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Comment by dstaley | Hacker News Reader

No, those are a whole separate thing that I wouldn't expect DDG to match the quality of. It's primarily been software development related queries.

For example, a few days ago I searched for "react dnd expected to find a valid target" on Google, and the first result is a GitHub issue describing the issue. All the results on the first page are related to the react-dnd library. The first result for the same query on DDG is an article titled "11 Prison Truths, Revealed By A Female Guard". None of the results on the first page are programming related.

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Don't use react, and it's not in my search set, but regularly and happily search for programming and tech issues on DDG. I find it's far better than Google these days. So I thought I'd try your search without the quotes, as your first result is so far from my experience.

First result: https://github.com/react-dnd/react-dnd/issues/1127

Then a couple more from react-dnd's github, then the other seven on the first page are a mix of relevant SO, and github. Seems quite a few people have opened issues on that topic!

Maybe they fixed it. :)

So this is incredibly bizarre. I went back into my history and clicked on the exact entry corresponding to this search query, and the results are now all programming related. The previous first result ("11 Prison Truths, Revealed By A Female Guard") is now on the second page of results.

Or maybe landed on a different shard if they organise that way.

All searches vary, but generalising DDG does disappear off into the silly and completely unrelated as you hit lower pages, rather than fading into "looks relevant but isn't" of Google. Pages 1 & 2 I find mostly on the money.

What has changed is when I !g out to Google I often don't find the results there either, so it's time to get creative with keywords, or try millionshort for blog hunting. A few years ago a !g felt like a much more reliable escape option. Which feels like a mix of DDG getting better so I'm probably escaping harder queries, and Google simply missing the mark more often.

I use ddg as default search and find it perfectly capable.

I tried that same search query and the first result is https://github.com/react-dnd/react-dnd/issues/236

Strange that the first result you got does not appear at all in my first page of results, although I get plenty of other pages related to the same react issue (and neither do I use or search for react issues).

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