com/hacking which seems to alternate between being on the front page of Google's results for that search and being completely missing from the index, depending on what week it is. That might have to do with Squidoo's sitemap and not just Google, but it's certainly peculiar.
- three14 16y ago
  I'm curious if Alex3917's response to this was set to dead as a result of automated spam filters or if there's something else going on.

dRother 16y ago

I have seen a blank page on Google, too within the past couple of days. Never saw anything of the sort before. It was when I clicked to try a search on News, and I couldn't get that search to come up with anything different - until I turned of 'Instant'. Oh well, whatever. I'm sure they logged an exception and will fix that soon. As for people gaming the results, it is a huge problem, but it's a problem that is bound to plague any market leader in search.

jsz0 16y ago

My biggest peeve about Google is how subpar their search is outside of Web & GMail. YouTube is the one that burns me the most. I often have to go to web search and append youtube at the end of my query to find the relevant result. The same exact search on YouTube gets me nothing relevant. The same is true of Android Market. A simple misplaced space, typo or misspelling breaks your search. It's like time warping back to web search circa 1996. I've never understood why Google doesn't apply all their knowledge about search to these other services.

Goladus 16y ago

I can't recall ever being seriously annoyed at google search until instant search. There have been times when I've been disappointed with the results. I've shared many of the experiences he mentions in the article. Instant search has not saved me any time and a couple times it has gotten in my way.

known 16y ago

Google "search engine"

tristanperry 16y ago
Oh. Wow. EPIC, EPIC FAIL. Actually, they're doing it for other things too: [web based email] [adverts for publishers] [traffic analytics] I'm sure there's more. Wow. That truly is an epic fail. Google have removed Google from the SERPs. LOL! I love(d?) Google, but they are definitely screwing something up somewhere. These rubbishy results occur when I'm logged out too (well, I don't have Web History or personalized search enabled so I guess that's n/a)

Matt_Cutts 16y ago

I left a few comments below, but I wanted to say thanks for mentioning some searches that Google didn't do well on. They're interesting searches, so I thought I'd break them down: - [avaya 103r manual] It's a fair complaint to say some low-quality results are returned, but there's a reason. Do that search and Google says "About 1,510 results." That's a minuscule number of results--it usually means the web has very little content that matches that query in any way. That's why the lower-quality and foreign results show up: we're scraping the bottom of the barrel of the web to find any results at all, and there's not many pages that have that those words. If you go to avaya.com and search for [103r], they don't find any results either. It's hard for Google to return useful Avaya results when avaya.com doesn't have that word anywhere on the site. :) - You were looking for specs on a Gateway mt6840 motherboard, specifically the socket. Instead of trying to solve that in one query, I'd go for doing it in two steps. I did the query [site:gateway.com mt6840] to see if there was any authoritative result, and the #1 result was http://support.gateway.com/s/Mobile/2007/Oasis/1014554R/1014554Rsp2.shtml http://support.gateway.com/s/Mobile/2007/Oasis/1014554R/1014... which has specs for that motherboard, but not the socket. But that spec sheet mentions that the motherboard uses a Intel® Core™ 2 Duo processor T2450. So then I searched for [T2450 socket] and got a Wikipedia page that says the T2450 uses Socket M. Just to be safe, searching for [MT6840 "socket m"], which returns a page on computing.net that's a forum with some ads, but the page mentions "945GM-based laptops support Socket M Core 2 Duo CPUs." The Gateway spec sheet says the MT6840 uses a 945GM chipset, so Socket M seems like a safe bet. - The last search was about an OpenSolaris machine that wouldn't boot and that said "Error 16" instead. The complaint was that the results were stale/old. I did the search [opensolaris boot "error 16"]. Then over on the left-hand side, click "Show search tools" and click "Past year" to get results from the past year. The #1 result shows a long discussion about debugging this (which implies it's not a trivial issue). The #2 result is a discussion that points into opensolaris.org, which then points to this bug: http://bugs.opensolaris.org/view_bug.do?bug_id=6774616 http://bugs.opensolaris.org/view_bug.do?bug_id=6774616 . My point on this query is that you can use the left-hand search bar to restrict the results to a certain time range (e.g. only results from the last week, month, or year). We do try to provide tools (e.g. estimated number of results, or the ability to restrict results by date) to help find the answers--or to find out if there aren't good answers on the web. And in some cases like your #2 search, we could do a better job of synthesizing information. If page A says that a motherboard uses this chip/chipset and page B says that this chip/chipset uses this socket, then we could infer what socket the motherboard uses. Inferring information like this is really tricky though because the web can be really noisy. I'm not saying Google shouldn't do better on these searches. You're clearly a power searcher, and I share your frustration when it's really hard to find what you want using Google. I'll pass this article around within the search quality group at Google and see if we could do better on searches like these--thanks for the feedback.

