I've been using FF for a while now and I like the privacy side of it. When I made the switch, I also tried to ditch Google for DDG, but I haven't been able to make it work. The results in DDG always seem to be pumped by SEO and are more often affiliate marketing blogs. Google often manages to bring me the right results right away.
I used to feel that way too but now I feel google is full of results bloat. The serps are full of idiotic social media results and entertainment results than original content results (blogs, news sites, commercial, personal sites, etc). Search has become frustrating everywhere.
I switched my SE to DDG on my mobile devices. It is 100% useless when I want to search for local news/events from my country/city (Southern Germany) and I always have to fall back to Google. What's quite funny is that last month a couple of DDG billboards started popping up in my city.
Google results are very aggressively targeted to where it thinks you're located. It makes it difficult to find globally notable results when Google just returns weird local results from my current city.
Interesting, I always thought the results I get with !ddgde are great. Maybe it’s the size of your city? I have no problems with Germany-, Schleswig-Holstein-, or Lübeck-wide results.
Same here for Norway. I can flip the switch for Norwegian results, but it's sticky, so I have to remember to flip it back when I want to search for everything else. All in all way to tedious.
What setting are you referring to? The region one is the same as on the search result page. I find it's way too powerful for technical searches, obscuring the stuff I want.
No, but it means I can't use the search bar and have to keep in mind if I want regional or global search. With Google I just use the search bar and get my results.
I was looking for independent movie reviews (in this case red letter media -but without adding RLM as I’d forgotten the source) for Star Wars, but got flooded with to me irrelevant results.
To be fair, it’s most pronounced when I’m looking for something I found in the past and then try searching for it in the present. Using custom date ranges help a bit but it’s still biased toward big entertainment and “brands”.
So what it looks like to is that it doesn’t use historical rankings to show results but present rankings.
So let’s say I was looking for something sports related that in 2005 was on a regional site, today that site is relatively obscure so even if you limit date range it would down rank the legacy site even if back then it would have been at the top.
Ah, fair enough, finding a thing I've seen before has never been in my powers too :(
I was very happy when someone announced a project to make a thing that indexes your own search history. I believe that it had a Mozilla affiliation. But it never made it to the point I could use it (it might have worked, but I never found it?), which is a bummer.
Hmmm, from a quick search, https://getmemex.com/ might be what I want. Needs a tiny bit of research whether it's something I actually want in my browser.
memex is cool but not quite fully baked enough for me to continue using it. I've seriously considered setting up my own instance of elasticsearch for this kind of thing, just for my own personal history + bookmarks.
I use DDG as main engine and it works for 95% of my search queries, you just have to be a little more exact with what you type. So if I know what I'm looking for, DDG usually gives me the better results. And if it's a general thing, the result are usually the same between Google & DDG (i.e. Who was the 42nd president or whatever).
When I specially search for something that is marketed/an ad, then Google yields better results. For example "that shop around the corner". But for that you can just use DDG's bangs: "g! shop around the corner" will redirect you to Google Search with that query.
Good to see someone else is having this problem. I thought I was failing at entering good search queries because I get full result pages of SEO garbage. I switched to DDG a few months ago so I don't even think to compare results to Google anymore.
What's interesting is that a major complaint about Google, besides their data harvesting, has been about how their ranking algorithm operates and how it's abused. Maybe the problem is actually much harder to solve than people here make it out to be...
In my case sometimes DDG returns me results in Russian, I am in Romania and my IP is geolocated to Romania so i am not sure what code they use to ignore my IP and my browser settings and serve me this results(I tried Ff and Vivaldi and a sample search is "php array search" and first link is https://www.php.net/manual/ru/function.array-search.php).
Seconded! I started using this a few weeks ago after finding out about it on HN and it has been excellent. There's a small 1-2s delay while it loads and sanitizes the results but I got used to that pretty quickly.
The one downside for me is that iOS Safari doesn't support custom search providers, so I can't use it on my phone unless I switch to an alternate browser. That said, once iOS 14 lands I can set Firefox as my default browser and use it that way.
> When I made the switch, I also tried to ditch Google
> for DDG, but I haven't been able to make it work.
My experience has unfortunately been the same; I often need to click through pages of DDG results to find the results I want, while Google tends to show it within the first 3-5 results. I tried using it for several months as my main search engine (last time I tried was 2019), and I basically just ended up typing `!g` in muscle memory when working.
For now, I'm using StartPage [1] which works quite well:
> You can’t beat Google when it comes to online search.
> So we’re paying them to use their brilliant search
> results in order to remove all trackers and logs. The
> result: The world’s best and most private search engine.
I use DDG almost exclusively. I just checked my history, what I use !g for are:
1. Long tail results. When DDG has few results, they completely ignore some of my terms to show me more, but useless results, even when I "force" terms. This is by far my number 1 complaint about them and I can’t fathom why they would do this.
2. Long tail results 2. While in 1) DDG has the proper results but just doesn’t show them, sometimes the result is not available to them. This is pretty rare though.
3. Google products. DDG sucks at giving me documentation (both API and help pages) for them.
I really have no problem with some abundance of affiliate spam, if anything, google is worse at that.
People need to remember that Google gives really good results on almost anything product or service-related because they're an advertising company. So when I search for stuff like that, I usually use the "!g" hashbang.
