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My relationship with DDG for the last few years has been the following:

- I read somewhere (mostly always on HN) how great it is.

- I set it as the main search engine on my browser.

- I use it for a while, but I notice how slow it feels compared to Google, and how the results (especially local, non US ones) are somehow off in some cases.

- I go back to Google after a few days, and I forget about DDG for a few months/years, at least until the next comment on HN about it.

...and the cycle begins, again.

The key to switching from Google to DDG is memorizing a few shortcuts for fallbacks, like "!g" (Google), "!gi" (Google images), and "!gn" (Google news). It can be annoying at first to have to type the few extra characters, but over time you'll find yourself using them less and less. They will never completely disappear, but one day you'll realize you're only using them in a few percent of your searches. In most cases, you will know in advance that you specifically want "Google results" instead of "search results," and can add them on the first query.

From a privacy perspective, using DDG like this denies Google 95+% of the information it would be gathering about you.

Caveat: I have never wanted "local" or "personalized" search results. I'm willing to type "Chinese food near ZIP code" or "Chinese translation" instead of relying on opaque algorithms to use my location and personal data to decide whether I'm hungry or confused.

For me it was exactly the opposite: It ended becoming an automatism, I used the flag 100% of the time, by default without looking at the ddg results.

That's when I switched back to Google.

> It can be annoying at first to have to type the few extra characters,

Especially on mobile. Can't they use something more mobile-friendly than "!g", such as "gg" or "/g" for example?

Better idea: place a "Google" button after the (say) third search result.

If not done universally, allow me to activate this feature in my preferences.

I tried DDG a few times but always switched back to Google eventually (typing <BACK> and then <SPACE> "!g" <ENTER> is tiring, especially on mobile). I think this option would make me switch to DDG indefinitely.

I just came up with the idea to make a bookmarklet, which converts the current DDG search into Google:

    javascript:(function(){ var s = document.location.search.split("&")[0].substr(1); document.location = "https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&"+s; })();

It's not perfect, but it's a start :)

To be clear: while this button directs people away from DDG to Google, it actually allows people to use DDG as their first (main) search engine, and lets them switch to Google if necessary without much inconvenience. The better the DDG search results, the less views they lose to Google.

Nice idea! However, I still struggle to see the advantage over "!g".

The workflow is exactly the same: Search for stuff in DDG, and if you suspect that Google might have returned a better result, prepend "!g " to your query (which might be even faster than clicking on the bookmarklet, depending on how fast you type).

I imagine the whole idea is that they don't obviously advertise a way to use a competing service...

BTW, you can also search through StartPage instead by using !sp, or Bing, etc so there's nice flexibility there.

DDG is useful if you're american. I'm canadian and the results are mostly crap.

Canadian. DDG is better for me now, stayin' with it.

You probably know about but with DDG you can add a !g to the search query to get results from Google. So I keep DDG as default and then sometimes I retry with a !g query.

Sometimes for programming related questions DDG does a better job I noticed.

Note you can also do !s for a slightly less Big Brother version of Google’s results (not personalized, not tracked):

https://www.startpage.com/

https://www.startpage.com/eng/protect-privacy.html

> and how the results (especially local, non US ones) are somehow off in some cases.

For local results, DDG sucks by default. Google, when I enter something local or German, has great results, DDG only if I flip the local switch to "Germany". But besides that I prefer their results for most things besides rare searches (if there are under 100 results, DDG is almost useless). But bangs make it preferable to me even then.

If the results aren't good enough on DDG, I just use the "g!" to search on google via DDG. I'm guessing a good 40% of what I'm looking for ends up on a Google search - mainly because I suck at using the right keywords.

I had a similar experience, and it took me a while to realize how much of my "this feels off" feeling was correlated to the appearance of the search results. I changed the DDG theme to match Google's appearance, and that feeling of "this feels off" evaporated.

How do you do that? I've switched to DDG, but for some reason the search results page doesn't feel like search results.

Switch your theme from "Default" to "Basic".

(After spending a while with "Basic" to convince myself the results were just as good and I just had a trained reaction to the visual style, I went back to Default. And after a while, now Google results seem subtly off.)

Thanks!

It looks like my mind over-fitted on blue title/green url/black pull-text as the code for a web search result hit.

