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Comment by huhtenberg | Hacker News Reader

Mozilla is now openly peeing in Google's punch all the while being dependent on piles of money they take from it.

At some point Google will get tired of this and will withdraw from the agreement. They won't be the default search provider, but that will play to their advantage - Firefox out-of-the-box user experience will take a sharp nose dive. Say all you want about DDG and alternatives, but they still can't hold a candle to Google's search quality. So what Mozilla will end up with is (a) a dip in funding and (b) a dip in the user share. This might be just enough to either make them reconsider their ethics or to kill Mozilla altogether.

So, yeah, a good CEO that can shed the Google dependency is very much required.

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Say all you want about DDG and alternatives, but they still can't hold a candle to Google's search quality.

I'm rather torn on this point. On one hand, yes, DDG for example feels some years behind Google in its relevance ranking. On the other, Google itself has been degrading the quality of its own results with ads, etc. so badly that they've seriously degraded their own "above the fold" relevant results.

I've always written off Duck Duck Go in the past, but lately after not being able to find relevant info on Google, I've been giving them a go and have been rather impressed. Especially on image results, which are way nicer to use and give you direct image links. Plus they don't obfuscate all the URLs with tracking redirects, so I can copy a link without visiting a page (that might redirect the URL on me again.)

There's still some things they miss, and my main complaint with DDG is it's too aggressive in taking the search you asked for and substituting in results it thought you meant. I suspect that problem comes from their upstream providers like Bing, which has similar issues.

> Especially on image results, which (...) give you direct image links.

Google removed that after pressure from the copyright lobby (they got sued by Getty). It'll happen to DDG too if they ever become big enough.

Oh, I wasn't aware of the lawsuit. That's ridiculous. Well in any case, I wrote a Userscript to restore direct links to Google image results, and also to filter out spam site results (cough e...-e...com), if anyone were interested: https://byuu.org/other/script/google

Middle-clicking or control-clicking will load the original images.

Bing direct links images as well so they'd probably go after Microsoft well before DDG, so I think we're safe. But I can always do the same for DDG if need be.

Agreed. I've given DuckDuckGo a try a few times in the past, and it never stuck. With the latest rounds of Google-being-Google, I gave DDG another go and so far haven't looked back.

The thing I've been enjoying since switching to DuckDuckGo on mobile for the last couple months is not having to deal with AMP.

I start with DDG now, and switch to Google if their results are not good enough. 90% of the time its fine. Google intentionally broke image search, and their top search results are getting very bad. Its as if my question was "show me links to as many ads as possible that might be related to my search terms." Do Google advertisers realize I see their ad when it matches only one of my search words? If they read more than one of my words, they know that was a wasted advertisement.

It doesn't sound like your torn at all, if you think DDG still feels year behind Google, despite Google's results degrading. Sounds like you still think Google is a lot better.

No, quite the opposite. To clarify: this is the first time I've started using DDG on multiple devices and it's stuck. I'll rephrase: I think that DDG is still a few years behind Google's unadorned best-effort result set, but not that far behind Google's actual presentation today. I.e. Google's degraded itself so much as to make the competition viable for this search user.

I feel exactly the same: I've been using DDG for 7 years now for privacy reasons, but I have been using !g (ddg's shortcut to search on google) a lot because ddg was often lacking useful results. But I've now noticed that Google itself has become a poor search engine too!

Nowadays, I still use !g when out of luck with DDG, but 90% of the times, Google don't give me the answer I'm looking for either. And I don't feel it's because DDG improved that much but because Google declined.

I still remember the old days of Altavista, Yahoo, Lycos and Infoseek, to name a few. I would usually have to try several and comb through their results to find what I wanted.

These days, I'm getting a sense of deja vu, because Google is slowly getting worse and DDG is slowly getting better. Most of the time, I'll get the desired result right away, regardless of the engine I use. But sometimes, I'll be surprised at how bad the results are on one and then I have to try the other. And although it's not happening very frequently, I have to do it more and more often.

I guess that's good, in a sense. Sure, it's nice when things just work and you don't have to think about them, but we've all seen that lack of competition is, in the long run, bad for the users.

DDG is just so bad. Yesterday I found a website on my desktop. I wanted to view it on my Raspberry Pi so I could copy/paste the commands. So I typed in some keywords from the title and the name of the site. By default the Raspbian image uses DDG apparently.

The page I was after was not to be found.

Well at least on the first page, I didn't bother checking beyond. Did the !g thing and got the page I wanted straight up first hit.

Here are the searches for reference:

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=maker+pro+install+tensorflow

https://www.google.com/search?q=maker+pro+install+tensorflow

I've tried DDG so many times, but it just doesn't find relevant stuff. Sad, because I don't want to rely on Google.

They both return the site tensorflow. What were you going for exactly a specific page?

