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Comment by LeftHandPath | Hacker News Reader

I've been using duckduckgo and bing for a while now. Google is just a fallback.

I switch to DDG precisely because I stopped being able to quickly distinguish ads from results in Google. Even the "results" felt like ads. Now when I have to fallback onto Google, the results just feel so spammy compared to DDG.

edit: For example, I just needed to look up the current version of Scala. DDG correctly has scala-lang.org as the top result. Google has a snippet from sourabhbajaj.com (incorrectly) stating 2.10 is the current version taking up the top 1/3 of the page.

This thread is so enlightening. I too switched to DDG a while ago and occasionally I have to use Google for a search and your description is exactly how I felt: the Google results felt “spammy”.

I had assumed I had simply adjusted to DDG and just forgot what Google had always looked like, but this post confirms that the Google results have in fact changed.

yeah duck duck go is actually great for coding!

Heck yeah! DDG results have gotten noticeably better in the past ~2 years.

Side note - most browsers offer 'search shortcut' customization options, so you can start an address-bar search with !g or !b or whatever to seamlessly swap to your fallback(s).

> Side note - most browsers offer 'search shortcut' customization options, so you can start an address-bar search with !g or !b or whatever to seamlessly swap to your fallback(s).

While you indeed can configure browsers to do this, I think you may be erroneously attributing a DDG feature to -- or duplicating a DDG feature in -- your browser, because those are built in DDG bang commands.

I know for a fact that Firefox can also implement bangs like Duckduckgo out of the box, although you have to manually set it up.

They used to have some default keywords, "g", "w", etc. (you enter "g key words" to search Google for the keywords. If they're not default anymore they're very easy to do.

I like the way Chrome shows it has recognised the keyword after you press space though, neat feedback, good design IMO.

Firefox has a few builtin keyword searches like "@g" (Google) and "@w" (Wikipedia):

https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/rev/cfd1cc461f1efe0d66...

This was a feature in Opera from something like 2002. That browser was ahead of its time.

Konqueror was even further ahead. After you searched for something via search engine and then opened a page, it offered you buttons which could be used to search for those same terms on the result page. Very useful, but never saw it elsewhere.

Maybe once a month I use Google as a fallback, and then am utterly disappointed. DDG is just plain better at my programming and random factoid searches than Google.

Which is I assume because Google is allowing their search results to be of a poorer quality in the pursuit of higher ad revenue.

I've used DDG for many years now, and I'm admittedly one of those weirdos for whom political statements about freedom and privacy matter, so I'm a "loyal customer" in a sense.

However, 10 years ago I honestly felt DDG is not really worse compared to Google. And here's the problem: DDG hardly changed over last I-don't-know-how-many years, while Google surely did. And while it seems primary Google users are constantly upset about the nature of the changes, I, on the contrary, quite often appreciate how it behaves, especially on the mobile. In fact, when I bought a new phone this autumn, I, for the first time didn't change Chrome+Google Search as my default search engine.

I'm still mostly content with DDG on PC, but Google is actually better at answering questions I mostly want to ask on the go: to look up badly misheard brand or person's name, find some local shop and show me the time it closes, or — the thing DDG is most useless for — brief me on the real-time news everybody is talking about for the last couple of hours.

Yes, been using in for several years now. I don't even think of it as duckduckgo any more, it's just search.

The only thing I can’t fully rely on DDG for is on mobile if I search a business on iPhone - I need the address and phone number instantly.

DDG still isn’t as good as google at this.

You can always prepend „!g“ before your query in DDG to fall back to Google.

No need to prepend. You can bang it at the end and retry your search if it doesn’t work with DDG.

I wonder why everybody (including me previously) thinks you have to prepend.

Because some search terms get interpreted by the browser as trying to hit a specific site. If you prepend the browser probably won't make that mistake. I tend to use !g on the end of my search terms and hit this every now and then; I feel like I've hit this issue in Chrome more than Firefox.

Yea, but in my scenario I’m driving and need the right result right now. I’m not in any sense pro-google, so it pains me they are still the best at this.

I can’t append or prepend, I had time for one search and need a result now before I miss a turn.