Same thing. I think the information Google has about me ends up leading to better search results. I want DDG to work, but the results are never as good.

I tend to find DDG to be comparable for most day-to-day searches. "Electricians in <home town>" or "Restaurants near <sports arena>" work great and is where they'd want to focus to attract market share. I have no problems with it being the default on my phone because of this.

Where I run into trouble is on anything technical. Trying to find research or technical references is a hopeless cause and Google is still my work computer default.

Yep, this has happened to me. DDG simply doesn't give me the results I want and expect I would get on Google, I can only stand a few days of using it before I go back.

I'm guessing it has to be the (what I once thought was subtle, but apparently is not) positive effect that Google promises it will deliver due to building a profile of me personally and returning different results based on what it knows about me.

I wonder what the easiest method would be for all of us to share screen shots of these results that we say are good at engine X and bad at Engine Y.

I see many people say results from [whatever] are bad - but not enough info to know if they are tech people who 99% search for debian docs and uber eats... and or other people who say [other] are good / bad.. we need to start posting examples. If there were some way to use the firefox screen capture and share tool for example, to upload good / bad searches, i'd love to see how others see things.

I really want to make new search engine options, and want to show examples of the others and how they could be done better. Crowd sources examples of good and bad would be a benefit to many.

If you want to stay in your bubble, Google is probably better (getting local results or results that are related to your search history), but personally, I don't like that, most of the time.

> Then I discovered DuckDuckGo and never looked back.

Well, the quality of the search results is not always as good as with Google. I do look back. But DuckDuckGo improved a lot over the last couple of years. Nowadays, DDG is my go-to search engine, and Google is the fallback when I hit a really hard problem; the more obscure the question, the more like it is in my experience that Google will yield more helpful results than DuckDuckGo.

In some way, DuckDuckGo is even better than Google. For specific questions, it often replies with a short snippet from stackoverflow or some other site that answers my question before I ever click on a link. That is just brilliant!

Google does that, too, sometimes, but for coding questions, DuckDuckGo seems to be better at it.

I actually forgot about google until this thread came up. I basically never have to use !g anymore, bc DDG does everything I need so well!

I've done a few googles over the last year, like on my girlfriend's computer, but I really find their results are so commercially-oriented that when looking for information it all gets in the way.

I envy you. A little at least. I had to make a conscious effort, and eventually I just switched my default search engine from Wikipedia to DDG and forcefully acquired the habit of just typing my search in the adress bar instead of calling up my search engine of choice. And still I find myself typing goog^H^H^H^Hddg.gg on a regular basis. The habit is just so deeply ingrained. ;-)

Well I admire Wikipedia as a default search engine. That's fairly hardcore.

Krylon, eh? Are you a painter?

For a long time I was in the habit to explicity open a search engine, i.e. type "google.de", or these days "ddg.gg", and then enter my search terms into their input field.

But at home I tend to look up stuff on Wikipedia more often than I search things on Google/DuckDuckGo. At work, I have used Google until I made an effort to switch to DDG.

The best I can paint are stick figures. ;-) I came across that word long before I had any idea what it meant. I remember being very confused, though, when somebody showed me a picture of some rapper wearing a T-shirt that said Krylon. (As so often in life, it was a lot less funny when I was told what it meant... :-/ )

I have tried to use Google alternatives a few times and always go back. Now I also been using Google for a long time and so they have my data and I probably have learned how to use Google efficiently.

One of the biggest difference is something that happened very recently. Google is much faster at updating then the alternatives for some reason.

I suspect it is about event driven versus polling. That Google is given update when things happen from trusted news sites instead of having to poll or crawl for new things. Would not be surprised Google just has a lot more of these connections than MS has.

But I am probably unusual in that I now just try to keep all my data at Google instead of it being spread around.

A big one is my ISP is allowed to sell my data without even me knowing. So I use Google DNS instead of my ISP and also use YouTube TV. All to try to keep my data away from my ISP.

My biggest issue is companies being hacked and people getting my data like what happened to Yahoo. I just trust Google better able to protect.

> But I am probably unusual in that I now just try to keep all my data at Google instead of it being spread around.

I made just the opposite choice, instead trying to offer different parts of my data to different companies. That way, when one company gets hacked, changes its terms of service, gets bought, etc., my losses are limited.

