Once you get over the initial UI muscle memory shock you eventually realize that the results aren’t as good and you jump back.
I can rarely find what I need with DDG and usually always find it instantly with google.
They certainly don’t have related/similar images, which I find useful.
https://venturebeat.com/2018/02/09/getty-images-and-google-d...
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/02/internet-rages-after...
But in general, it is good enough that I switched and stayed switched. The most eerie thing, actually, is that so many ads have become de-contextualized. I no longer see ads for things I've recently searched for and it's so obvious that it's a little weird.
Then I looked it up(using Google - haha)
Well I'll be dammed, DDG does use Bing. Wow.
> To do that, we've developed an open source Instant Answer platform called DuckDuckHack,
which links to https://duckduckhack.com/ which says "DuckDuckHack is now in Maintenance Mode".
And the "four hundred sources" link links to 400 special case replies. They are probably useful, but fire rarely. It's basically Bing, and that page is a bunch of spin.
> Powered by Metasearch technology, Dogpile returns all the best results from leading search engines including Google and Yahoo!, so you find what you’re looking for faster. [1]
[0] - https://www.dogpile.com
With this ~95% of my searches avoid google and as DDG keeps improving that percentage will get higher.
With regard to UI, it’s quite nice that DDG supports dark mode automatically.
For example, if I'm looking for technical information on a bug Google will probably give me pages worth of Krebs On Security articles while DDG will give me POC repos on Github which I prefer.
The paranoid in me wants to believe this is deliberate by Google. That they selectively disseminate certain information and withhold others.
Example?
The top result in a Google search for [crows in portland] is a snippet that answers my question with zero additional clicks required. If I want more info, I can click through the top result to a perfect, in-depth explanation.
It's the Audubon Society, a source I consider authoritative on this topic.
The top result on DDG requires me to click through to a shitty local news site with an extremely lightweight story.
I'd have to click multiple DDG links to find what Google presented as the top result, and summarized nicely so I probably don't even need to click through.
Advantage: Google
I typed the same terms on DDG, and clicked "more results" and scrolled down. The first relevant hit is #84, which is a link to a generic product listing page on an Australian online store. So DDG found 83 incorrect interpretations of "duck" before the rope fall protection one that I intended. The one it did find is pretty obscure. It's located neither in the country I live in, nor the country the device is made in.
Curiously, hit #80 is for google.com itself, so it seems even DDG gave up and pointed me to Google before finding a directly useful answer.
I like DDG's principles, but as a search engine, it's just not practical for me.
That is a good example. However, if I may...
You used a device and wanted to learn more about it, you searched using some general terms, as you say Google's top result was the product...but it was the Amazon page that "lets you buy it." Now you could have skipped the Google middleman if you wanted to buy the product and just gone to Amazon (you will find their search isn't much better than DDG based on your search term). All in all you didn't say you wanted to buy it you wanted to learn more, and yet we see Google's biased results is: 1) pushing the sale of the product; 2) their #1 result is Amazon which is loaded with fake results about the product (and honestly would you really trust buying your climbing equipment from Amazon)? All in all they got you a relevant result as the #1 result, but beyond that IMO its a terrible result.
I finally took the plunge and replaced google with ddg in my browser omnibar last week.
After a couple of days I switched back after having to search on google too many times.
So for example, I might search for a class name and Googole will know what language / environment I'm working it, but I'll need to tell that to DDG when searching.
Recently this has become pretty annoying in some cases : if I search the name of a sports team even though I mean something totally different, Google will start sending me notifications about that team. To make it worse, how to remove that team from your 'interests' is a bit convoluted.
I also have to go out of my way to make google understand that I am sometimes looking for a result in my native language (I live abroad).
Most of the time it is on point though. It does indeed seem that it taylors dev questions to the languages I use or more generally my interests.
If this kind of logic could be somehow stored on device instead of being something that Google (or Apple or whatever other company I don't have infinite trust in) owns, that would be a killer search product.
It’s a pain, but I’d say Qwant works about 60% of the time, usually for basic stuff. I find DDG to generally be more relevant than Qwant, but Qwant to be a bit more novel, which is part of why it’s my mobile default.
But take that with a MASSIVE grain of salt. I can’t say I’ve done any thorough analysis or paid close enough attention to judge that well. I’ll probably switch to DDG again regardless, as Qwant thinks I’m a bot fairly regularly.
add !g somewhere in your ddg query to search google
If you don't care about your privacy and don't want to dealing with learning a new search engine to the level you've learned google, then this article probably isn't for you.
The idea you wouldn't be able to do your job or that it would be impacted in a nontrivial way by switching to a different search bar in your browser seems ridiculous, correct me if I'm wrong.
Personally I would absolutely consider this to be wrong.
There is only so much cognitive energy we all have during the day. You have to spend it wisely. There are certain groups of people on the fringe (early adopters, Linux desktop folks, the people who run their own mail servers, etc...) who have the willpower (and can afford!) to trudge through the transition from one tool to another. Sometimes you can see the value of that transition before you make it, and so it's easier to push through. Other times, there is no light at the end of the tunnel or it's not very bright. The same thing happens when people switch operating systems or programming languages.
So there is always a cost to switching tools. That cost is either going to pay for itself in the end or it's not. I do not see DDG ever paying for itself.
The point is that with DDG, you have a uniform syntax for searching multiple services that doesn't require any special cooperation from your browser or those services, doesn't require any setup apart from using DDG and only requires you to learn one new concept.
And this will work anywhere where webpages work (like, say, lynx), and will work consistently. There are thousands of !bangs, from things ranging from amazon, to wikipedia, to maps, to dictionary definitions... You aren't limited to a handful of hand picked services that your browser decided to support out of the box, or that you decided to manually configure.
Also, there is generally decent support to switch languages and regions for services that support it. For example, "!w" gets you "wikipedia", "!wsimple" gets you the "Simple English" version and "!wpt" gets you the Portuguese version.
IMHO, this is all extremely convenient.
https://www.startpage.com/ works. DDG does not.
The most I've had to do is search the bangs documentation if i can't find the search engine i want. (for Terraria stuff i sometimes wanted `!terrg` rather than `!terraria`, and ended up searching to find the former)
As here: https://www.imdb.com/find?s=all&q=brad%20pitt
No bangs needed.
At the end of the day, though, it's a personal choice I make. I put in a small sliver of extra effort and get in return a big boost in privacy. It's worth it for me, but perhaps not for everyone.
Never had a single issue finding even the obscure stuff I look for when I get rid of Google habits and use habits of web 1.0
Me neither. That's why I use https://www.startpage.com/