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DuckDuckGo removed the ability to filter search results
- calo_star 3y agoBing also doesn't do "site:" queries properly it seems.
- logbiscuitswave 3y agoBing doesn’t do a lot of query filters properly. You can put a phrase in quotations and it’ll give you things that … aren’t that.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Buildstarted 3y agoIt seems duckduckgo removed all the operators like -, +, and, intitle, inurl and others
- djmips 3y agobut why?
- 2Gkashmiri 3y agoSo that ignorant internet duckers don't know any good. Its for their own benefit. With the rise of ai, you don't need to feed search operators like a caveman, you just use NLP
- causality0 3y agoPlease tell me this is an accident. How can you find anything when you can't filter out results you don't want?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- vidyesh 3y agodogs -crazy -cute -sounds site:youtube.com This seems to be working fine. Even though the search filter doesn't include them in the filters list, the results are getting filtered.
- LegitShady 3y agoi mean, the search works but the first result I get is "Cute Dogs and Adorable Babies", so the something is weird. If change the search to dogs -babies -crazy -cute -sounds site:youtube.com Then I no longer get that as the top result but the fifth result mentions babies.
- vidyesh 3y agoYes, but its filters were always iffy. It will filter cute but not CUTE and eventually filtered duckduckgo results eventually get repeated or the exclusions get added with a little bit of filtering.
- justinclift 3y agoSeems to have been a while ago. Was swearing at it only a few days ago due to stupid results it was showing, while completely ignoring the "-" sign. Search term: solar panel array concrete flat -roof -roofs Notice how the majority of results still include either "roof" or "roofs" in it? Fucking useless. :( :( :( Had to switch to Kagi, which at least seems to honour the negative signs.
- Crespyl 3y agoI'm not keen on paying for search, but this kind of behavior is exactly the marketing Kagi needs to sway me over.
- qup 3y agoWeb search might be the most valuable single tool I use outside of my computer itself, or my vehicle. If the only good option was paid, I would pay a lot. I think most other people would, too. But they'll keep using worse free options so long as those are passable.
- DanHulton 3y agoI'm actually tremendously keen on paying for search, since it means (at least in theory and currently in practice) that I don't have to worry about a paid search engine catering to advertisers instead of me. Like, it'd be nice if everything were free, but sadly everything has a cost, and we can see what the cost of "free" search is and it kinda sucks.
- mardifoufs 3y agoWait, so it's not a bug? Is it some new limitation from the bing API they use?!
- uni_rule 3y agoI noticed similar on Ecosia so this could be shanigans on Microsoft's end.
- JasonFruit 3y agoThings like this seem so arbitrarily hostile to intelligent people who just want to find what they're looking for in an efficient way. Why does this keep happening? Who benefits from these developments?
- ploxiln 3y agoThere are 10x the customers who don't have any idea about these search operators, and sometimes accidentally include one, and are dissatisfied with the results. Companies can't help but cater to the 10x bigger market. They probably spend money less carefully too, so are more valuable to advertisers. I don't attribute any malice to this kind of thing. I just expect that if a project or product is trying to be more easy and delightful to more users, using telemetry and the latest UX design research etc, then it's going to stop being a tool for smart technical people, even if that's how it became known in the first place. It wants to be a solution, a product, not a tool. I've realized that I like tools, particularly those that require skill to use. The mass market just always goes the other way. You'll have to find another niche project/product. The great benefit of locally-run open-source software is that you can keep using the tool even if the project goes a different way, and open-source projects can be forked by even smaller interested groups.
- throwfaraway9 3y ago[flagged]
- atxbcp 3y ago> There are 10x the customers who don't have any idea about these search operators, and sometimes accidentally include one, and are dissatisfied with the results but then they could disable them by default, and users can enable them in the settings ? Removing them entirely just makes the product worse.
- rendaw 3y agoOr add a button, etc.
- 3y ago
- 0xd1r 3y agoI'm hoping that this is a commit that is reverted back, after some amount of backlash from the community, if at all this was intentional. Else, it evokes the sentiment of riskynacho on the comment, "It's almost like DuckDuckGo wants to eliminate itself from being a safe useful alternative in the search engine competition."
