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The problem is that a lot of what I search for isn’t boring and obvious: searching about quantitative finance, stack traces, economics, and some math equations
by smabie 7y ago
The problem is that a lot of what I search for isn’t boring and obvious: searching about quantitative finance, stack traces, economics, and some math equations or theorems. Of course there’s the common stuff as well: what movies to watch in a specific genre, video game reviews, etc. But while both ddg and google do a reasonable job on the latter, they both fail hard for the former, ddg more than google though:
ddg has never given me good results for technical topics. Google used to, but I feel like they changed something. Now google just regurgitates the same top sites over and over again, very rarely if ever displaying less popular sources like forums or a professor’s website or papers. In fact a lot of the time, google decides it wants to search for some other thing than I tell it because I must have made a mistake searching for something that not very many other people search for. IMO, the apex of google search was around 2010-2013.
- tstrimple 7y agoI'm also having a lot more trouble getting good results from Google than I used to. Judicious use of quotes and other search modifiers are becoming a requirement. DDG is almost unusable for these topics. If I'm having to type !g for everything, I might as well stick with Google.
- Scoundreller 7y agoGoogle loves to ignore search words nowadays. Even quotes won’t force it. Ugh. At least they’ve added « Must Include » options sometimes.
- oefrha 7y agoAll “must include” does is double quoting the word/phrase at question (and maybe turn off autocorrect).
- copperx 7y agoI've never fully understood why Google hasn't provided an advanced search option. Even the most primitive library catalogs have one. Sure, there are a few options you can use, but they're extremely basic. Is it because it would reveal key parts of the algorithm? Or is it a stance (i.e., a standard Google search ought to be enough for everybody)?.
- jshmrsn 7y agoThere’s a decent amount of advanced search operators. Are you looking for something else? https://moz.com/learn/seo/search-operators https://moz.com/learn/seo/search-operators
- 2T1Qka0rEiPr 7y agoHave you tried Startpage? I've found results to be much more favourable
- amoshi 7y agoMight want to rethink that. https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/di5rn3/startpage_is_now_owned_by_an_advertising_company/ https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/di5rn3/startpage_i...
- sethammons 7y agototally agreed. Most recently for me, I switched from VS Code to GoLand for Go development. Every search I do for learning how to use the ide gets butchered. "goland multiselect" (for example), Google auto-changes to "we searched for golang, did you mean goland?". Sigh. In any case, both search engines think I must want to do something with Grunt with that search, so maybe it is just me who does not know how to use search engines anymore.
- rohan1024 7y agoI always include jetbrains or intellij in goland queries
- akvadrako 7y agoI get the best results by defaulting to google’s verbatim mode. Because it’s strict, you are more likely to find rarer pages. That ddg doesn’t have a similar option makes it unusable. I suppose I could write a wrapper that puts every word in quotes...
- stunt 7y agoDDG needs more users to use it to give you better results. I’m afraid it will never become as good as Google if we all decide to not use it until it’s as good as Google. I’m using DDG for more than a year now. Works well in most cases. Sometimes I have to use !g but that doesn’t stop me to use it.