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Comment by collyw | Hacker News Reader

I use DuckDuck go as my default search on my machines, but I think the fact that Google is not anonymous does give them a big advantage.

An obvious example of this is when I search for "Django" (I am primarily a Django developer). DuckDuckGo will return results about the film as the top hits, whereas Google already knows that I mean Django Web Framework and will return those as the top hits.

I appreciate the fact that my searches are anonymous with DDG, but I doubt that it will be able to be "as good" as Google for that reason.

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"As good" is subjective. I hate search bubbling. I'd rather click through semi-relevant results a few times then figure out why google hasn't heard of the movie Django, for example.

Also, I switched to ddg years ago, and can't remember one time when I thought that personalizing the results would improve matters.

Every few months, I'll search for something, not find it, and try google. Falling back to google has helped maybe two times out of dozens of searches. In one case google found an old email thread where someone asked my question and got no answer. In the other, I was looking for a specific document with a solution to a Linux issue. I had found it with ddg before. It turns out the solution no longer worked, and was superceded by documents ddg had already returned.

It is unclear that running that test with google as the primary search engine and ddg as the secondary would have different results.

And it not as if searching google from DuckDuckGo was hard.

DuckDukGo bangs syntax is simply fantastic even if i mostly always use theses 4 : !w , !m, !g, !gi

Privacy by default, google when you need, it's my default since 2 years.

I find myself often doing a two- or three-step search with DDG. First I search for a thing on DDG. Then if I get something back like Django the movie instead of Django the framework, I'll search the thing again on DDG with some sort of specializing term, e.g. "python." Lastly, I almost always end up searching with "!g thing + specializing term(s)."

I love the idea of DDG, and I'm delighted on the rare occasion that I get better results than google. But most of the time I get results that are inferior to El Goog. Still, I keep trying.

Really? I've been using DDG exclusively for a few months, and whenever I get unsatisfactory results, I retry with !g. Invariably, I get equally unsatisfactory results with Google. Maybe in some rare cases where I'm searching for something esoteric, Google will return an extra page or two, but that's not very frequent.

Maybe I'm searching in a way that biases in favor of Google? I'm willing to stick with DDG-first on principle alone, so perhaps DDG getting better + me figuring out subtlety of search will improve things.

They don't always do a good job of that, though. Yesterday I was searching for documentation for a JS validation library (Joi), and a specific search string ("Joi deny substring") returned some... pornier search results as the top five. It was somewhat redeemed with the sixth result being the one I was looking for.

And this was with safe search on.

I misread your comment. Google does indeed return porny stuff for this, and ddg does not. In both engines, your comment is the top of the search results. :-)

I cringe remembering when I Googled "developer dick image" instead of "disk image" with colleagues watching.

Out of curiosity I Googled that and, for me, Google now auto-corrects it to disk image.

It would have been excellent if that had happened. It was about 2-3 years ago.

i searched for freezing eggs (for cooking) and then saw ads for fertility clinics for the next few weeks.

And DuckDuckGo is not really comparable when you don't live in the US. Google is far more superior, even without your info.

True, but that could also be because they have other people's info. My primary search engine is still Google, but sometimes for fun i do use DDG and it serves way better pages than bing or yahoo.. It's just way too awesome. I'm not against data collection until it's for the benefits of the user, and duck duck go might be doing just that and anonymously. Google too, but they have way too much information about us than they should (which is kind of their business model, adsense). But i hope to see this project grow, for the healthy competition sake. :)

Isn't DDG a meta-search engine based mainly on search results from Yahoo/Bing and Yandex (from Russia). It is. And that's why it has this rather annoying latency or load time until the search results show up. And the results are only good for English and Russian. To cover up the deficits the return to quick guesses as first results like cached results or snips from Wikipedia, Yelp, etc and some other community curated so called "cook receipts". It's great that DDG exists, and it works great within its constraints, so don't get me wrong.

Ideally, the world needs more internet search engines - as of now only Google, Bing, Yandex, Baidu come to my mind. And various initiatives like Cuil, Wikia Search, etc failed or good ones like Exalead (EU sponsored Google competitor, bought by Dasault), Blecko (bought by IBM for Watson) got bought and vanished for general public but are still active for internal company purposes.

And why do we need more web search engines? Because of the filter bubble, censorship and privacy concerns, etc. - it's never good to have to deal with a mono- or duo-poly (which is already reality, as in most countries on 1-2 of them return really good search results, and the others are barely useable for local native language search phrases).

This, searching tech related topics, world news etc. works well enough but when I try to search for (not english) local content the top 10 results often aren't even specific to my country.

It seems to be just lumping results together by language without putting enough weight on location.

Funny thing is, I have just the opposite issue with google. While traveling, it constantly tries to force me to use the local version even if I don't want to (redirecting from google.com etc.) which puts more weight on local results.

