#duckduckgo #search #results
Today's DuckDuckGo search that performed worse than expected: 'make money money make money money money' (I remembered hearing a song that goes like this, and was looking for that - which Google figured out immediately for the same search).
DDG is often very good is my main search engine, but when you do come across a failure point it's surprising how bad the results are. Here DDG even suggested this completion in its autocomplete, so I assumed it knew what I wanted, but then results came back full of "get rich quick" schemes and no mention of the song at all.
@vaughan That's missing the point of the comment. My first instinct after the bad results was the add quotes around the query, and that also works swimmingly. But the point here is what this reveals about DDG: their search backend seems to ignore (unquoted) repetition entirely, and treats this query the same as just 'make money' - which makes sense for typos, and Google also probably has some form of that, but Google is smart enough also parallelly search without the repetitions removed just in case (as here) it's useful repetition.
I'm hoping for DDG to become as good of a Do What I Mean (DWIM) search engine as Google, so I can recommend it to my dad and my dentist and my nontech friends, and things like this are the places where DDG might trip them up (and they're not likely to engineer the query carefully to get the results, however simple that might seem to us).
@digital_carver ok but keep using it or it won't improve.
@vaughan Definitely. As I said it's my main search engine and I don't see that changing. I'm just trying to document places where I find weak results so I can send that feedback to them and hopefully help them fix those places.
@digital_carver All you needed to do was add "song" to the end of your search term.