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> DuckDuckGo were good enough when I tried them I'm curious as to where it lacked. DDG works more than well enough for me, but I'm wondering what other people

> DuckDuckGo were good enough when I tried them I'm curious as to where it lacked. DDG works more than well enough for me, but I'm wondering what other people search for where it is not.

aidenn0 4y ago
I often search for an error message from software, get nothing useful from DDG, then add the "!g" and find exactly my problem.
D13Fd 4y ago
I last tried DDG a couple of years ago, so it may have improved. But I gave it a good hard try for several months, and I just kept finding instances where I couldn't find something that I knew should be out there. Then I switched back to Google and it was like a breath of fresh air, I was finding things easily again. But I'd say with Kagi it's almost the opposite - it finds things at least as well and there aren't ads to get in the way. It feels like old-school Google. I actually found that I was getting annoyed on my mobile devices because they were still searching on Google and I need to scroll past ads etc., before I recently switched them over.
b1476 4y ago
I love DDG but there’s still an awful lot of weird results. Just the other day I searched for a clothing brand and the first result wasn’t their homepage but someones saved wish list (something like “?wishlistid=someuid”). It was bizarre. I don’t know enough about SEO to know if it’s down to the owners of the site or some weird DDG indexing but I’ve found a lot of weird indexing like this where you’d expect the homepage and get a very specific page instead.
NoboruWataya 4y ago
I think it's hard to describe how one search engine is less good than another. It just... is. Quite often there are very few or even no relevant results for my query, and as soon as I put a "!g" in front of it I quickly find what I'm looking for. Don't get me wrong, DDG works fine for me for 90% of my search queries (which are usually quite straightforward). But I have noticed a difference in quality vs Google, at the margins. I'm considering trying out Kagi.
- artisanscribble 4y ago
  totally agree that for ~5-10% of searches DDG is not as good as google. When DDG fails, I just re-run the search with "!g" and it goes straight to google and I'm good.
  - D13Fd 4y ago
    The problem is knowing when it is failing. How can you know what you may be missing? How can you know how much time you are losing by not getting the best results? Etc.
    - sgc 4y ago
      Yeah, I used DDG for about a year. It just became such a pervasive weight I went back to google. Despite the crappy seo it is still less of a pain / faster than ddg - but I know google is not surfacing high quality results from sites I found through it years ago. At this point, the web is far less useful than it was, mainly because you can't find the good sites anymore. I am going to give kagi a spin, since I really wanted to make something non-google work, and google looks like it will never improve. This feels exactly like my back and forth with linux as my daily driver. It took 15 years, but it eventually became the least bad option.
- neoromantique 4y ago
  Yeah, the dreaded !g in DDG is an all too familial feeling. I have been using Kagi for four months now, and can happily report that I resort to it less and less, and even when I do it is mostly due to muscle memory from years of DDG.
timeon 4y ago
Non-English queries have usually poor result.
Too 4y ago
Google still beats DDG on local search and providing latest results on news updates and other changing events. On more technical and stable topics, DDG is miles better and doesn't drown in clickbait or ads like Google does. These tend to be 99% of the searches i do throughout a day, so using DDG first is a no-brainer. The best way to describe it is it works exactly like google did 5-10 years ago, without neither the improvements nor the regressions that has happened since. For truly rare and unique searches, Google undeniable has a bigger index, so cases where searching for a unusual error code 0x004104010 give you nothing on DDG, Google could find one poor soul in an obscure Korean forum, that solved the same issue and then translate the result, just enough for you to recover your broken data.

> DuckDuckGo were good enough when I tried them I'm curious as to where it lacked. DDG works more than well enough for me, but I'm wondering what other people search for where it is not.

aidenn0 4y ago

I often search for an error message from software, get nothing useful from DDG, then add the "!g" and find exactly my problem.

D13Fd 4y ago

I last tried DDG a couple of years ago, so it may have improved. But I gave it a good hard try for several months, and I just kept finding instances where I couldn't find something that I knew should be out there. Then I switched back to Google and it was like a breath of fresh air, I was finding things easily again. But I'd say with Kagi it's almost the opposite - it finds things at least as well and there aren't ads to get in the way. It feels like old-school Google. I actually found that I was getting annoyed on my mobile devices because they were still searching on Google and I need to scroll past ads etc., before I recently switched them over.

b1476 4y ago

I love DDG but there’s still an awful lot of weird results. Just the other day I searched for a clothing brand and the first result wasn’t their homepage but someones saved wish list (something like “?wishlistid=someuid”). It was bizarre. I don’t know enough about SEO to know if it’s down to the owners of the site or some weird DDG indexing but I’ve found a lot of weird indexing like this where you’d expect the homepage and get a very specific page instead.

NoboruWataya 4y ago

I think it's hard to describe how one search engine is less good than another. It just... is. Quite often there are very few or even no relevant results for my query, and as soon as I put a "!g" in front of it I quickly find what I'm looking for. Don't get me wrong, DDG works fine for me for 90% of my search queries (which are usually quite straightforward). But I have noticed a difference in quality vs Google, at the margins. I'm considering trying out Kagi.

artisanscribble 4y ago
totally agree that for ~5-10% of searches DDG is not as good as google. When DDG fails, I just re-run the search with "!g" and it goes straight to google and I'm good.
- D13Fd 4y ago
  The problem is knowing when it is failing. How can you know what you may be missing? How can you know how much time you are losing by not getting the best results? Etc.
  - sgc 4y ago
    Yeah, I used DDG for about a year. It just became such a pervasive weight I went back to google. Despite the crappy seo it is still less of a pain / faster than ddg - but I know google is not surfacing high quality results from sites I found through it years ago. At this point, the web is far less useful than it was, mainly because you can't find the good sites anymore. I am going to give kagi a spin, since I really wanted to make something non-google work, and google looks like it will never improve. This feels exactly like my back and forth with linux as my daily driver. It took 15 years, but it eventually became the least bad option.
neoromantique 4y ago
Yeah, the dreaded !g in DDG is an all too familial feeling. I have been using Kagi for four months now, and can happily report that I resort to it less and less, and even when I do it is mostly due to muscle memory from years of DDG.

timeon 4y ago

Non-English queries have usually poor result.

Too 4y ago

Google still beats DDG on local search and providing latest results on news updates and other changing events. On more technical and stable topics, DDG is miles better and doesn't drown in clickbait or ads like Google does. These tend to be 99% of the searches i do throughout a day, so using DDG first is a no-brainer. The best way to describe it is it works exactly like google did 5-10 years ago, without neither the improvements nor the regressions that has happened since. For truly rare and unique searches, Google undeniable has a bigger index, so cases where searching for a unusual error code 0x004104010 give you nothing on DDG, Google could find one poor soul in an obscure Korean forum, that solved the same issue and then translate the result, just enough for you to recover your broken data.