DuckDuckGo Search Improvements
spreadprivacy.com
spreadprivacy.com
If you like DDG, recommend it to friends and coworkers. I usually put a link in newsletter if appropriate.
Also, I've found that DDG cannot consistently display a weather forecast widget for the query "[zip code] weather". Sometimes it will show a weather forecast, and other times it will not display it--very frustrating. Any idea why? Even just refreshing the results will switch to displaying the weather widget, which leads me to think it's either a bug (I'm in Firefox), or they don't actually have the data for my zip code and are going to fetch it after I make my request?
Weather.com is pure evil when it comes to tracking and clickbait. It's also slow as hell.
There's no scenario in which I already know which weather source I want to use, memorize its ! command, navigate to DDG, then enter that ! command. That's too many jumps. If I want the weather from weather underground or whatever, why would I ever go to DDG to start with?
Anyway this is just a workaround for when the weather infobox doesn't automatically show up in the DDG UI, which it normally does.
!wu = weather underground !owm = open weather map !nws = national weather service
to name a few alternatives.
curl wttr.in
Maybe try that?
You can also go directly there. [1]
Change the 1000000 to however many results you want to remove from the top of the results list.
1: https://millionshort.com/search?keywords=weather+22222&remov...
Where as the ‘official’ site has a long load time due to design bloat, videos and other non-content which can’t be blocked with a simple blocker because it’s a part of the actual website.
Google seems to assume name brand websites have good content. I rarely agree.
I was really hoping the title meant like it read. Maybe my hopefulness was reading too much into 'Search Improvements.'
It is also possible that I don't need a search engine. I'm guessing that at least half of the questions/searches result in a post on SO or Wikipedia. There's probably a quarter of them that shoot me to some Medium entry. I guess I could always just bookmark those sites and skip the search engine..
Google proper has several value-adds besides the search results. Solving math equations put in the search bar for example. I usually use a dedicated service for things like converting feet to meters instead of typing it into google.
I'd love to know what those 70% of your queries look like.
(One interesting observation: when first switching, I found that I liked the DDG results a lot better when I styled them to look like Google results; they felt more "right" somehow.)
If there were some way I could just use a hotkey to redo the same search in google, this wouldn't be such a big deal, but having to break up my flow with all the extra copy/pasting or retyping is getting frustrating.
Saves quite a lot of time.
"Kubuntu" OR "KDE" -gnome site:forums.ubuntu.com
It's really powerful to require that every result must contain either "Kubuntu" OR "KDE" exactly, especially when searching technical projects that have variant spellings / brandings.
Look Google, if you can't find any pages with my search term, it's OK to return nothing! That's valid! It means I need to change my query! Stop trying to make a square peg fit a round hole!
I think I'll analyze my browser history of Google searches that are similar enough because I'm tweaking the query to match what I want.
It works exactly as expected. If you want an exact match you need to quote the search terms.
"Kubuntu" OR "KDE" -gnome site:ubuntuforums.comI run into this frequently when searching error messages. Quoting the error is useless, it still returns pages that contain parts of the quoted string.
When Google ignores it for me, it is usually on "high value" terms, with lots of potential ad views.
But to say "It works exactly as expected" is only correct for you and your machine.
Perform a search on DDG, then do the same search on Bing. You'll notice the first results are the same.
In order for search results to get better on DDG, they first need to get better on their partner search engines (which I believe Bing is the main) so as far as I can tell it's out of their control.
You search for the thing and you find the thing. Why do you expect the results, especially the top results, to be different? Is there any other evidence that they are not doing searches themselves?
100% match between DDG and Yahoo from my tests
I tested this by choosing to search for something completely random that would return unusual results and give a decent indicator of whether or not DDG was just copy-pasting results, so to speak. I searched for "extent space taco secure", no quotations. Bing seems to have exploded when I searched for this. The results are completely nonsensical and seem to have nothing to do with what I searched for. The first two hits are to Google, the first about webhp (apparently some virus?) and the other to their chrome page. Other links include things like links to fidelity.com, americanexpress.com, and the huffington post front page.
