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Comment by ne01 | Hacker News Reader

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ne01·

I'm so happy that duckduckgo.com is getting better and better over time.

I tried to use it for a month 2 years ago and switched back to Google.

Now it has been 3 months and I don't notice -- which is a very good thing!

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I've been using duckduckgo as my sole search engine for years. I've been totally satisfied with my results. In fact I've had other people mention how my googlefu is exceptional since I'm always finding stuff that they can't seem to find. It just occurred to me that maybe it's the search engine that I'm using instead of my search skills.

Either my google-fu is failing me, or Google changed so much that my fu isn't working anymore. I feel Google is so fucking terrible now, I was looking for an obscure DOS game, and the word "game" lead it to show me games on the app store...

Or, it would show pages with just 2 out the 3 search terms I give it. And guess which word they'll leave out? The word that makes the search specific instead of broad... god effing damnit!

Doesn't duckduckgo use Bing on the back end?

DuckDuckGo has their own crawler (DuckDuckBot), and they also serve modified results from other search engines (including Bing and Yandex).

https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/so...

This keeps getting said, but the 500 or so 'sources' they mention are at best a distraction. The vast majority of the compute and storage needed to maintain a global index comes directly from Bing and Yandex. DDG is nothing more than a middleman.

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