- Kiro 3y agoBacklash won't matter since this is most likely due to a change in the underlying Bing API they are getting their search results from.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- hk1337 3y agoLooks like they just rewrote the markdown file and the exclusion looks is still there in the additions? Maybe it was reworded, or an attempt to reword it, because of this issue: https://github.com/duckduckgo/duckduckgo-help-pages/issues/160 https://github.com/duckduckgo/duckduckgo-help-pages/issues/1...
- Buildstarted 3y agoI went looking for the reason why searches weren't filtering properly. So I'm not sure what's going on but filtering by site only (which seems to be the only option left) doesn't help at all.
- 12907835202 3y agoIt looks like it never worked and the docs were wrong or out of date. How few people were using duckduckgo with these filters for it not to be noticed until now? Stranger still that the author noticed the change to the docs but not that it didn't work previously
- Buildstarted 3y agoI've never had problems adding operators until recently. I couldn't say when the change happened but I've been successfully using them since I moved to duckgo many years ago. I've been increasingly frustrated with duckgo and finally decided to find out what was going on and found this page.
- nashashmi 3y agoI noticed it (only knew of site filter). But could not understand why it worked the way it did. In the end I used it seldom. The other filters are cool.
- bredren 3y agoIn long search routines or deep research I often use quotes to find pages with specific language. DDG has been my default engine for years now, but by the time I am searching at this level I often have added a !g along the way and am working in Google at that point. Frankly, these changes don’t alarm me much because I am presuming most Q&A I’m going to be doing going forward will be in chatgpt or a similar service. In the last few weeks, I’ve taken more and more questions, sometimes spanning a wide but related context to chat gpt. There are no keyword-stuffed greyhat websites and long serps to dig through with varying formats, styles and recency. It is just information. And while I am keenly aware chatgpt will spit back complete BS, I have found this problem is not bigger than the problems I face for information seeking via DDG or Google.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- suprjami 3y agoIs there a decent search engine which still has filtering like this?
- elektor 3y agohttps://kagi.com/ https://kagi.com/
- dharmab 3y agoKagi. See: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/search-operators.html https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/search-operators.html https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/filtering-results.html https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/filtering-results.html
- user3939382 3y agoI've been a big advocate of them, but they broke their promise to grandfather in users on original plans, they doubled their prices, and have everyone counting the number of searches they make. Until they get a reasonable unlimited price plan I wouldn't use them.
- palata 3y agoI guess you can't have it all. Either you are the product, or you pay for it.
- user3939382 3y agoI'm willing to pay but not $25/month.
- palata 3y agoWell if you wanted to support the idea of paying for your product, you could totally decide to limit Kagi to 10$/month, and switching back to a free (as in "you are the product") alternative when your credit is finished. Now I'm expecting you to potentially say "I would pay 10$, but I refuse to have to go through the trouble of changing my default search engine twice a month", which brings me an idea: Actually Kagi should maybe offer that option: after you're done with your monthly credit, they redirect everything to the free engine of your choice. That would provide an easy way for people to support them with the amount they are willing to pay, without having to change anything in their setup. EDIT: already suggested: https://kagifeedback.org/d/512-automatically-redirect-search-query-to-other-search-engine-when-run-out-of-credit https://kagifeedback.org/d/512-automatically-redirect-search...
- vrglvrglvrgl 3y ago[dead]
- TobyTheDog123 3y agoI'm not entirely sure what market DuckDuckGo is trying to serve. - Non-privacy-conscious people are just going to use Google. - Privacy-conscious people know enough to realize that DuckDuckGo isn't really protecting your privacy, and that it's akin to using ExpressVPN or NordVPN to "hide your IP address". Didn't they also have some kind of censorship uproar back in the day?
- claaams 3y agoExpressVPN is still good for hiding your IP if you torrent.
- freeAgent 3y ago> Didn't they also have some kind of censorship uproar back in the day? They recently down-ranked Russian propaganda-linked sites (like RT). I can't remember if that change has remained in place or they reversed it.
- TobyTheDog123 3y agoOh right I remember now - I guess the point I'd make about that is I'd think there's a large overlap between those that are privacy-conscious and those that are conscious to those kinds of algorithmic manipulations. I don't think toeing the line is a viable business strategy when your competition blows your search result quality out of the water. There's no benefit in that case.
