Although my default is DDG and I am technical, but I still find myself heading back to Google in case DDG disappoints. and that happens frequently (although definitely not always)
I had the same problem with DDG. I use Bing now. It may not be as ideal as DDG, but it's not Google and I seldom have difficulty finding what I'm searching for.
How much of that is down to them missing the familiar look of the Google results page?
I wish we could do a blind study where users were asked to use a white-labeled search page where the results are served by Google or Bing (or others), but not disclosed. They would be asked to use that engine exclusively for 3 months, and rank their satisfaction with it.
I imagine the results would be similar, but people would still feel a pull towards Google because it's been around for 20 years.
I dont understand how people make these claims. For web search, Google is obviously better but for other classes of queries like question answering of structured knowledge or video search, it’s way better.
Ask DuckDuckGo for “Shang chi cast” and compare that with Google.
Or look at how it now returns search results that contain deep links into VIDEOs at the exact time index that is relevant.
(I think this may be done with VideoBERT and if you search for that it will return deep links into a videobert presentation!)
In any case Apple would have along long way to go to match what Google is doing. Search is no longer just TFIDF and 20 blue links.
I really think DDG should at least search for results of "my" country by default. Otherwise it's just too annoying for the regular user. Aside from that, I like DDG more than Google.
I use DDG as my default. The bang syntax is great for quick pivots and for wikipedia-like information. However, digging deep into a topic or doing certain technical searches brings up SEO hell/malicious PDFs worse than Google ever does.
Yes it is. I have tried 6 others and all of them give much much worse results in lots of cases.
It won’t matter if you search something popular, but otherwise you notice the difference.
The other day I was watching somebody search "Mass Effect Legendary Edition Ultrawide Support" while logged in to Google. They repeatedly got nothing but results for Heroes of the Storm, a completely different game which they had been playing a few days earlier. It was the creepiest thing. HotS is not a very popular game. I guarantee that most people searching "$VIDEO_GAME Ultrawide Support" are not looking for HotS info.
Anyway, on Bing and DDG both the first page of results were what I would have expected. Just like they would have been on Google ten years ago.
I don't doubt it. I believe it was a results personalization issue. A history of queries related to one game caused it to include that game in all game-related queries. Maybe exacerbated by the heroes:legendary relationship? Who knows. I don't even recognize the Google algorithm year to year anymore. I don't expect to be able to reproduce anything.
