5 ms·

What is HN's opinion on the quality of the search results?

mksaunders 11y ago
Pretty mixed. A search for my project (MikeOS) brings up a highlighted Wikipedia page at the top, even though that page was deleted over a year ago...
ninjin 11y ago
I switched to using DDG as a default a long time ago and have experienced improved results over the last few years. I would say that ~97.5% of my searches now go over DDG, if the search fail I add "!g" to the query to see if Google can do better. About 40% of my searches are research related, 40% software development related, and 20% "others". Searches that tend to fail are usually for local news in my country of origin or very exotic configuration/library errors. For the former, Google still does better than DDG, for the latter, it is about 50/50 if Google will fail to deliver as well.
S4M 11y ago
For things in English, I would say it's acceptable but relevance is still below google and I find myself switching to google for about 10% of my searches, being unhappy with what DDG got me. For things not in English, it's quite bad.
- realusername 11y ago
  I would say the same, for English it works quite well (the quality is maybe a bit below Google but not much). But for other languages, it just does not work at all.
zorked 11y ago
On average worse than Google but not without its pleasures. Much worse on "long tail" searches and non-English terms. I went back to Google. To be fair what really made me move away was that their page load times were much slower. Now that I live in a country that is closer to DDG's servers I may give them another go.
- netcan 11y ago
  My experience is similar. A small notch worse than Google, but enough that I didn't stick on it. It's a good example of how we just can't go back, for almost any reason. I like the idea of less tracking and less personalization. But it turns out I'm not willing to sacrifice almost anything for it. The internet is so unkind to close seconds.
UserRights 11y ago
A major annoyance are the endless clones of SO sites polluting my searches.
mhd 11y ago
Pretty okay for most stuff that has to do with work, never mind that often you can "bang" to where you really want to go anyway (github, wikipedia). I often bang to google for longer queries or almost anything that's local to Germany.
- maelito 11y ago
  Even though I sometimes find more relevant results on ddg than google, I wouldn't use it without its !
- icebraining 11y ago
  I never understood the appeal of !bang - browsers have had that built-in for a long time. You just right click on the Github search field, choose "Add a Keyword for this Search" and then type some keyword like "gh". Then just type "gh <query>" on your location bar and it'll search directly in that site.
  - BuckRogers 11y ago
    Bangs can be used anywhere in the string. I use them at the end so if I want to try another source I can just update "searchingthis !mq" with "searchingthis !gm". No need to go to the front of the query and update the keyword there. Also, you don't have to configure anything. DDG bangs are intuitive. I find myself searching sites I wouldn't have otherwise.
usethis 11y ago
I try to use DDG every once in a while, because I really would like to use them. But after a while, I almost always switch back and vow to try them again in a few months. If you compare a query like "static webserver", you'll see why Google's results are much more diverse, than DDG's: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=static+webserver https://duckduckgo.com/?q=static+webserver https://www.google.com/search?q=static+webserver https://www.google.com/search?q=static+webserver
- 4ad 11y ago
  Both results seem of extremely poor quality to me.
  - icebraining 11y ago
    What are you getting on Google?
fsniper 11y ago
I have been trying it as default se for a while and had to turn back to google recently. It seems to be decent at first but after a while, I get the feeling that I'm not finding good matches that comes with google and loosing precious time on searches instead of studying the resulting pages.
kaolinite 11y ago
Whilst the search results are generally quite good, Google is often far better for highly specific or technical queries. Google also shows genuine intelligence and understanding at times whereas I find that DuckDuckGo does not. One big problem I find with DuckDuckGo is the search suggestions. I found that with DDG they are very poor and that I used them with Google far more often than I thought. That said - give DDG a go! I think that for many people, the results are more than good enough. They have improved dramatically over the past few years. Even if you're not ready to use them full-time, I'd recommend trying them out on your phone first, perhaps.
- technomancy 11y ago
  Same here; I feel like DDG works for 95% of my searches, but most of the ones it fails to find relevant pages on are error messages or stack traces.
kagamine 11y ago
Maybe because google have spent years compiling data about me, but I had to switch to google search yesterday to get a result that wasn't showing on DDG. I have ddg as my start page on my main computer at home, I was looking for a military paint code so typed "military paint code A6" and all I got was Audi A6 sites (non military and I wan't looking for anything to do with Audi). Scoot over to google and my expected results where at the top. I continue to use dgg because they won't improve otherwise. Google need the competition, frankly.
- johnchristopher 11y ago
  > Maybe because google have spent years compiling data about me, but I had to switch to google search yesterday to get a result that wasn't showing on DDG. Maybe ? Maybe ?! Come on, that's the whole point of duckduckgo. http://dontbubble.us/ http://dontbubble.us/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2673898 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2673898
  - kagamine 11y ago
