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Ask HN: Has Duckduckgo gotten worse recently?

43 points by pmoriarty ↗ HN
In the last 3 or 4 months, I've been noticing that search results from Duckduckgo, which I've been using and loving for years, have gotten much, much worse. There are many fewer results in my queries, and I often have to resort to searching Google via !g and wind up getting many more results.

Has anyone else noticed this? Or is it just me?

Has anything changed at DDG that might account for this?

44 comments

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proaralyst
I've actually noticed the opposite; I've been resorting to !g much less.
fats_tromino
I agree with this as well. I tried using Duckduckgo around a year and a half ago or two years ago and abandoned it due to poor search results, but I began using it again a couple months ago and it seemed much improved.
tmaly
I have been using g! much more for programming.

I was hoping to build an extension for DDG a few months back, but things seemed to have changed in the forum.

This could explain why we are seeing changes.

giancarlostoro
I've always had to !g for programming I wish there was a !code option that would improve searching for code / programming related searches or something?
geoelectric
!code seems to go to searchcode.com for me.
chr
!so narrows your Duck Duck Go search to Stack Overflow.
prathiks
I have been using DDG as a daily driver for my programming. If i don't get a answer then only i use google. DDG works for like 80% of the cases.
copperx
What is g! if I may ask?
ramayac
I did the switch 2 weeks ago, I'm actually enjoying it!
tblyler
I noticed about a week or two ago that I was always leaning toward !g as well. I have been testing out my own instance of searx. I have yet to specify using google with it, since it already uses google results.

https://github.com/asciimoo/searx

dodgedcactii
i've noticed this too and its fucking with my mind, since i end up using !g in a private window and not having the history (the whole point of being not tracked)
watertorock
Unrelated but I wish they would rebrand already. Call it Duck, call it Go, call it something simple.

It's not an easy or memorable name at the moment, and branding matters.

thedaemon
I can only guess that it come from the game "Duck, Duck, Goose", which is really easy to remember if you played it as a child.
nostromo123
Must be a US-centric cultural thing -- I always thought this was just a random sequence of words the creators thought would be memorable and / or cute!
majewsky
I thankfully watched the Simpsons, where that game was referenced once. So I got the pun after only a year or so.
h1d
Even worse as name only suggests US? game for kids. Users should be from all over the world.
watertorock
I played that as a kid and never once connected it to the search engine.

I really think it's a poor name choice

thomastjeffery
It's a mouthful, but it's certainly sensible to me. Searching the web tends to be a lot like "duck duck goose".
amelius
Perhaps they should let the user choose the search algorithm. Make it an option somewhere.
bsstoner
Disclaimer: I work for DDG.

I'd be interested in looking into any examples of searches where the results aren't good enough or where it seems to have gotten worse recently.

As far as I know there haven't been any changes over the past few weeks that would have made things worse.

Shanea93
Why does DDG only seem to search videos via Youtube, even with Safe Search set to off?

I live in the UK and with our internet laws here becoming more and more strict over the last few (and coming) years, I wanted an alternative to Google or Bing who both actively cooperate with the governments existing proclivity to censor things like Porn.

Bing's video search for pornography is absolutely fantastic, it's legitimately the one thing I use Bing for.

bsstoner
Thanks for the feedback. We only return videos from YouTube right now, but expanding that is definitely something we'd like to do in the future.
prathiks
I guess its a right time to try bing. Will do the next time i have a urge
kjsujwai
thank you for bangs. changed my entire web browsing experience.
pmoriarty
Here's one I searched for just today: "helium" "futures"

DDG returns 2 results.[1] Google returns 369,000.[2]

Here's another one: "opec" "rebalancing" "peak"

DDG returns 0 results.[3] Google returns 319,000.[4]

There have been many, many others. I can email you them as I run in to them, if you want. Just let me know what email address to use.

Also, just to clarify, I noticed the change maybe 3 or 4 months (not weeks) ago.

[1] - https://duckduckgo.com/lite/?q="helium"%20"futures"&kd=-1

[2] - https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22helium%22%20%...

[3] - https://duckduckgo.com/lite/?q="opec"%20"rebalancing"%20"pea...

[4] - https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22opec%22%20%22...

bsstoner
Thanks, these are helpful. Is it mostly searches with quoted words?

brian@duckduckgo.com

pmoriarty
Yeah, I use quotes a lot because otherwise I find the results are pretty poor (ie. they seem to be more likely to miss at least one of the terms I searched for, and if I'm searching for a phrase then an unquoted phrase could have its words scattered all over the place rather than be treated as a phrase).
bsstoner
This was in fact an issue with queries containing quotes on our /lite and /html sites. It should be fixed now. Let me know if you see any other issues.

What happened is we frequently get hit by bots trying to scrape the links from our /lite and /html sites and we have to react by creating rules to try to block them. This particular rule, was over-aggressive. Our ops team is going to discuss internally how to prevent something like this from happening again.

Thanks!

pmoriarty
Thank you. I appreciate you responding personally, taking this seriously, and providing a quick fix.
larma
I guess the problem only occurs with the lite version? At least for me, removing the /lite/ part in the URL results in far more results.
faulker
I've personally had the opposite, I've been getting better results over the last year and I'm using !g very rarely now.
Polyisoprene
For searches containing multiple words, code or error messages I resort to google as ddg doesn't find the relevant pages. Other than that it's a lot better than before.
babyrainbow
Ha! I had the exact opposite.

I used DDG a while when it was introduced. But returned back to google since the results were no as good.

But recently I was feeling googles results has got a lot worse and gave DDG another try.

Big difference! Like Google vs Yahoo back in the days.

Now DDG is my default search.

ravenstine
I've noticed it's results have gotten much better. Now if there were a version of the Personal Blocklist chrome plugin for it(so I don't see crap from W3Schools, WebMD, or Livestrong, etc.), I would never use Google again.
cdevs
Duckduckgo is my default at work and on my phone. I love it for quick programming questions and usually everything else is fine but if I'm doing any design and need images I usually for some reason head to google but for everything else I'd rather not have google turn my query into my next YouTube ad2 seconds later..
snoitavla
I've recently wrote yet another ddg API wrapper for python https://github.com/alvations/rubberduck. I'm loving how I can browse the web in jupyter notebook. Oh the irony of having jupyter on a browser and calling an API to get search results
snoitavla
I wonder if I could get a python wrapper to w3m...
majewsky
For a terminal application, you can always write a wrapper by just sending key events on stdin. The messiest part is probably managing a pty for w3m to run on.
stuaxo
Weird, I've been feeling like the same thing has been happening, just noticed over the last couple of weeks that it doesn't seem to find what I want.

I'm in the UK and noticed I often seem to be getting US centric results and have to try using Google more often.

Edit: ddg has been my default for 2 years.

chatnati
I too feel the results have been poor of late. I think Google probably "knows" the type of questions you look for (ie. usually on stack overflow for programming questions, or whatever most popular links people are clicking on around that time). If I'm looking for something very esoteric, I can tell straight away that DDG doesn't understand my query from its results and I go over to Google and find the answer on the first, second or third page.
everdayimhustln
I had a problem with a chrome extension hanging DDG from displaying results, but otherwise seems awesome as usual on mobile and desktop.
grizzles
I just switched over to DDG because I was getting Google's human detector + classify these images nearly every search.

I guess my estimated worth to Google must be fairly low because I don't click on many ads and I often use a work VPN.