11 ms·

Been using DDG in Firefox for the past ~5 years or so. About 50% of my searches give me exactly what I'm looking for within the first few results. 20% require

Been using DDG in Firefox for the past ~5 years or so. About 50% of my searches give me exactly what I'm looking for within the first few results. 20% require a little more digging, maybe adjusting my search terms. 30% are nearly total garbage and I just re-run it with !g. I'm not going to switch though because for the most part it's "good enough" and I want to see that hockey stick trend continue. I'm usually frustrated with the technical searches the most. If I do something simple like search for "django queryset model update" I will get nearly a full page of SEO spam that's literally just copies of the real django docs site before I even get to the actual docs page. This has gotten somewhat better recently, but it's still not nearly as good as Google. Maybe because Google knows what I click on when I search for these things so it just goes right to it. It's a tradeoff, I guess. Although I do often feel like I'm punishing myself with this.

mirkules 5y ago
I started using DDG around 2011. The progress they made is nothing short of incredible. I've completely switched to them around 2015 or so. I've used Google exactly twice last year. I'm curious what kind of queries yield you 30% garbage results?
- spookybones 5y ago
  I agree. I !g for about one search per month; otherwise, garbage results are far less than 30% for me.
- mdaniel 5y ago
  I'm not the person you asked, but my experience seems mostly tied to the lack of depth on the indexer they (use/inherit from bing). GitHub issues are #1 on that list, mailing lists and other esoteric backwaters of the Internet are another. I try very hard to always use the "Report Bad Results" in those circumstances
- efitz 5y ago
  When I search for super technical things I sometimes get less relevant results. Also when I remember Something I read years ago and try to find it (in other words it’s not widely linked anymore) I get better results from Google. Not overall I vastly prefer DDG.
- coolso 5y ago
  DuckDuckGo is awesome, I advocate for DDG as much as I can, and I switched completely a few months ago both on my phone and my PC, but I'm genuinely curious about how you were able to completely switch. Unless you also use the !g command? I'd love for there to be a "permanent !g" option, because Bing (DDG's default engine) just doesn't cut it. Like, at all. And it's not like I do fancy searches all the time, or ever really. But unless I am searching for a very popular, basic term, most of the time DDG's results either show nothing relevant at all on the first page, or there's one or two results that are relevant, often times the most relevant (like, say, a product page for a product I'm searching for) being shown pretty far down on the page, with third party sites being up top. In either case, I try !g and immediately find what I'm looking for on the front page. Like it's a whole new world. At this point I am using !g 90% of the time and it gets frustrating; I have half a mind of switching back, but I really don't want to do that, because Google needs to go. Even when I add "site:xyz.com" or (gag) "site:reddit.com", while DDG's results are better in these cases, just in case I'll try "!g" to see if I missed anything and... bam, even more relevant results I never saw before. I think Apple needs to enter the search engine business. Bing is just not good enough, and Google is evil. I've moved away from Google Maps, Gmail, Chromecast, and anything else Google I can move away from... but it's the best search engine by far and it's the one instance where it really does make me less productive if I use the alternative.
  - majkinetor 5y ago
    Why would you need permanent !g, that defeats the purpose of DDG? Use google if you like it so much. My DDG experience is awesome and Google could die tomorrow for all I care. Not sure if my experience is due to the domains I typically search for though, which are highly scientific/engineering related.
  - mdaniel 5y ago
    > I think Apple needs to enter the search engine business. Relevant: https://www.macrumors.com/2022/01/05/google-pays-apple-stay-out-of-search/ https://www.macrumors.com/2022/01/05/google-pays-apple-stay-...
