Comment by hombre_fatal
6 years ago
DDG results are so much worse for me, especially anything longer tail or in Spanish, that I switch to Google when I'm actually getting work done. I find myself adding "!g" to an important search just to check for any results that DDG doesn't know about and it's almost always an upgrade to see Google's results.
Search is hard.
I don't like to chime in to say something negative about an underdog like DDG, but I see this "people probably just don't know how to use DDG" suggestion a lot and it's quite the opposite: Google feels like it can practically read my mind with minimal context, like knowing I also may be talking about a recent event that shares the name with a generic search term. And I'm not talking about personalized search.
Or consider how "elm dict" in Google takes me to https://package.elm-lang.org/packages/elm/core/latest/Dict (#1 result), but https://duckduckgo.com/?q=elm+dict&t=h_&ia=web in DDG doesn't (nowhere on page 1).
Run into this enough and it becomes hard to willfully use DDG when you know you're likely missing out on good results when trying to do real work.
I know you're probably annoyed that I'm telling you that you're using ddg wrong. That's not exactly what I'm saying. It's more like: we're trained to expect certain things from the search engine, and so it's hard to switch.
> Or consider how "elm dict" in Google takes me to https://package.elm-lang.org/packages/elm/core/latest/Dict (#1 result), but https://duckduckgo.com/?q=elm+dict&t=h_&ia=web in DDG doesn't (nowhere on page 1).
ddg gives me the source code to elm Dict (8th hit, so it's in the first page): https://github.com/ivanov/Elm/blob/master/libraries/Dict.elm
I assume it's the same because ddg is claiming not to affect search results by anything except time and user configuration.
Google's results (for me) are a full page of references to every different version of elm's documentation for dict. Not exactly a wide net, and frankly pretty redundant. To see anything else, I have to click at the bottom of the page. It doesn't show me the source code. I went through the first ten pages and didn't see any link to it.
For ddg, I just use the arrow key to scroll down, and I can press enter to follow the link I want, changing the meaning of "first search page" for me quite a bit.
> DDG results are so much worse for me, especially anything longer tail or in Spanish, that I switch to Google when I'm actually getting work done. I find myself adding "!g" to an important search just to check for any results that DDG doesn't know about and it's almost always an upgrade to see Google's results.
I have a completely different experience in italian. They're actually pretty good, which is surprising given the small audience.
For work, usually I directly search for documentation in reference systems (e.g. en.cppreference.com). Neither ddg or google will consistently direct me to the "best" documentation. YMMV.
A comment on my comment. It is really true that Google indexes the deep web of generated content (like AliExpress, eBay, and others) better than ddg. That's part of the long tail that's costly to cover.
Sure, but 90% of the time, I and most people I know don't do very sophisticated searches. I'm actually mostly using google as a billion dollar search engine for wikipedia / stackoverflow / arch wiki / bbc / nyt / ft / whatever big site there is in a given domain. Because these sites happen to have 90% of what i'm looking for. For the rest, we all have our own little forums we follow: fb, hn, email etc.
So instead of trying to beat google on full web searches, the trick might actually be to index all 100 best ranking websites according to some metric (alexa rank for instance) and do it better than google. Then, maybe you can grab over 50% of the search traffic. For broader queries (in the search knowledge graph sense), in this scenario, people would fallback to google.
Search is ripe for disruption, and ddg is the lead candidate right now. One wonders if such a strategy could give rise to more challengers more quickly. I’ve certainly considered it myself (alexa top 10k though).
> Google feels like it can practically read my mind with minimal context, like knowing I also may be talking about a recent event that shares the name with a generic search term. And I'm not talking about personalized search.
I wish there was some compromise, because Google regularly seems to read another mind than my own, automatically "correcting" search terms to terms with similar spelling that are totally irrelevant to my search or including what is superficially synonymous but for my purposes irrelevant in the results. I frequently feel like I have to convince Google to stop second-guessing me and actually consider what I wrote rather than what it assumes I meant.
A few more knobs and switches to adjust that behavior would be helpful at least for power users.