The top result is the same (for me) in both searches (<https://www.tensorflow.org/install/>). What is the page you were trying to find?

Interesting, I guess Google used the fact that both searches came from the same IP to prioritize the one I wanted[1].

In any case, I just connected to my work PC and did a search from a clean VM there, we don't do anything remotely Raspberry Pi or TensorFlow related there. The link you posted was the first hit at work, but the one I wanted[1] was the third hit.

Yet for DDG the results were the same, no hits. I even tried pressing "more" once, still nothing. I even tried "maker.pro install tensorflow" (without the quotes), and similar result. I tried "maker.pro tensorflow raspberry pi", still not finding it.

Maybe I just need to learn what DDG focuses on in a search string, and I've been trained to what Google weights.

But the reason Google got big was because it was the first search engine where, for 99% of the time, I didn't have to spend several minutes optimizing search terms just to find the right thing.

I don't want to go back to that.

[1]: https://maker.pro/raspberry-pi/tutorial/how-to-set-up-the-ma...

"Say all you want about DDG and alternatives, but they still can't hold a candle to Google's search quality."

I use DDG as main search engine since a while. It usually works, but occasionally (less than 10% of searches however) I have to repeat the search using Google. The point being that even if I had to revert to Google for half of my searches, this would mean for Google 50% less information about my search habits, and exposure to their injected ads/information, which wouldn't be a trivial figure at all.

One doesn't use DDG because it's superior to Google (it's not and won't be for a long while) but rather to send a message to corporations making profits out of user information. I'm convinced Google doesn't give a rat's ass if ten thousands users like me don't use their search engine and services as we're already flagged in their database as users with adblockers, therefore immune to advertising (including ads that manage to defeat the blockers), but they would surely panic in terror should DDG use become somewhat trendy among Joe Users after some media coverage, social media campaign etc. The reason being that "normal", usually non technical, users are the ones providing Google mostly with real numbers because they allow webpages to analyze their habits and don't obfuscate their online behavior. Should a big number of those users make the transition to DDG or alternatives, we would likely hear of flying chairs at Google headquarters.

I use DDG because it's superior to Google. Maybe not in results, but in UX. In particular, I use bangs ALL the time. Given that I can just add !g to quickly search Google in the <5% of the time (based on my history) that I need it, I prefer DDG. (I would still use it for privacy reasons even if it were worse -- it was and I did for several years).

> Say all you want about DDG and alternatives

I've been using DDG, finally, for a little less than 1 year. For most part my DDG searches have been sufficient, in the sense that I generally find what I'm looking for and my need is met.

On few occasions where my need is not met, I do a !g and sometimes Google gives me what I want, but not in all the cases. I have to refine my search query in many, if not most, of those cases.

One area where Google is definitely better than DDG, for obvious reasons, is where Google shows better YouTube videos and I believe also Image results. But for regular searches, DDG has been satisfactory.

I've been enjoying using startpage.

https://www.startpage.com

How does it compare to DDG?

In other words, I went from Google to DDG because of privacy. Why should I move from DDG to say StartPage, does it provide any additional benefits?

To clarify, I'm totally open to other search engines, just an trying to understand more.

It is in a sense a google proxy. Better results IMO than DDG, more similar to Google without sending your IP/info to google.

I don't understand the stuff too much at a really high level to know which is more private, DDG vs Startpage.

>On 29 March 2016, Ixquick.com was officially "merged" with the same company's Startpage search engine[3] (a search engine with the privacy features of Ixquick, but using only Google search results[4]). Users entering ixquick.com are now automatically re-routed to startpage.com. Ixquick had long declared on its sites, that it operated in compliance with European Union privacy standards, and it retained its original European search engine, Ixquick.eu,[8] until about April 2018, when it was also redirected to startpage.com.

>Prior to the release of Tor Browser version 4.5, Startpage.com was its default search engine.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Startpage.com

The one thing that drives me nuts about startpage is that by default, links open in a new tab.

You can change this in Settings, but it's stored in a cookie which my devices clear from time to time. (Not that I'd rather they store it a different way, the situation is just unfortunate.)

> Say all you want about DDG and alternatives, but they still can't hold a candle to Google's search quality

I started using DDG, believing that "it shows me inferior results, but privacy-wise, it is worth it." Yet I've come to learn that DDG's results are often on-par or better than Google, and inferior only a small fraction of the time.

Often when I "!g" a query, I find that I get pretty much the same results with Google too. There are maybe 10% of cases where the results significantly differ.

My perception now is that Google performs better on programming-related queries, and much better on giving me local results (especially results related to my city). But when searching for content that you'd often find on blogs, or looking for reviews of products, DDG almost always beats Google by showing less SEO-heavy, more authentic results.

Edit: typo

I use DDG almost exclusively and I haven't noticed the difference.