- stjohnswarts 5y ago
  I find that startpage(google) tends to do a bit better with very specific warnings, serial numbers for chips, etc. I get SEO spammers aren't really looking for people who are looking for why an obscure arm processor has just failed.
- majkinetor 5y ago
  Any time I get garbage on DDG, the same garbage is on Google with identical query. Only reason to use Google for me is some extra features like site:xxx (it looks like they added this one to DDG finally). I am honestly very happy that DDG is so great and I can't stop supporting dark Google patterns.
- freediver 5y ago
  Here is an example: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=web+worker+message+transferable&t=h_&iax=videos&ia=videos https://duckduckgo.com/?q=web+worker+message+transferable&t=... vs actual content on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=web+worker+message+transferable https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=web+worker+mess... Bing is for some reason pretty bad at indexing programming related queries.
awb 5y ago
> I'm usually frustrated with the technical searches the most. Same, but I’ll usually give DDG a try first. If the search fails you can prepend “!g “ to your query and it’ll redirect you to Google.
- themodelplumber 5y ago
  "!so " is my new "!g" for technical searches...the sheer difference in spam results is lovely.
- ghosty141 5y ago
  Yeah but it kinda defeats the purpose. I mean, I'll give it a try on my private PC but at work where I only google technical stuff I don't see myself switching. Generally I want my tools to "just work".
qsort 5y ago
Eh, I agree. I default to DuckDuckGo as well, but it's just as a middle finger to Google. It's significantly worse than Google and basically unusable in languages other than English. Turns out making a search engine is a whole lot of work, I genuinely hope they keep working on it!
- mananaysiempre 5y ago
  > basically unusable in languages other than English. It works about as good for (simple) French as for English in my experience, but is absolute garbage for Russian—because, I suspect, of all the noun morphology. But, to be fair, the moment Google started becoming comparable to Yandex for Russian was the moment it started to randomly substituting terms in my English searches, like switching “Fréchet space” for “Banach space” in complex queries (they are both things in functional analysis, good job Google, but they are not the same). So looks like it’s either the heavy-handed clustering we hate about the current Google, or difficult linguistic work and tuning for every language in the world. (Is there a way to stop DDG from ignoring the quotes in my searches? At this point I sometimes get better results from Gigablast than from Google or DDG when searching for a quote.)
- bamboozled 5y ago
  I tried to use it but I agree, it’s no where near as good as Google, I don’t like Google ad a company either but I use it because it’s better.
- UncleSlacky 5y ago
  Qwant is another privacy option for European languages at least: https://lite.qwant.com https://lite.qwant.com
acidburnNSA 5y ago
> literally just copies of the real django docs site before I even get to the actual docs page The faster way to get to django docs would be: !dj queryset model update For python it's !py3 There are thousands of these, and they're awesome. https://duckduckgo.com/bang https://duckduckgo.com/bang?
- AshamedCaptain 5y ago
  I fail to see the point of these "bangs" versus resolving them locally (e.g. using firefox keyword bookmarks -- http://johnbokma.com/firefox/keymarks-explained.html http://johnbokma.com/firefox/keymarks-explained.html). Specially if you are using DuckDuckGo which I guess it's for privacy reasons (rather than say quality of results), why would one proceed to send them many more queries than they ought to receive? Just do these redirections locally and send them to the appropriate site directly, skipping yet another unnecessary and potentially-meddling middleman. Most damning is !g where both DDG and G get to see your query , offering zero privacy benefit and double the risk.
  - BoysenberryPi 5y ago
    Setting this up sounds like a tremendous waste of time while DDG has already setup all the bangs for me.
  - leokennis 5y ago
