Why should I use DuckDuckGo instead of Google? | Hacker News Reader

Why should I use DuckDuckGo instead of Google?

quora.com

245 pointsberkeleyjunk189 comments

No offense to Gabriel or DDG, but this kind of question on quora always looks a bit set-up.

If you take DDG out it reads like "Why should I use <specific product>?", to which the creator/CEO/Owner of <specific product> can now answer with the complete marketing blurb he/she has ready, without guilt.

I also have seen that about some obscure AI-Algorithm and a question like "Why is <obscure algorithm> so superior?". To which the inventor of said algorithm had a few pages as a reply.

I don't understand what the problem is.

It's irrelevant if the question is being set-up or not for people wanting to know the difference between a search engine marketing itself for privacy, like DuckDuckGo, versus Google.

I think OP is making a distinction between a question like "what are the differences between DDG and Google" and the more subjective question that was actually posted. With a subjective question, the marketing team can come tout all the positive attributes as reasons why one should switch without giving equal time to discuss what might be lacking.

In other words, the bottom line was already written.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/34XxbRFe54FycoCDw/the-bottom...

Yeah agreed I've actually seen this a lot on Quora as well.

I personally don't think there's anything "wrong" with it because the pros listed will most definitely be valid however as an outside user, I am interested in both the products and they are less likely to tout their own shortcomings.

The real answer may very well be different to the marketing answer that a founder or CEO might put out. In fact it usually is.

DDG is my default search engine, and I only revert to Google very rarely. I'm happy DDG exists and want them to succeed. Yet I would take quite some issue with point 4 "We listen". They may very well listen more than the others, particularly Google who are renowned for being deaf. I've reported faults with bangs, instant answers or results to DDG with little effect weeks and weeks later. They also shut down their community for creating and fixing bangs and instant answers.

Maybe you are right, but it's quite pointless in this context to judge someone's intentions.

Staged or not, if Gabriel's answer is factually accurate -- as it seems to be from a cursory look -- I don't see a problem here.

That's actually a pretty smart way of marketing, Gabriel might have had a shadow account to write that question

And then answer 10 months later?

I didn't see that so I probably am completely wrong here

Quora makes the edit history of everything related to a question public. In this case, the question was asked by John Fish. His profile looks like it could be fake, but it's not clear. If it is fake, they waited several months after asking the Quora question before adding other non-setup questions as cover. https://www.quora.com/profile/John-Fish-49

No problem with that - it's a legitimate marketing channel, which in this day and age of digital proliferation, cannot be ignored. No one forced anyone else to read it, but people are obviously searching in a similar fashion and these answers are getting read.

> No one forced anyone else to read it, but people are obviously searching in a similar fashion and these answers are getting read

The problem is that it is seriously blurring the line between advertising and unbiased(or less biased that an ad from the company) advice/comparison of search engines.

Is it though? I think it is very clear that this is advertising regardless of the authenticity of the source of the question. The answer is an ad and I don't think that is bad (or good).

It's clear to you and I, but I can see how it would not be clear to others.

They could have stated up front in the response that they represent DDG, but they did not.

> They could have stated up front in the response that they represent DDG, but they did not

perhaps they thought it was unnecessary to repeat the information that sits just under the title:

"Gabriel Weinberg, CEO & Founder at DuckDuckGo (2008-present)"

Honestly I didn't even notice that until you pointed it out. I guess my mind is trained to jump straight to the content and ignore everything else around it.

Who cares if it's staged? Taking on a giant like Google requires some hassle and maneuvering.

As a business owner it's your responsibility to do whatever it takes to succeed. This harms no one.

Yes, this is benign and shrewd. But "to do whatever it takes to succeed" is a motto that is rotten to the core.

Said the unsuccessful entrepreneurs.

Except unlike all other marketing, this "Marketing blurb" is packed with information and likely teaches the reader about new things, like "Filter Bubble" which they probably didn't even realize is a thing.

Can't you say that about pretty much any time someone asks about a product in a forum where people who are involved with the product have accounts?

The question was asked on 2017-03-12. Weinberg didn't answer until 2018-01-24, 10 months later, after others had answered. After Weinberg answered others continued to add answers.

If it was a setup, they did a really good job of making it look like a "user finds question about something he has first hand knowledge of and answers" situation.

It's good to be cautious, but most of the time the monsters aren't actually coming to Maple Street.

You're right, I don't think this particular question was set up. And I don't blame Gabriel for answering.

What I wanted to say is, that as a reader the answer to the general question "Is product X good?" by the owner/creator/inventor of said product, adds little value. Because obviously the creator knows a lot about his/her product but is also very biased. And I can probably find the same arguments and thoughts somewhere on the product page itself.

I've seen this exact question on my feed with 'sponsored' above, so it seems intentionally asked and answered as part of an advertising campaign.

In the early days of StackOverflow (mostly during the beta) there was encouragement to ask intelligent questions which hadn't been asked yet. This was a way to seed the site with better content.

I can see the same strategy being useful to Quora who rely on search engine traffic. Sadly, the low signal/noise ratio of Quora, and encouragement of opinions (not that many SO answers aren't!) makes the content even more subjective.

SO has a horrible tendency to mark questions as already answered, when they are in fact subtly different questions. It’s infuriating when you are deep in the weeds.

You can find idiotic question on both SO and Quora but, in my experience, the stupidity demonstrated in Quora questions is just astounding.

But that is not the issue. The issue is that complete garbage answers get upvoted to the top too frequently. You actually have to dig very deep to find something interesting.