mkramlich 16y ago

Google may be becoming more optimized for the larger number of non-tech/non-elite users, while becoming less optimized for the smaller number of elite users. If so, we've seen this phenomenon happen with other businesses in the past, nothing new. A side effect of becoming popular with the masses.

poundy 16y ago

One of the issues with Duck Duck go is that it does filter results to the country of the user. As an UK user, when I put in the word flowers or "local programmers", I expect the results to be inclined towards UK pages as this is what will help me. Google does this well! There is no point in showing me stuff in NJ or Canada.

nadam 16y ago

A comparison article on search not mentioning Bing? Yahoo and Duck Duck Go both use Bing as far as I know. Of course there are cases when Bing is weaker than Google. For example your 'streamline/streamlining' example. (As Duck Duck Go also uses Bing of course they have the same problem). On the other hand in other cases Bing is better than Google. I searched for this a while ago: 'impact of basic research on GDP' There were no relevant results on Google, and the first result was relevant on Bing. (and of course on Duck Duck Go and Yahoo, which use Bing.) Edit: It seems that now google also gives back relevant result on my search query, so this example is not relevant anymore.

epi0Bauqu 16y ago
DDG uses Bing, but usually not straight up. In this case, the first result is the same but others in the top ten are either different or in a different order. Not that they're necessarily better though :)

clyfe 16y ago

I don't yet use duck duck go because of the tiny lag (couple ms) that takes to display the results. The google results are almost instant, and i'm relly annoyed by the ddg small lag.

protomyth 16y ago

My biggest complaint is that queries with something like OpenBSD don't have the word OpenBSD on the page. I have resorted to adding the names of configuration files I know need to be changed in my queries (e.g. pf.conf). I do really wish I could have a "NO" button when it asks "Did you mean this?". It might give some feedback.

all 16y ago

This article prompted me to do likewise. For the past 24 hours and running, I have used Duck Duck Go exclusively instead of Google. It is like a breath of fresh air. I tried DDG a few months back and it was a bit on the rough side. It has made tremendous strides in the intervening time. As for Google, they have gone past their prime. As the other comments note, 2008 was the peak. Yahoo is in the midst of what may be the longest running identity crisis ever to hit a company. And the name of the game for both Google and Bing is to keep you on their site with their advertisements for as long as they possibly can. Like some tentacled monster, they don't want to just serve you and let you go. The cheap tricks masquerading as a flashy UI ruin the user experience and make me not want to go back. Duck Duck Go actually keeps you coming by serving salient information (aka 'value') and then lets you get on with life. Kinda reminds me of the difference between the personality ethic and the character ethic from Covey's 7HHEP. This was a great post. Thanks for putting it forward.

exportgoldman 16y ago

It's almost like you need a anti-spam filter program for google to remove all the spam/farm sites from the results. I wonder why google can't store a list of results I simply never want returned.

Sid_ram 16y ago

I love the privacy policy on DDG - so elegant and clear. If google wants my business, I need to be able to u derstand their privacy policy. I am too suspicious.