You cant even avoid irrelevant results with "site:" anymore

rosenjcb@lemmy.world to Technology@lemmy.world – 456 points –
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I have been using duckduckgo.com for the last few years. I definitely find it preferable to google.

That said, when I first switched over I would occasionally have a hard time finding something and swap back to google to let their algorithm that was tailored to me help out.

Would you say that duckduckgo's search algorithm has gotten better, or that you have gotten better at using it?

Google's algorithm works better at finding really weird things deep in the bowels of the web (for example: obscure programming questions around GPU shaders in a specific framework or graphics pipeline) and when searching for local things if outside the US (because Google has the notion of Region when returning search results, so for example here in Portugal if I search in portuguese for a store to buy something I don't get results from Brasil) whilst duckduckgo works better for everything else.

Personally I default to duckduckgo and only use Google when duckduckgo isn't returning good enough results, which is surprisingly unusual.