Both of the points you have made are very similar to the issues with ExpertsExchange which SO set out to replace. The reason idiotic questions and answers remain is that they are fodder for people arriving from search engines. If you cleaned them up and removed the duplication there would be a huge reduction in content. I often wonder if Quora actually knows what it wants to be when it grows up. They have some serious funding (https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/quora) for what little they seem to have delivered. I would love for them to prove me wrong as I think there is space for an alternative to SO and the StackExchange network.

> If you take DDG out it reads like "Why should I use <specific product>?", to which the creator/CEO/Owner of <specific product> can now answer with the complete marketing blurb he/she has ready, without guilt.

From what I have seen, this is what Quora is all about related on technology, basically a marketing platform for companies to spit their boilerplate marketing material.

It wasn't always this way, although it certainly started heading in that direction and that's when I decided to delete my account. Sad to hear that the situation appears to have gotten even worse - it was a really great site in the early days.

> You may realize they also track you on YouTube, Gmail, Chrome, Android, Gmaps, and all the other services they run. Yes, you can live Google-free. I’ve been doing it for many years.

You can, however all these alternatives are measurably worse in terms of features and ease-of-use, so much so that switching to them is both painful at first and frustrating on a daily basis. Consider the sheer number of people who in every DDG thread keep on saying "well yes DDG results are worse than Google's, but you can use Google from DDG so it's okay". Well it's not okay for most people.

Also, bangs seem like a great idea at first, until you realise that Google simply does not need them to return relevant results! Then they suddenly seem way less differenciating and more like an acknowledgement of the inferiority of DDG compared to Google. And as a user, I'd much rather type "duckduckgo" and get the official site at first then the wikipedia entry (with a complimentary knowledge box on the side) than have to decide first where I want to look and then type "!w duckduckgo".

Even in this very thread, we can read stuff like

> "I've been using DuckDuckGo for years now. It's not perfect but if you think carefully about your query it will work fine.

> For me the killer feature is DDG's bang commands (https://duckduckgo.com/bang) prepend "!w" for wikipedia, "!imdb" for movie trivia stuff, etc."

Well, Google will achieve the same or better results without this need to mentally switch context. This is a feature, and a key differentiator.

When is the last time you used DDG? I switch about a year ago. I've used the !g trick 3 times when I didn't find what I wanted, and in all cases google didn't find what I was looking for either.

I can't speak for you, but I find DDG is good enough to replace google for search. Is google better - maybe, but not enough to overcome their downsides.

I've been using DDG for years now, and the results are exactly as good as Google. I've never had a case where going to Google returned better results for me. Maybe it's because I tend to search for programming/hardware questions, but that's my experience.

Also, I don't use bangs, I use the browser's built-in searches. So, for example, "i <movie name>" will take me to IMDB (actually Rotten Tomatoes nowadays) by searching for "site:imdb.com ! <movie name>" on DDG.

I still have to fall back to Google every now and then or tweak the request more. Random example I encountered today:

"Mastodon API". DDG does not find the api documentation on the first two screens, on Google spot 1 is the old location of the docs that has a link to the new, spot 2 is the new location of the docs.

"Mastodon API documentation" and DDG understands it too.

I’ll second that. DDG is good for regular searches, but can stumble upon rare particular queries and/or what one calls ‘deep googling’. Otoh, it is good that I can hide everything except few queries from google, so it wastes its money on irrelevant ads that I block anyway.

..and by DDG, you mean Bing.

Yahoo, actually, if you insist that DDG is not a fair search engine on its own. Both shown very similar results on my areas of interest.

DDG was built on Yahoo! BOSS, which was backed by Yahoo search engine results until Yahoo switched to Bing (almost 10 years ago.) So, if we are insisting on being accurate, SSG's main backend is Bing.

Didn't know that. So, is it safe to use ddg in a sense of not gifting your data to ms/ggl/etc tech pigs? Or is it just Bing with a new skin?

I don't think it is just a re-skinned Bing, the people behind DDG have done a lot of work to built features around the "10 blue links."

The question is: Do you trust a trillion dollar company, with everything to lose if it is revealed that they are misusing user data [1], or do you trust a 50 people team who is trying to get you to switch using FUD techniques.

[1] ..and by the way, have waaay better results than their closest competitor

I trust my eyes. The ads that get through filters show that a trillion dollar company tries to earn another cent of my data and ddg team doesn’t, at least it is not instantly visible. Chances are, their business model really implements my privacy, while a $1T guys openly sell it asap. Health, porn, food, tech, politics — everything. If ddg datamines me too, then, well, data buyers remain the same and there is no way to hide the fact of sale. Given that, is there a reason to trust them less?

Yes, of course! They have little to lose compared to Google, which has _everything_ to lose.

Lack of personalization is not a "feature" that DDG implemented. It is a lack of feature that they had to justify. The results that they were getting back from Yahoo! BOSS were not personalized, because Yahoo! (and now Bing,) would not trust a third-party with your ID, let alone your data.

More importantly: Google is not selling your info to anyone. They use it to personalize their two main search engines: web and ads. Non-personalized ads means smaller revenue per ad, which in turn means more ads shown to you (which is what you get with DDG.) If you see Google ads on a third-party site, it is still Google that is directly serving those ads, not that site.

Think of it this way: Here is a company that screams that Google is evil, but is happy to provide you with direct functionality ("!g") to visit Google, and oh, by the way, says nothing about their main partner, Bing, that also personalizes results.

On the other hand, look at Google's behavior. They own duck.com through their acquisition of On2. What do they show when you visit duck.com ? "If you meant to visit the search engine DuckDuckGo, click here." Who does that ?!

Brands build trust over many years, and in my (and most of the planet's) opinion, Google has earned mine.

