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Tell HN: DuckDuckGo Search Results have jumped the shark
Recently I have noticed that when using DuckDuckGo to search, it's returning unrelated 'news' in my results. For example, I just searched < circle.co video calls > and in the first page of results got links related to the war and Speaker votes. This has been happening generally now when I search using DDG. (I'll put a link in the comments to an image)
- laurex 3y agoImage: https://pasteboard.co/iP0mR5HSFyKU.png https://pasteboard.co/iP0mR5HSFyKU.png
- reactordev 3y agoYeah that’s pretty bad. 60% of the results are non-related content.
- chrismorgan 3y agoI have never seen anything even vaguely like this, and can’t reproduce it on that exact query. I’m more inclined to attribute what you’re observing to a temporary glitch of some kind, if true (not that I have any reason to disbelieve you).
- laurex 3y agoI actually hesitated to post this because I want to support privacy-oriented tools and appreciate the education DDG has offered to lay people. But lately this seems to happen for me all the time. Perhaps they have testing segments and not everyone is getting the same algorithm, or maybe there’s some other factors like location, device or browser type, who knows?
- cassianoleal 3y agoNeither can I. I tried the same query and the first few results are exactly about circle.co . There are some news articles near the end of the first page but they're still relevant - about making video calls.
- laurex 3y agoIf DDG is truly privacy-oriented (as in, not using information about the user), then what inputs is it using to return different results to different people? Shouldn't it be returning based on a neutral ranking?
- cassianoleal 3y agoWild guess, it could have something to do with location - either IP location or whatever is selected in the search, or a combination of both. No idea if that's the case though.
- anenefan 3y agoIf I search the same - I don't even get sponsored ads with DDG with your search terms. I generally get with my own searches one or two sponsored ads at top of page before the real results begin. This is the main links from the first page of results I get. https://circle.so/ https://circle.so/ (followed by a number of child entries and links) https://go.circle.so/coaching/ https://go.circle.so/coaching/ https://guruscoach.com/circle-so-review/ https://guruscoach.com/circle-so-review/ https://help.circle.so/c/getting-started https://help.circle.so/c/getting-started https://redeemingproductivity.com/circle-review/ https://redeemingproductivity.com/circle-review/ https://circle.so/events/ https://circle.so/events/ https://community.circle.so/c/tutorials/ https://community.circle.so/c/tutorials/ https://community.circle.so/c/product-updates/introducing-live-streams-events-paywalls-more https://community.circle.so/c/product-updates/introducing-li... https://circle.so/mobile/ https://circle.so/mobile/ https://circle.so/pricing/ https://circle.so/pricing/ I would guess even if DDG protects your privacy, it would use information (perhaps search and or site history) the browser is broadcasting regardless to filter results it pipes to the end point. For example I never see quora results (honestly it's been some years so I'd forgotten they existed still) as some members in this thread were annoyed with and paid to be done with them ... then again I'm cheap and would use search terms -site:quora.com
- jruohonen 3y agoI too have noticed that DDG has gotten a lot worse. Fortunately, SP is still decent.
- ad404b8a372f2b9 3y agoWhat's SP, I can't find it on google.
- jruohonen 3y agoStartpage.
- ad404b8a372f2b9 3y agoThanks.
- squarefoot 3y agoStartPage is my default engine on the search box, I use Google only when SP fails to find something, which is rare but does happen from time to time. DDG has been great for years, growing steadily in quality, then just when it was about to become a lot better than Google, its reliability got a lot worse. I can't confirm what the OP writes as I abandoned DDG like 2 years ago, but wouldn't be surprised at all if it was true.
- KomoD 3y agoStartpage is owned by an adtech company
- guerrilla 3y agoIt's been a while. https://search.brave.com/ https://search.brave.com/
- Euphorbium 3y agoI use this and it is mostly fine. Absolutely better than ddg, which I used before this was launched.
- s_dev 3y agoI use DDG but actively of thinking switching to Kagi: https://kagi.com/ https://kagi.com/ -- it's a paid service but I can justify it based on the amount of search queries I run everyday. Has anyone switched and not looked back?
- mhsdef 3y agoYes. It's the first time I've successfully replaced Google search. Previously, I used DDG but pretty much reflexively g!'d every query.
- j05h 3y agoKagi is fantastic. I rarely use anything else now. Mostly if I’m on a browser I have yet to configure. I’m surprised I normally stay within the $5 plans limits, but when I’m regularly above I’ll gladly bump to the next tier.
- ozyschmozy 3y agoI'm on the same boat. Used to g! most of my queries with ddg. Since switching to kagi, I've fallen back to Google for only a few queries, and I think only one or two had better results
- ipaddr 3y agoI use a number of different search engines for different purposes. Yandex offers sites duckduckgo doesn't. Duckduckgo offers sites Google doesn't Google is good overall and at image searching. You seem like someone who has used a number of search engines. How does it treat sites Google blacklists like nsfw sites or porn sites or torrent sites? Does typing in movie/book/game torrent bring up listings the way Google previously did? How does it treat older non-mobile friendly sites? Is the image search comparable to Google?