    Bangs work anywhere, also on browsers where you cannot use these keywords or on someone else’s computer.
  - Retric 5y ago
    Using !g only DDG can identify you. G would see your query so if you included your SSN etc then they could identify that, but they don’t know your IP etc.
    - jraph 5y ago
      !g redirects to Google, so yes, they get to know these things.
feanaro 5y ago
I don't understand why DDG doesn't just hand pick the most popular of these documentation sites and pins them to the top when they show up for a query.
- edoceo 5y ago
  Scale problem? How to do that for 4B sites?
  - Nextgrid 5y ago
    Are there really 4B frameworks or large software projects out there? I'd argue that simply doing that for the top 10 programming languages or frameworks will make a huge difference and is relatively easy to do. Low effort but very high impact.
- NeedMoreTime4Me 5y ago
  Im not sure if I understand this correctly but wouldn’t this prevent other sites from being able to emerge in the future? Basically a forced monopoly on currently popular sites.
  - feanaro 5y ago
    We're lamenting the fact that these authentic documentation sites are not the top results, instead being overtaken by bad copycat sites. I'm suggesting not relying on algorithmic improvements to do this and just pinning them to the top, since this is the wanted outcome anyway. The suggestion is not that these pins should be immutable for all time. I'm not suggesting this be done for commercial sites, just neutral documentation sites for languages and frameworks. This would be strictly better from the perspective of the searcher.
mrweasel 5y ago
The SEO spam has gotten much worse on DDG the past year or so, they pop on Google every now and then as well. Google on the other hand has a page of ads before the real results. My experience is that if DDG can't find what I'm looking for, then neither can Google, it's just that I'm still much quicker to second guess the results on DDG, compared to Google. It's a little weird, you'd think that it would be easy to spot the sites that just copy text from Stack Overflow or the Python documentation and drop them from the index entirely, but apparently not.
- prox 5y ago
  Googles results top 10 results are usually all ad ridden sites that have a high fluff (ads and banners / dark patterns) Yeah, the content is there, but with a ton of hoops to jump through.
  - Nextgrid 5y ago
    Guess which search engine also happens to run a web advertising network?
    - Simon_O_Rourke 5y ago
      Exactly this. !g is basically evil in more ways than you'll ever know.
  - stjohnswarts 5y ago
    The first 3 or 4 a always ads usually. I look for a lot of "best of" and I just automatically click past the first page or two because I know they are going to be SEO spam with some semi honest reviews about something, and another blurb that says the product I'm looking for is thte best.
- ravenstine 5y ago
  I've noticed something similar, but I'm not sure if it's SEO spam so much as something that may have changed with their algorithm. I could swear that DDG used to strictly honor wrapping terms in quotes, but now it behaves extremely loosely with quotes, often returning things that contain nothing that was quoted without making it clear if it's doing that because it found no matches. Quotes are kind of a niche feature, but to me the change in behavior likely reflects something that affects all searches.
otherworldly 5y ago
I found the Firefox extension "Search Filter" [1] to be immensely helpful at combating SEO spam. It allows you to define a list of URL patterns to remove from the search result list altogether, you can use mine as a start for your own if you wish [2]. [1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/g-search-filter/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/g-search-filt... [2] https://pastebin.com/5MPSHv3w https://pastebin.com/5MPSHv3w
- phil294 5y ago
  Thank you for the link. uBlacklist [1] is a more popular alternative, also featured recently on HN [2] [1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublacklist/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublacklist/ [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29794372 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29794372
JSONderulo 5y ago