I could be more worried about ISPs logging URLs and selling them, but I'm not: I'm just not that interesting to track and I bet this is true for most of us. Maybe you're different.

With respect - how you possible state that? If you are not searching on google most of the google magic isn't going to work?

For instance - when I google "python" google knows I mean the programming language. For another user, they may mean the snake.

What do you mean? I search for <x> on DDG, results are unsatisfactory, I search for <x> on Google, results are equally unsatisfactory. Sure, Google may know I mean the language, not the snake, but I never search for "python", I always search for something like "python regex", which clarifies it for almost all cases.

One use to be able to help contribute niche type search support to DDG. I went on their forums a year or two back and it did not see as if they were still accepting this.

I have to fall back to Google for almost every search for specific coding information. I want it to work but it really doesn't.

I have to frequently fall back, so every time I make the switch to DDG - I quickly switch back out of frustration

>I've been using DDG for years now, and the results are exactly as good as Google.

That's mostly because DDG use Googles API, they don't actually search anything themselves.

I thought they mainly used Bing; not Google.

DDG says they use "over 400 sources" [1] direct link [2]. They don't mention Google at all.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DuckDuckGo#Overview

[2] https://duck.co/help/results/sources

> Maybe it's because I tend to search for programming/hardware questions, but that's my experience.

I feel like I have the reverse experience—that only non programming queries work well on DDG. I have literally switched my programming searches a bunch of times today alone, from DDG to Google by simply prepending the !g bang. Google would then give me way better results on the exact same query. This is sometimes I very often end up doing.

I would love to not use Google, so DDG is still my default, but I sure end up there a lot anyways :(

>I've never had a case where going to Google returned better results for me

Only if the search query is something trivial as "ruby Array" or "SQL WHERE".

As soon as you ask more general question (yeah, sometimes it is pretty hard to come up with a strict search query) DDG does not understand what the heck do you want to get in return unlike google which as results for a queries similar to the you've provided.

I tried DDG for a while and had the opposite experience. Worked fine for trivial stuff (looks like Bing), but I whenever it was tricky to come up with a solid query, DDG failed and Google worked. Can't use it.

I have been using DDG for over a year now. I have to use Google/!g at least once daily. Especially with forums/blog posts, it shows older, outdated info more often than Google. And my searches mostly consist of programming related topics too.

I continue use DDG to support them but I do wish their results were better.

DDG has been working well enough for me that I haven't had a good reason to compare on technical or other topics. However, DDG is worse looking for local information for things like store opening hours, Google knowing your location is an advantage there.

For opening hours I now often use http://openpoimap.org/

It can be a challenge sometimes to find the right category to activate to get the markers but when using the search box it usually tells you in brackets which category to switch on for more information and it even centers the map for you.

YM(and expectation)MV, obviously.

I tried to be Google free for a couple of months by dropping Chrome and Google's search for Firefox and DDG. It was a painful experience. Without going in to detail (though I easily could), the stability, performance, and quality just was not there at all. In the end, the final straw was a critical business app that I use that had one too many problems with Firefox. I ended up having to bail. I still look forward to the day that I can ditch Google, but it isn't going to be today unfortunately.

I prefer to fail-over to google. If DDG doesn't work, then I use google by typing !g in the search bar. Using DDG and increasing their audience should hopefully make them better in the long run.

For a long time, I felt that Firefox was just less nice to work with than Chrome and couldn't quite make the switch. However, Firefox developer addition feels pretty "Chrome-like" and I've yet to experience any noticeable performance or stability issues.

I'm really curious about the business app you had problems with. I've yet to experience any issues with Firefox and apps since moving back to FF shortly before they moved to Quantum. I do know there are many apps that take advantage of non-standard features supported by Chrome, which could be the case here. I was finally able to completely ditch Google, though because of going back to college to finish up my degree, I'm stuck with MS for a bit longer, though I've been fairly pleased with W10, I'm a sucker for the Ubuntu subsystem.

I'm not sure this is a key differentiator. I don't know how many times I've searched for a tv show, movie, song, etc and wanted the wikipedia page, and Google has only shown my IMDB and a ton of other corporate marketing sites, with wikipedia nowhere to be found on the first few pages.

Without a knowledge graph infobox?

When you want the Wikipedia page, can't you search on Wikipedia directly? At least in Firefox, I have Wikipedia added as a search keyword.

> so much so that switching to them is both painful at first and frustrating on a daily basis

Speaking as someone who made a switch about 2 years ago, I could not agree more. For desktop purposes it's OK because I don't mind refining my search query, but for mobile it's a serious pain. As an example, sometimes you just want to look up something quickly, like restaurant reviews, or an article you were talking about to a friend. Trying to "re-find" things you've searched or seen before, or trying to find specific places in your neighbourhood, that is where the need for privacy takes its largest toll on convenience.

Why isn't there a way to combine privacy with keeping your data?

> Why isn't there a way to combine privacy with keeping your data?

Because we haven't figured out how to monetize it yet. Or perhaps more accurately, we haven't convinced the average consumer that it's worth paying for.

In theory, we could build services which do combine privacy with convenience, but consumers would have to be willing to pay for those services - and pay enough to make them viable. But too many people are too accustomed to "free" services, paid for with their data/loss of privacy (an intangible loss which many people either don't care about or believe it's too late to recover), to like the idea of handing over cold hard cash instead (a tangible loss which could directly impact the ability of people on limited budgets to access these services).