If having Google as the default search is so important, couldn't they just make it the default without the deal?

Sure, but they count on it for significant revenue. If Google didn't want to pay it, but they kept Google, they'd be giving up that revenue from some other potential provider.

(Of course, if Google didn't want to pay it, it might cause a crash in the 'market value' of such a placement anyway).

I'd be happy to support Mozilla financially, but I'm too lazy to go figure out how to do it. Link me to a Patreon, or shove some subscription model more prominently in my face, Mozilla.

https://donate.mozilla.org/en-US/?presets=50,30,20,10&amount...

There's a monthly option right there

Yeah but I have to go remember to do it and stuff. Meanwhile at ArsTechnica.com, it shows a big banner telling me to subscribe, and I do. More reminders that I can give money to Mozilla would remind me to do it. Eventually they'd hit me at the right time/place to put in the effort to set up a sub, and I would.

> Contributions go to the Mozilla Foundation, a 501(c)(3) organization based in Mountain View, California, to be used in its discretion for its charitable purposes.

I've read about this before I think, for some reason donations cannot be used for development and has to be used for outreach etc?

All it means is that they can use the funds as they see fit. There should be a breakdown somewhere on their site of what % of funds go toward development verse admin/fundraising as they are a 501c3.

This is correct. The best way to support Mozilla products is to use them.

It sounds like a matter of time before they introduce a paid plan for Firefox Accounts, with e.g. a higher limit on Firefox Send, a VPN service, and the fuzzy feeling of supporting improving the web.

I use smile.Amazon.com and set my charity to Mozilla. It's an easy way to donate (especially if you're on the lower income end)

I mean, something is better than nothing, but the amount Amazon donates is an absolute pittance.

On the flipside, Chrome went from being the best browser on the market to a bloated spying machine, and I'm very glad firefox exists to offer an alternative.

If on top of that, they manage to do it using Google's dough, I say bravo and hope they'll remain smart enough to feed from the vampire for a long time

Chrome was always a spying machine. It was just a spying machine that was fast.

I'd guess the intersection of people who will even consider using Firefox, have search engine needs that won't be satisfied by DuckDuckGo, and won't be able to change their search engine is vanishingly small, so I'm not that concerned about the user experience hit. But, yeah, the dip in funding would be brutal in that scenario.

> At some point Google will get tired of this and will withdraw from the agreement.

AFAICT, the situation is not so different from the days where Microsoft was paying Apple to avoid a defacto finding of monopoly.

Are you sure the season that G gives you "better" results is not a consequence of them tracking you everywhere and know your preferences and habits?

That's probably true to some degree, but I found that the most effective thing that Google does to improve search results is to connect multiple searches you submit in relatively quick succession.

Googling a paper or article, skimming it, then searching for something that's in the text makes Google appear like magic. When I enter the first word of my follow-up question, Google will often suggest a complex 10 word query exactly like I would have entered it.

Apparently, many people have the exact same follow-up questions that I have after reading the same text.

That doesn't require a whole lot of tracking. It does require a session cookie, but that's not the sort of tracking I'm opposed to at all.

Another thing that Google does well is searching for local content. I think this is very difficult to replicate for DDG.

But for context free and non-local queries, Google is usually no better than DDG in spite of all the wealth of data they have on me. For some niches DDG is actually better than Google and they don't fill half of their result pages with ads.

Sometimes I wonder whether the entire ad targeting thing is a fraud. Maybe Google doesn't actually track us after all ;-)

> Are you sure the season that G gives you "better" results is not a consequence of them tracking you everywhere and know your preferences and habits?

I'm 100% sure that's why they give me better results.

The options seem to be:

(1) Don't use the web,

(2) Give up decent search results and engage in a (probably only with limited success) tedious eternal war to prevent Google from tracking me,

(3) Relax and let Google track me, but still give up the good search results, or

(4) Take the payment Google is offering in exchange for tracking.

>They won't be the default search provider, but that will play to their advantage - Firefox out-of-the-box user experience will take a sharp nose dive...So what Mozilla will end up with is (a) a dip in funding and

Right, like from 2014 to 2017 when Google wasn't the default search provider for Firefox. It was such a shame to see their income go from 300 million to 500 million.

"Say all you want about DDG and alternatives, but they still can't hold a candle to Google's search quality. "

Sadly I agree. I use DDG almost exclusively but when ever I use "!g" I often get better results there.

Google's search quality has been on the decline for a while now. If that trend continues and DDG merely manages to stay the same, it will probably only be a few more years until they're as good as Google...

> Say all you want about DDG and alternatives, but they still can't hold a candle to Google's search quality.

I prefer DDG and I almost never Google, except out of curiosity, but I see this sentiment a lot.

How about startpage as an alternative? It's literally just Google results

i have been using DDG exclusively for over a year now with no complaints or need to use Google search

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