Ask HN: Did you notice any change in DDG's search quality over the last years?
No synthesized answer yet. Check the discussion below.
That makes me think that they may have downsized the Bing index, and then sometimes they have the quotes work in which case you get few or no results, and sometimes they ignore the quotes so that you still have some results even though they’re dumb.
You say Bing is better, so it seems weird that a Bing proxy would get less results than Bing, but I think I have heard people talk about things like this before, where Bing’s API doesn’t let you paginate as far as the normal Bing front-end does.
That might be what this is. Bing might be degrading their API product more aggressively for some reason, maybe in an attempt to get people to use normal Bing, or maybe just to cut costs? I don’t know.
By the way, you don’t need to be sorry for the rant. More people need to rant about these things.
As a recent example, I needed to quickly find the zone b tax offset for tax this year. (In Australia.) I note their search today with similar queries is behaving in a manner that most would consider passable (still no result that is going to satisfy what I was after then) - but when I searched a few weeks ago, no matter if I put 2025 or zone b in quotes, were the search results getting any more specific ... google I might mention, failed just as badly. In the end -- yandex for the win, and their first page of results, the first three I thought were hopeful, which got me confidently close enough to the simple bit of information I needed.
I feel sorry for those who haven't noticed how lacking search engines have got the last few years and I recently explained to a youngster who thought it's got just so good ... it's like being out at night looking at the stars and ... marvelling at the handful of bright stars, as well as the multitude of lights from their city's buildings and street lights ... never realising that once if they'd looked up there'd be hundreds of stars easy to see.