Like many others in this thread, I've got ddg as the default search engine and sometimes fall back to google (maybe once a week.) I think google is "smarter", specifically sometimes about the context of the query. However, I usually don't prefer that: it's sometimes very difficult to find something on google which resembles, but is not, something popular that people often search for. In that situation, my brain can play ddg's results more easily. Perhaps it's relevant that said brain was wired for web search in a simpler time, on altavista.

I take issue with the idea that alternatives are measurably worse:

- Gmail -> FastMail: faster, more standards compliant, fewer limits (e.g. user aliases, connections, domains, etc), sub-domain aliasing, push email on iOS, app passwords with certain permissions (e.g. just SMTP, for usage on your server), mobile web interface that doesn't suck

- Chrome -> Firefox: better UI for power users, better extensions, better privacy (e.g. Facebook multi-account container), even after the WebExtensions API

- Android -> iOS: OK, this isn't for everybody, still you have AOSP distributions out there and to their credit Android is very customization still

- Gmaps -> OpenStreeMaps: in Easter/Central Europe where I live the maps in Gmaps are really poor and got me lost several times, OSM is miles ahead, for POIs too

- YouTube -> Vimeo: not for users, but for content creators Vimeo is superior because it lets you sell your movies and embed private videos on your own website; for users too I prefer seeing conference presentations on Vimeo because the mobile app lets me download them for offline viewing; YouTube indeed is unmatched in content, but I don't feel it's very relevant

> bangs seem like a great idea at first, until you realise that Google simply does not need them to return relevant results

That's just wrong. I've been using Google since aprox 2002 and no, their results are pretty shitty at times and are only getting worse. I was using "custom search engines" with _keywords_ (supported in both Firefox and Chrome) even when I was using Google. Also DuckDuckGo is pretty good at serving direct answers to various question types too.

I'm not a fan of DDG bangs though, because the browser is perfectly capable of handling custom search engines powered by keywords. That's not why I use DDG.

> in Easter/Central Europe where I live the maps in Gmaps are really poor and got me lost several times, OSM is miles ahead, for POIs too

OSM is nigh-bubkes without some other data from a service like Waze; else the "fastest" route won't take into account traffic congestion.

Traffic congestion is only relevant for people driving a car. More people use maps for routing than just drivers. I too live in Eastern/Central Europe like the OP, and when I am looking for a place on my phone, I am typically on foot, on my bike, or I am searching for suitable public transportation between me and my destination.

That's fine if you're only going to look at Wikipedia. I use Google Scholar a lot, and !scholar is mighty useful.

!gsc is shorter :)

Once you use DDG for a while, you will soon realize just how bad google's filter bubble was. I sometimes do '!g' just to see what Google returns and it's just bad. It's mostly packed with ads, it's just so bad.

If I know I want to go a Wikipedia article, I can avoid an extra click. I use DDG as a research tool, and being able to bang jump to pubmed, UniProt, DrugBank, etc really speeds up my workflow.

bangs are a dumb way to solve a problem, because you're basically telling the user they must use terminal or command line synthax to interact with a search engine.

once you start !banging, you are not far from -dashing and that is --not -a "good user experience".

> measurably worse in terms of features

I suppose that depends on whether you think of privacy as a feature or not.

I think the real question is which Google year has DDG reached feature/quality with? Eg. is DDG as good as Google circa 2010?

As soon as you pose this question, whatever the answer, you will realize that your life was pretty fine with google in 20xx. You didn't feel pain or frustration then, why are you feeling that now?

I've been a long time Google Search user that used to complain about DuckDuckGo's results. That changed and I'm now a full time DuckDuckGo user, on desktop and mobile.

For one I became aware of privacy implications, so went to my Google account and deleted all apps history I had. To their credit they let you delete your data (although under GDPR companies now no longer have a choice). I did this because looking back I was amazed at how many things they could infer from my searches over the last decade at least (my Google account is from 2004).

Without that history Google's results became visibly worse than before, worse than DuckDuckGo!

Also once you become privacy aware you end up being concerned with the actual searches. For example I'm now following a ketogenic diet for weight loss and I also have hypothyroidism issues, so lately I ended up doing a lot of searches on weight loss, diabetes, ketosis, hyperinsulinemia, heart disease, interpretation of cholesterol results, high uric acid and gout, etc... some of these issues have been for my own education, but I cannot in good conscience let Google know of my potential health issues. I was careless enough to join a local T2 diabetes group on Facebook and now I'm getting ads for diabetics.

Whenever I searched for a subject on DuckDuckGo, I never noticed subsequent "relevant" ads following me around the web ... although you can get them via Google/Facebook enabled tracking planted on the landing pages themselves, but I'm armored with an ad-blocker, Privacy Badger, plus Firefox's FB Multi-account Containers.

I cannot investigate DuckDuckGo's implementation of course. This is not open source. So there's always the risk of betrayal. But the difference is I already know what Google is doing and I want none of it.

And as far as quality is concerned, I got used to it, plus I now have better peace of mind, coupled with the blocking of trackers and with a good VPN of course. Once the privacy mindset infects you, it's really hard to go back unfortunately :-)

BTW, I don't know if DuckDuckGo is the best choice. For European users, it's still hosted in the US which might be a concern. Here are 2 other alternatives:

1. https://about.qwant.com/

2. https://www.startpage.com/

I don't understand why DDG is not open source. I don't think it would hurt them business wise and it would be much easier to trust them.

It's a web interface linked to a service in the cloud. You can't secure a web interface, since the changes going on the backend are invisible to the user and even if you have a system that makes use of end to end cryptography (which doesn't apply here), you can always be targeted with a special version of the client that tracks you.

This is why online password managers that allow you to insert your password in a web form are inherently insecure.

