
Ask HN: What's your experience with DuckDuckGo search quality? - BjoernKW
Because I think that privacy is important and - for the most part - non-personalised search results fundamentally are a good thing these past few weeks after more than a decade of Google having been my default search engine I&#x27;ve finally been giving DuckDuckGo a try and made it my standard search engine.<p>So far unfortunately, in terms of search result quality I&#x27;m not convinced at all. I constantly find myself using the Google bang !g as a prefix because native DuckDuckGo (or rather Bing, which is their main underlying search index provider) results are sorely lacking.<p>Maybe, it&#x27;s me and due to years of using &quot;Googlese&quot; I&#x27;ve unlearned how to use a generic search engine.<p>However, frequently even when explicitly searching for phrases I find that the search results don&#x27;t even contain the terms I was looking for. To give you an example, when while coding I encounter an error message or stack trace I don&#x27;t exactly know the cause of I usually search for a relevant, distinctive segment as a phrase.<p>With Google I usually get relevant results that point me in the right direction fairly quickly. With DuckDuckGo more often than not I&#x27;m presented with completely irrelevant results.<p>This might be personalisation at play but an explicit search for a specific technical error message should return relevant results (if available) regardless of my search history.<p>From what I&#x27;ve read from others who made the switch  I seem to be in a minority. Most DuckDuckGo users claim that for them search results are equivalent to - or even better than - Google&#x27;s, not the least because Google&#x27;s search quality is said to have been in decline for some time now.<p>What&#x27;s the experience with DuckDuckGo among Hacker News users? Am I the only one having these issues?
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bediger4000
I switched a few years ago. I use Firefox, explicitly because it's not
controlled by a profit-driven multinational corporation, so factor that belief
in...

Duckduckgo started to b the default search engine for FF a few years ago. For
a while, I found myself irritated with the results, and I would sometimes try
again in Google. That gradually wore off - I'd like to think it was because of
changes at Duckduckgo, but more likely I'm fooling myself. I very seldom try
again in Google, but I do try again every once in a while.

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HackedBunny
I find their results pretty abysmal, like ALL modern search engines --
particularly in terms of returning irrelevant results that don't even contain
my specific search terms, so you're definitely not the only one!

I think they're all scared of having to simply say "we couldn't find anything
that matches what you specifically asked for... or was even close".

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Jamwinner
Pretty decent overall, but I am starting to see more low-effort sites gaming
results. Mostly those useless question/answer format sites that make you sign
up to see that nobody else knows which bolts on a 1989 toyota camary are left-
hand thread either. But increasingly, the keyword jackpotting spam sites.

Overall, still a smidge better than the ugly g for most things.

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provlem
I feel same.

I do try sometime google especially for code related work. Duckduckgo is best
for the people who are ready to sacrifice more accurate results against
privacy.