same, but lately been I've doing technical searches on you.com
FredPret 5y ago
You just convinced me to try DDG… for the tenth time. Hopefully this time it sticks!
stavros 5y ago
Same for me, though for the garbage results I get garbage from Google too. I will agree that it's unusable for Greek, though.
throwoutway 5y ago
I'd like there to be a "Report blogspam / SEO spam / plagiarism" button in DDG. Step 1: Click the result... Step 2: Ugh, swipe back Step 3: Click "Report poor result" > "SEO spam" Step 4: Click next relevant link
- DizzyDoo 5y ago
  How would this not be gamed by bots? I see how what you're suggesting would work if there were humans going through and moderating, but I can imagine they would be deluged with millions of reports. Doing it algorithmically is just giving the bad actors a mechanism to sink their competitor's results.
  - dylan604 5y ago
    Simple. Enable Captcha! /s
  - 0xbadcafebee 5y ago
    This is the thing people don't get about search. Not only is it incredibly difficult to accurately predict what content will give people exactly what they want, but there is an entire class of bad actors dedicated to making the results worse. I think we need to stop using search so much. Curated indexes of information are often better for finding what you need. They organize bodies of knowledge that enable us to do more than just play detective and scavenger hunt. Take a library for example. To find out how to repair a stuck brake caliper, you don't go to the library and tell the librarian "stuck caliper fix". You say "Can I have a book on auto repair, or on repairing car brakes?" You get the book, and it's an index of organized knowledge. In that book you'll learn how to fix the stuck caliper, but also see what causes stuck calipers and how to prevent them - because it's not blog spam designed to fix one error, it's organized knowledge. Wikipedia is a great curated index. It is literally a giant list of links, with paragraphs summarizing what you can find in different pieces of the links. (it's also an entire semantic database, but ignore that) If you suggested starting Wikipedia to people today, they'd probably say it was crazy and nobody would use it because of how difficult it would be and that the results wouldn't be useful or accurate. And in spite of all that being true, people today probably can barely imagine life without Wikipedia.
kergonath 5y ago
> I'm not going to switch though because for the most part it's "good enough" and I want to see that hockey stick trend continue. I’m in the same boat. I am also not going to switch because Google is getting consistently worse and filled with rubbish SEO click farms. That’s why I am surprised by > This has gotten somewhat better recently, but it's still not nearly as good as Google. Google is really quite bad.
andai 5y ago
>!g If there's an option to get good search results, why isn't it the default?
- burnished 5y ago
  I believe its the flag to use google's search engine.
- freedomben 5y ago
  Because it's not a single variable equation. There are more variables besides search quality. And I think you agree. If G clubbed a baby seal every time you used it, but produced better results, would you still use G?
- californical 5y ago
  Oh, !g in DDG just sends you to the Google search results for that query. They have more of those too, they’re pretty neat. For example: Typing “United States Capitol !w” will bring you directly to the Wikipedia results page for that search.
  - FabHK 5y ago
    And !wde will take you to German wikipedia, !wes to the Spanish, etc. Also works for amazon: !a for amazon.com, !ade for German amazon.de, etc.
peakaboo 5y ago
Use !sp instead of !g and you get startpage results which is Google results without the tracking.
- FabHK 5y ago
  !s is enough.
JakeAl 5y ago
Or at least a "always omit results from this domain" option.
greenimpala 5y ago
Agree with this! It's fantastic for most things but unkind with programmer API docs!
stjohnswarts 5y ago
every time I see !g I say to use !s (startpage) as it's just a proxy :)
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
mysterydip 5y ago
I wonder if there's a way to have "verified websites", where for example the actual django documentation site is considered authoritative for searches with django in them.

