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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.

> 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 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 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.

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

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.

> 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.

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 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.

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.

Without a knowledge graph infobox?

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.

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 :)

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?

> measurably worse in terms of features

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

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".

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.