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I’ve found DuckDuckGo can be better at some searches, and at others far worse. I was recently trying to search up how to do something in Excel and every result

I’ve found DuckDuckGo can be better at some searches, and at others far worse. I was recently trying to search up how to do something in Excel and every result from DDG was some “excel-help” website that was actually just parroting common search terms as the headers on non-articles full of ads. The entire search space has apparently been hijacked by what is essentially a fake help site. I see results like that on google too sometimes but not across a whole results page. These sites seem to have emerged in earnest over the last 5 years or so, designed to present the appearance of relevant content to the search engine but existing only to serve ads.

andrenotgiant 5y ago
Most of DuckDuckGo's "10-pack" of traditional search results come from Bing: https://help.duckduckgo.com/results/sources/?redir=1#:~:text=we%20also%20of%20course%20have%20more%20traditional%20links%20in%20the%20search%20results%2C%20which%20we%20also%20source%20from%20multiple%20partners%2C%20though%20most%20commonly%20from%20bing https://help.duckduckgo.com/results/sources/?redir=1#:~:text...
- dylan604 5y ago
  Whenever DDG is mentioned, these "but it uses Bing" comments always pop up. Sure maybe somebody is in the lucky 10k with TIL moment, however these "but it uses Bing" comments leave out the fact that Bing doesn't know you made the search. That's kind of the point in DDG is to be able to search the web anonymously. I don't know the intent of the "but it uses Bing" posts to just be "in case you didn't know" or "it's lame because it just uses Bing" or something in between. It just seems to me these comments are missing the forest through the tree.
  - SllX 5y ago
    It speaks more to the quality of the results you can expect receiving non-personalized Bing results. From my experience, it isn’t very good, and I’ve had DuckDuckGo as my default search engine for years, at first to give DuckDuckGo the old college try, but now primarily to be able to replicate a feature I had in Firefox in Safari and iOS Spotlight (being able to redirect a search to any search engine with a keyword).
    - Server6 5y ago
      DDG is fine for most things. It's made a lot inroads, not because its gotten better, but because Google has gotten worse.
      - SllX 5y ago
        Nah, most of my searches still start at DuckDuckGo since I haven’t fully gotten back in the habit of putting the search redirection keyword back in yet. If it’s fine for you for most things, great, but based off very recent and nearly daily data on my end, that is not my experience at all. I do agree about Google getting worse though. There isn’t a search engine today that can even hold a candle to Google from over 10 years ago including Google itself. Unfortunately, the closest thing is still Google.
        spronkey 5y ago
        I find DDG is generally good or at least good enough when the data you need is relative popular and relative well distributed around the internet. DDG falls very, very flat when it comes to needing to scour the depths of the internet for something very specific. Case in point is car parts - find an obscure part from a Japanese Honda, for example, and attempt to find it in DDG. I'll wait. :P
  - pb7 5y ago
    It’s mentioned because Bing isn’t very good so you shouldn’t expect any different with DDG. Also every time this comment is posted, someone tries to argue that it doesn’t come from Bing despite zero evidence so it’s a TIL for more than you think.
    - dylan604 5y ago
      are people using DDG using it just because it's not Bing and/or G? I thought the whole premise of DDG was providing the ability to search anonymously by "proxying" your search to a different search engine altogther. I was aware of the switch away from G to Bing, and I was okay with that as now G no longer gets any search data from me even if it was made anon by DDG.
      - EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 5y ago
        then use startpage, it takes its results from google
    - EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 5y ago
      DDG is cool with the kids today, Bing is not, all matter of fashion.
blisterpeanuts 5y ago
Isn't the phenomenon you're describing (and I agree it's a real trend) more due to SEO efforts than to any defects in the search engine itself? It seems like there are millions of how-to informational articles now that are inherently designed to be clickbait. It's not that they don't have useful information, but they make you dig through a lot more verbiage than is necessary, because apparently some search engines think longer = more informative.
- cratermoon 5y ago
  ¿Por que no los dos? Google has increasingly favored results that work in concert with the overall revenue-generating aspects of the web. Selling things has overtaken providing information, and SEO exists to push pages to the top of search results with the explicit purpose of making sites better at earning money. Google's business is selling ads and, perhaps more importantly, selling information about user preferences that allow businesses to better target potential buyers. Just a random example I tried a bit ago. A search of "guitar tuner" gave results like Fender's online tuner site (stuff with plenty of upsells for Fender gear) a site that had a basic online tuner page – filled with ads, and a tutorial at the web site of a company that sells music lessons and runs music camps.
- mustacheemperor 5y ago
  I think it is a failure on the part of the search engine if it falls for that SEO trickery. I recall in the early 2000s it was popular to fill the bottom of a page with keywords in the same color as the background color, to trick the crawler into thinking the page was full of relevant content. After a little while that stopped working and would actually get your site penalized in ranking. The bad actors are never going to go away, they’re going to keep getting more clever and search engines like Google and Bing with billions in the corporate warchest ought to keep the edge in that arms race.
SerLava 5y ago
Similarly on Google and YouTube- nearly the entire search space for "how to pronounce xyz" has been taken over by videos of text to speech recordings that have absolutely no idea how to pronounce anything. There are huge YouTube channels posting this scam content, and they never seem to go away. There are real ones in there too, but there are way more spam words than real ones.
- Y_Y 5y ago
  Thank god for PronunciationManual, which seems to be the only channel taking things seriously. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6EekGFJhrg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6EekGFJhrg
  - paconbork 5y ago
    I knew a student in a neighboring lab (very smart guy, postdocing at Stanford atm) who had to look up how to pronounce the word "schadenfreude". Sure enough he found the PronunciationManual video first, eventually leading to a hilarious conversation where his advisor was trying to figure out what he meant when he said "skoodenfruity".
    - FabHK 5y ago
      I must say, PronunciationManual is one of the few YT channels that has me literally LOL frequently, and so did your story there. My enjoyment of those hilarious videos is just tempered a bit by pity with the innocent victims that fall for it. FWIW, here's the link for Schadenfreude: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d3_DjiLLDfo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d3_DjiLLDfo
  - sss111 5y ago
    I never knew I could get pranked on HN. Kudos!
- padthai 5y ago
  I use Forvo for this, it is great: https://forvo.com/ https://forvo.com/
0xcde4c3db 5y ago
I've found DDG to be fine most of the time, but I wish they'd up their game on advanced operators. DDG seems to have a "feature" where it will ignore quotes around terms iff there were zero results for the original query, but not tell you that it did so. It's really annoying to get to the second or third page of results and realize that this happened.
cogman10 5y ago
These things have been around for a while. Back in the day, it was a major problem with yahoo. Every search you do would have 5 or 6 links to the likes of ask Jeeves which was in turn just showing you what ask would return if you put in the same search terms. It's maddening.

