What's your experience with DuckDuckGo search quality?

Question

Because I think that privacy is important and - for the most part - non-personalised search results fundamentally are a good thing these past few weeks after more than a decade of Google having been my default search engine I've finally been giving DuckDuckGo a try and made it my standard search engine.So far unfortunately, in terms of search result quality I'm not convinced at all. I constantly find myself using the Google bang !g as a prefix because native DuckDuckGo (or rather Bing, which is their main underlying search index provider) results are sorely lacking.Maybe, it's me and due to years of using "Googlese" I've unlearned how to use a generic search engine.However, frequently even when explicitly searching for phrases I find that the search results don't even contain the terms I was looking for. To give you an example, when while coding I encounter an error message or stack trace I don't exactly know the cause of I usually search for a relevant, distinctive segment as a phrase.With Google I usually get relevant results that point me in the right direction fairly quickly. With DuckDuckGo more often than not I'm presented with completely irrelevant results.This might be personalisation at play but an explicit search for a specific technical error message should return relevant results (if available) regardless of my search history.From what I've read from others who made the switch I seem to be in a minority. Most DuckDuckGo users claim that for them search results are equivalent to - or even better than - Google's, not the least because Google's search quality is said to have been in decline for some time now.What's the experience with DuckDuckGo among Hacker News users? Am I the only one having these issues?

bediger4000 · Accepted Answer

I switched a few years ago. I use Firefox, explicitly because it's not controlled by a profit-driven multinational corporation, so factor that belief in...Duckduckgo started to b the default search engine for FF a few years ago. For a while, I found myself irritated with the results, and I would sometimes try again in Google. That gradually wore off - I'd like to think it was because of changes at Duckduckgo, but more likely I'm fooling myself. I very seldom try again in Google, but I do try again every once in a while.

HackedBunny · Answer

I find their results pretty abysmal, like ALL modern search engines -- particularly in terms of returning irrelevant results that don't even contain my specific search terms, so you're definitely not the only one!I think they're all scared of having to simply say "we couldn't find anything that matches what you specifically asked for... or was even close".

Jamwinner · Answer

Pretty decent overall, but I am starting to see more low-effort sites gaming results. Mostly those useless question/answer format sites that make you sign up to see that nobody else knows which bolts on a 1989 toyota camary are left-hand thread either. But increasingly, the keyword jackpotting spam sites.Overall, still a smidge better than the ugly g for most things.

provlem · Answer

I feel same.I do try sometime google especially for code related work. Duckduckgo is best for the people who are ready to sacrifice more accurate results against privacy.