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Comment by mattparcher | Hacker News Reader

The elephant in the room: DDG's search results are primarily sourced from Bing.

Unfortunately, as long as DDG depends on third-party crawlers, the suggestions to improve search results (& "the algorithm") seem far-fetched & naive.

(DDG does have its own crawler, DuckDuckBot, but apparently it's only used for very specific functionality.) https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/so...

> For DuckDuckGo, it may be tricky to resolve the issue permanently as long as it relies on Bing. https://torrentfreak.com/duckduckgo-restores-pirate-sites-an...

> According to various online forums, the best way to ensure your site gets indexed by DuckDuckGo is to submit it to Bing and Yandex. https://www.jessesquires.com/blog/2022/03/25/my-website-disa...

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Moved from DDG to Brave Search about 6 months ago and haven't missed DDG at all. I can still use the !bangs I was accustomed to.

Given that Brave uses its own search index, and only a few times do I need to fall back to Google, it feels good to have a measure of independence from the Google/Bing dominance in search

Brave search does feel like a differens search engine, i really appreciate their goggles and forum post features.

is this related to the browser or do they have a standalone website for search? Never knew about it, looks like its https://search.brave.com/

It's standalone website. Not tied to their browser

Brave automatically changed my default search engine on private tabs to their search. I don't know if it was a bug or feature, but this kind of behaviour keeps me wary from committing.

Anecdata for anecdata: that didn't happen with me, I'm still on DDG.

Similarly, I moved to Kagi and couldn't be happier

Same, Kagi is great. I tried to make do with DDG and uBlacklist, but with my rules file reaching 269 domains in about 3 months, I gave up.

Love being able to customize the ranking order for specific domains.

> Brave uses its own search index

Did not know that. I immediately grabbed some recent "poor result" Google searches from history and tried them at search.brave.com — so far ALL results are better. Reminds me a bit of Google from ten years ago.

Google's decline into its present inability to NOT show only "assumed popular content" created a huge time sink in my life that wasn't there before. Not a fan of the over- and inaccurate use of "disruption" but it was a legitimate description for what Google did to other search engines, and this feels like a similar level of improvement. I'm frankly amazed at how good the search results are in my initial test.

> I immediately grabbed some recent "poor result" Google searches from history

Did you revisit every query from your recent Google searches (or) Is it that you have a good memory that you were able to remember poor results from looking at the query?

I'm asking this because, I've been contemplating a 'Search Engine Wall of Shame'[1] where people can submit their poor search results for the engines to make actionable changes towards improving them.

[1] https://needgap.com/problems/207-search-engine-wall-of-shame... (Disclosure: It's my problem validation forum).

Worthy project, thank you.

I re-opened several Google SERPs from my history and compared to Brave.

I often find NO results relevant to my query on the first three pages of search Google results, often seemingly because there is a "more common/popular" aspect of the topic I am searching about, and everything is about the common and related aspects and none about my use case.

Thank you.

Would you be willing to submit your bad search results to such forum? I welcome you to post your bad search results with the queries to that needgap thread for the time being unless there's a dedicated forum for that.

I am willing, but the odds actually doing so are low (busy and disorganized).

That's fine, Next time you come across a bad search result, I hope you remember this conversation.

Why hasn't DDG grown internal search competency? It's been years, and there's still no sign of search being a first class concern at DDG. That seems like a number one must have for any search product company.

Rebranded Bing with a new interface isn't hard tech. It risks so much on the business relationship. They should be staffing for this yesterday.

Hire more search folks, DDG! Also, ditch that awfully long name.

would also like to hear from DDG ppl. On another note, Really appreciate DDG's map functionality using apple map with iaxm query parameter set "maps" and q set to whatever you want to search for:

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Africa&iaxm=maps

It is refreshing to be able to use a usable map on tor without having to accept google big term of service.

> Why hasn't DDG grown internal search competency?

Maybe because it's already a profitable business model as it is?

Because internal search costs a lot of money. Google has millions of search servers costing billions of dollars just for the hardware.

Maybe they could partner up with https://www.mojeek.com/ as an independent search engine with own crawling technology.

They are welcome too, but perhaps are restrained by their stakeholders.

Looking at the suggestions in the blog, and for transparency - Mojeek CEO:

> Stop trying to look like Google.

Agreed. We and our users still believe that "10 blue links" have great value. But drowning these out with too many of things like Ads, Videos and Answers on the page helps pretty much just Google.

> Arrange that algorithm to make it less vulnerable to SEO hacking.

Admittedly we don't yet have that problem yet. Still there are plenty of measures that we provide, and will expand upon to mitigate that. Without going into details these generally amount to giving users, and API customers, more control over searching and ranking.

> Discard AI-generated text.

A good idea. But can also be done on the SERPs. Do users benefit from AI answers? Mojeek is a search Engine not an answer Engine.

> Results in other languages.

Bing?

> New opportunities.

DuckDuckGo is doing a great job of providing new and improved privacy products. We stand with them on many things. I am sure they appreciate the opportunity also in providing more informational (search) diversity from and with a fully independent search stack (infrastructure, crawler, index, ranking).

> DDG's search results are primarily sourced from Bing

That isn't an accurate characterization of what we do now.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32360642

This seems to be the gist of the response you've linked:

> mobile searches are the largest category of searches, and local searches are the largest category of searches within mobile. Instead our local search content is a combination of our own indexes in partnership with Apple, TripAdvisor, and others.

This suggests Bing isn't used for local searches, but it is still used for mobile and desktop searches that aren't local. If I am searching for a tech problem or how to tie a knot or recipes or the history of hair metal, I'm getting Bing results wrapped in DDG. Is that inaccurate? Is Bing still used for searches that aren't local searches?

We've indexed billions of pages already at you.com to avoid this situation. The majority of our apps like Stackoverflow and Medium etc, we've indexed ourselves.

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