andrenotgiant 5y ago

Most of DuckDuckGo's "10-pack" of traditional search results come from Bing: https://help.duckduckgo.com/results/sources/?redir=1#:~:text=we%20also%20of%20course%20have%20more%20traditional%20links%20in%20the%20search%20results%2C%20which%20we%20also%20source%20from%20multiple%20partners%2C%20though%20most%20commonly%20from%20bing https://help.duckduckgo.com/results/sources/?redir=1#:~:text...

dylan604 5y ago
Whenever DDG is mentioned, these "but it uses Bing" comments always pop up. Sure maybe somebody is in the lucky 10k with TIL moment, however these "but it uses Bing" comments leave out the fact that Bing doesn't know you made the search. That's kind of the point in DDG is to be able to search the web anonymously. I don't know the intent of the "but it uses Bing" posts to just be "in case you didn't know" or "it's lame because it just uses Bing" or something in between. It just seems to me these comments are missing the forest through the tree.
- SllX 5y ago
  It speaks more to the quality of the results you can expect receiving non-personalized Bing results. From my experience, it isn’t very good, and I’ve had DuckDuckGo as my default search engine for years, at first to give DuckDuckGo the old college try, but now primarily to be able to replicate a feature I had in Firefox in Safari and iOS Spotlight (being able to redirect a search to any search engine with a keyword).
  - Server6 5y ago
    DDG is fine for most things. It's made a lot inroads, not because its gotten better, but because Google has gotten worse.
    - SllX 5y ago
      Nah, most of my searches still start at DuckDuckGo since I haven’t fully gotten back in the habit of putting the search redirection keyword back in yet. If it’s fine for you for most things, great, but based off very recent and nearly daily data on my end, that is not my experience at all. I do agree about Google getting worse though. There isn’t a search engine today that can even hold a candle to Google from over 10 years ago including Google itself. Unfortunately, the closest thing is still Google.
      - spronkey 5y ago
        I find DDG is generally good or at least good enough when the data you need is relative popular and relative well distributed around the internet. DDG falls very, very flat when it comes to needing to scour the depths of the internet for something very specific. Case in point is car parts - find an obscure part from a Japanese Honda, for example, and attempt to find it in DDG. I'll wait. :P
- pb7 5y ago
  It’s mentioned because Bing isn’t very good so you shouldn’t expect any different with DDG. Also every time this comment is posted, someone tries to argue that it doesn’t come from Bing despite zero evidence so it’s a TIL for more than you think.
  - dylan604 5y ago
    are people using DDG using it just because it's not Bing and/or G? I thought the whole premise of DDG was providing the ability to search anonymously by "proxying" your search to a different search engine altogther. I was aware of the switch away from G to Bing, and I was okay with that as now G no longer gets any search data from me even if it was made anon by DDG.
    - EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 5y ago
      then use startpage, it takes its results from google
  - EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 5y ago
    DDG is cool with the kids today, Bing is not, all matter of fashion.

