6 ms·
Ask HN: Is DDG Becoming Unusable?
I've noticed that the quality of search results has dropped precipitously in the past few months. Now, almost every search ends with "g!". I'm wondering if it is just me or are others noticing this?
- mechanical_bear 4y agoSame for me, I’ve found myself…shudder using Bing more often.
- osigurdson 4y agoI wish Bing supported "g!". They are too proud.
- sMarsIntruder 4y agoisn’t it “!g”?
- sha-3 4y agoBoth works. You can use ! at either sides.
- sMarsIntruder 4y agoty
- SanjayMehta 4y agoDoesn't DDG use Bing as its backend?
- stjohnswarts 4y agoyes, for the most part, there are evidently some custom algos in there but most results are from bing.
- Normille 4y agoI'm pretty sure DDG used to use Yandex... which in turn used Bing. Now DDG uses Bing directly. The world of search engines is nearly as frustrating as the world of web browsers, or dare I say Linux distros; on the srface, a lot of choice. But, underneath, much of it is just the same old thing, with a different front end.
- mike_d 4y agoDDG is just Bing without personalization.
- nvahalik 4y agoI have been getting very strange results periodically. Switching browsers for a while usually fixes the issue.
- joshxyz 4y agowhats ddg? data driven gevelopment? edit: okay duckduckgo lol i hate it, still low quality search results for most of my use cases in programming related search.
- dev_0 4y agoDavid De Gea
- gedy 4y agoSearches frequently hang for me past year, thought was network but Google is fine.
- jinnko 4y agoCheck your network MTU. Cloudflare have a few good posts for context.
- tetris11 4y agoits as good as it ever was for me, though admittedly I use search.brave often as fallback
- rapjr9 4y agoI've noticed something similar, DDG has been increasingly ignoring my keywords, especially when I put quotes around them, and returning irrelevant results. It used to be that if you had two words with quotes around them it would tend to return results with both keywords, now it seems to return results with only one of the keywords. I think the scope of searches has declined also, I can search for things I know exist and DDG won't find them. The more marginal the search, on the fringes outside of what is most popular, the less capable DDG seems to be in finding results. Maybe they shrank the size of their database or excluded a lot of the less connected sites from their search?
- Normille 4y agoDDG has always been crap in my experience. It's one of those companies who seems to be a media darling, in spite of having a mediocre product. About the only thing I miss from my brief period of using it as my default search engine was the bangs. Now those were a good feature!
- mritun 4y agoIt’s the curse of popularity! As soon as gaming a search engine becomes financially profitable, the hoards of “SEO”s develop methods to do so. On plus side, this means ddg is finally getting noticed, on the minus side, this means they need to react fast or lose ground to the competition that’s relatively better able to fend off spam. Btw, this is also why search engines only grow big (or go home). Fending off spam is very very expensive and thankless job!
- hulitu 4y agoIt has nothing to do with SEO . It just ignores the quoted part.
- marginalia_nu 4y agoThis is a popular notion, but I'm not sure how well founded it actually is, since we really only have one search engine that's really been struggling with SEO spam, and that is a search engine that is also in an uniquely tricky bind where they're primarily an advertisement broker, and thus extremely limited in what they can do about search engine spam without hurting their own bottom line.
- 2Gkashmiri 4y agoAs long as you put Pinterest filter in your unlock filter, ddg image search is usable. I tried brave image search and it was pathetic, same as google or ddg without fiters. Why don't search engines actively sabotage Pinterest?/
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- bunnyfoofoo 4y agoI'd recommend giving Kagi a try. I've been using it for 4 months now as my default search engine, and it's excellent.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- calculated 4y agoUsed it but as a student paying $10 for a search engine isn't possible.
- GekkePrutser 4y agoYeah here in Europe that is a lot of money. In Silicon valley it's pocket change but here it's not.
- calculated 4y agoYeah doesn't look sustainable
- _abox 4y agoYeah it surprises me that 10 euros seems to be the minimum for pretty much every online service now. For 10 euro you can get Netflix, Spotify. My Ring security subscription is also a tenner. Pretty much everything that has a subscription model targets 10 euro as a minimum. I don't really know why, all these tenners add up a lot. I'm even dropping Spotify now some months (especially because when I drop it, the next month they offer me 3 months for a tenner to come back, which I find a lot more reasonable as I don't use it much). Kagi does really sound like it is easier to provide and should not cost as much. It feels like they are expecting super-heavy users. Their 50 free searches a month is not enough for me but I could probably do with 100 or 200. But there is no intermediate subscription, it's just 50 free or unlimited for a tenner.
- 4y ago
- mckirk 4y agoI've been using Startpage for a while now and am quite content. It's essentially a privacy-preserving frontend for Google, so you get the result quality without the data trace.
- hulitu 4y agoIt's not really a frontend for Google becsuse it returns far fewer results compared to Google. And it has the same quoting problem like ddg. For some reason "" has become equivalent with - in the world of search engines.
- navjack27 4y agoDdg is bing. It's literally the same now. Ha ha
- jspash 4y agoI've noticed the same with the search results from Brave. It started about 3 months ago and it's really frustrating. But apparently they don't use Bing. It's a strange coincidence.
- stjohnswarts 4y agoDon't use g! use s! if you're going to do that. If you use !g almost every time you may as well just go to google from the beginning
- _piif 4y agoEvery time I give DDG a try with a search it only gives me unrelevant results. Even unpersonalized Google results kind of suck for any specialized searches for me. I primarily use DDG for its bangs which I make heavy use of.
- GekkePrutser 4y agoI still think it's fine, way better than Google. Google gives too many 'sponsored' results. DDG is just bing of course.
- s_ting765 4y agoGave up on DDG and now selfhost my own instance of searxng.
- andyexeter 4y agoStill a great shot stopper, but there are much better goalkeepers than him around now. Goalkeeping isn’t all about stopping shots, the top teams want to build from the back and a goalkeeper who can actually play football with their feet is paramount to that. Keepers like Allison and Ederson are miles ahead of DDG in that regard.
- acidioxide 4y agoFor me it hasn't degraded (or, possibly, I haven't noticed it). I think it really depends on type of searches you usually do.
- ekianjo 4y agofor code related questions DDG has always been awful, that's for sure.
- jacooper 4y agoHonestly since Brave search launched, I never bothers with DDG. brave is just so much better.
- Bakary 4y agoTrusting a crypto company with privacy seems a bit odd to me.
- funshed 4y agoI started seeing DDG TV advertising in the UK recently mocking Google tracking.