[lowkeyokay]

> I mean, DDG worked fine for 95% of time, but the remaining 5% failure often led to some extreme frustration that I just couldn't stand.

Is 95% really not acceptable?My experience is quite different though. When I don’t get the results I hoped I just use !g. Easy. But the result are rarely any better

[GendingMachine]

Honestly the main reason I ended up abandoning DDG is because you can't see the publish date on search results.

I know it's a fairly minor feature and one manipulated often by some websites, but I've still found it massively increases my chances of picking a relevant and up to date result. I didn't even realise how much I used it until I found myself getting extremely frustrated about its absence in DDG.

[tobr]

I used to do this, but at some point I just stopped. Google is not better than DDG. More SEO spam and much more hostile UX.

Brave has a culture of user-hostile UX too so I don’t have any big hopes for this. I like the idea of paying for a search engine, though. I would seriously consider that if DDG offered it.

[smoldesu]

> Brave has a culture of user-hostile UX

Yep. The missteps that they've made over the past few years do not give me any confidence in the future of the project.

[burn]

Why not try Neeva? They are going the route of a paid search engine.

[jonathansampson]

Can you elaborate on how you feel "Brave has a culture of user-hostile UX"? You're not talking about the first version of the User Tipping feature from 2018 (where Brave gave BAT to its users and asked them to give mark which creator(s) they'd like to support) are you?

[fowlie]

After using the duck for a couple of years, I have become better at two things:

- Reading man pages or official documentation sites before opening a search engine

- Thinking of more precise search keywords, as I got used to duck not helping me as much as google

[cturtle]

Along these lines I use ddg’s bangs for the same benefit. So many searches for Python help are filled with very shallow intros on tutorial sites of varying quality with the official docs rarely the first result.

Now I just prefix my query with !py and I’m immediately taken to the docs.

[trts]

also: considering how far out in the long tail of search terms my query is, before choosing to go with the !g bang out of the gate.

Google I find is still better for topics that are more idiosyncratic. But the bang syntax makes DDG a natural choice as default because many times I'll want to go directly to a specific domain search, e.g. !r or !nyt

[nh2]

> Is 95% really not acceptable?

No: When you use web search for professional work, such as searching for error messages or description of bugs of some software, any miss of somebod having encountered and solved them before can cost you days of work.

From my experience, Google is currently still the best at finding those.

[mkl]

I think before you spend days of work on something DDG can't find, taking a few seconds to add !g and check Google's results would be sensible. Usually when I try that, though, Google isn't any better.

[brundolf]

I use DDG on personal devices and Google at work. I have a work-issued Google account, so privacy isn't really tractable for work stuff anyway

[mbauman]

> When I don’t get the results I hoped I just use !g. Easy. But the result are rarely any better

This is exactly my experience. I have a "failed" search probably about a quarter of the time. Changing around the keywords can sometimes fix those failures... maybe about a quarter again are still stuck. So, yeah, ~5% failure rate. I inevitably try !g and am inevitably disappointed with effectively the same results (or lack thereof). Google successfully recovers a failed search maybe 10% of the time.

[bscphil]

> Is 95% really not acceptable?

Moreover, is any search engine really at 95% success rate? I certainly have never gotten that high with Google, even back in the days when Google Search was good. Nowadays it's like 85% or so. About the same as DuckDuckGo for me. No matter which one I made my default, I'd have to check the other occasionally. (Incidentally, the same is true of satellite imagery. Sometimes Bing Maps is just much better for no obvious reason.)

[ElijahLynn]

It isn't acceptable, no. I tried Duck Search (aka Bing) for a couple weeks and in the beginning I wouldn't know that I wasn't getting the results I was looking for and eventually realized that the results just sucked compared to Google.

I found myself having to second guess the results and then did a Duck / Google hybrid for a while, going to Google when I didn't get what I was looking for and eventually it was too much friction. I equate it with when I used to use two different text editors, one for speed (Sublime) and another (IntelliJ)for step-debugging because Sublime didn't have that part well implemented and it was just maddening to have to switch back and forth all the time and learn/maintain two sets of keyboard shortcuts etc.

[mastazi]

> When I don’t get the results I hoped I just use !g

I use !sp instead, same results and no Google tracking

(!sp searches on Startpage which in turn uses results from Google; according to both Privacy Badger and Brave Shields there are no trackers on SP)

[tjpnz]

I sometimes wonder if that 5% is something DDG and others can realistically solve. Perhaps the issue has less to do with engineering and more to do with Google being the dominant player over the previous 20-years (give or take). That's an awfully long time for one company to effectively own a product category and build expectations among users about how it should work.

FWIW I do get good results from DDG (sometimes better than Google) but that does require me to be a bit more thoughtful with my queries.

[dopidopHN]

For me it's random technical dumb stuff, like library version compatibility. Or a specific syntax I know exist but I can't figure out.

Now when I don't find what I need, I double check with g! ... once every 2 or 3 times, google do find what I'm vaguely remember exist and is out there.

Is never actual content, it's when I look for a specific one liner to copy paste and DDG do not deliver.

I can live with that.

[cfn]

I am on the third or forth trial to change to DDG and this time it is working not because DDG is better but because Google's search is degrading so much.

[gentleman11]

I tried brave search today and the results were rather good. I have no idea what 95% working means but this is a nice start

[basq]

In my experience, without use of g! DDG isn't serviceable.