    Well, it was a niche search for sure. The A6 is a British military internal code (I haven't yet found out what it is, but strongly suspect it to be anti-reflective drab green because the vehicle was that colour when I bought it). It's just that the other search words had no connection to Audi, I haven't seen Audi used by any military (Mercedes, Land Rover, Jeep, Ford etc yes). The result seemed based off of only one of the search terms, not a grouping.
- mcintyre1994 11y ago
  Heh, I wanted to see how that search looked on Google without any hints in my bubble - my mistake, they show your comment at the top :) On another note I wonder if their indexer is actually that fast on a relatively niche site like this or whether they also index pages as I visit for use in search.
- AtmaScout 11y ago
  I tried the query. Second link was to your post. I also got some audi links and a Ford link about vehicle colors.
ionised 11y ago
Works great for every day stuff. If I'm searching something code-specific sometimes I might need to defer to searching elsewhere however. Overall I would highly recommend DDG.
thirdsun 11y ago
I try DDG every once in a while for a couple of weeks since I'd like to switch. Yet even today, the results just aren't good enough. Particularly when debugging and searching development related error message I had to use the "!g" bang almost constantly. For easy queries, DDG is great, but so is Google. When we reach just mildly confusing queries, the differences are very noticeable. One example from the top of my head: Searching for "devise", a popular ruby gem, yields several unrelated results before the actual Gem on DDG, while Google has the Github page as first result. Due to the popularity of devise I wouldn't rate this as a difficult query, yet problems already emerge on DDG. Multiply that by the number of queries you input daily and it becomes annoying.
- galaktor 11y ago
  I have noticed the same, and find myself using the !g feature in DDG a lot for searches... I suspect this could be related to Google knowing that you tend to search for code (i.e. Ruby) a lot, thus bumping related results to the top. Since DDG avoids storing context for users (from what I gather), I wonder if they'll ever be able to deliver the same quality of results as Google do.
  - dhimes 11y ago
    Maybe he could add a 'context' flag on the search. Instead of the engine trying to discern what you are looking for from your history, maybe there could be a way you could tell it. #programming, #cooking, etc. Not sure what the UI should be.
    - simpleigh 11y ago
      Why not just expand the original query? A search for "devise ruby" works pretty well (https://duckduckgo.com/?q=devise+ruby https://duckduckgo.com/?q=devise+ruby). I've long given up searching for trendily-named JavaScript libraries without adding "js" to the search term.
      - kagamine 11y ago
Eupolemos 11y ago
I use DDG as an addition to Google, not as a replacement. When I want to look up something factual I know nothing about, DDG is the right searchengine. I finde that DDG is best at giving short, concise results. When I'm searching for something within the (very) broad "entertainment" category, I go with Google.
Aoyagi 11y ago
I use it as my primary search engine and I'm mostly satisfied with it, but there are still times (once a day maybe) when I have to use Google (through Startpage).
atirip 11y ago
Aligned with others here. English is okish, Estonian (my native) is bad. Not unusably bad, but bad. But !g is always there, so im fully switched and never going back.
gitaarik 11y ago
I use it as a default search engine and I'm very satisfied. The keyboard shortcuts are very handy [0]. I rarely find myself needing a different search engine. Only the images search is not really useful I think (also UI wise). [0] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=duckduckgo+shortcuts&t=canonical&ia=answer https://duckduckgo.com/?q=duckduckgo+shortcuts&t=canonical&i...
mrweasel 11y ago
They're getting better, or I'm getting use to using DDG and adjust my searches accordingly. Without having much proof I would claim that DuckDuckGo is get better at about the same rate I feel Google as been declining in quality.
paublyrne 11y ago
A styling UX complaint I have is the titles of the search results are the same colour as the excerpts so it's not easy to quickly scan the results. Google puts them in blue to differentiate all that text.
- dublinben 11y ago
  Titles and excerpts are actually different colors. The titles are #333 (Gray20) and the excerpts below are the lighter #666 (Gray40).
toxican 11y ago
I'd say about 75% of the time it gives me what I'm looking for. The other 25% I end up using !ge or typically !so since what I'm looking for is webdev related and Stack Overflow usually has what I need. The !bangs more than make up for any lower quality in search results, imo
rprospero 11y ago
I use DDG as my primary search engine, but I almost never perform a search without using a bang pattern. Is there absolutely no chance that even 90's era Lycos could ruin this search? Use the blank ! and skip the list. Do I need a brief overview before I do more refined research? Use !wiki Do I have a bug in my code? Use !so Did Stack Overflow have nothing about my bug? Use !scholar For any other search, I just wind up putting in !g and letting Google handle it because, if I haven't found it by this point, the regular DDG search probably isn't going to help.
lazyjones 11y ago
I switched years ago, initially quality for non-US-centric results was lackluster, but it is excellent now. Considering that I'm stubbornly trying to use Tor wherever possible, the fact that it isn't blocked or hampered (like Google does with its crappy twisty little maze of captchas sometimes), is an additional advantage. I honestly cannot remember when I last felt I had to use "!g" and was proven right by better results. Perhaps Google Image Search is still worthwhile.