mirkules 5y ago

I started using DDG around 2011. The progress they made is nothing short of incredible. I've completely switched to them around 2015 or so. I've used Google exactly twice last year. I'm curious what kind of queries yield you 30% garbage results?

spookybones 5y ago
I agree. I !g for about one search per month; otherwise, garbage results are far less than 30% for me.
mdaniel 5y ago
I'm not the person you asked, but my experience seems mostly tied to the lack of depth on the indexer they (use/inherit from bing). GitHub issues are #1 on that list, mailing lists and other esoteric backwaters of the Internet are another. I try very hard to always use the "Report Bad Results" in those circumstances
efitz 5y ago
When I search for super technical things I sometimes get less relevant results. Also when I remember Something I read years ago and try to find it (in other words it’s not widely linked anymore) I get better results from Google. Not overall I vastly prefer DDG.
coolso 5y ago
DuckDuckGo is awesome, I advocate for DDG as much as I can, and I switched completely a few months ago both on my phone and my PC, but I'm genuinely curious about how you were able to completely switch. Unless you also use the !g command? I'd love for there to be a "permanent !g" option, because Bing (DDG's default engine) just doesn't cut it. Like, at all. And it's not like I do fancy searches all the time, or ever really. But unless I am searching for a very popular, basic term, most of the time DDG's results either show nothing relevant at all on the first page, or there's one or two results that are relevant, often times the most relevant (like, say, a product page for a product I'm searching for) being shown pretty far down on the page, with third party sites being up top. In either case, I try !g and immediately find what I'm looking for on the front page. Like it's a whole new world. At this point I am using !g 90% of the time and it gets frustrating; I have half a mind of switching back, but I really don't want to do that, because Google needs to go. Even when I add "site:xyz.com" or (gag) "site:reddit.com", while DDG's results are better in these cases, just in case I'll try "!g" to see if I missed anything and... bam, even more relevant results I never saw before. I think Apple needs to enter the search engine business. Bing is just not good enough, and Google is evil. I've moved away from Google Maps, Gmail, Chromecast, and anything else Google I can move away from... but it's the best search engine by far and it's the one instance where it really does make me less productive if I use the alternative.
- majkinetor 5y ago
  Why would you need permanent !g, that defeats the purpose of DDG? Use google if you like it so much. My DDG experience is awesome and Google could die tomorrow for all I care. Not sure if my experience is due to the domains I typically search for though, which are highly scientific/engineering related.
- mdaniel 5y ago
  > I think Apple needs to enter the search engine business. Relevant: https://www.macrumors.com/2022/01/05/google-pays-apple-stay-out-of-search/ https://www.macrumors.com/2022/01/05/google-pays-apple-stay-...
stjohnswarts 5y ago
I find that startpage(google) tends to do a bit better with very specific warnings, serial numbers for chips, etc. I get SEO spammers aren't really looking for people who are looking for why an obscure arm processor has just failed.
majkinetor 5y ago
Any time I get garbage on DDG, the same garbage is on Google with identical query. Only reason to use Google for me is some extra features like site:xxx (it looks like they added this one to DDG finally). I am honestly very happy that DDG is so great and I can't stop supporting dark Google patterns.
freediver 5y ago
Here is an example: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=web+worker+message+transferable&t=h_&iax=videos&ia=videos https://duckduckgo.com/?q=web+worker+message+transferable&t=... vs actual content on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=web+worker+message+transferable https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=web+worker+mess... Bing is for some reason pretty bad at indexing programming related queries.

awb 5y ago

> I'm usually frustrated with the technical searches the most. Same, but I’ll usually give DDG a try first. If the search fails you can prepend “!g “ to your query and it’ll redirect you to Google.

themodelplumber 5y ago
"!so " is my new "!g" for technical searches...the sheer difference in spam results is lovely.
ghosty141 5y ago
Yeah but it kinda defeats the purpose. I mean, I'll give it a try on my private PC but at work where I only google technical stuff I don't see myself switching. Generally I want my tools to "just work".

qsort 5y ago

Eh, I agree. I default to DuckDuckGo as well, but it's just as a middle finger to Google. It's significantly worse than Google and basically unusable in languages other than English. Turns out making a search engine is a whole lot of work, I genuinely hope they keep working on it!

mananaysiempre 5y ago
> basically unusable in languages other than English. It works about as good for (simple) French as for English in my experience, but is absolute garbage for Russian—because, I suspect, of all the noun morphology. But, to be fair, the moment Google started becoming comparable to Yandex for Russian was the moment it started to randomly substituting terms in my English searches, like switching “Fréchet space” for “Banach space” in complex queries (they are both things in functional analysis, good job Google, but they are not the same). So looks like it’s either the heavy-handed clustering we hate about the current Google, or difficult linguistic work and tuning for every language in the world. (Is there a way to stop DDG from ignoring the quotes in my searches? At this point I sometimes get better results from Gigablast than from Google or DDG when searching for a quote.)
bamboozled 5y ago
I tried to use it but I agree, it’s no where near as good as Google, I don’t like Google ad a company either but I use it because it’s better.
UncleSlacky 5y ago
Qwant is another privacy option for European languages at least: https://lite.qwant.com https://lite.qwant.com

acidburnNSA 5y ago

> literally just copies of the real django docs site before I even get to the actual docs page The faster way to get to django docs would be: !dj queryset model update For python it's !py3 There are thousands of these, and they're awesome. https://duckduckgo.com/bang https://duckduckgo.com/bang?

