Ask HN: Is DDG Becoming Unusable?

[osigurdson]

I've noticed that the quality of search results has dropped precipitously in the past few months. Now, almost every search ends with "g!". I'm wondering if it is just me or are others noticing this?

[rapjr9]

I've noticed something similar, DDG has been increasingly ignoring my keywords, especially when I put quotes around them, and returning irrelevant results. It used to be that if you had two words with quotes around them it would tend to return results with both keywords, now it seems to return results with only one of the keywords. I think the scope of searches has declined also, I can search for things I know exist and DDG won't find them. The more marginal the search, on the fringes outside of what is most popular, the less capable DDG seems to be in finding results. Maybe they shrank the size of their database or excluded a lot of the less connected sites from their search?

[Normille]

DDG has always been crap in my experience. It's one of those companies who seems to be a media darling, in spite of having a mediocre product. About the only thing I miss from my brief period of using it as my default search engine was the bangs. Now those were a good feature!

[mritun]

It’s the curse of popularity!

As soon as gaming a search engine becomes financially profitable, the hoards of “SEO”s develop methods to do so.

On plus side, this means ddg is finally getting noticed, on the minus side, this means they need to react fast or lose ground to the competition that’s relatively better able to fend off spam.

Btw, this is also why search engines only grow big (or go home). Fending off spam is very very expensive and thankless job!

[marginalia_nu]

This is a popular notion, but I'm not sure how well founded it actually is, since we really only have one search engine that's really been struggling with SEO spam, and that is a search engine that is also in an uniquely tricky bind where they're primarily an advertisement broker, and thus extremely limited in what they can do about search engine spam without hurting their own bottom line.

[hulitu]

It has nothing to do with SEO . It just ignores the quoted part.

[bunnyfoofoo]

I'd recommend giving Kagi a try. I've been using it for 4 months now as my default search engine, and it's excellent.

[dmm]

The Kagi founder believes only criminals need privacy:

> I think that a class of people, who ask kind of questions that need absolute guarantee of anonymity (I am thinking terrorists, drug dealers, traffickers etc) are:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29844665

That's the main reason I haven't tried it.

[aliqot]

> I think that a class of people, who ask kind of questions that need absolute guarantee of anonymity (I am thinking terrorists, drug dealers, traffickers etc)

Hard nope, that guy's trouble. He's not one of us.

[calculated]

Used it but as a student paying $10 for a search engine isn't possible.

[ATMLOTTOBEER]

I used this exclusively for around a year and I’m back on google. I hope it’s improved since I stopped using it but I had trouble finding relevant blogs and stack overflow posts for the somewhat obscure language I use at work. Kagi does have a nice pdf filter though.

[RealStickman_]

I can second the recommendation for Kagi. It's been working very well for me the past 2 months now.

[2Gkashmiri]

As long as you put Pinterest filter in your unlock filter, ddg image search is usable. I tried brave image search and it was pathetic, same as google or ddg without fiters.

Why don't search engines actively sabotage Pinterest?/

[s_ting765]

Gave up on DDG and now selfhost my own instance of searxng.

[tetris11]

its as good as it ever was for me, though admittedly I use search.brave often as fallback

[jacooper]

Honestly since Brave search launched, I never bothers with DDG. brave is just so much better.

[Bakary]

Trusting a crypto company with privacy seems a bit odd to me.

[jspash]

I've noticed the same with the search results from Brave. It started about 3 months ago and it's really frustrating. But apparently they don't use Bing. It's a strange coincidence.

[mckirk]

I've been using Startpage for a while now and am quite content. It's essentially a privacy-preserving frontend for Google, so you get the result quality without the data trace.

[hulitu]

It's not really a frontend for Google becsuse it returns far fewer results compared to Google. And it has the same quoting problem like ddg.

For some reason "" has become equivalent with - in the world of search engines.

[mechanical_bear]

Same for me, I’ve found myself…shudder using Bing more often.

[mike_d]

DDG is just Bing without personalization.

[SanjayMehta]

Doesn't DDG use Bing as its backend?

[osigurdson]

I wish Bing supported "g!". They are too proud.

[stjohnswarts]

Don't use g! use s! if you're going to do that. If you use !g almost every time you may as well just go to google from the beginning

[_piif]

Every time I give DDG a try with a search it only gives me unrelevant results. Even unpersonalized Google results kind of suck for any specialized searches for me. I primarily use DDG for its bangs which I make heavy use of.

[navjack27]

Ddg is bing. It's literally the same now. Ha ha

[acidioxide]

For me it hasn't degraded (or, possibly, I haven't noticed it). I think it really depends on type of searches you usually do.

[GekkePrutser]

I still think it's fine, way better than Google. Google gives too many 'sponsored' results.

DDG is just bing of course.

[nvahalik]

I have been getting very strange results periodically. Switching browsers for a while usually fixes the issue.

[funshed]

I started seeing DDG TV advertising in the UK recently mocking Google tracking.

[gedy]

Searches frequently hang for me past year, thought was network but Google is fine.

[jinnko]

Check your network MTU.

Cloudflare have a few good posts for context.

[joshxyz]

whats ddg?

data driven gevelopment?

edit: okay duckduckgo lol

i hate it, still low quality search results for most of my use cases in programming related search.

[dev_0]

David De Gea

[ekianjo]

for code related questions DDG has always been awful, that's for sure.

[andyexeter]

Still a great shot stopper, but there are much better goalkeepers than him around now. Goalkeeping isn’t all about stopping shots, the top teams want to build from the back and a goalkeeper who can actually play football with their feet is paramount to that. Keepers like Allison and Ederson are miles ahead of DDG in that regard.