I keep on trying to love duckduckgo but find that often even typing the exact title of an article I'm looking for, it's not on the first page of results...
I have Google routinely deciding that I didn't mean to use ALL three words I searched for and "helpfully" dropping them. Sure, I can tell it "no, I really want those", but the experience is definitely becoming more and more sub-par for me. As bad is when a search doesn't give me what I want, so I narrow it, only to find that Google uses my previous search to decide what I want to see so I still end up finding similar results.
I remember when Google blew us away with Page Rank (goodbye Alta Vista!), but in the last few years Google has gotten so good on providing entry-level information that it's useless for finding specifics, so I expect the next Big Thing in search to come along, though I have no idea how far out it is.
Fun example of this: last week I was trying to figure out all the floating point operations that can produce NaN. Go ahead and try searching Google for "ways to make nan"; it's going to show you dozens of pages of naan recipes, and there isn't even a link to click to make it actually search for what you've typed (instead there's a link for Did you mean "ways to make naan"?, which shows a different set of naan recipes).
I use DuckDuckGo as my main search engine. One place it drops the ball is in searching for anything health related. Top of the page: homeopathy, conspiracy theories and supplement salesmen.
ergothus|7 years ago
I remember when Google blew us away with Page Rank (goodbye Alta Vista!), but in the last few years Google has gotten so good on providing entry-level information that it's useless for finding specifics, so I expect the next Big Thing in search to come along, though I have no idea how far out it is.
kibwen|7 years ago
hedora|7 years ago
Also, the DDG devs are certainly lurking on this thread, and can fix the class of queries in question.
Kiro|7 years ago
i_am_proteus|7 years ago
JumpCrisscross|7 years ago