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Hi all, Founder/CEO DuckDuckGo here and I hope I can help clear this up. Search syntax filters are still available on DuckDuckGo and we’ve re-updated the help p

by yegg 3y ago

Hi all, Founder/CEO DuckDuckGo here and I hope I can help clear this up. Search syntax filters are still available on DuckDuckGo and we’ve re-updated the help page to reflect that. Nothing has actually recently changed with the way they work in terms of removing any functionality. In fact, we actually recently added functionality to make site exclusion work better as described in https://duckduckgo.com/updates https://duckduckgo.com/updates What did happen is last month we temporarily updated our syntax help page because we had been getting complaints from some users that they were not working consistently and wanted to get to the bottom of it, but we never actually deactivated the features themselves. Instead of removing that information from the help page, even temporarily, we should have said we know users are having problems and we’re working to address them. That's what the help page says now and we hope to provide an update soon.

Buildstarted 3y ago
Thanks for the update! I did notice they were flaky and maybe it's my queries that were more flaky than others that it stuck out at me more than when they possibly worked. Hopefully you can get this resolved as it's become extremely frustrating searching technical pages to weed out unrelated information.
porkbeer 3y ago
You ignore quotes. You ignore -modifiers Your search is near useless these days and after evangelizing, I now tell people to avoid ddg.
tlavoie 3y ago
The site exclusion very much does _not_ work for images, just FYI. For example, and especially since Pinterest is mentioned in your help page, I tried the following in the image search: the far side gallery -site:pinterest It is a good example, because Pinterest in particular, with all its TLDs, seems to really excessively pollute search results. Changing it up to -site:pinterest.com does catch those, but still not all the other TLDs, so I guess it would be a case of whack-a-mole for the rest.

by yegg 3y ago

Buildstarted 3y ago

Thanks for the update! I did notice they were flaky and maybe it's my queries that were more flaky than others that it stuck out at me more than when they possibly worked. Hopefully you can get this resolved as it's become extremely frustrating searching technical pages to weed out unrelated information.

porkbeer 3y ago

You ignore quotes. You ignore -modifiers Your search is near useless these days and after evangelizing, I now tell people to avoid ddg.

tlavoie 3y ago

The site exclusion very much does _not_ work for images, just FYI. For example, and especially since Pinterest is mentioned in your help page, I tried the following in the image search: the far side gallery -site:pinterest It is a good example, because Pinterest in particular, with all its TLDs, seems to really excessively pollute search results. Changing it up to -site:pinterest.com does catch those, but still not all the other TLDs, so I guess it would be a case of whack-a-mole for the rest.