So it would be cool if DDG open sourced their code, but it wouldn't help for doing reviews of how well they respect their privacy policy.

In such cases you just have to trust them. Well, for companies such as DDG, if they broke their privacy policy and word got out, the company would go out of business fast. Since a good reputation is all they have.

SEO attacks?

I've been using DuckDuckGo for years now. It's not perfect but if you think carefully about your query it will work fine.

For me the killer feature is DDG's bang commands (https://duckduckgo.com/bang)

prepend "!w" for wikipedia, "!imdb" for movie trivia stuff, etc.

And if you don't find what you're looking for "!s" will search with Startpage (a site that proxies Google searches for you)

I initially thought that there would be a high mental cost of switching from Google to DDG - but now that bangs have become muscle memory, using privacy-conscious DDG by default and then using !g if the results aren't helpful feels seamless.

Quick question: What's the advantage of bangs over adding a custom search engine to something like Firefox? In Firefox, we can right click any search bar and add a keyword for the search, so we could just type something like "w topic" to search Wikipedia for some topic. Anyway, maybe there's something I'm missing, but I am curious.

Wikipedia’s in-built search has historically been poorer than third-party search like Google. That is why people prefer to use a bang on DDG to show all relevant content on Wikipedia’s domain.

!w drops to Wikipedia's native search, not DDG's.

I use it precisely for this.

To me the advantage is that it works in any browser. So I don’t have to set up anything. It evens works on mobile.

I was thinking the same. I have a ton of custom search engines in Google Chrome.

Examples:

gi (google image search)

gl (google i'm feeling lucky search)

y (youtube)

wa (wolfram alpha)

i (imdb search)

w (wiki search)

m (google maps directions from my home address)

d (definition)

a (amazon)

f (stock/finance)

>I have a ton of custom search engines in Google Chrome.

Many of those have the exact same abreviation for their bang command. All of them should be available.

I prefer having the same search engine anywhere I use DDG versus only having custom search engines on machines I've customized.

There are some bangs that do not directly correspond to search boxes. For example, "!rfc 2616" expands into https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2616

"Rfc 2616" typed into google works just as well and saves you a click.

Which click? DDG just redirects without even showing a SERP.

All of DDG's bangs already exist. I can just think up what the bang probably looks like and lo-and-behold: it works. Try !mdn, !tvtropes, !deb, !wayback...

Check out http://duckduckgoog.com -- which is google search with a sprinkling of DDG's bang commands

Curious how they made it to work (the same for startpage.com). Even my stationary workplace PC with static IP occasionally asks for captcha in google search. It says something like "we suspect you're a robot that abuses google search, back off". Sometimes solving series of 4 captchas is still not enough so I back off and beep twice.

Besides the privacy issues, the single most frustrating thing is it's dropping of keywords that are critical to the query so it can pretend that it always has search results ready for you (here are zillion results found in 0.0000001 seconds!)

https://www.google.com/advanced_search

My Search: SPC58C72 Nexus Datasheet

Results: Datasheet

Ironically, you are the sole result for "spc58c72" Nexus Datasheet

I don't even remember if the C72 is a chip. Might have been a C74? To further complicate, iirc the C-series is customer specific version with limited data released on it.

ALTHOUGH Nexus is a trace interface, basically Ethernet 10G trimmed down to communicate to a micro directly. And there is pretty much no information on it outside the ultra expensive tools you need to buy.

EDIT: LOL downvotes for Nexus and an obscure STM chip :D Oh Hackernews... be less Reddit.

What were you searching for, if you don't mind sharing ?

I've been using DDG for many years now. I rarely resort to !g anymore, and when I do it doesn't help. (That is, if I don't find anything good in the DDG results, I don't find anything any better in the !g results.)

(That said, my Google account is purposefully pretty clean of "personalization", so if you've let Google track you for many years then maybe it will still return better results for you.)

When I visit duckduckgo.com, uBlock reports blocking a tracking image from the domain improving.duckduckgo.com whose url includes my browser user agent. That doesn't seem fair to me.

One can only wonder what a backlash Google would get if they had their analytics script at https://improving.google.com/ instead of https://www.google-analytics.com/analytics.js

I think a company or a maker does have the right to measure how many people are using their product. As long as they constrain their collection to that, I think it's reasonable.

The payload (sent via query param) seems to include locale, OS and browser (among with a couple other pieces of info that may or may not be related to the user vs. the page).

My concern is about the params. If you use Chrome on Windows at San Francisco user agent is dispersive, but if you connect from a little country using an exotic browser and an exotic OS the user agent data could be enough to identify you.

DDG is an ok skin on bing search results, but their pushy and misleading marketing is a huge turn-off to me. And I'm very very sympathetic to the "we don't track you" cause in general.

I got downvoted the last time I posted this (love you HNers) but DDG states they're more than just a skinned Bing: https://duck.co/help/results/sources

That links "more than 400 sources" to https://duck.co/ia which in turn links to https://docs.duckduckhack.com/#improve-a-live-instant-answer saying "DuckDuckHack is in Maintenance Mode". But https://docs.duckduckhack.com/welcome/how-ias-work.html suggests that these sources are for things displayed at the top, which I see super rarely. So this is in fact a nice example of misleading DDG PR.

Maybe. I just thought it makes sense to share what the "official" DDG position is when calling them out for being a simple "skin".

The 400 sources are just for instant answers. The "normal" search results are all from Bing, Yahoo and Yandex.

I want to love DDG - but for local search in the UK - it is terrible. I can be in a small town, searching for that small town, and it will give me a whole bunch of American results.

