4 ms·

In my experience, Google is mostly correct when it thinks I mean something else. DDG is incorrect far more often.

• JohnFen 3y ago
  There'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 ago
    For 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 ago
      This 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.
• dpkirchner 3y ago
  Google will often exclude ignore terms in my searches -- specific error codes and messages, for example -- making it pretty useless unless I add quotes around every term. Even then, it doesn't do a good job of ignoring content in sidebar divs (supposedly related content), which is even worse.