Ask HN: Did you notice any change in DDG's search quality over the last years?

[basilikum]

I know we all complain about search engines getting worse, but with DuckDuckGo I'm at a point where I'm seriously wondering what's going on there.

I use DDG since many years and it was never as good as Google, but for most things it served me well enough as a default. But lately it has become almost unusable. Whenever I search something that's more than a single word, it just seems to pick one random word out of my query and then shows me slop results that are vaguely about that thing. To be fair Google does that too, but on Google using quotes helps, while the quoting operator is completely broken on DDG since years. It's at a point where I can't even find the name of songs that aren't super well known, but not fringe either, using exact quotes from the lyrics. This is especially weird because Bing, which is the source of their index, is much better. Have they just abandoned search and are pivoting to AI and their email alias service?

Sorry for the rant, but I'm wondering if it's just always been this way and I have just put up with it until now or whether DDG actually got worse.

[anenefan]

You are not mistaken. DDG search has degraded considerably the last year or so.

As a recent example, I needed to quickly find the zone b tax offset for tax this year. (In Australia.) I note their search today with similar queries is behaving in a manner that most would consider passable (still no result that is going to satisfy what I was after then) - but when I searched a few weeks ago, no matter if I put 2025 or zone b in quotes, were the search results getting any more specific ... google I might mention, failed just as badly. In the end -- yandex for the win, and their first page of results, the first three I thought were hopeful, which got me confidently close enough to the simple bit of information I needed.

I feel sorry for those who haven't noticed how lacking search engines have got the last few years and I recently explained to a youngster who thought it's got just so good ... it's like being out at night looking at the stars and ... marvelling at the handful of bright stars, as well as the multitude of lights from their city's buildings and street lights ... never realising that once if they'd looked up there'd be hundreds of stars easy to see.

[n1xis10t]

I think it’s gotten worse, but as for how much worse and whether or not Google is better I’m not sure. I think I have noticed a few times when quotes didn’t work, but I think recently I’ve been noticing that I put things in quotes and then there are no results, and thinking about it now I think that happens more frequently than it used to.

That makes me think that they may have downsized the Bing index, and then sometimes they have the quotes work in which case you get few or no results, and sometimes they ignore the quotes so that you still have some results even though they’re dumb.

You say Bing is better, so it seems weird that a Bing proxy would get less results than Bing, but I think I have heard people talk about things like this before, where Bing’s API doesn’t let you paginate as far as the normal Bing front-end does.

That might be what this is. Bing might be degrading their API product more aggressively for some reason, maybe in an attempt to get people to use normal Bing, or maybe just to cut costs? I don’t know.

By the way, you don’t need to be sorry for the rant. More people need to rant about these things.