- freeAgent 3y agoI agree. There are cases where I appreciate this sort of thing, like when it's a child performing the search. When it's me doing it, I would prefer to not have sources artificially de-ranked because they're government-affiliated and/or propaganda. However, I could also see having some sort of visual indicator like Twitter used to use being useful. I don't always know in advance whether a particular source has a background conflict of interest I should be aware of...but it's still a bit of a slippery slope.
- hedora 3y agoI’ve also noticed that “”’s stopped working as expected there recently. Sample query: “lowes pet bedding”. The quotation marks do something; they remove some results from tractor supply and home depot. However, many results don’t contain the word “lowes” or “bedding”. For example: https://animalcare.lacounty.gov/licensing/ https://animalcare.lacounty.gov/licensing/ And, none contain the exact phrase. Google does the expected thing (return one result). Annoyingly, the last time I checked, the situation was reversed, and Google search is now useless for other reasons. Thirty seven spam results surround the one organic google search result for the query. For the love of all that is good and proper, thirty seven?!? Who thought that was a good number? That result page would make 90’s era pay-for-placement search engines blush!
- explorer83 3y agoYeah I feel all search engines have had declining quality for some time now. Not sure if it's unintended consequence of fighting bots. Or unintended consequence of trying to remove some content from the results. I'm assuming it's unintentional.
- ImPostingOnHN 3y agoit's intentional as a result of them making money off showing you bad results (ads) after all, you aren't paying them
- andai 3y agoIn a recent Google, the first non-ad result was accessible only after scrolling through two pages (phone height) of ads. At least they're marked "Sponsored"...
- weswilson 3y agoI feel like this is a big reason for people wanting to using ChatGPT (LLM's in general) for search results. Search engine quality has declined due to ads/sponsored results and the adversarial nature of SEO driving the signal-to-noise ratio into the ground. So now people are using ChatGPT to lookup the information they'd normally use a search engine for but don't want to wade through the tens of sponsored posts to get to something useful. The idea of LLM's taking over search is pretty gloomy to me, because it destroys the discoverability of unique information. Sites that have expert information often leads you down the rabbit hole and introduces you to new information. With LLM's you will get 'mean reverted' results and won't be introduced to that information that sparks curiosity. On the other hand, it's pretty hard to find those nuggets with search engines these days. Years ago, you'd be able to just Google for the answer. Now you have to go to specific sites to search those knowledge bases.
- moepstar 3y agoUgh, i just thought something was wrong with me, my queries or something in the last few days - the results have kinda turned to bleep.. My results have been looking like the code for Google Ads had some error and was stuck in a loop - resulting in page after page of advertisements :( Example: roborock s8 disassembly (variants tried: roborock s8 teardown) Same goes for Youtube - not a single disassembly video / teardown could be found, only reviews with cringy thumbnails.. This is after a number of years of using DDG and considering "good enough" most of the time, i seldomly had to result to !g - and like 50% of the time i had was to find other interesting content to augment what i had found so far...
- plaguepilled 3y agoAh yes, the classic corporate footgun. I am sure power users who are alienated will most definitely stay quiet and not complain to their peers, damaging the reputation of a once reliable tool. This has never happened before after all. :')
- p-e-w 3y agoThere is no meaningful competition, so reputation doesn't matter. Those people already left Google to use DDG. Where are they going to go now? Some random individual's hobby search engine with a crappy index? Some shady startup's Bing wrapper that promotes a crypto scam? There is no real competition in search (and in social media, and in email, and in operating systems, and in browsers, ...). Companies can do whatever the fuck they want, and the only thing users can do is complain in vain.
- mb7733 3y ago> Those people already left Google to use DDG. Where are they going to go now? Back to Google?
- p1esk 3y agoKagi, Brave, you.com, Phind.
- _a9 3y agoBeen using Brave search since they released it. I used to fallback to Google but I've stopped using it recently, it has turned to absoulte crap always returning random spam or nothing at all unless I'm searching for something basic. Been falling back to Phind on dev stuff now if Brave doesnt have anything. Phind is something I would absolutely pay for when the time comes.
- nicce 3y agoPhind is still a bit slow. By the time it finishes writing, I have found the solution with other search engine.
