I first tried DDG in its early years and it just didn't yield the results I needed, I tried it again a couple of years ago and have stuck with it ever since as it has must better results these days.
For me personally, Google is a less pleasant experience these days.
The DuckDuckGo privacy extension is currently the only type of "ad-blocker" I currently use. I really like the look and feel, as well as the functionality. The automatic downgrade from an A rating for the lack of an entry on https://tosdr.org/ is a little over the top for me though.
I'm very upset because this hinders my daily work and research. I'm starting to rely on Bing which is definitely worse than old Google but may be better than current Google.
I want to like DDG but it's normally missing article dates or other small features I depend on. I'll keep checking in to see if this changes.
Results are decent but I just hate that.
I tried to switch to DDG on mobile recently (using the Brave browser) and I found myself really missing those inline results.
Our search result pages may include a small number of
clearly labeled "sponsored links", which generate revenue
and cover our operational costs. Those links are retrieved
from platforms such as Google Adwords. In order to enable
the prevention of click fraud, some non-identifying system
information is shared, but because we never share personal
information or information that could uniquely identify
you, the ads we display are not connected to any
individual user."> Our search result pages may include a small number of clearly labeled "sponsored links", which generate revenue and cover our operational costs. Those links are retrieved from platforms such as Google Adwords. In order to enable the prevention of click fraud, some non-identifying system information is shared, but because we never share personal information or information that could uniquely identify you, the ads we display are not connected to any individual user."
I still find this weird because it's the exact opposite for me. I've posted this here several times, but to say it again: Everytime I use google, they honor all my forced terms. DDG, as soon as they don't have a lot of results, says "As we can't show you a lot of results, we decided you want something completely unrelated instead. Have fun."
Google also shows you which terms they excluded, DDG quietly drops them.
I like DDG, but when they made that change, it made me use !g more often.
edit: Because people tend to downvote me when I say this, here are examples:
Query: google "amp" modal
DDG: Google Maps SO issue, Google Sheets landing page, more google maps results. Only 7 is related by simply showing the AMP homepage.
Google: Only google amp results related to "modals" in some way.
And yes, the results google shows are actually in DDGs index, it's just that they decided they know what I want even though I forced the amp term.
I've found myself using double quotes more often now than ever before. Google just doesn't seem to understand what I'm looking for.
The growth of content marketing has ruined Google search results.
Ex: `libwacom huion gaomon`, missing libwacom in first result.
I tried switching to Brave and DuckDuckGo over the last six months, but found myself opening google and re-running the search so often that I recently gave up, and, with misgivings, reset my browser and search preferences back to google.
Duckduckgo just never found what I was looking for, and, in broader searches, would return relatively fewer results.
What Google does is to have context and to use that context to make the queries more specific. They use for example your location and your history of searches.
However being privacy conscious, I deleted my Google history and disabled the collecting of history in my Google account. And then the results became visibly worse.
This is important because when people complain loudly about the difference, they usually have a search history in Google going back a decade, reflecting a trail of embarrassing moments of course that most couldn’t make public. Not many people are curious to look at that history, although to Google’s credit, they do expose it in full detail and a nice interface.
With DDG you just have to be a little more explicit. For example searching for “ruby” won’t yield results related to programming (except for ruby-lang.org), but searching for “ruby programming” does. So in general you just have to be a little more specific and we’re talking about a word or two.
Nowadays whenever I can’t find something on DDG on my first try, I’m confident that I won’t find it with Google either. And lately I feel like DDG is better, maybe due to my changing search patterns.
The real gain is privacy and this reflects in the searches you’re doing. I can’t convince myself to search for medical conditions on Google anymore. What if I’d get classified as a diabetic (I’m not)? What if that data leaks and this affects my credit score? No thank you.
my guess as to the reasons for this particular failure of !G is that, because i have been gradually shifting to fastmail for the past 1.2years and the chain of messages between myself and the company i was looking up never managed to make it from linkedin --> gmail.
Moreover, I'm not convinced it's entirely due to my search history, location or other online history. It's definitely not search skills, or inspecificity of search terms that's the problem.
IMHO, it's mostly poor coverage. In my casual experience, it's particularly evident in academic journal articles, but there's definitely poorer coverage in general. Even when I know the web page I'm looking for, I can't get it to show up in the search. Or, as I mentioned, a blanket search will bring up a page or so of relevant links, compared to many pages from google.
The elephant in the room here is Bing. Bing is an objectively worse search. There's no way around that, and no ideological dressing that can change the fact.
I've brought this discussion up because at that time (4 months ago) the results on DuckDuckGo were worse than Bing's: https://www.reddit.com/r/duckduckgo/comments/9j5f1p/duckduck...
But nowadays they are better for that same keyword. Whether somebody on their side noticed my issue on Reddit and manipulated this particular result, I don't know. But they definitely aren't just a shell over Bing.
Google provides the best results in this case, without doubt. For a software company of their size, hiring some of the best engineers and specialized in ML, I wouldn't have expected otherwise.
I still use Google's Search for double checking whenever I don't find something, but as I said, I increasingly find that for my search queries Google can't help me in finding anything that DuckDuckGo can't.
I don't search academic papers so of course we have a different experience.
---
Btw, I don't think caring about privacy is an ideology. I've worked in the advertising industry and I still do, although I'm on the publisher's side now.
Companies are carelessly trading user data and if that happens to me (1) I need to be informed and (2) I need a substantial reward in return to outweigh the risks and as long as there are cost effective alternatives that protect privacy, I'd rather use those, voting with my wallet and all that.
Money quote:
> We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we also source from a variety of partners, including Oath (formerly Yahoo) and Bing.
The other 400 sources are just used to widget stuff while the organic links are mostly from Bing and Oath. So it's a mash-up.
For example, just now, I came across "ED survivor". No idea what "ED" means here (it's eating disorder).
I just put it into DDG and got nothing on the first page that looked like it could be pertinent: A user name "ED survivor" on Instagram posting about vegetarianism, Ed Stafford on Wikipedia, "ED: The Survivor" (a mod for a computer game evidently), Devil Survivor Full HD (a film obviously, no idea what ED means here), a few more in this vein, until the page ends with the TV series Survivor on Wikipedia.
Google: First hit "Template:ED survivor" in Wikipedia (and that page contains the words "eating disorder". Second hit "Eating Disorder Survivors Wall", third hit "Surviving ED" from HealthyPlace (so it's health-related – and the snippet shown on the result page starts with "Eating Disorders recovery is a long road.).
The rest of the results on Google are all similar, all of them(!) clearly tell me what ED means in this context.
DDG gave me crap, none of the results(!) came even close to answering my question.
This is not a singular occurence, just a thing I wanted to know a few minutes ago. I'd love to take DDG's search results, but when not narrowed down to specific origins with bang commands, the results are usually worthless.
Edit: and before people tell me that I should have used quotation marks around my search terms, great, let's try that: Two results with "We would like to show you a description here but the site won't allow us.". From the top three results, one times out, one redirects to a sports betting site, and one to a product in an online apothecary (nothing to do with eating disorder). Then penis extension. Erectile dysfunction, something general about mental disorder, and again two results about penis enlargement.
From: https://support.startpage.com/index.php?/Knowledgebase/Artic...
More: https://support.startpage.com/index.php?/Knowledgebase/List/...
> Why does Google let Startpage access their search results?
> Startpage.com has a contract with Google that allows us to use their official "Syndicated Web Search" feed, so we have to pay them to get those results.
So what is their own business model? Do they show ads? (I disabled adblock but didn't see any.)
There's thousands of them
!w Wikipedia !hn Here :) !auk Amazon UK !so Stack Overflow