AshamedCaptain 5y ago
I fail to see the point of these "bangs" versus resolving them locally (e.g. using firefox keyword bookmarks -- http://johnbokma.com/firefox/keymarks-explained.html http://johnbokma.com/firefox/keymarks-explained.html). Specially if you are using DuckDuckGo which I guess it's for privacy reasons (rather than say quality of results), why would one proceed to send them many more queries than they ought to receive? Just do these redirections locally and send them to the appropriate site directly, skipping yet another unnecessary and potentially-meddling middleman. Most damning is !g where both DDG and G get to see your query , offering zero privacy benefit and double the risk.
- BoysenberryPi 5y ago
  Setting this up sounds like a tremendous waste of time while DDG has already setup all the bangs for me.
- leokennis 5y ago
  Bangs work anywhere, also on browsers where you cannot use these keywords or on someone else’s computer.
- Retric 5y ago
  Using !g only DDG can identify you. G would see your query so if you included your SSN etc then they could identify that, but they don’t know your IP etc.
  - jraph 5y ago
    !g redirects to Google, so yes, they get to know these things.

feanaro 5y ago

I don't understand why DDG doesn't just hand pick the most popular of these documentation sites and pins them to the top when they show up for a query.

edoceo 5y ago
Scale problem? How to do that for 4B sites?
- Nextgrid 5y ago
  Are there really 4B frameworks or large software projects out there? I'd argue that simply doing that for the top 10 programming languages or frameworks will make a huge difference and is relatively easy to do. Low effort but very high impact.
NeedMoreTime4Me 5y ago
Im not sure if I understand this correctly but wouldn’t this prevent other sites from being able to emerge in the future? Basically a forced monopoly on currently popular sites.
- feanaro 5y ago
  We're lamenting the fact that these authentic documentation sites are not the top results, instead being overtaken by bad copycat sites. I'm suggesting not relying on algorithmic improvements to do this and just pinning them to the top, since this is the wanted outcome anyway. The suggestion is not that these pins should be immutable for all time. I'm not suggesting this be done for commercial sites, just neutral documentation sites for languages and frameworks. This would be strictly better from the perspective of the searcher.

mrweasel 5y ago

The SEO spam has gotten much worse on DDG the past year or so, they pop on Google every now and then as well. Google on the other hand has a page of ads before the real results. My experience is that if DDG can't find what I'm looking for, then neither can Google, it's just that I'm still much quicker to second guess the results on DDG, compared to Google. It's a little weird, you'd think that it would be easy to spot the sites that just copy text from Stack Overflow or the Python documentation and drop them from the index entirely, but apparently not.

prox 5y ago
Googles results top 10 results are usually all ad ridden sites that have a high fluff (ads and banners / dark patterns) Yeah, the content is there, but with a ton of hoops to jump through.
- Nextgrid 5y ago
  Guess which search engine also happens to run a web advertising network?
  - Simon_O_Rourke 5y ago
    Exactly this. !g is basically evil in more ways than you'll ever know.
- stjohnswarts 5y ago
  The first 3 or 4 a always ads usually. I look for a lot of "best of" and I just automatically click past the first page or two because I know they are going to be SEO spam with some semi honest reviews about something, and another blurb that says the product I'm looking for is thte best.
ravenstine 5y ago
I've noticed something similar, but I'm not sure if it's SEO spam so much as something that may have changed with their algorithm. I could swear that DDG used to strictly honor wrapping terms in quotes, but now it behaves extremely loosely with quotes, often returning things that contain nothing that was quoted without making it clear if it's doing that because it found no matches. Quotes are kind of a niche feature, but to me the change in behavior likely reflects something that affects all searches.

