I used this quite frequently but since Google “”““improved””“” it last year (there was a popular HN post complaining about this) it doesn’t work anymore. Search for a domain name with quotation marks for example just recombines the contents of the domain and returns a bunch of unrelated content completely cluttering what I am looking for. Until last year it used to return no search results if there weren’t any exact matches, which is the whole point.
Does someone have a work around for this phenomenal Google decision?
There is a discussion on Hacker News, but feel free to comment here as well.
Duckduckgo for the win
I use ddg and I find it endlessly frustrating. Am I doing something wrong or is there a privacy/quality tradeoff?
There’s definitely a quality trade off. DDG uses bing for search results (which, at one point they were letting bing keep tracking data on you so it’s debatable if they’re much better than google), and bing’s results are definitely inferior to google’s. I don’t really notice a difference unless I’m trying to find hard to find info, but it’s very obvious on searches for things like troubleshooting a problem.
Duckduckgo is probably even worse for this. For example, you can’t filter words with by putting “-” before it. You can find years worth of forum posts begging for the feature.
I committed to using ddg for a few years, but after realizing that I was using bangs for anything but the most trivial searches, I had to be honest with myself and just give up on it.
Oh shit… After looking it up it’s gotten worse since I quit: https://www.ghacks.net/2023/04/24/duckduckgo-disables-most-search-filters-from-search/
Dang I did notice it was pretty flakey with the “-”
What’s not Google and better than ddg?
I wish I knew