Tell HN: DuckDuckGo Search Results have jumped the shark

https://search.brave.com/

Google has gone so far into the “well we think you really meant this” zone that it refuses to show me pertinent results unless I start adding quotes and modifiers to my search.

DDG is veering there.

Bing for now is the most literal. I search something and it gives me results that have tighter matches to my terms

I wonder if Google / DDG will start to notice this drop in searches or not.

Also, I find myself using GitHub search a lot, it returns actual code someone was using, which is always helpful.

https://techcrunch.com/2022/08/05/duckduckgo-microsoft-track...

    $ whois $(dig a duckduckgo.com @1.1.1.1 +short) | grep OrgName
    OrgName:        Microsoft Corporation

Default search engines have a massive amount of inertia behind them. Anything that disrupts the Google near-monopoly is a good thing, in my not-so-humble opinion.

Edited to add: What sort of use cases do people have for the Kagi API? I was just curious about its use.

Seems to be fixed now, but it reminded me of the early search engine days.

Funnily enough, when I used dogpile.com, it returned relevant results

In the meantime, you should also check other free search engines. DDG gets it's results from Bing. Startpage.com is another good one, it gets it's results from Google and just has a privacy layer. I recently switched to Brave Browser and have been using their native Brave Search & it has been working pretty well. They use their own bot to actually go out & index stuff (from what I understand).

There's also Metager.org which is a meta search that gets it's results from several different sources. There's also a few others but I really haven't found much use for them or just get poor results.

Check out searchengine.party if you want to try out the really esoteric search engines.

https://www.privacytools.io/private-search

When Google was new, we used to play a game to see who would run out of answers first on a particular search term. Then that morphed into who got a porn link first, even though the search term had nothing to do with porn.

But now Google has gotten so bad, you might have to play to see who gets a reasonably correct answer first.

What happens if disable Javascript, cookies and use lite.duckduckgo.com

Also what happens if try the .onion address (can set exit node country in torrc)

Something like

  tor -f torrc &
  x=duckduckgogg42xjoc72x3sjasowoarfbgcmvfimaftt6twagswzczad.onion;y=$x;
  socat tcp4-l:443,fork,reuseaddr,bind=127.0.0.42 socks4a:127.0.0.1:$x:443,socksport=9050 &

  #!/bin/sh
  read x;x=q=$(echo "$x&p=&s=${1-0}&dc=$(($1+1))&api=%2Fd.js&o=json&kl=wt-wt"|tr '\40' +);
  { printf 'POST /lite/ HTTP/1.0\r\n';
  printf 'Host: '$y'\r\n'; 
  printf 'Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded\r\n';
  printf 'Content-Length: '${#x}'\r\n';
  printf 'Connection: close\r\n\r\n';
  echo "$x";}|sed w/dev/stderr \
  |socat stdio,ignoreeof ssl:127.0.0.42:443,verify=0

  # usage: echo circle.co video calls | 1.sh > 1.htm;firefox ./1.htm
  # usage: echo circle.co video calls | 1.sh 22 >> 1.htm;firefox ./1.htm