- upon_drumhead 3y agoI actually just switched back to google yesterday after a really frustrating time trying to get double quotes working for filtering. I'm super disappointed in DDGs changes the last few months. I wish them the best but I'm on the hunt for a new search engine.
- itake 3y agoCan anyone explain why Google and DuckDuckGo made this change? I don't see how this impacts them selling ads. My only thought is its technically expensive to support?
- thornewolf 3y agoBoolean search is pretty expensive computationally. Maybe they are so far disconnected from that initial implementation that there is no semblance of support anymore?
- marginalia_nu 3y agoI'm not convinced this is true. It's more likely they're moving away from a keyword model of search toward a more natural language model because the AI hypetrain goes choo-choo. It's genuinely difficult to do both of these at the same time. You can do keyword search well, you can do natural language search well, you can't do both at the same time. What you get in a mixed paradigm is confusing and unpredictable results. This is mostly a limitation in query understanding. The traditional boolean index is still there. Natural language search engines typically first do a series of traditional keyword searches to identify candidate results, and then re-score them using a natural language understanding of the query.
- Kiro 3y agoYou mean Google and Bing. Must really suck to be DDG, being under the mercy of Bing but can't publicly blame these changes on them since they want to downplay their dependency.
- pleasantpeasant 3y agoDoes no one here use searx? I keep seeing Kagi being pushed and it seems suspicious as Kagi is a subscription based search engine that limits your searches to their paid tiers. Kagi shillposting with their bot accounts?
- O-stevns 3y agoImo there's nothing suspicious about, I am an early adopter and I happily pay for it. It simply provides better results than Google, Bing, DDG and any other search engine I've tried. I'm not a fan of subscription based software/services at all, but for once I think it makes sense when it comes to search queries. Before I was an avid user of google but seeing the results getting worse and worse made me look for different solutions. For now i'm interested in supporting a search engine that can keep itself above water through my wallet.
- dns_snek 3y agoI doubt it's shillposting, their search is genuinely very good. Better than Google at the very least - which is admittedly a low bar these days, but not every alternative manages that, e.g. Neeva (in my opinion, anyway). That said, I stopped using it after they increased prices. I'll reconsider it when they figure out how to decrease them and add privacy-friendly payment methods. I think Kagi is good, but not $25/mo good. People with SV salaries will disagree, though.
- ck2 3y agoSince DDG is just a proxy for Bing, do they have a survival plan once Microsoft cuts them off? Is it a long-term contract?
- xyst 3y agoFor what it’s worth: I have been using Ecosia as my preferred search engine. Basically it just forwards requests to Bing in exchange for ad revenue which is used to plant trees. Have been able to use the advanced keywords and operators to filter results with Ecosia https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/advanced-search-keywords-ea595928-5d63-4a0b-9c6b-0b769865e78a https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/advanced-search-ke... https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/advanced-search-options-b92e25f1-0085-4271-bdf9-14aaea720930 https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/advanced-search-op... Sometimes the search results can be irrelevant especially for programming queries. But in those cases I just fallback to G
- creshal 3y agoIf the DDG changes are caused by Bing pricing changes, won't that also affect Ecosia sooner or later?
- mardifoufs 3y agoIt seems like it sometimes works on ecosia, but not for everyone. Ddg also seems to have a similar issue, where it sometimes works depending on location (?). I guess even if it is not related to api pricing, it still shows that search engines that depend on reselling or vendoring an API aren't much of an alternative to the big guys (though ecosia is awesome, and it doesn't pretend to compete on the search offering itself ). And hopefully I'm totally wrong about the whole situation being related to pricing!
- elforce002 3y agoBrave search is quite good for development. I have +1 year using it and it's ok.
- NayamAmarshe 3y agoBrave Search is the best one I've used so far. Super clean search results, really helpful widgets and independently indexed unlike DDG.
- ReadCarlBarks 3y agoLook into the Goggles feature. It lets you create your own search engines with different lists of excluded or boosted sites.
- elforce002 3y agoI don't see anything like that using this feature.
- ReadCarlBarks 3y agoI'm talking about https://search.brave.com/goggles/discover https://search.brave.com/goggles/discover You need to check out the guide on how to create a new Goggle.
- elforce002 3y agoNice. Thanks!
