28
votes
Has DuckDuckGo recently started giving you significantly worse results?
Over the last week or so, I have been noticing that the majority of my searches in DuckDuckGo have been completely failing. For example, I was searching for a specific Firefox extension api and it only brings up a list of Firefox extension. If I put the exact same query into Google, the second result is exactly what I wanted. Before this last week, I have being using DDG almost exclusively, but know I am need to add the Google bang before nearly every query. Am I the only person that is having this experience? I really prefer using DDG to Google, but I can't if the results stay this way.
I found myself using the
!gfeature all the time lately to ultimately end up on google for each and every search query. I just changed my default search engine back to google. I noticed doing this for the last 4-6 weeks I think.The only reason I'm not switching back to Google are the bangs shortcuts, like
!yt <query>to search on Youtube for instance. If I'm doing an actual search, I'll use!gevery time too.try
!sp, it gets you results from startpage, which proxies results from google.I use it most of the time when I don't find the results i am looking from ddg.
Seeing how It looks like I am not the only one, I decided to do a bit of digging. I have found a general email contact and sent a quick email to it. I also found their subreddit where by far the most upvoted post in a while was this post about terrible search results, as well as 5 or 6 other posts about the poor results. I will update if I get a response.
Update: I got a canned response immediately after, so I am not expecting an actual response. I hope if it was a change they are looking into it. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I've specifically noticed an increase in amazon.com results, instead of results pointing either directly to an item's corporate product page, or some article discussing said search term. Anyone else? I'm still sticking with DDG, but I'm glad I'm not the only one.
I default to DDG but I’m constantly using the !g flag to reroute to google. I also feel like I don’t get the basic product page anymore when I search for something - too much amazon. Just a feeling, I’m not totally sure.
Definitely, over the last two or three weeks, I’m simply not able to use ddg at all. I am a linux user, but the results are almost always regarding windows, no matter how many times do I repeat “linux” in the query.
force mount as writeableused to yield actually useful results, mainly from stack overflow and friends, but lately all I get is results from microsoft documentation or various tech news sites with ad-ridden tutorial how to open flash drive on Windows 10, even if I mention linux in the query.And it keeps ignoring keywords in quotes as well.
It used to be legitimately better than google, what has happened?
…Huh.
I just tried that search and every result above the fold is relevant. Google has two of the same top three results.
What happens if you clear your DDG cookies or run the search in a private tab? Is this an attempt at customization gone massively awry? (I don't use DDG since an abortive attempt several years ago when I found their search results generally not good enough to default to.)
I thought the whole point of DDG was that it doesn't customize search results to the user? I haven't really kept up with them, but I remember that being their selling point a few years ago.
Hm, it looks like it works just fine now? I guess maybe there was some messed up a/b test. It had troubles even finding xkcds.
The only thing it doesn't handle now is
!i i made their lives return null, which is not something I can blame them for, and it probably didn't find it even before. The search looks perfectly normal now. Thanks!Yeah, I've definitely hit this in the past week or so. Very frustrating.
Personally almost all of my search results have been significantly worse over the past few years, maybe Google has just been faster in mitigating that? I use Startpage a lot and DDG as a second option if I want more different results and I've always found the DDG results to be somewhat more lackluster than the Google or Startpage ones.
And startpage itself got purchased by an ad company, or something, so, sigh. We'll see how it goes
YES! I thought it was just me. I went from getting really good results to having to use !g almost all the time to get results that are helpful.
I don't think so. Occasionally I think I'm getting bad results and try
!gbut I typically find I just picked bad search terms and the Google results are just as bad.I think it's cause I started using Duck Duck Go, and made it worse for everyone. I'll start using Google again, see if it fixes it for all of you.
Could be your post just making me reinterpret my recent searches differently but yea, I can remember a few times I got odd results, recently. I think I retried them in google and got equally bad results, though.
Out of curiosity: What was the specific Firefox extension api?
It was the Tabs api; I have looking at writing an extension to give me more keybinds for moving and sorting tabs.
Hmm, maybe they fixed it, but most searches I tried ("firefox tabs api", "tabs firefox", "tabs api") had your link first or second. "firefox tabs extension" brings up tabs addons (both in DDG and Google) but that's what I would expect? "firefox tabs extension api" works.
Not trying to say you "searched wrong", it's the job of the search engine to understand your intent but I'm just curious about what could be the error.
If I am remembering correctly, the query I used was "firefox tabs api". I double-checked it know, and it pulled up the right result now. However, I am fairly certain they prioritize links you have already visited.
Has anyone asked DDG about it? I have noticed the same problem as well.
I've noticed a massive increase of Russian text and links to Russian websites over the last few months.
I know they partner with various places to get their results and that they have an agreement with yandex but as someone who doesn't read or understand Russian and doesn't use Russian text in any of my search queries it's an serious drop in quality.
It doesn't matter what region I use I still get a huge numbner of useless results in Russian.
I'm convinced they are being gamed by yandex to push Russian results higher up in the results to boost ad/clicks/metrics for Russian web sites.
It's getting fucking ridiculous.
Yep, happened to me too. Not on hard requests either, pretty mundane stuff
I thought its just my search queries were bad. But yeah lately i started using !g alot. Specially if i want to get some reviews or some versus searches. ( gtx 970 vs radeon blabla).
to be fair, Google's results have also gone down hill. So many spam blogs and stuff are making it to the second or third page.
I'm of the opinion that sites like Pinterest, All Recipes, and other link aggregators that lie to the search engines to get placement, then bait and switch the links to a signup page when you click them are every bit as bad as the spam blogs, and they're often on the first page of results.
yeah, I've been using unpinterested to automatically add
-site:pinterest.*to the end of searches.I've thought about writing a userscript to automatically do this for a bunch of scummy sites. There's also the uBlacklist extension, but I didn't like that it adds so much text to the results.
The sad truth is that there are too many sites (successfully) trying to game the system.
No not yet but now I will look out for it (and may create my own results due to expectations) :D
Definitely. For me, it feels like I get results that are too broad or related to my search but not what I asked for.