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I've switched full time to DDG for a couple months now, and have rarely ever used !g to Google results because I was unsatisfied with the DDG results. I'm curious what the criticisms of DDG's search results are. It's clear to me that many people prefer Google over DDG, but it's unclear why. What is the standard that the search results are being held up to?



When I search for something on DDG, I generally find one or two good results somewhere in the first set and all the rest are spammy/junk sites that repost content from other larger sites or just poor quality results.

DDG also doesn't understand context or acronyms, like MoP. I work for a gaming site, so my example is gaming related.

Google knows when I search for "mop legendary" I am looking for information relating to a legendary item in the Mists of Pandaria expansion for World of Warcraft. DDG doesn't make that connection of MoP -> Mists of Pandaria. I do get some amusing results like this though: http://www.buy.com/th/swiss-legend-diamond-mop.html


Tough one. blekko has a WoW slashtag, but it doesn't auto-boost for that query. You can invoke it by hand, though, how do you like this result?

https://blekko.com/ws/mop+legendary+%2B/wow


Less of the low quality sites, but I would expect one of these URLs to be on the first page:

1) http://www.mmo-champion.com/content/2806-Mists-of-Pandaria-B...

2) http://www.wowhead.com/news=204099/mists-of-pandarias-first-...

3) http://wow.joystiq.com/2012/05/25/mists-of-pandaria-new-wrat...

It does better (at least as far as the first result or two go) when you don't have to guess the acronym though:

1) https://blekko.com/ws/tier+14+sets+%2B%2Fwow

2) https://blekko.com/ws/challenge+mode+sets+%2B%2Fwow

For more standard searches it is okay, but DDG/Bing and Google are better. In these results I especially like potstuck and fabien potencier posts.

1) https://duckduckgo.com/?q=php+dependency+injection+container...

2) https://blekko.com/ws/php+dependency+injection+container+exa...

3) https://www.google.com/#hl=en&safe=off&sclient=psy-a...

It is nice to see alternatives developing though, should the day ever come that I want to leave Google behind!


I tend to still use !g for when i'm doing code / error searches, google just seems to give better results. There was some article a couple weeks ago about how often search engines "crawl" info, and google was still miles ahead of bing / ddg.


Besides the stuff mentioned by chaud, Google does a lot better for German terms as well.




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