- mardifoufs 3y agoThis might be related to the bing API. I'm pretty sure Bing hiked their API access prices, effective may 1st 2023. Custom search is way more expensive than regular search too. But I'd think duckduckgo wouldn't really be affected by public pricing, and that they have some sort of huge discounts and contracts that would protect them against this. If they pay anything that is, since I thought ddg generated revenue from using bing. Though Ecosia seems to have the same issue so who knows. https://www.computerworld.com/article/3688574/microsoft-more-than-triples-bing-search-api-prices-to-recoup-investments.amp.html https://www.computerworld.com/article/3688574/microsoft-more... Source on the price increases, seems like the API is now 3x to 10x more expensive (I used the MS docs directly but the article shows the previous rates too).
- throwaway2037 3y agoDo the paid search results also include paid adverts? If not, I can understand why MSFT raised the prices so much. The initial costs were probably way too low, but they wanted to gauge market interest. After finding firm interest, raise the prices to ensure that no one will use the API to build their own search engine without adverts! The people who work on Bing must be very expensive. Not to mention hardware/network costs.
- IceWreck 3y agoThey'be been in the search game for a long time. Its time they stop relying on bing and build their own search tech instead. Or mix and match atleast.
- justinclift 3y agoDidn't they used to have their own search index infrastructure?
- mardifoufs 3y agoI think they only use their own crawler/index for smart search results. (maybe because those cost a LOT to source from Bing)
- DanHulton 3y agoI debated bringing up Kagi at the top level here, since I already commented on it in a reply, but honestly I really want them to succeed and shit like this is why. It's a paid search service, and I'm honestly really happy with that distinction and what it entails. Being paid means that they can deliver on and support features that users can use to get the best results for them, without worrying how those features may affect potential advertisers and their opinions of the service. For example, you can block a whole site from your search results - and it's an easy-to-find button directly in the search results, not hidden deep within some settings or done via a manually-installed extension. They already deprioritize a whole lot of "junk" sites -- for example I very rarely see the kinds of technical results that are just reposts of Stack Overflow but laden down with their own ads, and if I do see them I can nuke the site from orbit, never to be seen again. They are working out the kinks with the pricing scheme currently, but I've always found the plans fair and very transparent. If you are interested in good search and potentially giving the industry a bit of a hint that search is important enough to pay for, and all this advertiser-prioritized bullshit is unacceptable, I can wholeheartedly endorse them.
- p-e-w 3y agoCan I use Kagi without linking any real-world identifiers (including credit card details) to my search queries in any way? I'm very much interested in a high-quality search engine, and certainly willing to pay for it, but unless the above condition is satisfied, it's a non-starter for me.
- rsch 3y agoThere are good reasons why the next generation just looks up videos. The idea of a web search engine is disappearing into the mist of time. Text search engines worked well 10 years ago, but they are now completely overwhelmed by content farms.
- timbit42 3y agoYouTube's search is now so bad I've been using DDG's video search to find videos on YouTube. I'll have to keep an eye on whether DDG's video search goes south as well.
- ornornor 3y agoI noticed that and it is infuriating. Adding `-term` now seems to be the opposite and show only results containing the term you didn’t want in the first place. I seriously wonder who thought this was a good idea…
- for1nner 3y agoThere is also a (related, I assume) PR to remove the search syntax page from being published entirely[1]. It's dated December, so it may be fair to assume this has all just been documentation-publishing that hasn't been done yet, as others have posited. That says nothing of the rationale/efficacy of such filtering/syntaxing, though. [1] https://github.com/duckduckgo/duckduckgo-help-pages/pull/152 https://github.com/duckduckgo/duckduckgo-help-pages/pull/152
- bloaf 3y agoI personally feel like negative filters are important because they create an incentive for advertisers/SEO/etc people to not spam every keyword into their product. If you're only allowed positive searches, the best way to get your product found is to maximize the number of positive search terms associated with your product. With negative search terms, every additional term you add is a potential exclusion criteria as well. Unfortunately, people just don't use the negative search terms enough, so it is up to the search engines themselves to detect metadata bloat, and that ends up being a cat-and-mouse game.
- geysersam 3y agoI don't want incentives for ads-criminals and SEO spam :( I want the search engine to help me find high quality pages, not piles of crap.