- Kuinox 3y agoThe first days, I compared to google the results. But since I customised the result to boost/lower site I want, I never looked back.
- 3y ago
- dagmx 3y agoAnnoyingly, I find that Bing is the only “good” search engine of the 3 major ones (Google, Bing , DDG) Google has gone so far into the “well we think you really meant this” zone that it refuses to show me pertinent results unless I start adding quotes and modifiers to my search. DDG is veering there. Bing for now is the most literal. I search something and it gives me results that have tighter matches to my terms
- EduardoBautista 3y agoIn my experience, Google is mostly correct when it thinks I mean something else. DDG is incorrect far more often.
- JohnFen 3y agoThere's a fascinating split there. For a lot of people, Google's guesses seem to be mostly on-point. For a lot of other people, they're awful. (I'm in that latter group). It would be interesting to see some sort of study about what the difference between those two groups actually is.
- lolinder 3y agoFor myself, I feel like I was really good at getting precise results from Google years ago, but it took a specific way of asking that isn't natural to most people. I learned that way of asking, and was able to consistently find exactly what I needed, but the average user couldn't. It appears that they've "improved" search over time to cater to the lowest common denominator, in the process neutering all the functionality that I used to get precise results. So most people will have seen an improvement, because it no longer takes any expertise to use the search field well, but the skill ceiling is so low that there's no way to do much better than the mean.
- JohnFen 3y agoThis tracks with my experience as well. For a long while, I tried different ways of formulating my Google queries to try to get good results again, but I never was able to find the magic formula.
- tgv 3y agoWeird. I get different results. I also get the "Speaker vote" thing, but I can sort of accept that because the words "circle" and "calls" appear in the title. Nothing about the war, though. Instead, there's a bunch of companies with a similar name or product. It also offers me to search to "circle.co" video calls.
- mksybr 3y agoWhat alternative for meta search engines are there? I know about DDG and SearX (and SearX-NG). I don't really care of the bangless search quality because most times I have a particular website in mind to search (and when I don't I alternate between Google, Yandex and Bing, depending on content)
- kurisufag 3y ago4get.ca, but instead of mixing results it gives proxies results for a single backend scraper. Of the three source engines listed, I believe only Yandex is implemented. there is also LibreY, but my searches there fail more often than they succeed.
- thebigspacefuck 3y agoThe only problem I’ve had is that sometimes there are 0 results for something that should definitely have at least some results. It feels like I’m hitting some prohibited combination of words but I’m searching for something tech related, nothing like “tank man”.
- _oskh 3y agoThanks for posting this. I had the same suspicion. Makes me wonder if they've teamed up with one of the other big tech companies to supplement their results.
- ddxv 3y agoAfter months of arguing against using ChatGPT, I now find myself using it for probably 80% of the things that I would previously have searched for. I also find it's much different, instead of spending 3 minutes trying to reword my DDG search, I have a fairly useful conversation learning things. I keep my skepticism up as I get more specific and detailed, but I somehow started trusting it, and haven't missed search at all... I wonder if Google / DDG will start to notice this drop in searches or not. Also, I find myself using GitHub search a lot, it returns actual code someone was using, which is always helpful.
- pelicon 3y agoIf you like ChatGPT for search, I highly recommend checking out Perplexity, it is a search engine that uses the same model but can provide quite good information with source citations. https://www.perplexity.ai https://www.perplexity.ai
- stranded22 3y agoAnnual perplexity pro user here. I love it.
- danielbln 3y agoI've started subbing to Perplexity.ai recently and it's been great. All the benefits of interacting with an LLM with the grounding truth injected from search results. It's not perfect and sometimes falls on its face, but I use it way more than regular search these days. As a paying customer you can switch the underlying model to GPT4 or Claude2, which is nice.
- elicksaur 3y agoCan you share an example chat you felt was more useful than what you would expect to get from a search session?
- dangus 3y agoI am not the person you’re replying to but what is great about ChatGPT is how it parses meaning and doesn’t get confused by a large amount of results with similar wording but different meaning. Example: I wanted to know how tall Frank Lloyd Wright was. But if you google something like “Frank Lloyd Wright height” you’ll get a bunch of results about his buildings.
- maven29 3y agoDue to trying to decouple from Microsoft? https://techcrunch.com/2022/08/05/duckduckgo-microsoft-tracking-scripts/ https://techcrunch.com/2022/08/05/duckduckgo-microsoft-track...
- forward1 3y agoI'm convinced DuckDuckGo is just Bing. I mean, it's hosted on the same infrastructure. $ whois $(dig a duckduckgo.com @1.1.1.1 +short) | grep OrgName OrgName: Microsoft Corporation It's totally a private and anonymous search engine though!
- jruohonen 3y agoThat's Azure?
