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Comment by philfrasty | Hacker News Reader

The key for switching to DuckDuckGo for me was to set it as the default searchengine / startpage on all browsers. While the relevance of search results is slightly (noticable) worse than Google, I think the tradeoff between privacy VS result-quality is worth it. Thanks for making such a great product!

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Hey Phil,

DuckDuckGo employee here - Be sure to use the 'feedback' button that you find on the search results page whenever you feel a search isn't up to standards.

Our team has been working hard at increasing relevancy, but the best changes come when users let us know what they need.

Since we don't filter bubble results (https://www.ted.com/talks/eli_pariser_beware_online_filter_b...) results certainly feel different when making the leap, and that takes an adjustment period for most people. But, if you actually feel you have examples where you can't find what you're looking for, then we want to know so we can provide you a seamless search experience as well!

Thanks for the tip. I'll do that.

I use DDG as primary but any time the search results aren't relevant, I fall back to Google. I fall back a lot right now and I think this is the area for DDG to focus in.

Google has a list of scheduled flights when you put in two airport codes which is useful, doesn't look like DDG does the same.

Google paid $700m to get that functionality though.

This is a significant subset of what ITA does though - just a list of what flights go on each day of the week and at what time. I expect that can be built for significantly less than 700 million, certainly among the popular airports that most people search for. I suspect they might have had it before the ITA purchase as well but not 100% sure. The Google flights search with pricing and custom dates and routes came after ITA was bought I think.

It's basically QPX. Not just flights and times, but prices as well. It is the most significant part of ITA.

Flights, times, and fares is deceptively hard to get right. There's a reason there are only a few providers.

Edit: Ahh. If you're saying DDG could get by with just flights and times, and no fares, I see what you mean. That seems to be reflected in the pricing for the FlightStats product vs Google's flight/times/fares API pricing, yes. Parity with Google search requires fares though.

At DuckDuckGo we've got open-source Instant Answers that currently pull in information from over 1100 sources: (https://duck.co/ia)

If you know of a good data source for scheduled flights you can easily contribute an Instant Answer, or leave the source as a suggestion for our community!

Sorry I don't know a source... actually I don't think I've seen this on any other sites. Just one of those small things that keeps me with Google.

Here is a reasonable looking service:

http://www.flightstats.com/go/Mobile/flightStatusByRoute.do?...

It looks like a nice weekend project for someone.

I typed in sfo and jfk, but it looks like the java script submitted longer names, so there might be some non-trivial airport name handling to wire in.

Flightstats is a popular service. Not free though: https://developer.flightstats.com/getting-started/pricing

Similarly, Google sells api access to their flight search api: https://developers.google.com/qpx-express/v1/pricing

I have no idea if DDG could leverage either and not wreck their business model.

Hey Adam, thanks for the tip! Will do for sure in the future.

Edge cases I have in mind are usually related to indexing of forum posts, where I search for a specific-term (say bookkeeping) and roughly know the Google results of the most important forums by heart, but DDG does not even show them.

Second case I just used yesterday was searching for an exact match for an @gmail address of a priest (for our marriage) where Google had a lot more results than DDG.

Keep up the great work!

There was a long HN thread talking about DuckDuckGo results vs Google behavior.

Some people are put off by the fact that you don't substitute synonyms as aggressively as google. A concrete example was "foss [search term]". Google seems to rewrite this to "[open source] foobar", even with bubbling off.

I prefer the duck duck go behavior (and google's aggressive query rewriting drove me nuts back when I used google -- it makes it hard to run precise searches!). After all, if I bothered to type an obscure acronym, I'm looking for results that actually contain the acronym!

Maybe a "did you mean 'open source [search term]'" link at the top of the page, and even a preference toggle to enable aggressive query rewording by default would help.

I believe if you do "foss" (with quotation marks) in Google it will not rewrite it. But I am not sure.

Not sure how this might affect privacy, or maybe you're doing it already, but couldn't you guys sample every time someone runs a search and then the same search with !g ?

Hi Gingerlime,

Thanks for the suggestion. Part of the reason we don't do this is the returned search results on Google are Google's commercial property. To use them in such a capacity would require us to reach a commercial agreement with them. These agreements come with stipulations that we don't feel represent the privacy interests of our users, so we don't pursue such agreements.

The other reason, is because of the 'filter bubble' Google tailors results based on user tracking, which is what helps with result accuracy. So the results we as DuckDuckGo see on a query would be different than what you see. Plus, even if we could see your results, we wouldn't want to. We don't think it is good to be filter bubbled, we want to serve you the best results we can without censoring you. It should be your decision to a view a certain website, not ours!

You could still identify searches where there's room for improvement even without comparing with Google results.

I may be wrong but the reason is again privacy (and probably cost). If they tracked your queries and tied them back to you for future then they need to store your information or enough to tie to you and what you clicked on and the history to improve things. These all become things that they can be subpoenaed for which is anti-privacy.

Don't believe for a second that governments are not already banging at the door for access. The only ways to combat is either hosting in neutral offshore datacenter and incorporating there and living there is to not collect "useful" information in the first place on users. I think they went for the latter.

Why would they want to tie them back to you? The suggestion is: "these search terms returned unsatisfactory results".

So don't tie them back to the user. Seems like a simple solution.

I think the suggestion was more that you identify specific search urls which did not return a good result (hence the user went off to google). You could do this anonymously without tracking anyone or their usage of google or other search engines, or looking at the results on google.

As a DDG user I'd be really happy if you did this and think it would be the best way of identifying searches I'm unhappy with. I go to google now only if I'm not happy with the results from DDG.

I've had a lot of problems with literal searches on DDG over the years. That is, searches containing search terms in double quotes, like this: "my search terms".

DDG is committed to returning literal search results for the exact query that the user typed within double quotes, right? Sometimes I wonder if DDG is going the route of other search engines and trying to return "relevant" results instead of only results containing the exact search term the user asked for within double quotes.

Could you make clear exactly what DDG's policy is on exact search terms within double quotes? Does DDG honor such requests?

I'd be really interested in a write-up of how you use and process feedback.

Hey Asb,

That's a great idea - I'm not personally involved in the feedback process, but I'll certainly bring this up to the relevant team!

I often experience that ddg gives me results from really old websites. In cases this is OK, but when used for tracking down bugs or software errors it can be frustrating.

Still love you though!

Setting it to default was what also got me using it daily. I've known about it for a long time but never used it much simply because when I open a new tab I want to search from there.

I'd say I'm happy with the search results I get and never find myself going to google unless I need a map. I also really like that they adopted the quick results if you hit something common and get a excerpt which usually has my answer in it right at the top of the search results.

I have it set in only one of my browsers and am always jarred when DDG results come up, quickly falling back to !g

Switching over everywhere would probably help me adapt more quickly.

Yes, I encountered this. Soon after I had set ddg to the default on all my browsers (mobile & desktop), I found that DDGs results have been perfectly acceptable most of the time.

Further, I find that I use shortcuts like !w, !yt, or plain "!" much more often than I use !g due to poor (or simply less targeted) search results.

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