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Comment by Karunamon | Hacker News Reader

Bing seems to be a bit better at generic, broad searches (games, file extension $something, etc) and Google seems to be better at exact, specific queries (stop error 7B, RPGs announced at PAX 2012).

Bing ended up winning, which shocked the hell out of me, but after trying a couple more times, I noticed that pattern.

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And at the end of the day, what I need are exact/specific queries.

Whether to get the job done, to get some certain information or something third.

DuckDuckGo is now a hundred times better than Google for those exact & specific queries. I was looking for some info on my truck engine, and Google sent me to sales pages for completely unrelated parts (and sometimes, entirely unrelated cars!). DDG sent me to deep in an old forum thread, where someone had posted a diagram of exactly what I was looking for.

Every time I see a link comparing search engines, I try them with hope, but always go back to Google. My last search confirms this :

* Google https://www.google.com/search?q=insertObject+atIndex+zero+bu... * http://www.bing.com/search?q=insertObject+atIndex+zero+bug&#... * http://duckduckgo.com/?q=insertObject+atIndex+zero+bug

So, five results at the top from StackOverflow... Why not just skip the search engine middle man and go straight to StackOverflow?

Proper search engines are better at finding content than a site's own search feature.

Because you still don't know if StackOverflow will have the result you're looking for

I've seen this in shopping results -- I'm probably going to buy from Amazon, but I like to see the top N competitors' results along side the Amazon results, so that I can easily confirm that no one is more than a buck or two cheaper than Amazon and can then feel good about my purchase.

Because the goal is to have something that finds any particular information I want, not go to every site and hope it may show up in a site search?

I usually type in my browser address bar, which searches to Google directly. I tried my query on Stack Overflow... Google still gets a better SO question than SO itself : http://stackoverflow.com/search?q=insertObject+atIndex+zero+...

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