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Comment by ryanSrich | Hacker News Reader

DDG in theory is great. I would love to use a service that does what DDG wants to do for privacy.

In practice though, their search is mostly unusable. Google’s results are 99% more accurate for me, even without being logged in. Anecdotal, but I’ve heard similar feedback.

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I can use DDG for one to three word phrases, or just a general unordered keyword search.

But any time I need to search for exact sequences of strings (usually error messages), then DDG fails miserably and Google comes through.

Here is a recent example:

https://www.google.com/search?q=u-boot+%22unable+to+select+a...

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=u-boot+"unable+to+select+a+mode"+s...

Or try: https://www.runnaroo.com/search?term=u-boot+unable+to+select...

Your query (even without the quotes).

That's basically false. There is a learning curve that people seem to ignore when using search engines. It's not obvious, but Google vs Bing work a bit different and the type of queries each one likes are different. I use a Bing based engine as my daily driver and when I'm working, 9/10 searches are successful in the first couple results. When I'm out and about searching for something casual on my phone, that's usually 10/10.

I don't think it's false. It highly depends on what you're searching for. There are cases where DDG isn't good enough and I don't think the user is responsible for it in any way. Two examples off the top of my head:

* If you're searching something not in english. I'm french and DDG is my default search engine, but I have to switch to other search engines a lot when searching in french.

* When searching very technical things, like a very specific and rare error message. Good luck finding anything relevant with DDG.

As much as I'd like to use DDG for 100% of my research, I just can't.

For me it's weird. It has worked well sometime in the past, but in the last half year or so it became close to unusable again. For instance, if I search something related Pandas (the Python package), it consistently gives me the doc on Pandas 0.23 instead of the current one. I am switching back to Google, I've had enough for now.

> 99% more accurate

> Anecdotal

I think the word you’re looking for is hyperbolical.

Sure, but it’s anecdotal. For me, it’s 99% more accurate. Meaning 99 times out of 100 Google returns more relevant results.

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