It is still my default search on my phone (plus I use Brave as the browser) - but I find myself popping back to google when I want a 'proper' search (and by that I mean the way that I've conditioned myself to thinking search should work with the last X years of googling - sure DDG will feel more natural one day)

> "When you search, you expect unbiased results, but that’s not what you get on Google. On Google, you get results tailored to what they think you’re likely to click on, based on the data profile they’ve built on you over time from all that tracking I described above."

That explains why I get much more helpful results for technical questions on Google than when I tried DDG. Granted, that was 3-4 years ago, maybe I should give DDG another try.

The quote that you citied is bizarre. When I search for my keys at home, I don't want a fair search pattern of the house -- I want the answer... the location of my keys. Bias isn't always bad.

Think about how annoying it would be as a non-tech person to google or acronyms, for example. Google is amazing at what it does in this space.

The problem there is when the personalization interferes with what you're searching for. It's easy to create a more precise search term to clarify things when you get a large set of data, but at times it's not so easy to escape the confines of a bubble that a site locks you into based on an opaque profiling of you.

YouTube is a good example of this. I find the experience of visiting YouTube when not in incognito mode to be just obnoxious. A huge chunk of all recommendations are basically other things I've watched, when more often I just want things related to what I'm currently watching.

I've been using DDG for a while now.

It's taken some time, but I am now finding that DDG is giving me more relevant results than Google. The only time it doesn't is for breaking news, which is something I rarely search for.

Occasionally if I can't find something I'll put !g before it and get Google's results, it's getting very rare now that Google has a better result. Earlier today I started to reflex type ! into Google and then realised there was nowhere to search and google doesn't even have bangs for other sites.

Honestly if I was banned from Google Search I wouldn't miss it now. Couldn't say that 6 months ago.

Did anyone notice that DDG recently stopped treating prefix - as a way to remove search results that contain the prefixed term, i.e. -news would remove all pages with "news"? It is now instead highlighting "news" as the term you searched for... I hope this is just a bug they are going to fix, otherwise I'd have no choice but to migrate elsewhere, as without it search results are mostly useless.

dash works for me. Maybe the issue is specific to "news"?

    bulger

    bulger -whitey

return different results as expected.

Maybe your keyboard is not actually inserting an ASCII "-"? Compare

https://duckduckgo.com/html?q=hacker%20ycombinator%20%CB%97n...

and

https://duckduckgo.com/html?q=hacker%20ycombinator%20%2Dnews

Hmm, that's scary. On Linux Mint it inserts the first one, on macOS the second one...

There are a whole bunch of similar-looking Unicode characters: - ˗ ֊ ‒ – — ― −

Something between your keyboard and the input box is probably trying to be helpful by not inserting a hyphen at the beginning of a word. You might be able to trick it by typing "x-news" then inserting a space or deleting the "x".

Alternatively, file a bug report against your input method or tell DuckDuckGo about it so they can undo the transformation.

I have noticed this...

For instance, searching "dribbble -shots", the first result contains the word "shots" in bold. I'm not entirely sure what makes this happen and is sometimes frustrating when making "advanced searches".

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=dribbble+-shots

Because DDG doesn't bloody geolocate you and then shove some dreadful localized content in your face, in a language you do not understand. If you travel, you'll know what I'm talking about.

Instead of advertising that their quality is better in some way, they employ FUD to say that Google is bad because they tailor their results to the user.

Notice how it's always Google that is under attack and never Bing, which has 20% of the US desktop market share and, incidentally, provides their web results.

What a pathetic way to market a product.

It's not FUD to say that Google track you across the internet and that if you don't want Google to do that you can use DuckDuckGo.

I have no problem with DDG using Bing or Google for search results so long as tracking information about me isn't sent to them as part of the process.

My point is: Bing also personalizes results and has 20% of the US desktop traffic. Did you ever see DDG advertizing that Bing is tracking you ?

I use DuckDuckGo regularly now and Google only when the results aren't up to par (often with technical stuff). I do this in protest of Google becoming the opposite of their motto.

It is faster than google for some things. For example it is nice to be able to type xxxx !octo and auto search at octopart.

Since DuckDuckGo always seems to get the most publicity, I feel compelled to point out two other search engines:

http://www.startpage.com

Searx (https://asciimoo.github.io/searx/)

You can install searx on your own host/PC, or use one of the public instances like http://searx.me (although no one can guarantee that the public instance isn't tracking you). Searx has apparently been around for quite a few years. I installed it recently on my machine and the results are decent enough that I continue to use it.

I actually use startpage.com now. Searx seems curious, thanks - the idea of a self-hosted meta search engine seems curious, I hope it is going to get more steam, perhaps it also could leverage strong personalization and access to my browsing history and bookmarks (which I certainly don't want 3-rd parties like Google or any to have).

DDG is a better search engine for developers for a number of reasons:

- Infinite scroll allows you to find information faster, even from not so notable sources

- Privacy means you can search freely and do research on issues that will probably not be found out on a civil case (patents, papers, dev articles etc).

- Bangs allow for a streamlined, faster search experience if you use certain services massively.

- Search results are very simple. No knowledge graph boxes, etc. So you can just get the content you want.

- Less (irrelevant) advertisements when you leave the search engine. You will be tagged by the content you consume and not the one you search due to privacy settings.

- Your personal data will be safe in case of a Google hack.

* Disclosure: Some years ago I was a DDG ambassador.

The only thing it doesn't do is exact matching when you use quotes, which really sucks when you're looking for something an app you're using spit out and it returns a bunch of irrelevant results that closely match what you typed :/

https://www.google.com/preferences -> Results per page -> drag it to 100

now you don't need infinite scroll.