DDG's results are [mostly] reasonable and populated mostly by things like some recent event where the head of NASA mentioned space security. Though it does have a link to the SF bay area craigslist alongside a couple of other really weird ones. In any case, you can see for yourself. Suffice to say they're definitely not just replicating results, at least not from Bing.
> Because of the way we generate our search results, we unfortunately do not have the rights to fully syndicate our results, free or paid.
That page links to: https://help.duckduckgo.com/results/sources/
Where, after you get past a bunch of stuff about their "instant answers" gets to the root of it:
> We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we also source from a variety of partners, including Verizon Media (formerly Yahoo) and Bing.
So yes, maybe I was wrong saying results come only from Bing. But they definitely source their search results.
I'm not knocking DDG here, I use it as my daily search driver. If you were to try and build a search engine today with limited resources would you really try to start from scratch? The way DDG has approached the problem (by sourcing results from other search engines) seems like the only reasonable way to be even remotely competitive.
That is simply completely wrong, as my example showed extremely clearly. The one and only weakness of sourcing from third parties is that if they are not indexing some site, you also will not be indexing it. You were implying they are directly dependent on the ordering and quality of the other engines, which is obviously and provably false.
However, I did try your experiment, same terms. The top results from DDG were indeed found in the top results of both Yahoo and Bing. You are right though, not in the same exact order. Then I tried the same terms on Google. There is only one shared result on the front page (the Nasa chief one). I went through 4 more pages of Google, none of the results that both DDG, Yahoo, and Bing all seem to share were on any of them. This aligns more with the point I was trying to make:
DDG is going to have a hard time improving their results if the information they're getting is from inferior sources to begin with. It's like working on incomplete information. No matter how good their algorithm is that ranks and filters results from other search engines, if those other engines suck, there is no way their results can be that much better. If, for a given term, Yahoo returns site A, B and C, and Bing returns Site D, E and F, is there a way for DDG to determine that actually site G is the better result? The results can't appear out of thin air.
Also, you claim with emphasis, that the only weakness of sourcing from third parties is the indexing problem. That's absurd.
Obviously, a huge weakness on sourcing from other search engines is that DDG are bound to the terms of those partnerships. Or a complete severance of them. No partners, no search results.
One result of the terms in these partnerships is that DDG can't provide a search API. There was a time I thought perhaps I could write a developers search engine with DDG as the backend. Turns out you can't, and as a small search engine popular with HN types, I feel like that is a huge weakness.
But beyond that, consider the bias in your statement. You're claiming, by definition, that anything that doesn't match Google results is "inferior". I found Google's results here to be much better than Bing (not a high bar to pass) but much worse than DDG. Here are the results I get for Google, though I think it's also worth mentioning the hassle. For the privilege of being able to search I was required to go through a captcha. This is presumably because I prefer to use TOR when directly using Google. Then there's some giant "privacy reminder" at the top that requires me to agree to have all my data hoovered up and combined across services to generate a profile on me. Presumably a GDPR related thing since each time this happened it was on an EU exit node, though it used dark patterns to coerce consent which was supposed to be unlawful to my knowledge. Anyhow, after that nonsense I get:
- 4 monetizable links (Amazon 'space taco' lighter, 2x space taco restaurant facebook pages, some soundcloud 'space taco' band)
- 4 nonsensical links of google linking to its own books.google service
- 1 link to FT.com where Neumann raised $700m through share sales.
I changed my IP a couple of times and got similar results - the monetizable ones were always the same (order varied - though always at the top), so I expect this is probably at least similar to what you got. Of course it's silly to debate what results should be returned for an intentionally nonsensical query, but nonetheless I think this inadvertently ends up emphasizing what each engine's priorities are. DuckDuckGo tries to return whatever results are likely most appropriate for what you searched for. Google tries to return whatever it can make the most money from. And Bing... well Bing is "special."
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I do fully agree with you that being tied to the partnerships is potentially exploitable by the partner. And as DDG continues to grow this could become an issue if, for instance, Microsoft decides they have more to gain by undermining DDG than they do by continuing to partner and profit alongside them. My "only" was in reference to the quality of the search, which is what we were discussing.
