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This is interesting, can you expand at all? I have a similar sense, but can't really articulate the difference.


Not the person you replied to, but: Google invests tremendous wealth into guessing what you mean based on what it knows about you and what it knows in general. That's how you can type in a generic word that's also the title of 300 different movies, books, and TV shows, and still get exactly what you expected (usually).

DuckDuckGo is Google before it started down this path. You have to be specific. The more words you provide, the smaller the set of possible answers, and the more likely your answer is at the top.

Google, these days, tends to report the same number of results no matter how specific you get. It used to get smaller the more words you put in. It's a philosophical difference. Google assumes you only have a vague idea of what you're looking for and is increasingly confident it knows best.

DuckDuckGo starts with the same assumption, but trusts you to refine your own query without the help of a global network of patterns acting on data. That doesn't work too well on Google now. You're just as likely to trigger an anti-bot check refining queries as you are to find what you're looking for.


It's for this very reason that I find google annoying when searching for programming solutions - if I'm switching between languages often, it "learns" that I'm focusing on C# problems and always bubbles those to the top, even though I may have been looking for a Typescript solution.


DDG is far from perfect in this case, but at least you can refine the search per website without having to add a keyword to the search. By the way try doing some search for programming languages that choose a poor name for a bit of a laugh (I am looking at you Rust and Go).




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