Pretty mixed. A search for my project (MikeOS) brings up a highlighted Wikipedia page at the top, even though that page was deleted over a year ago...

ninjin 11y ago

I switched to using DDG as a default a long time ago and have experienced improved results over the last few years. I would say that ~97.5% of my searches now go over DDG, if the search fail I add "!g" to the query to see if Google can do better. About 40% of my searches are research related, 40% software development related, and 20% "others". Searches that tend to fail are usually for local news in my country of origin or very exotic configuration/library errors. For the former, Google still does better than DDG, for the latter, it is about 50/50 if Google will fail to deliver as well.

S4M 11y ago

For things in English, I would say it's acceptable but relevance is still below google and I find myself switching to google for about 10% of my searches, being unhappy with what DDG got me. For things not in English, it's quite bad.

realusername 11y ago
I would say the same, for English it works quite well (the quality is maybe a bit below Google but not much). But for other languages, it just does not work at all.

zorked 11y ago

On average worse than Google but not without its pleasures. Much worse on "long tail" searches and non-English terms. I went back to Google. To be fair what really made me move away was that their page load times were much slower. Now that I live in a country that is closer to DDG's servers I may give them another go.

netcan 11y ago
My experience is similar. A small notch worse than Google, but enough that I didn't stick on it. It's a good example of how we just can't go back, for almost any reason. I like the idea of less tracking and less personalization. But it turns out I'm not willing to sacrifice almost anything for it. The internet is so unkind to close seconds.