- forward1 3y agoWhich is totally controlled by Microsoft, right?
- dangus 3y agoNo, it’s controlled by the customers who rent the infrastructure. An analogy to your claim would be to say that Hertz drives their rented cars. You can encrypt your data with your own key with trivial effort on all the major cloud providers.
- Nextgrid 3y ago> You can encrypt your data with your own key with trivial effort on all the major cloud providers. Believing that this actually protects you from the provider is wishful thinking. What keeps them honest is that it's mostly not worth it for them to mine cloud customer data, but if they wanted to they absolutely could.
- jruohonen 3y ago> Believing that this actually protects you from the provider is wishful thinking. Indeed. Besides, there is a whole genre of research and practice on the introspection of virtual machines.
- 3y ago
- jiffygist 3y agoI have also noticed that when I search for something obscure, when pages related to my query are exhausted, there are search results related to my IP region (e.g. weather sites, wikipedia pages, linkedin pages mentioning or related to that city). These results appear even when the region switch is off or set to another country.
- ysavir 3y agoThis happens to me as well. I wonder whether they just ignore that selection now, or if Bing somehow is able to tell the user region despite DDG not sharing it with them.
- bloopernova 3y agoHappy with Kagi and its 2-person unlimited "family duo" account for $14/month. Default search engines have a massive amount of inertia behind them. Anything that disrupts the Google near-monopoly is a good thing, in my not-so-humble opinion. Edited to add: What sort of use cases do people have for the Kagi API? I was just curious about its use.
- DueDilligence 3y ago[dead]
- YesBox 3y agoThis happened last week: https://i.imgur.com/EXzZqCl.png https://i.imgur.com/EXzZqCl.png Seems to be fixed now, but it reminded me of the early search engine days. Funnily enough, when I used dogpile.com, it returned relevant results
- pogue 3y agoEveryone in the comments is mentioning Kagi, but I can't afford yet ANOTHER subscription service. In the meantime, you should also check other free search engines. DDG gets it's results from Bing. Startpage.com is another good one, it gets it's results from Google and just has a privacy layer. I recently switched to Brave Browser and have been using their native Brave Search & it has been working pretty well. They use their own bot to actually go out & index stuff (from what I understand). There's also Metager.org which is a meta search that gets it's results from several different sources. There's also a few others but I really haven't found much use for them or just get poor results. Check out searchengine.party if you want to try out the really esoteric search engines. https://www.privacytools.io/private-search https://www.privacytools.io/private-search
- JohnFen 3y ago> I can't afford yet ANOTHER subscription service. Fair. For me, Kagi and YouTube (which I'm ditching) are the only subscription services I have, so it isn't a burden.
- nunez 3y agoI feel you, but running something like Kagi requires massive amounts of computing power, and something has to give. It's either we pay for the hosting costs and growth, or we get an ad-supported mess, i.e. Google v2.
- fidla 3y agoI use Perplexity AI exclusively
- ksaj 3y agoEverything eventually starts to look like Google. When Google was new, we used to play a game to see who would run out of answers first on a particular search term. Then that morphed into who got a porn link first, even though the search term had nothing to do with porn. But now Google has gotten so bad, you might have to play to see who gets a reasonably correct answer first.
- DougN7 3y agoAnother recent kagi convert here. It really is great, and a great deal at $10/month. I seriously doubt I’ll ever go back.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 3y agoI cannot reproduce. Curious if get same results under different conditions What happens if disable Javascript, cookies and use lite.duckduckgo.com Also what happens if try the .onion address (can set exit node country in torrc) Something like tor -f torrc & x=duckduckgogg42xjoc72x3sjasowoarfbgcmvfimaftt6twagswzczad.onion;y=$x; socat tcp4-l:443,fork,reuseaddr,bind=127.0.0.42 socks4a:127.0.0.1:$x:443,socksport=9050 & #!/bin/sh read x;x=q=$(echo "$x&p=&s=${1-0}&dc=$(($1+1))&api=%2Fd.js&o=json&kl=wt-wt"|tr '\40' +); { printf 'POST /lite/ HTTP/1.0\r\n'; printf 'Host: '$y'\r\n'; printf 'Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded\r\n'; printf 'Content-Length: '${#x}'\r\n'; printf 'Connection: close\r\n\r\n'; echo "$x";}|sed w/dev/stderr \ |socat stdio,ignoreeof ssl:127.0.0.42:443,verify=0 # usage: echo circle.co video calls | 1.sh > 1.htm;firefox ./1.htm # usage: echo circle.co video calls | 1.sh 22 >> 1.htm;firefox ./1.htm I use custom filters, small C programs, that extract the URLs, descriptions and other info from various SERPs, e.g. DDG, and output SQL or simple HTML. This makes it very simple to exclude/include results based on strings in domains, paths or descriptions. I like to mix results from different search engines into a single SERP comprised of simple, regular HTML. No nonsense.