This is key. You can't keep all of your data off the Internet, but you can guarantee nobody can see all of it by trying to prevent your various internet identities from being linked or associated, and keeping data siloed in different, disconnected services.

There's a couple things I do still use Google for, like YouTube. But since they no longer have 95% of my personal data, the impact of them having my YouTube history is drastically reduced.

Firstly, it is quite difficult to manage so many usernames and passwords, for non-tech-savvy people such as my parents.

Secondly, don't you think that actually maintaining it is very difficult? One inadvertant click could expose one of those accounts to another with a different service provider, etc. Arguably, it can work should you define a different browser profile for each of those accounts!? Nonetheless, it is neither easy nor smooth, in my opinion.

If you are that worried about your ISP selling your data sign up for a $5 a month DO/Linode instance and look at a VPN (or it's slightly easier to setup cousin, sshuttle if you are a linux user).

So it's not just me that thinks Google lost the war to spammers?

I limit my searches to com,org,net,io domains and the first pages are still full of spam.

The UI is race-to-the-bottom terrible.

Choosing "verbatim" takes 3 mouse clicks FFS!

Google is becoming only useful with esoteric knowledge. E.g. you need to append site:stackexchange for the search to be useful.

It really depends what you're searching for - product reviews are an endless landscape of garbage, science-related stuff is pretty good.

Google might have just lumped you into the idiot bin, there are people who WANT their searches to look like spam. Google will happily show people what it thinks they want based on how they've interacted with the service (or sometimes, how the people on that IP address/machine have interacted with the service).

I always have to start an incognito tab to find anything that isn't pure drivel on my mothers machine. Otherwise I get search results that look remarkably like the spam she forwards me.

Try a search from an incognito tab and compare.

She might have malware. My parents' machine had a malicious extension that made all the search results terrible.

> Why are the results so strange, and no improvement in sight for years

I don't currently have any issues with Google search result but I won't be surprised if underlying PageRank is slowly crumbling away. After all forums died off, blogs popularity has drastically dropped and most links between users are exchanged on closed platforms (FB) / communicators. Wisdom of the crowd might no longer be available in open web.

>For example, why do Google searches for HTML/JS stuff result in third-party crap sites instead of pointing me directly to the relevant MDN or W3C sites? Why do searches for company names result in tons of marketing crap (where their main web site would have been sufficient), instead of at least showing the Wikipedia article as well?

I gotta be honest, from my perspective, that feels like a weird thing to say. It's totally different from what I've seen.

I always get sites like MDN/W3C when I search for HTML/JS stuff, usually there isn't any blogspam at all on the first page of results. I always get Wikipedia articles and main company websites when I search for a company's name.

I have a lot of problems with Google, but I almost never see 'spammy' search results. It's weird that our experiences are so different.

> For search engines, it's not Bing versus Google, there are DuckDuckGo, YaCy and so on.

DDG is just a wrapper for Bing.

Wait, really?

Fwiw, I switched to DDG a ~year ago (can't remember honestly lol), and I've been quite happy. With that said, not a week goes by where I don't use the !g bang to run my search on Google. DDG just has terrible results. It's good enough a lot, maybe even most of the time, but frequently it's too terrible.

I'm still happy I switched, the "good enough" results are heavily reinforced by privacy, and not giving Google everything. The fact remains though, DDG misses the mark for me frequently.

No, GP post is inaccurate. As sources below state, DDG

"generates those results from over 400 individual sources, including key crowdsourced sites such as Wikipedia, and other search engines like Bing, Yahoo!, Yandex, and Yummly.[6][7]" as well as DuckDuckBot.

Also, more importantly, Bing, like google and facebook is building personal dossiers on everyone, while DDG is not.

This is so wrong it's laughable. Please provide proof if this ridiculousness.

https://web.archive.org/web/20150124074006/https://duck.co/h...

“Just a wrapper” is misleading, but DDG returns bing results at least some of the time.

I suspect they're referring to the fact that it is? (Well, Bing and 400+ other engines)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DuckDuckGo

https://web.archive.org/web/20150124074006/https://duck.co/h...

https://www.theregister.co.uk/AMP/2017/08/15/bing_microsoft_...

From what I understand, it's mostly Bing + Yandex (for Russian pages) these days - the additional sources are websites that submit their own custom indexing of their pages.