UserRights 11y ago

A major annoyance are the endless clones of SO sites polluting my searches.

mhd 11y ago

Pretty okay for most stuff that has to do with work, never mind that often you can "bang" to where you really want to go anyway (github, wikipedia). I often bang to google for longer queries or almost anything that's local to Germany.

maelito 11y ago
Even though I sometimes find more relevant results on ddg than google, I wouldn't use it without its !
icebraining 11y ago
I never understood the appeal of !bang - browsers have had that built-in for a long time. You just right click on the Github search field, choose "Add a Keyword for this Search" and then type some keyword like "gh". Then just type "gh <query>" on your location bar and it'll search directly in that site.
- BuckRogers 11y ago
  Bangs can be used anywhere in the string. I use them at the end so if I want to try another source I can just update "searchingthis !mq" with "searchingthis !gm". No need to go to the front of the query and update the keyword there. Also, you don't have to configure anything. DDG bangs are intuitive. I find myself searching sites I wouldn't have otherwise.

usethis 11y ago

I try to use DDG every once in a while, because I really would like to use them. But after a while, I almost always switch back and vow to try them again in a few months. If you compare a query like "static webserver", you'll see why Google's results are much more diverse, than DDG's: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=static+webserver https://duckduckgo.com/?q=static+webserver https://www.google.com/search?q=static+webserver https://www.google.com/search?q=static+webserver

4ad 11y ago
Both results seem of extremely poor quality to me.
- icebraining 11y ago
  What are you getting on Google?

fsniper 11y ago

I have been trying it as default se for a while and had to turn back to google recently. It seems to be decent at first but after a while, I get the feeling that I'm not finding good matches that comes with google and loosing precious time on searches instead of studying the resulting pages.

kaolinite 11y ago

Whilst the search results are generally quite good, Google is often far better for highly specific or technical queries. Google also shows genuine intelligence and understanding at times whereas I find that DuckDuckGo does not. One big problem I find with DuckDuckGo is the search suggestions. I found that with DDG they are very poor and that I used them with Google far more often than I thought. That said - give DDG a go! I think that for many people, the results are more than good enough. They have improved dramatically over the past few years. Even if you're not ready to use them full-time, I'd recommend trying them out on your phone first, perhaps.

technomancy 11y ago
Same here; I feel like DDG works for 95% of my searches, but most of the ones it fails to find relevant pages on are error messages or stack traces.

kagamine 11y ago

Maybe because google have spent years compiling data about me, but I had to switch to google search yesterday to get a result that wasn't showing on DDG. I have ddg as my start page on my main computer at home, I was looking for a military paint code so typed "military paint code A6" and all I got was Audi A6 sites (non military and I wan't looking for anything to do with Audi). Scoot over to google and my expected results where at the top. I continue to use dgg because they won't improve otherwise. Google need the competition, frankly.

johnchristopher 11y ago
> Maybe because google have spent years compiling data about me, but I had to switch to google search yesterday to get a result that wasn't showing on DDG. Maybe ? Maybe ?! Come on, that's the whole point of duckduckgo. http://dontbubble.us/ http://dontbubble.us/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2673898 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2673898
- kagamine 11y ago
  Well, it was a niche search for sure. The A6 is a British military internal code (I haven't yet found out what it is, but strongly suspect it to be anti-reflective drab green because the vehicle was that colour when I bought it). It's just that the other search words had no connection to Audi, I haven't seen Audi used by any military (Mercedes, Land Rover, Jeep, Ford etc yes). The result seemed based off of only one of the search terms, not a grouping.
mcintyre1994 11y ago
Heh, I wanted to see how that search looked on Google without any hints in my bubble - my mistake, they show your comment at the top :) On another note I wonder if their indexer is actually that fast on a relatively niche site like this or whether they also index pages as I visit for use in search.
AtmaScout 11y ago
I tried the query. Second link was to your post. I also got some audi links and a Ford link about vehicle colors.

ionised 11y ago

Works great for every day stuff. If I'm searching something code-specific sometimes I might need to defer to searching elsewhere however. Overall I would highly recommend DDG.

