from Hacker News

Ask HN: What's your first query to a new search engine?

by adityar on 2/5/18, 4:29 PM with 2 comments

I always ask "verilog" or "what is verilog" to get a sense of how the engine matches up to Google/DDG. I was curious about what others ask for the first time.

  • by dallascowboys on 2/13/18, 7:55 PM

    I usually start with "cars" or "dogs"...just to get an idea of what sort of results I will get.

    This will give me an idea of if I will be served ads, and if the search engine includes snippets from wikipedia, etc.

  • by mtmail on 2/5/18, 4:53 PM

    "flowers". It's a commercial competitive term and most ad spots would be filled (flower delivery). I expect a wikipedia entry, dictionary entry, a diverse set of results overall and ideally not many SEO-heavy pages.

    "mexico". Check official websites vs commercial (travel related or SEO heavy) ratio.

    "news". Well the German translation of news to check the language vs region setting. Switzerland and Austria are German speaking as well and in the past search engines would show a mix of results. These days I think IP addresses are a factor and when in Germany I wouldn't see Austrian results.

    "good dick". I expect the movie, not NSFW results. (alright movie, terrible title).

    Disclaimer: worked at Yahoo! Search