IMO it's not about "going back to" anywhere. It's not as if we couldn't use different search engines for different queries.

This all-or-nothing mentality of migrating away from Google (the search engine) seems flawed to me. It's still better for your privacy doing half of your queries using Google, instead of doing all of them.

By the way, no offense intended! We're all free to pick our tools.

> Non-English Wikipedia articles before the English ones

It was only recently that I discovered that each language’s version of Wikipedia is independently edited, rather than being a translated reflection of a canonical source material; and, therefore, that inevitably there will be “better” or “worse” versions of a page (i.e. more/less content, more/less fact-checking, etc.) depending on the language.

This gulf sometimes turns out to be so large, that it’s sometimes more informative to read a foreign-language Wikipedia article through machine-translation, rather than reading the one in your own language!

(I recall, in the recent HN discussion that linked to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musth, people were pointing out that the German-language article carried a lot more information than the English-language article. That specific discrepancy has probably been since fixed up care of HN readers themselves, but it was eye-opening, especially since the English-language version of the article was phrased in decisive terms like “scientists don’t know X” where the German article instead says “X is caused by Y” citing enough [German-language] studies to thoroughly prove its point.)

I wonder if DDG has just caught onto this trend, and is prioritizing the language of the article that has the most editorial activity. (It would actually be more work to do the opposite, now that I think about it—in raw PageRank terms, there’s always going to be a most-linked-to language-version of a Wikipedia article, and doing nothing means that that version simply floats to the top. Google et al must be doing extra work to group the “same” articles of different language-versions together, assigning them the PageRank of the highest-ranked one in the grouping, while rendering out the link+summary as that of the group-member corresponding to your own language.)

A killer feature on Hackernews would be the ability to just point to a common thread like wiki that people could update; so we don't have to scroll through the comments on how people love DDG, but it just doesn't have good results. So instead of every post having a huge comment section on this restating the entire thing over and over and over, we could just link to the wiki that has the discussion on duck duck go.

It's pretty easy to append "!g" to your ddg search results if they're inadequate.

For me the quality of DDG search results seems to fluctuate over time. In the recent times it’s become worse, and I’ve resorted to going directly to !s (startpage) or !g (google). I take many other precautions in my browsing to thwart tracking anyway.

Translation: you prioritized convenience over privacy.

That's your choice to make and I'm not criticizing your choice, but I do think it's a bit off-base to criticize DDG for this. There's a pretty inherent tradeoff: violating privacy is should allow Google to produce better, more personalized search results if they are at all competent.

I would guess that the vast majority of DDG users don't use DDG because they think it produces better search results. We're using DDG because we're concerned about our own privacy and/or the implications of letting a corporation gather very personal data on every person in our society.