4 ms·

I agree that Google is slipping... but DDG is essentially just a Bing syndicator, which means their result quality will compete at the rate of Bing. Hard to see

I agree that Google is slipping... but DDG is essentially just a Bing syndicator, which means their result quality will compete at the rate of Bing. Hard to see a threat there.

perryizgr8 6y ago
Bing is pretty good though. The results are different from Google's but not necessarily worse or better.
ZiiS 6y ago
DDG do far more work then just syndicating Bing. The have their own crawl, combine many sources, and are much stronger at down weighting low vaulue content. For many they also have an up hill battle against Google as personalising search results to your interests is a double edged sword.
- jamiek88 6y ago
  Plus !bangs they kept it useful for me before I got used to their search. I rarely !g nowadays and being able to quickly dip in and out of sites for specific things is great. Like a super ‘I’m feeling lucky’ with parameters.
- rjzzleep 6y ago
  Unfortunately DDG is really only useful for english search results. I tried running it as my default search engine, but in most places it's more or less useless.
  - Semaphor 6y ago
    Great for non-english results for me, I simply search with !ddgde which flips the "Germany"-switch to on. You and others keep saying this, but you really need to mention which non-English languages you are talking about as at least some of them are pretty good.
    - lawl 6y ago
      Ok, but google just works for me if i type english or german queries. DDG doesn't. I've been using ddg as a default engine and wasn't aware of this. (also !ddgde is a lot more to type than !g)
      - oezi 6y ago
        Completely opposite experience: German Google brings up so much irrelevant things when searching in English.
      - Semaphor 6y ago
        They show a switch for me even when I search in English. With google, I sometimes wish I had an easy switch like that when the terms are also available in English as currently this makes their results useless. !ddgde is indeed a bit long, but as most of my searches are not local, I can live with it ;)
    - rjzzleep 6y ago
      Chinese? Japanese? Probably a huge amount of LTR languages? It's not "You and others keep saying this... provide some examples". It's that you have a tiny scope of what you consider to be the world.
      - Semaphor 6y ago
        > It's that you have a tiny scope of what you consider to be the world. No, that’s something you put into my mouth. This is why I was asking. Unlike others, I explained which language works great. "Doesn’t work" is useless without saying what it doesn’t work for. "Does/Doesn’t work for language X" is actually relevant information.
  - kergonath 6y ago
    From my experience, it’s not great with queries in French, but it is not terrible either. I tend to use g! much more in French than English.
- mda 6y ago
  Non trivial queries are answered from Bing index. So it is not really "much more than" it.
skinkestek 6y ago
Bing is now starting to be scary good in some regards. One of my clients have integrated their intranet solution with Microsoft and if I search on Bing while logged in I get relevant results from both the Internet and the company network! Two observations: - I'd not accept if Google did this (like many others I was a fanboy, and like someone said: Google have worked hard tp make me dislike them - and they have now succeeded. Between years of insultingly mismatched ads, search quality dropping 10 years ago and staying lower than before and the whole witch hunt affair a few months ago I now do dislike them.) - Google had this, or at least search on my machine and on internet working with Google Desktop Search already back in 2006! (Of course they killed GDS after I think they'd ruined the market for everyone else by pushing the best solution for free for a couple of years.)
passtheglass 6y ago
Well Google is only good if you're looking for paid reviews/blog posts and populist articles from very popular media outlets. I should hope people would realise how far their search quality has decreased in the past 2-3 years (for text search)

I agree that Google is slipping... but DDG is essentially just a Bing syndicator, which means their result quality will compete at the rate of Bing. Hard to see a threat there.

perryizgr8 6y ago

Bing is pretty good though. The results are different from Google's but not necessarily worse or better.

ZiiS 6y ago

DDG do far more work then just syndicating Bing. The have their own crawl, combine many sources, and are much stronger at down weighting low vaulue content. For many they also have an up hill battle against Google as personalising search results to your interests is a double edged sword.

jamiek88 6y ago
Plus !bangs they kept it useful for me before I got used to their search. I rarely !g nowadays and being able to quickly dip in and out of sites for specific things is great. Like a super ‘I’m feeling lucky’ with parameters.
rjzzleep 6y ago
Unfortunately DDG is really only useful for english search results. I tried running it as my default search engine, but in most places it's more or less useless.
- Semaphor 6y ago
  Great for non-english results for me, I simply search with !ddgde which flips the "Germany"-switch to on. You and others keep saying this, but you really need to mention which non-English languages you are talking about as at least some of them are pretty good.
  - lawl 6y ago
    Ok, but google just works for me if i type english or german queries. DDG doesn't. I've been using ddg as a default engine and wasn't aware of this. (also !ddgde is a lot more to type than !g)
    - oezi 6y ago
      Completely opposite experience: German Google brings up so much irrelevant things when searching in English.
    - Semaphor 6y ago
      They show a switch for me even when I search in English. With google, I sometimes wish I had an easy switch like that when the terms are also available in English as currently this makes their results useless. !ddgde is indeed a bit long, but as most of my searches are not local, I can live with it ;)
  - rjzzleep 6y ago
    Chinese? Japanese? Probably a huge amount of LTR languages? It's not "You and others keep saying this... provide some examples". It's that you have a tiny scope of what you consider to be the world.
    - Semaphor 6y ago
      > It's that you have a tiny scope of what you consider to be the world. No, that’s something you put into my mouth. This is why I was asking. Unlike others, I explained which language works great. "Doesn’t work" is useless without saying what it doesn’t work for. "Does/Doesn’t work for language X" is actually relevant information.
- kergonath 6y ago
  From my experience, it’s not great with queries in French, but it is not terrible either. I tend to use g! much more in French than English.
mda 6y ago
Non trivial queries are answered from Bing index. So it is not really "much more than" it.

skinkestek 6y ago

Bing is now starting to be scary good in some regards. One of my clients have integrated their intranet solution with Microsoft and if I search on Bing while logged in I get relevant results from both the Internet and the company network! Two observations: - I'd not accept if Google did this (like many others I was a fanboy, and like someone said: Google have worked hard tp make me dislike them - and they have now succeeded. Between years of insultingly mismatched ads, search quality dropping 10 years ago and staying lower than before and the whole witch hunt affair a few months ago I now do dislike them.) - Google had this, or at least search on my machine and on internet working with Google Desktop Search already back in 2006! (Of course they killed GDS after I think they'd ruined the market for everyone else by pushing the best solution for free for a couple of years.)

passtheglass 6y ago

Well Google is only good if you're looking for paid reviews/blog posts and populist articles from very popular media outlets. I should hope people would realise how far their search quality has decreased in the past 2-3 years (for text search)