Out of curiosity, do you tell ddg which country to search in? (there is an option somewhere inside the hamburger menu)

I don't think they use IPs to geolocate, so I find myself using yelp (or sometimes tripadvisor/citysearch) for local results.

Maybe a geolocating custom search / instant answer box (that can be opt-in/out) would help. It is one step down the slippery slope of search bubbling/tracking, but maybe that isn't the end of the world -- it could be done by town or something.

Yes, I had my location set all this time but now that you asked I took a second look and realised that is not enough.

While my countries flag was displayed next to the search bar it was set to "All results" in the menu, so I have to explicitly enable the region filter by flipping the switch next to it.

We have the chicken and egg problem there. Google have that results because it has terabytes of information on everything and that's because millions use it. If more and more people start using DDG, their results will also improve.

> If more and more people start using DDG, their results will also improve.

Let's say everybody stops using Google right now and starts using DDG with its anonymous, proxied queries to Bing. How does this in any way improve search results? You could maybe argue that heavy direct use of bing.com would give Microsoft some useful training data. But none of that changes the fact that Bing's crawlers aren't that good, and neither is its search engine.

See, I'm not willing to do that. I'm not willing to put up with inferior results on the promise that maybe, someday in the future, they might get better.

I remember how impossible searching was before Google. DDG at its worst is infinitely better than that.

It very well might be. But there's also something better. And I'd prefer to use the better option.

As someone in the UK, I agree with this. I try to use DDG as often as possible, but Google always provides better results.

...and if you don't use English it's pretty much useless.

It just requires a habit shift. You have to learn to be slightly more specific. "Django framework".

Lets hope that's not the name of the sequel.

Logged in just to upvote.

I just tried that with DDJ out of curiosity (I develop mostly in Flask, but also Django occasionally). It did display a few imdb movie results (though the top one still referred to the framework). However, when I searched for "django python", the intent became quite clear and I got the relevant results. So basically, what you say about personalized search applies only to normal users who don't have much "googlefu" skills, for power users like us who know exactly what to search for, its not much relevant.

>* the fact that Google is not anonymous does give them a big advantage.*

What if DDG allowed us to manually tell them information about our demographic in a way that wasn't stored on their servers and could be changed at will? If you want convenience, maybe there could be an optional client-side preference detector script that only offered possible configurations.

Good idea. I definitely don't want them "filtering" my results without my permission, but with permission is fine.

What a drag. So now I have to set up a profile of my ever changing interests on all of my devices just so I can get an approximation of what Google offers out of the box?

Don't get me wrong, I like the idea of not using Google, but this seems like a very user hostile way to do it.

I actually think this gives one slightly better control. I've experienced a weird phenomenon on Facebook where a contact of mine kept posting borderline conspiracy theories and I kept correcting him, but now all I get are his posts and it's really quite infuriating.

I would prefer conscious filtering to this automated (and obscure) filtering that Google et al. utilise. I understand it's not for everyone, but it would suit me far better.

Sure it is more control. Just like pushing electrons with a magnetized needle is even more control. It doesn't mean it's convenient.

Now if you had an ML algorithm running in your browser that analyzed your preferences and transparently changed your DDG searches from "Django" to "Django web framework", you might get something closer to what you get with Google. Wonder if Firefox could make that happen.

Ddg lets you transfer settings cookies using "cloud save", or bookmarklets. Here is a bookmarklet:

https://duckduckgo.com/?kl=jp-jp&kae=t&kt=g

With cloud save, you pick a password, and have to type that in once on each device.

They don't support bubbling, or user profiling, so you can't dump/restore those.

Like this https://support.google.com/ads/answer/2842480?hl=en&ref_topi...

That is a nice UI, but it seems to be for ad targeting (based on the URL). The more fundamental difference is that google knows nearly everything about you already, so this is helping them complete a dossier on you.

I think the parent poster was asking for a feature more like "I use LaTeX to document Django. This is all you should know about me. Go."

Put another way, can I fill that form out, create a google search bookmarklet that encodes my responses client-side, and then use it with all google cookies and ad domains blocked?

Giving your browser a resume is both hilarious and creepy - I like this idea a lot more than what Google do though.

But you can also edit your search history, YouTube watching history, synced Chrome browsing history etc. You can make up new Google profiles with different interests.

May be use DDG as the primary search enigne, and switch to Google when you don't get what you want in the first go on DDG. Atleast more traffic to DDG, and hence better results in future.

Pretty much what I do, as I say its set as my default search engine on most of my machines. Add "g!" if I am not happy with the results.

Have you tried the bang searches?

https://duckduckgo.com/bang?c=Tech&q=django

It has it's pro's and con's. I do love how I can just to !a to search amazon, or !w to search wikipedia, or !g if I really want to use Google. Kind of wish Google had a feature like that.

If that's what's holding you back:

    https://duckduckgo.com/?q=django+python

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