> - Infinite scroll allows you to find information faster, even from not so notable sources

That is the opposite of my experience. I used to be able to skip, say, 5 or 8 pages of results to ignore the automated botsites and mainstream nonsense on some searches and get less popular but in some contexts more helpful results. Now I'm stuck with torturing my mouse wheel or use some specialist search engine like https://millionshort.com/. Especially since "-" and "+" don't seem to work reliably anymore.

> - Bangs allow for a streamlined, faster search experience if you use certain services massively.

Yes! I love !wa for time zone conversions that understand most appointments copied from somewhere

I've seriously given it a shot, but it's just not the same. I really want DDG to succeed, but don't think it's fully-there, yet. I get significantly more relevant results with google.

Just !g when you search on duckduckgo. The best part of duckduckgo is being able to append commands as to where you want to search. !yt takes your search to youtube, !gi to google images and theres a longer list somewhere for even more sites.

What's the advantage of !g over searching directly from google?

I wind up using DDG as a search terminal basically. I just type to get to any type of search site not just google specific ones.

> I really want DDG to succeed, but don't think it's fully-there, yet.

You should root for Microsoft then and for Bing to succeed. Also in some regards Yahoo and Yandex (the two other search engines that DDG aggregates results from).

>You should root for Microsoft Bing to succeed.

Those paying attention would notice a difference in Google's attitude to the AOSP since WP died. IOS's a slight threat.

For search, Bing's the only "real" competition. If it dies, Google will at best, force DGG, startpage... to include tracking and Adsense. Or simply, track through Chrome.

A few billions in the right pocket will shut EU up. So don't count on their intervention.

Let's Bing at least twice in a year.

> I've seriously given it a shot, but it's just not the same. I really want DDG to succeed, but don't think it's fully-there, yet. I get significantly more relevant results with google.

Why not stick with DDG and only fall back to google with the !g bang command when it fails?

Even better, only fall back to StartPage (google proxy) with the !s bang command when it fails. Same google results, less the tracking

I've used DDG for close to a year now and every time I go to google.com and search it feels like a bloaty Yahoo style web.

I've also noticed that when I don't get the results I want on DDG and try Google instead, it too gives me bad results. Probably a sign I should use some other words in my query.

Can you give some examples of searches that you felt provided significantly more relevant results with google?

I see people say this on occasion, and it was absolutely true some years back. But now a days that does not seem to be the case, at least not for the things that I search for. Perhaps my searches are biased in some way, or perhaps yours are. Mostly, I'm just quite curious and would like to see it with my own eyes.

I'm pretty happy with DDG as well, but someone provided an example further up: Mastodon API. On Google it gives the API docs, on DDG it doesn't.

I am blown away that DuckDuckDuck.com continues to claim no tracking after being exposed for tracking here:

https://archive.is/qntuk

Tracking they removed when called up on it. I'm willing to give it a pass for incompetence, instead of flagging the tracking as malevolence (an application of Hanlon's razor).

I don't know what archive.is is, but earlier today I followed a link to them and got a cloudfare DNS error. Now I get SSL_ERROR_NO_CYPHER_OVERLAP. Can't say they are impressing me so far.

Thanks for sharing this. I’m very disappointed but not surprised.

Even though it is a 'minor' feature, I find the !bangs feature incredibly useful and time-saving. They even make searching on Google faster!

In the rare case that I'm unable to find something in DDG and want to compare with google, I always use the !s bang to use StartPage - which is a proxy of google. Its much slower then DDG or google, but its nice to have that firewall between google and my searches

I’ve switched to DuckDuckGo on my mobile device and it’s great but I found it difficult to commit to on my work machine and switched back to Google.

When conducting searched pertinent to software development the results on DuckDuckGo tended to be too generic, often missing the stackoverflow posts discussing exactly what I’m looking for.

Interesting to read this, because my subjective experience has been exactly the opposite - DDG tends to turn up a bunch of relevant SO posts at the top, while being a bit shaky for more general queries.

> #1 — Google tracks you. We don’t.

I'm not convinced this is a problem. I have commented before that even after 9 years on facebook they still suggest totally irrelevant groups for me to join (for example, facebook recently suggested I join a group for progressive asian-american christians. I am not asian or a christian)

>#3 — Get unbiased results, outside the Filter Bubble.

I read Eli Pariser's book and it was terrible. Full of "might" and "could" and little hard data. I am highly skeptical of the effect of a filter bubble.

>#8 — Our search results aren’t loaded up with ads.

>For many Google searches, most of the entire first page is ads. On mobile it can be even worse.

Really? I have not encountered that many ads on google searches.

>#9 — Search without fear.

Being afraid isn't really a good reason to switch in my mind.

More power to DuckDuckGo but the main thing that will make me use it is if it has good search results.

IMVHO you shoudn't. They are both companies that run proprietary service outside user control.

If you want a different approach you should use something like YaCy witch is a FOSS, distributed, search engine, based on solr. So something you can know (have the code) and that does not run on a single company server.

I agree and don't like the proprietary nature of DDG and others. YaCy has no !bangs, no instant answers and you have to install it.

I've made an open source version of DDG with !bangs, instant answers, etc. We are hosted on Digital Ocean but feel free to run it on your own server or even locally. https://jivesearch.com

They still filter and curate search results though.

For example if you ddg "crimes committed by the fbi" you get a whitewashed and filtered response. So what other responses are modified?

Another good litmus test is to ddg something politically incorrect. Most of the time the response does not match the query.

Presumably, this is because their results are really just from someone else's index (e.g. Bing). If that's the case, then it's not really DDG doing the curating or filtering.

