Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Searching for 'VK' shows only a single result on DuckduckGo. Why?

duckduckgo.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 215 posts

Re: Searching for 'VK' shows only a single result on DuckduckGo. Why?

#61

Post by pmachinery »

mr-ron wrote: post #26

Ive been using DDG as a default search for a while now. My conclusion is that the results are just NOT as good as Google's. I find myself using Google searches for time sensitive or mission critical searches, which totally defeats the purpose of a search engine. As an example, I was playing around with Phaser and found that DDG just does not surface the entire Phaser documentation or forums correctly, and had to swit…

I agree, sadly, and in (literally) every discussion on DDG that I've seen, people cite as one of DDG's plus points that you can use !g to search Google instead.

Just out of curiosity, what do you (anyone reading) see when you search "curry" on DDG images?

Re: Searching for 'VK' shows only a single result on DuckduckGo. Why?

#63

Post by bhrgunatha »

ffpip wrote: post #20

Manually changing region to Russia gives many more results. https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=VK&kl=ru-ru&ia=web Might be a partnership with Yandex to not show russian results outside Russia? Because they use Yandex in Russia. https://www.reddit.com/r/duckduckgo/comments/a7nl1v/duckduck...

> Might be a partnership with Yandex to not show russian results outside Russia?

Quite the opposite.

My search results from DDG over the past year or so have been infested with Russian sites, articles and even twitter account titles of English language accounts, despite not living there and not having any preference for Russian in any browsers settings or regions and never issuing a single query in Russian.

Re: Searching for 'VK' shows only a single result on DuckduckGo. Why?

#64

Post by svachalek »

mostlysimilar wrote: post #41
mr-ron wrote: post #26

Ive been using DDG as a default search for a while now. My conclusion is that the results are just NOT as good as Google's. I find myself using Google searches for time sensitive or mission critical searches, which totally defeats the purpose of a search engine. As an example, I was playing around with Phaser and found that DDG just does not surface the entire Phaser documentation or forums correctly, and had to swit…

Why not use DDG to find the correct site, and then use that site's built-in search for finding things within it? Better yet, if I already know I want a particular doc or site, I'll go directly to that site instead of hopping through a search engine first.

Usually you get much better results by doing the opposite, go to Google and run the search with site:reddit.com or wherever.

Re: Searching for 'VK' shows only a single result on DuckduckGo. Why?

#65

Post by ffpip »

PCChris wrote: post #19
ISL wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google returns: "About 782,000,000 results (0.45 seconds) "

If you actually click through Google's result pages, you will find that there are actually only about 87 results. Even if you "repeat the search with the omitted results included" Google returns only about 226 results. Google's estimated result count is routinely off by so much as to make it virtually useless.

https://www.google.com/search?q=VK&start=100

100*10 results per page= 1000

Google only shows 1000 results for each query. Even if it says 100 million found

Re: Searching for 'VK' shows only a single result on DuckduckGo. Why?

#66

Post by grahamjpark »

rjzzleep wrote: post #21

I've been trying to use duckduckgo for almost a year, but I can't really justify it. I've even gotten used to just adding !g at the end of each search. It has terrible results for anything non english and pretty bad latency where in asia it seems. Does anyone have a recommendation for another search engine that does decently well in terms of privacy and also supports chinese results?

Another search engine I recommend is Ecosia. They’re slightly better than average with privacy, and focused on the environment. I think they just use straight bing results so I’m not sure how well it handles Chinese searches.

Re: Searching for 'VK' shows only a single result on DuckduckGo. Why?

#67

Post by soco »

pmachinery wrote: post #61
mr-ron wrote: post #26

Ive been using DDG as a default search for a while now. My conclusion is that the results are just NOT as good as Google's. I find myself using Google searches for time sensitive or mission critical searches, which totally defeats the purpose of a search engine. As an example, I was playing around with Phaser and found that DDG just does not surface the entire Phaser documentation or forums correctly, and had to swit…

I agree, sadly, and in (literally) every discussion on DDG that I've seen, people cite as one of DDG's plus points that you can use !g to search Google instead. Just out of curiosity, what do you (anyone reading) see when you search "curry" on DDG images?

Wikipedia definition, many recipes, news about Steph Curry... pretty much what I'd expect.

Re: Searching for 'VK' shows only a single result on DuckduckGo. Why?

#68

Post by pheug »

xVedun wrote: post #47
PCChris wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you actually click through Google's result pages, you will find that there are actually only about 87 results. Even if you "repeat the search with the omitted results included" Google returns only about 226 results. Google's estimated result count is routinely off by so much as to make it virtually useless.

I found that going to the last page showed a more realistic number for results. This would only be shown on that "last page" of results though. However, it does seem strange that there are only 447 results for a google search of "apple"[0] down from a whopping 4,070,000,000 results shown before that page. And that is with show omitted results. Seems like max result limiting for the 0.1% of users that want to look pas…

It is actually plausible that there could be billions of pages with apple on the internet.

The 447 results you paged through are just the most relevant docs for your particular query ("apple" + country) and Google doesn't bother retrieving any further. Your use case of finding all the pages with the term "apple" is simply too rare and too expensive to support and they don't optimize for it.

If you try different query variants apple + something with different locales (&hl=) you'd get very different top NNN results.

Re: Searching for 'VK' shows only a single result on DuckduckGo. Why?

#69

Post by t0mbstone »

temp wrote: post #52
majormunky wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you can prepend your search on DDG with !g and it'll search google for you, without leaking your info to google.

>without leaking your info to google. Can you elaborate? It just does the same query on Google, how is it preventing leakage of information to Google?

If it runs the query through DDG's server side, then Google would just see at as an anonymous query along with a million other anonymous queries coming from DuckDuckGo's servers.

Unfortunately, that's NOT what they do. Instead, they just forward you to the google search result, which is pointless and stupid.

Re: Searching for 'VK' shows only a single result on DuckduckGo. Why?

#70

Post by pmachinery »

soco wrote: post #67
pmachinery wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, sadly, and in (literally) every discussion on DDG that I've seen, people cite as one of DDG's plus points that you can use !g to search Google instead. Just out of curiosity, what do you (anyone reading) see when you search "curry" on DDG images?

Wikipedia definition, many recipes, news about Steph Curry... pretty much what I'd expect.

On images?
Post reply on HN