HACKER Q&A
📣 floren

Has DuckDuckGo suddenly gotten worse?


I've been using DDG as my primary search engine for years, and I've very rarely needed to try a query on Google--it usually felt like putting a "!g" in my queries gave worse results, not better.

But over the last week or so, I feel like I've been having to switch over to Google a lot more often. DDG just isn't turning up good results. I've noticed that no matter what I did, for instance, last night I could not get it to include IMDB in the results (even if I put "imdb" explicitly in the query).

Any ideas what's going on?

  👤 Trouble_007 Accepted Answer ✓
Looks pretty similar for me;

search >IMDB:'fart'< @DuckDuckGo : <https://html.duckduckgo.com/html?q=IMDB:'fart'>

search >IMDB:'fart'< @Google : <https://www.google.com/search?q=IMDB:+'fart'>

👤 taxcoder
Haven't noticed any problem here. A poor A/B test, maybe? I find DDG's results superior to Google's 99.9% of the time, anyhow.
👤 dazc
Negative SEO is proving to be quite effective in having entire sites being removed from Bing and, subsequently DDG.

Obviously, Bing/DDG isn't the intended target - just that Google is better at ignoring such attacks.