thirdsun 11y ago

I try DDG every once in a while for a couple of weeks since I'd like to switch. Yet even today, the results just aren't good enough. Particularly when debugging and searching development related error message I had to use the "!g" bang almost constantly. For easy queries, DDG is great, but so is Google. When we reach just mildly confusing queries, the differences are very noticeable. One example from the top of my head: Searching for "devise", a popular ruby gem, yields several unrelated results before the actual Gem on DDG, while Google has the Github page as first result. Due to the popularity of devise I wouldn't rate this as a difficult query, yet problems already emerge on DDG. Multiply that by the number of queries you input daily and it becomes annoying.

galaktor 11y ago
I have noticed the same, and find myself using the !g feature in DDG a lot for searches... I suspect this could be related to Google knowing that you tend to search for code (i.e. Ruby) a lot, thus bumping related results to the top. Since DDG avoids storing context for users (from what I gather), I wonder if they'll ever be able to deliver the same quality of results as Google do.
- dhimes 11y ago
  Maybe he could add a 'context' flag on the search. Instead of the engine trying to discern what you are looking for from your history, maybe there could be a way you could tell it. #programming, #cooking, etc. Not sure what the UI should be.
  - simpleigh 11y ago
    Why not just expand the original query? A search for "devise ruby" works pretty well (https://duckduckgo.com/?q=devise+ruby https://duckduckgo.com/?q=devise+ruby). I've long given up searching for trendily-named JavaScript libraries without adding "js" to the search term.
    - kagamine 11y ago

Eupolemos 11y ago

I use DDG as an addition to Google, not as a replacement. When I want to look up something factual I know nothing about, DDG is the right searchengine. I finde that DDG is best at giving short, concise results. When I'm searching for something within the (very) broad "entertainment" category, I go with Google.

Aoyagi 11y ago

I use it as my primary search engine and I'm mostly satisfied with it, but there are still times (once a day maybe) when I have to use Google (through Startpage).

atirip 11y ago

Aligned with others here. English is okish, Estonian (my native) is bad. Not unusably bad, but bad. But !g is always there, so im fully switched and never going back.

gitaarik 11y ago

I use it as a default search engine and I'm very satisfied. The keyboard shortcuts are very handy [0]. I rarely find myself needing a different search engine. Only the images search is not really useful I think (also UI wise). [0] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=duckduckgo+shortcuts&t=canonical&ia=answer https://duckduckgo.com/?q=duckduckgo+shortcuts&t=canonical&i...

mrweasel 11y ago

They're getting better, or I'm getting use to using DDG and adjust my searches accordingly. Without having much proof I would claim that DuckDuckGo is get better at about the same rate I feel Google as been declining in quality.

paublyrne 11y ago

A styling UX complaint I have is the titles of the search results are the same colour as the excerpts so it's not easy to quickly scan the results. Google puts them in blue to differentiate all that text.

dublinben 11y ago
Titles and excerpts are actually different colors. The titles are #333 (Gray20) and the excerpts below are the lighter #666 (Gray40).

toxican 11y ago

I'd say about 75% of the time it gives me what I'm looking for. The other 25% I end up using !ge or typically !so since what I'm looking for is webdev related and Stack Overflow usually has what I need. The !bangs more than make up for any lower quality in search results, imo

rprospero 11y ago

I use DDG as my primary search engine, but I almost never perform a search without using a bang pattern. Is there absolutely no chance that even 90's era Lycos could ruin this search? Use the blank ! and skip the list. Do I need a brief overview before I do more refined research? Use !wiki Do I have a bug in my code? Use !so Did Stack Overflow have nothing about my bug? Use !scholar For any other search, I just wind up putting in !g and letting Google handle it because, if I haven't found it by this point, the regular DDG search probably isn't going to help.

lazyjones 11y ago

I switched years ago, initially quality for non-US-centric results was lackluster, but it is excellent now. Considering that I'm stubbornly trying to use Tor wherever possible, the fact that it isn't blocked or hampered (like Google does with its crappy twisty little maze of captchas sometimes), is an additional advantage. I honestly cannot remember when I last felt I had to use "!g" and was proven right by better results. Perhaps Google Image Search is still worthwhile.