otherworldly 5y ago

I found the Firefox extension "Search Filter" [1] to be immensely helpful at combating SEO spam. It allows you to define a list of URL patterns to remove from the search result list altogether, you can use mine as a start for your own if you wish [2]. [1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/g-search-filter/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/g-search-filt... [2] https://pastebin.com/5MPSHv3w https://pastebin.com/5MPSHv3w

phil294 5y ago
Thank you for the link. uBlacklist [1] is a more popular alternative, also featured recently on HN [2] [1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublacklist/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublacklist/ [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29794372 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29794372

JSONderulo 5y ago

same, but lately been I've doing technical searches on you.com

FredPret 5y ago

You just convinced me to try DDG… for the tenth time. Hopefully this time it sticks!

stavros 5y ago

Same for me, though for the garbage results I get garbage from Google too. I will agree that it's unusable for Greek, though.

throwoutway 5y ago

I'd like there to be a "Report blogspam / SEO spam / plagiarism" button in DDG. Step 1: Click the result... Step 2: Ugh, swipe back Step 3: Click "Report poor result" > "SEO spam" Step 4: Click next relevant link

DizzyDoo 5y ago
How would this not be gamed by bots? I see how what you're suggesting would work if there were humans going through and moderating, but I can imagine they would be deluged with millions of reports. Doing it algorithmically is just giving the bad actors a mechanism to sink their competitor's results.
- dylan604 5y ago
  Simple. Enable Captcha! /s
- 0xbadcafebee 5y ago
  This is the thing people don't get about search. Not only is it incredibly difficult to accurately predict what content will give people exactly what they want, but there is an entire class of bad actors dedicated to making the results worse. I think we need to stop using search so much. Curated indexes of information are often better for finding what you need. They organize bodies of knowledge that enable us to do more than just play detective and scavenger hunt. Take a library for example. To find out how to repair a stuck brake caliper, you don't go to the library and tell the librarian "stuck caliper fix". You say "Can I have a book on auto repair, or on repairing car brakes?" You get the book, and it's an index of organized knowledge. In that book you'll learn how to fix the stuck caliper, but also see what causes stuck calipers and how to prevent them - because it's not blog spam designed to fix one error, it's organized knowledge. Wikipedia is a great curated index. It is literally a giant list of links, with paragraphs summarizing what you can find in different pieces of the links. (it's also an entire semantic database, but ignore that) If you suggested starting Wikipedia to people today, they'd probably say it was crazy and nobody would use it because of how difficult it would be and that the results wouldn't be useful or accurate. And in spite of all that being true, people today probably can barely imagine life without Wikipedia.

kergonath 5y ago

> I'm not going to switch though because for the most part it's "good enough" and I want to see that hockey stick trend continue. I’m in the same boat. I am also not going to switch because Google is getting consistently worse and filled with rubbish SEO click farms. That’s why I am surprised by > This has gotten somewhat better recently, but it's still not nearly as good as Google. Google is really quite bad.

andai 5y ago

>!g If there's an option to get good search results, why isn't it the default?

burnished 5y ago
I believe its the flag to use google's search engine.
freedomben 5y ago
Because it's not a single variable equation. There are more variables besides search quality. And I think you agree. If G clubbed a baby seal every time you used it, but produced better results, would you still use G?
californical 5y ago
Oh, !g in DDG just sends you to the Google search results for that query. They have more of those too, they’re pretty neat. For example: Typing “United States Capitol !w” will bring you directly to the Wikipedia results page for that search.
- FabHK 5y ago
  And !wde will take you to German wikipedia, !wes to the Spanish, etc. Also works for amazon: !a for amazon.com, !ade for German amazon.de, etc.

peakaboo 5y ago

Use !sp instead of !g and you get startpage results which is Google results without the tracking.

FabHK 5y ago
!s is enough.

JakeAl 5y ago

Or at least a "always omit results from this domain" option.

greenimpala 5y ago

Agree with this! It's fantastic for most things but unkind with programmer API docs!

stjohnswarts 5y ago

every time I see !g I say to use !s (startpage) as it's just a proxy :)

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

mysterydip 5y ago

I wonder if there's a way to have "verified websites", where for example the actual django documentation site is considered authoritative for searches with django in them.