Ultimately though I'm a lazy person and once I figured out how to get DDG to return the results I was really looking for (e.g. the wiki bang and weather thing) I eventually quit using google for almost everything.
DDG is fine for me, even if it's not perfect and even if occasionally I have futz with search parameters or very occasionally fall back to a google bang. I guess I'll take good enough with better privacy than occasionally better with privacy baggage on the scale that I can only guess about.
https://twitter.com/ylogx/status/1131152424591339520?s=21
When scrolling with mouse, it feels convenient to have this as a button instead of typing it manually.
Out of everything on the first page of a recent search, there were only 8 actual results - everything else was an ad.
DDG feels to me like Google did when it first launched - simple, fast and unobtrusive. A world away from the incumbents, like AltaVista and Yahoo, that were intent on becoming ‘portals’, owning every moment of a user’s online activity.
Google has become a portal.
I use an AdBlock Plus & uBlock Origin, and when I Google something -- by default -- basically my entire search is ads. Do you need to add some configuration to uBlock Origin or AdBlock Plus? Are you in the US?
I just use DuckDuckGo instead on Desktop. But since I have an Android phone, it's just easier to use Google.
AdBlock Plus has a program where they allow companies to buy spots on their ad whitelist, and I imagine that's interfering with uBlock Origin's more absolutist stance.
I use DDG as part of TOR but the results are just not that good, and I really want them to be.
So I ended up switching to Ecosia which is a cleaner front-end for Bing. I never really find myself using using google for search anymore. Bing is good enough.
I do occasionally go back to Google but that's for less than <10% of my queries and when I do it's after a few attempts at finding something on DDG.
Definitely recommend to anyone for use.
Or use Firefox's smart keywords https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-search-from-address...
You could configure it to use:
g something # to search google
d something # to search DDGThe `!g` can show up anywhere, not just at the beginning of your query.
Also, other possible `bang` shortcuts: https://duckduckgo.com/bang
So nice to type "vintage flute !e" and land on eBay or "john 3:16 !bLb" straight to a Bible verse.
For example, if someone does the !g thing, after searching for the same thing without !g, that implies the DDG search didn't give them what they wanted. Conceivably then DDG could run that search themselves and use that for training their algorithm a bit more, mooching off of Google's results.
There's probably some kind of horrible implication there that I'm not thinking of.
on one hand, as a dedicated user of !g on DDG for many years, my urge/need to use !g has gone down almost exponentially (despite being firmly in muscle memory)
on the other hand, when I do turn !g, I find more and more that I still don't find what I'm looking for
this is either down to:
(a) Google's results getting worse over time
(b) my searches getting more obscure over time
(c) selection bias due to DDG solving for my less obscure searches
I suspect (c)
There's something to be said also, I think, for the ever expanding mountain (of 90% shit) that is user-generated webcontent that must be sifted through by any search engine: The problem of searching the internet is itself getting harder and harder by the day.
> "is satoshi nakamoto really tombert from hacker news?"
Logging the searches back at the Duckquarters is exactly the kind of privacy invasion you use DDG to avoid. Also they would have the burden of proving it's not PII for GDPR purposes even if they don't log any IPs etc.
DDG actually says that they track queries, just no identifying data to them.
Admittedly some of Google's advantage here is the sheer scale of the compute resources they throw at their crawlers, and I don't know if DDG actually maintain their own index, but I'd love it if they noticed and slowly added those sites to some kind of more-frequently-updated list.
to search Google Maps
Do you realize how inconvenient this is on mobile?
It requires 7 (!) taps on the screen to restart the search.
I'll switch to DDG as soon as they implement a "search on Google instead" button at the bottom of their first results page.
Search DDG by default —> can’t find results —> click browser search bar again —> click Google icon and does a Google search
Also, many soft-keyboards these days let you type common symbols, including "!", by holding down some key, or holding down a key and dragging across a popup. This makes re-searching on google take 5 or 6 taps -- one to edit the query, an optional one to drag the cursor to be between search terms, three for " ", "!", and "g", and one for the "enter" "search" button.