blisterpeanuts 5y ago

Isn't the phenomenon you're describing (and I agree it's a real trend) more due to SEO efforts than to any defects in the search engine itself? It seems like there are millions of how-to informational articles now that are inherently designed to be clickbait. It's not that they don't have useful information, but they make you dig through a lot more verbiage than is necessary, because apparently some search engines think longer = more informative.

cratermoon 5y ago
¿Por que no los dos? Google has increasingly favored results that work in concert with the overall revenue-generating aspects of the web. Selling things has overtaken providing information, and SEO exists to push pages to the top of search results with the explicit purpose of making sites better at earning money. Google's business is selling ads and, perhaps more importantly, selling information about user preferences that allow businesses to better target potential buyers. Just a random example I tried a bit ago. A search of "guitar tuner" gave results like Fender's online tuner site (stuff with plenty of upsells for Fender gear) a site that had a basic online tuner page – filled with ads, and a tutorial at the web site of a company that sells music lessons and runs music camps.
mustacheemperor 5y ago
I think it is a failure on the part of the search engine if it falls for that SEO trickery. I recall in the early 2000s it was popular to fill the bottom of a page with keywords in the same color as the background color, to trick the crawler into thinking the page was full of relevant content. After a little while that stopped working and would actually get your site penalized in ranking. The bad actors are never going to go away, they’re going to keep getting more clever and search engines like Google and Bing with billions in the corporate warchest ought to keep the edge in that arms race.

SerLava 5y ago

Similarly on Google and YouTube- nearly the entire search space for "how to pronounce xyz" has been taken over by videos of text to speech recordings that have absolutely no idea how to pronounce anything. There are huge YouTube channels posting this scam content, and they never seem to go away. There are real ones in there too, but there are way more spam words than real ones.

Y_Y 5y ago
Thank god for PronunciationManual, which seems to be the only channel taking things seriously. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6EekGFJhrg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6EekGFJhrg
- paconbork 5y ago
  I knew a student in a neighboring lab (very smart guy, postdocing at Stanford atm) who had to look up how to pronounce the word "schadenfreude". Sure enough he found the PronunciationManual video first, eventually leading to a hilarious conversation where his advisor was trying to figure out what he meant when he said "skoodenfruity".
  - FabHK 5y ago
    I must say, PronunciationManual is one of the few YT channels that has me literally LOL frequently, and so did your story there. My enjoyment of those hilarious videos is just tempered a bit by pity with the innocent victims that fall for it. FWIW, here's the link for Schadenfreude: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d3_DjiLLDfo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d3_DjiLLDfo
- sss111 5y ago
  I never knew I could get pranked on HN. Kudos!
padthai 5y ago
I use Forvo for this, it is great: https://forvo.com/ https://forvo.com/

0xcde4c3db 5y ago

I've found DDG to be fine most of the time, but I wish they'd up their game on advanced operators. DDG seems to have a "feature" where it will ignore quotes around terms iff there were zero results for the original query, but not tell you that it did so. It's really annoying to get to the second or third page of results and realize that this happened.

cogman10 5y ago

These things have been around for a while. Back in the day, it was a major problem with yahoo. Every search you do would have 5 or 6 links to the likes of ask Jeeves which was in turn just showing you what ask would return if you put in the same search terms. It's maddening.