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Comment by schoen | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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