The real test will come if they ever switch over to their own crawl and search.

I feel like I'm having DDG shoved down my throat atm with all the cheesy twitter advertising and spontaneous HN posts. Clearly what happens when you take VC money.

To me - not tracking searches (or, "not doing anything") is not protecting my privacy - It's just not doing anything. Privacy is just a commercial narrative to reinforce a weak service IMO when it comes to DDG.

It's pretty hard to believe there is a big team behind this website. It doesn't feel like it has changed in many years - what are all the employees doing. Clearly lacks leadership on all levels. Probably need better people

I genuinely fear the biggest contribution DDG makes to privacy is their yearly contributions to companies / products that actually product privacy of everyday people

I think it's important to use multiple search engines in order to see different results and disparities. DDG, Google & Bing are the 3 I mainly use and there is quite a disparity on every given search.

I have DDG set up on my home machine. However, I keep on switching back to Google for the difficult searches.

I have an old imac set up with no accounts on it, fascinating to see 'raw' google and how it learns from my searches...

Shameless plug: I've tried DDG in the past and didn't like that they weren't completely open source. I've been developing https://jivesearch.com and it is similar to DDG with all the !bangs and tons of instant answers. It offers better privacy IMO because it is 100% open source and you can run it on your own server or even locally. Plus, we aren't hosted on AWS.

Thank you!

I've been using DDG for quite a few years now, and it's been great, but I wish they would stop with the Yummly recipe results when I search for recipes.

Yummly is a cancer on the Internet, they're just an aggregator as far as I can tell, that gets in the way. We didn't need a recipe site aggregator, search engines work fine. Awful UI/UX while they try and advertise to you and shove things down your throat. DDG, banish Yummly please.

The irony of this linking to Quora is painful. Spen 0.5 on the page; get a request for notifications permissions.

> Even less well known is they also enable advertisers like airlines to charge you different prices based upon your personal information.

I hate this with a passion and it highlights why privacy is valuable to every individual whether or not they think they have "nothing to hide"

Been missing Scroogle just about as long as I've been a DDG user....

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

I have switched to DDG as my default. It answers the many daily questions I have. Have to switch to maps.google for directions though. For research I actually use Yippy. Great filters and easier to set dates.

Slightly related: in the linked article from the answer, iOS is proposed as the privacy preserving alternative to Android. But I am having a hard time to agree to that. Are there anything else?

As much as I like using DDG, the search results rarely feel on par with Google - But I'm mostly searching for German results or specific technical stuff.

I second this. Tried to switch for a while but, especially with the technical stuff, it always feels like you might be missing out on something. Maybe I will try again in a few years or find some sort of mixed solution with both search engines depending on what I'm searching for...

An very simple reason I use it: being able to push the arrow keys to cycle through search hits. Google used to have it, but it's gone now.

DDG is known to be backed by Yandex search engine. This means that your request's metadata is already reported to Russian government services.

https://www.quora.com/How-does-the-partnership-between-Yande... https://duck.co/forum/thread/2725/yandex-partnership

There seems to be no direct link between DDG and Yandex besides these two links that lack any evidence. Yandex merely appears to be one of DDG's content sources.

I'm pretty sure there may be some. Please check my comment in previous post about DDG https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17868117

Read your original post. As far as I understand you are saying these two things:

1. Yandex search results very closely match DDG's in Ukrainian (or did) as opposed to Google/Bing

2. When Yandex could no longer operate in Ukraine, DDG's region for Ukraine disappeared

I am reminded of Hanlon's Razor in this situation, that perhaps in Ukraine they simply did not fix their search after their top index provider was blocked.

> DDG is known to be backed by Yandex search engine.

IIRC, DDG is a privacy-preserving metasearch engine. That means it farms your query out to other search engines and then combines the results.

I think it started by proxying Google searches to hide your metadata from Google.

> This means that your request's metadata is already reported to Russian government services.

This sound like FUD. Why would a metasearch engine send anything out to the search engines it proxies besides the query? It might not even have to make that query for your request if someone else made it recently.

Large employers fake GOOG certificates and spy on employee's search queries.

They usually won't do that for DDG and smaller portals.

News to me! Interesting - do you have a source for that? Surely browsers will be flagging up HTTPS warnings for this?

Commercial products like BlueCoat proxies do this. You won't see a warning because the CA of the proxy will be trusted on your system by your administrator.

Certificate pinning with HSTS/HPKP isn't effective as the proxy can strip those headers in the response.

https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/33976/man-in-th...

There is a fantastic paper on how these proxies often lower security: "The Security Impact of HTTPS Interception" [1]. The paper also provides some interesting ways of detecting this type of proxy on the server (and client too - although a client should know if they have custom trusted certs). mitm.watch has implemented the details of the paper.

[1] https://jhalderm.com/pub/papers/interception-ndss17.pdf

[2] https://mitm.watch/

Or you know use, your phone on data plan instead of corporate network for anything private.

Would it be possible to detect this by inspecting the certificate information manually?

Yes, 100%. Just click on a lock icon in browser and drill down.

Eventually you'll see the weirdness that Google certificate (as well as Linkedin and some others) are issued by BlueCoat or something like that.

Big banks do that.

It is not just about Google Search vs DDG. If you use DDG via Google Chrome, google can still track you.

I use it for streaming movies, Google has managed to clean its results from a lot of these websites.

DDG should display Google results side-by-side

it is probably illegal for them to do so.

Use Brave instead of Chrome (:

Will they make me use AMP? I don't want to use AMP.

I've been using DDG pretty exclusively for about a year now. I've never seen an AMP domain/link in any of my search results

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