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Comment by yegg | Hacker News Reader

Specific examples you're willing to share really help us improve. Feel free to send them to us at inbound at duckduckgo.

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I found DDG commonly does worse than Google on long natural-language questions, especially ones that are mainly made up of common words, and also seems to have more trouble than Google with automatically splitting queries into relevant noun phrases (like if a query included "vegetarian restaurant new york", I expect Google more reliably to decompose that into (vegetarian restaurant) (new york) than DDG).

But I'll keep an eye out and actually write down particular queries where I see these phenomena, and send them along.

We've actually been working on improving relevancy for queries like your example ("vegetarian restaurant new york") -- check it out!

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=vegetarian+restaurant+new+york

Huh, it sure got that one right! Way to go. I'll keep an eye out for cases where this does or doesn't work in the future.

Or something like "movie with andre the giant". Google gets Princess Bride as result #2. DDG doesn't have a direct link to that in the first batch. I think Google handles ambiguity better (what users are searching for when they don't know how to express it). Of course, Google tends to overdo this too such that simple keyword searches ain't what they used to be.

Google also apparently entirely eliminated the verbatim search mode (some time after making double quotes no longer perform a verbatim search). People now complain that there is no documented way to perform verbatim searches with Google.

At least from Australia, you can still perform a verbatim search by clicking "search tools", "all results", then changing the option to "verbatim". I still sometimes forget I can do this and wonder why Google is ignoring several of my qualifying terms. The deprecation of the plus symbol and double quotes for coercion is the single biggest piece of vandalism I've seen Google commit on their interface in over fifteen largely restrained years.

Aha, that exists in the U.S. too; thanks for the tip. I think I heard a complaint that the current implementation doesn't truly always do a verbatim search, but I tried a couple of experiments and so far it did appear to have the behavior I expected (at least when putting the entire search term in quotes).

I agree with your chagrin at the loss of the plus symbol.

My biggest pain point with DuckDuckGo, is locality. I search for "hdmi cable" on DuckDuckGo and it gives me links to products that are sold in BestBuy and Walmart... They don't exist here in the UK. It also gives me links to Amazon.COM and Ebay.COM...

I do the same search on Google and it gives me links to Currys, Tesco, Argos and Maplin (all UK shops/sites). And it links me to Amazon.CO.UK and Ebay.CO.UK.

I don't use DuckDuckGo for searching for products which I want to buy, because this is always what happens.

I suspect DuckDuckGo is a much better search experience for people inside the US than outside.

EDIT: Ooh. I've just noticed that if I set my region to "UK" in DuckDuckGo the results suddenly become far more relevant. Why isn't this set by default? Not only am I coming from a UK IP address, but my browser is sending "Accept-Language: en-gb"

I expect if they did use these signals to automatically set geography, some of their user base would assume that their location is being "tracked".

I find the auto-correct to be over-zealous. If DDG decides that what I've entered is a typo, It will only show me results for the "corrected" word, so I'll have to quote uncommonly searched words. This usually happens when the search is similar to another one that is much more common.

That isn't really different from Google, though, is it?

It is, because sometimes DDG is so sure you made a typo, they don't bother to mention it and just search the correction. Try searching "president ovama". The first one or two pages of results are almost exactly the same as the results for "president obama", with no mention of the correction. I know this is sort of a contrived example, but you get the point.

As far as I can tell, Google will always tell you when it thinks you made a mistake, and provide a link to search for your exact query.

So... two poorly designed sites?

As a workaround, you can prefix the word in question with a +, and DDG will recognize that you really did mean to search for that specific word.

I agree with this criticism. Making auto-correct optional would help usability a lot.

I'll frequently run the searches from within DDG as !g or !scholar searches (my most frequent variants).

Lack of date-bounded search is a frequent reason to resort to Google. Special collections (Scholar, Books, News) others.

I'm actually relying far more on DDG image search than even a few months ago -- the results are getting good. Also the instant answers, which are getting good.

There have been a few times in recent past where DDG searches have turned up empty (or unsatisfactory results) while Google's nailed it. Actually went hunting for an example and got lost which is why this comment is so late. Couldn't find the example though I'll try to remember to submit it when I do.

Huge fan of DDG, but overseas speed is a problem for me. I find DDG amazing in the States, but when I'm in Australia the extra tiny bit of latency can be frustrating (in the most First World Problem kind of way, of course).

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