- fwlr 3y agoIt’s getting to the point where I’m thinking about downloading the Wikipedia archive, mirroring all of archive.org, downloading Common Crawl, etc., and then setting up some kind of super-powered offline query machine.
- nologic01 3y agoMy experience with both DDG, which I use as default, and Google, which I use as backup has been steadily deteriorating over time. That is the opposite of what you would expect if incentives and business models around this most basic utility were not broken. If people can build collectively incredibly useful resources like wikipedia and openstreetmap why not an index of the web as a public good that is devoid of the race to the bottom dynamics of SEO and adtech and whatnot. Why do we need to worry about privacy violation and/or gross commercial bias when trying to access the most important information machinery invented in recent decades, the web? Imagine you try to find your way in an unknown city and the only maps available are the sketchy freebies handed out at hotels, choke full of commercial ads, spam and fake entries. We have normalized too much, we are accepting as inevitability suboptimal services. This is not theoretical and without systemic implications. Knowledge worker productivity - which is a large fraction of modern economies - depends on the speed and quality of information retrieval. At some point people must snap out of the spell and work towards a sane internet that puts the interests of billions of users first.
- geraldhh 3y agothe capacity of a community for content generation grows faster than the capacity for self moderation, putting a limit on group-size in regards to the level of 'unwanted' content (spam, hate, porn ...). automated moderation or more tolerance are needed to extend the group further; one of those can be bought with money.
- nologic01 3y agoMoney is not a dirty word when people work for it (using it to keep count of who contributes valuable time and skill). Unfortunately what is happening - ever so frequently - is various digital cartels finding ways to extract permanent rents and use them to exercise undue and unaccountable control and influence instead of working for the money. Decades of apathy and bad policy means that is not a trivial problem to crack, but in contrast with all prior technology revolutions, what we have is an entirely social, organizational challenge - disruptive change of behaviors can happen overnight. We need to think boldly about these new "professions" (open source developers, online platform moderators, creative commons content generators, etc) and how they might become sustainable and purposeful options for people. The dividend we will reap collectively if we succeed is enormous.
- scrum-treats 3y agoI just used DuckDuckGo with filter, and it worked as expected (i.e., the filter still correctly filters). E.g., search query: t-shirts -site:amazon.com
- TonyTrapp 3y agoYes, according to the linked diff, that is the only remaining filter.
- scrum-treats 3y agoGot it. There are some one-offs that still function, but for the most part the filters are wiped. Bummer. I wonder if Google paid DDG to remove the filters, as a means of reclaiming search traffic.
- TonyTrapp 3y agoAs mentioned elsewhere, it's most likely related to a price hike for the Bing API that DDG uses. No need for conspiracy theories.
- kid64 3y agoWho in their right mind would continue to rely on Kagi after the bait and switch? How many more "realities of the search market" will they need to learn? It amazes me that anybody would accept such an egregious betrayal, whether or not they can afford the new pricing.
- freediver 3y agoSorry that you feel that way, but there was no bait and switch, just reality of search today. I expanded on it more here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35683834 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35683834
- Springtime 3y agoI've been keeping a directory of screenshots of poor DDG results for the past couple years and there have been many conspicuously broken results. It's a damn shame since 2+ years ago DDG was better. Some examples: - Double quoted strings ignored, continuing to return results without the quoted string. - Adding the exclusion parameter doing nothing, continuing to return results with the string. - Various queries return non-legit sites in the majority top 10 results or more—sometimes being all results. By non-legit, meaning: these are randomized named domains that have scraped other sites' content or are doing word salad query matching. Example query from December last year: `google "oauth" "api" "thunderbird"` returned all non-legit sites. - Using `site:` parameter to restrict a query to specific site can return fewer results for that domain (eg: two results vs dozens) than just searching for the site name and query without the `site:` parameter. - Using `site:` parameter to limit to TLD only sometimes returns only single result or nothing despite knowing there are domains that contain the query. Eg: last year when searching `opnsense site:.se` there should have been tons of results from teklager.se but there were none (I have the screenshots), but searching `opnsense site:teklager.se` returned results. In the most egregious cases that I've documented I submit feedback but it always seemed like a hopeless cause the worse the results became.