Google's results for you are better for you because Google knows too much about you.
A tradeoff for privacy is less relevant search results, or as I like to think of it, access to pages that Google was hiding from me.
I use DDG because I think it’s important and have family members doing it too, but it costs us time when we search because the search completion is poor and the results aren’t as intelligent as I expect. Perhaps maintaining those expectations is my problem to solve, but that does not make the product’s deficiencies go away.
I try not to give them any more hooks into my privacy than I need to, so I never search while logged in.
Google is like word, and DuckDuckGo is like vim.
Do you mean, for everyday services, for general knowledge, or for specialized information? Personally I am distrustful of "intelligent" results, but that's because I assume they will be gamed (especially for services). Although it's probably silly for weather or something.
The most aggravating thing is trying to ask about something specific and being flooded with content about something basic and probably more popular (of course stripping rarer keywords because why not). But I'm personally interested in search, so curious about people's experiences.
I know it's more, but DDG really just feels like bing with privacy.
I ended up using startpage.com which basically gives you Google results without all the stalky tracking nonsense. Now I only resort to Google for about 10% of searches.
I think it's time to switch to the dark theme. Thanks duckduckgo!
It's not really an inconvenience. It's just weird. Why do it like that?
The idea is to have one OS-wide dark theme switch and your browser to expose that preference to the websites. Latest iOS/Android/Windows already have that OS-wide preference, but, you know, it'll take quite a while before your favorite websites start supporting it.
There's certainly power of default at play where people just don't want something seemingly unfamiliar, but there's also plenty of queries that the big G answers without a sweat that DDG just can't seem to gather info on.
Anyways, that's a long winded way of saying that yea, I think a respectable number of "real world" people use dduckgo.
None of these improvements point to helping fix that. You've got my attention, but search results need to be better.
If you just focused on "coding related" search results that would make a world of difference. Maybe just put stack overflow on top.
I know this search was weird...but no I was not trying to type an order for chicken wings.
Of course I never got a response. I think it might be impossible due to their model. They aren't really a search engine, more like a search aggregator, they get results from Bing mostly if I remember correctly.
I do like having an alternative general search engine, for one. So imposing a "coding" restriction would be a little sad.
Maybe bangs could also indicate topics inside normal search. (edit: sorry, already suggested by a sibling!)
DDG often can’t even correct single letter typos where the character is adjacent. On a phone there is usually no autocorrect or word suggestion in the search box as it doubles as the URL bar, so this means you have to manually fix typos to get the right results.
* the way they do scrolling by up and down arrow buttons.
* "load more" button instead of normal pagination.
But sometimes I have to use ddg when google forces me to solve recaptcha (this often happens when I connect via mobile network).
The results have been getting much better over time and I'd argue that the quality of Google's results is actually declining. Some queries return almost an entire 1st page full of ads.
Why in the world would you show me local results in the local language when I'm searching in English? Google is the worst offender, they so "helpfully" run stuff through their own translate, resulting in a special kind of garbage SERPs.
Yes, I know there's settings, but I just can't be bothered to login every time on a different device or browser. And personalized search has its own problems.
pro tip: Use !s for StartPage instead of Googling. It is a privacy preserving Google proxy.
https://duckduckgo.com/settings#appearance
Background Color: #002b36
Header Color: #073642
Result Title Color: #fdf6e3
Result Visited Title Color: #93a1a1
Result Description Color: #839496
Result URL Color: #268bd2
Result Hover, Module, and Dropdown Background Color: #073642Unfortunately this has the side effect of clearing all my three customizations and forcing me to use the default. Is there a way to keep the theme colors but use my own font?
Things I still use Google for are...
- getting Distance from one city to another
- getting X business locations nearby with hours
- movie times/listings
And unfortunately
- email...would love to use a DDG email service .. wish DDG would somehow let me use my iCloud email through its interface. I and I think millions of others would move away from Gmail then.
I wish more sites would do this, but I have an extension for that.