I am and I do, but I didn’t mean to say DDG is just as good. It’s just been good enough for me.

True, I think I probably just skip over those results and don’t even register them anymore. They definitely happen a lot but it’s not something I even remembered when I thought about search results.

The problem with search is not that it’s broken. The problem is that an effective search system like google had on the early days is only truly effective for “power users” who try to understand how to use search effectively.

The majority of people have been using Google as if it was an AI long before it turned into one. People search for questions expecting to see answers, so search engines tried to adapt to that. And then when you’re trying to guess what the user wants to search for instead of just searching literally for what they asked, your search engine will never be 100% effective for anyone.

Like, on the old days for each person who could get great search results from Google you had 9 people who failed to use Google at all. That was one happy user and 9 very unhappy ones. Nowadays they have all 10 of them getting mediocre to ok-ish results. They are never getting anyone as satisfied as that one person used to be, but in general the average satisfaction has gone up.

Suck in what way? And what kind of stuff do you usually search?

I used to think search was kind of an universal thing but after looking at some people’s examples of what is a good or bad result I noticed that is definitely not the case.

For me a good search result is a list of sites that contain the words I typed on the search bar, sorted by how closely the words match and then perhaps subsorted by some website ranking system. For that, DDG has been quite decent.

On my first job the boss was telling a story about one of his previous jobs, where at one point they had to redo a whole week’s worth of work in one night. They tried hard and managed to do it. So I just added: “it’s in those times one see how slow they usually work”