- mdaniel 3y ago> In the most egregious cases that I've documented I submit feedback but it always seemed like a hopeless cause the worse the results became. I once had a Ducker(? Goer?) reply to me here on HN saying that a human does in fact read the feedback, and yet this indescribably terrible change aligns with your conclusion: they read them, and then cheerfully "put them on the backlog"
- emrah 3y agoI really don't see a bright future for search engines. LLMs have exposed a new way to interact with knowledge, which is that, instead of sifting through results/webpages manually, they do that for us and present answers instead. Sure, they have a ways to go (for example, i think they should provide confidence level for their answers based on how many docs/pages they ran into during training that support a particular answer; show references when asked etc) but the search engine as an interface is obsolete at this point.
- _oyks 3y agoWould encourage DuckDuckGo people who are looking for a new option to consider Ecosia - it also uses the Bing API so it has good indexing coverage - but does a much better job of postprocessing the results.
- b3nji 3y agoDoes anyone use Neeva? I have been for a few years, and pay for it. Loving it so far. I was a heavy user of Google way back when, then moved to DDG for many, many years. Settling on Neeva. However, I will check out Kagi now, maybe I will move again.
- kderbyma 3y agoIt's garbage lately. no better than Google. they are all shit now a days. they just promote their results. search is a misnomer these days.....it's an engine....for ads
- SentientAtom 3y agoDDG has top of the page ads now for products when doing an image search.
- ParetoOptimal 3y agoWhy couldn't DuckDuckGo just offer an "advanced mode" in settings where operators are still active? They could default to the simple one and achieve their goal.
- timbit42 3y agoThey could. Perhaps they will, but they may need to charge for it if Bing is charging them for those fancy features.
- yegg 3y agoHi all, Founder/CEO DuckDuckGo here and I hope I can help clear this up. Search syntax filters are still available on DuckDuckGo and we’ve re-updated the help page to reflect that. Nothing has actually recently changed with the way they work in terms of removing any functionality. In fact, we actually recently added functionality to make site exclusion work better as described in https://duckduckgo.com/updates https://duckduckgo.com/updates What did happen is last month we temporarily updated our syntax help page because we had been getting complaints from some users that they were not working consistently and wanted to get to the bottom of it, but we never actually deactivated the features themselves. Instead of removing that information from the help page, even temporarily, we should have said we know users are having problems and we’re working to address them. That's what the help page says now and we hope to provide an update soon.
- Buildstarted 3y agoThanks for the update! I did notice they were flaky and maybe it's my queries that were more flaky than others that it stuck out at me more than when they possibly worked. Hopefully you can get this resolved as it's become extremely frustrating searching technical pages to weed out unrelated information.
- porkbeer 3y agoYou ignore quotes. You ignore -modifiers Your search is near useless these days and after evangelizing, I now tell people to avoid ddg.
- tlavoie 3y agoThe site exclusion very much does _not_ work for images, just FYI. For example, and especially since Pinterest is mentioned in your help page, I tried the following in the image search: the far side gallery -site:pinterest It is a good example, because Pinterest in particular, with all its TLDs, seems to really excessively pollute search results. Changing it up to -site:pinterest.com does catch those, but still not all the other TLDs, so I guess it would be a case of whack-a-mole for the rest.
- Zuiii 3y agoIt's ironic that one of the best search engines for technical searches we have today has become yandex (which still fully supports filters) and the only reason why is because their devs didn't go out of their way to ruin their service like the rest. I mean even searching for a literal string (part number) doesn't give me results on Google/DDG anymore. I'd be happy to use yandex as my main search engine if I didn't have to (re)solve a captcha every couple of searches. Are there other search engines that still allow us to run powerful search queries?
- H12 3y agoCurious how people use search these days. For me, I'm less and less using a single search engine for all my needs, rather using a plethora of engines for different tasks. I use DDG as my default engine to ensure I get privacy by default, and if the results aren't to my liking, I use a bang to re-run the search in a different engine. I also like to set up custom search engines in my browser with shortcuts, so if I need to search a specific GitHub org or something I can quickly run a search there from my URL bar. A lot of the comments here saying "DDG is dead, switch to xxx instead!" strike me as not particularly relevant with my usage patterns, but I'm wondering whether I'm just in a minority.