I suspect the nature of things just leads to that even if they have multiple big upstreams.

If bing offers up the best results most of the time DDG will, as a result, offer up bing results most of the time. "Best results" easily determinable even with DDG privacy constraints.

They're definitely doing some cool stuff at DDG and its certainly a hell of a lot more than "a wrapper around bing." I just don't think expanding their own index infrastructure is something feasible for them right now.

Sure, but I don't think it's fair to compare DDG to other search engines that crawl and index the entire web themselves. It's a different user experience for sure but the indexing is (for the most part) the same as Bing.

I agree, I always get w3schools at the top of html/js results. I actually installed a Chrome extension to allow me to manually block google results from certain domains, to prevent me ever clicking on a w3schools link. It just hides the result as soon as the page loads.

Another annoying one is Postgres ('postgres add primary key'), which always has an ancient version as the first result, sometimes as far back as 7.x.

> For example, why do Google searches for HTML/JS stuff result in third-party crap sites instead of pointing me directly to the relevant MDN or W3C sites?

Probably because you either haven’t searched often enough, or because you’ve been clicking on too many irrelevant links when presented with results.

I consistently get MDN and StackOverflow results in the top when I search because those are the links I click the most so Google has learned that I prefer those sites.

Speaking of W3C, in case you are not aware the site W3Schools has nothing to do with W3C, and W3Schools used to be filled with a lot of outdated information. I’ve heard they’ve gotten better but I still never intentionally click on W3Schools links and when I do by accident I immediately navigate away. Even though they’ve allegedly gotten better I don’t like them and I urge others not to use W3Schools. Use MDN, StackOverflow and the real W3C resources instead.

You can use devdocs.io for MDN searches. It just parses and scrapes MDN among many other authoritative doc sites into an easy, searchable reference manual

I'd actually prefer the 3rd party searches on google over duckduckgos, because I could easily refine the search on google by appending "MDN" in search and get the result. Not only that, I know I can find the MDN and W3C doc easily, so I want to broaden my search horizon normally when doing a google search anyhow

DDG doesn't give you as much of an oppurtunity to see the 3rd party sites though, so its more limited

Finally, biased searches. I actually prefer biased searches the vast majority of time, partially because I'm too lazy to bookmark sites I visit a lot. If I wanted an unbiased search result DDG is my go to tool

Fans of LineageOS and Replicant absolutely must look into CopperheadOS - the most stable version of Android I've ever used.

DDG is a godsend. It’s painful when you first switch and realize just how skewed and weird Google’s results have been though. Sort of like waking up from a particularly disorienting dream.

DDG results are great, but it still pains me that it's (relatively) slow compared to Google + Chrome, which is as close to instantaneous as far as I perceive.

On Firefox and Safari they seem the same to me, and either way I’d rather wait a few extra ms to get results that aren’t a bunch of SEO spam and ads.

> DDG results are great

No, it's still far inferior to Google search.

Try "D without garbage collection" in both, and get back to me.

First result in DDG is from stack overflow: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/13574552/d-programming-w...

Google: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/13574552/d-programming-w...

Same exact thing, so what is your point exactly?

Cherry-picking, then. Real cute.

Of the top 10 Google results, 9 specifically relate to the D programming language.

Of the top 10 DuckDuckGo results, the number is 3.

Using the top result of a search engine with a string you provided is cherry picking?

Yeah... good to see you’re not reaching or anything.

You're suggesting that nothing matters but the top result?

Don't be silly.

I’m suggesting that if the top result works it doesn’t matter. More, I’m suggesting that the next time you want to suggest a challenge you should run it yourself, first.

You can also try https://www.startpage.com/ (or !s in DDG)

Googley, but without the personal dossier.

I'm seeing different ordering of results from Google. I used a fresh Private Browsing session, so no cookies.

Second result from Google: https://dlang.org/blog/2017/06/16/life-in-the-fast-lane/ (on StartPage this is the third result)

Second result from StartPage: https://dlang.org/spec/garbage.html (on Google this is the third result)

Don’t know what to tell you except that one of them is known to filter and personalize results, definitely leverages your IP address and other identifiers, and the other claims not to.

Can confirm, using DDG, Fedora, Lineage, never looking back.