What the fuck are you doing typing on your phone whilst driving?!

Being an adult whilst living in the real world.

Needlessly endangering other people's lives. (And hopefully breaking the law, depending on where you live.)

Seriously, which parts of adulthood and 'the real world' make this seem necessary and okay to you? It really is super dangerous. (Google the statistics if that might convince you, or news stories to make the risk emotionally real.)

There are adults living in the real world which drink and drive, but that doesn’t mean we should encourage it.

What you are doing is posing a significant risk to other pedestrians and drivers.

You should reconsider your irresponsible “real world” behaviour.

Typing that on mobile is not easy

All you need is the !g

still too hard (due to the !)

I switched a couple months back because Google started messing around with image search. If you click on an image it now displays a small version of it on the side, instead of enlarging it. It's so useless.

There are some things I miss about Google (I feel like I got better results when searching for programming questions), but I don't miss it too much.

I don't currently have an alternative I use daily, but programming questions seem to me to be the most annoying use case for Google search. I frequently use 4 or 5 keywords to try to find information on a topic, and it gets a cluster of results which ignores one or more of the words that is absolutely essential, because what I want has few if any hits. But things that are everywhere on the internet, I don't need to search for, dammit!

I’ve been using DDG for almost three years.

Going back to Google is actually frustrating for me.

Their results are so badly presented and the number of ads so onerous to scroll through...

I am most frustrated with how almost any url from search or Gmail shows as the url, but actually routes you through a Google url first (so they can track it, of course). That extra hop sometimes takes a second or more.

I don't understand why they don't just track my click with JavaScript. I suspect this new hiding the url thing might have to do with circumventing scripts like I have used before that rewrite the url so that when you click, you go directly to what you clicked on.

If it's named according to the true URL, those same scripts would work, albiet differently.

Currently, the real URL is url encoded into the Google link. But if they stopped displaying the URL and started encrypting the URL or using a DB pointer instead, which is what I am thinking they might be moving toward, then you wouldn't be able to do that.

DDG uses an aggregate of results from various search engines. I really do hope that at some point (if they haven't already) they build out a native search team. I know its hard computer science, but they really need to start rolling their own search engine

DDG has its own crawler and index too, they had it for a long time

https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/du...

Interesting, I did not know that. Thanks for the link!

> I've been using duckduckgo and bing

Bing’s UI looks exactly like Google’s with a two-year delay.

Their current ads have a single distinguisher from an organic result: the circled word ‘Ad’ in the same color and font size as the description.

Same as Google before the change. A worse distinguisher as the one it had before, where ‘Ad’ used a distinct color.

Do we really trust that Bing won’t copy the new design in two years?

> Do we really trust that Bing won’t copy the new design in two years?

Do you need to? Worst case you have delayed the bad for two years.

My biggest beef with DDG is that they do not do worldwide results very well. Their results are overwhelmingly US centric.

As an example.... I search on DDG, "buy cricket equipment near me". I am not behind a VPN and whatsmyip correctly identifies my hostname with the correct European country suffix. However, the top results on DDG for this query is "Dick's Sporting Goods". Click on that and I get a nasty "GDPR DSG Sorry. Can't help you message." Second result is "Cricket Best Buy," who help "to connect North American cricket fans with the best possible cricket equipment." Next, AA Sports. Fourth, First Choice Cricket, "#1 USA Cricket Retailer".

If instead I try to be more precise with the query, "buy cricket equipment "austria"". First result is US Sports Direct.

Nothing here is relevant to my query. At least try to give me some UK results in the first few.

There is a box at the top of the results page which you can tick to get country specific results

Yeah, but it's just not very good. Set the UK tick box and it will still throw a lot of US results into the mix. Adding "UK" and "manchester" or whatever in the search does a much better job than DDG's country specific tick box. Of course even that isn't great as it'll often give a business in manchester NH, pop 100k over the city of 3m just down the motorway. Even with keywords and DDG's tick box set.

It's a minor annoyance that I've got used to, and hasn't persuaded me to go back to Google (I've used DDG as first choice for probably a little over 5 years now).

If DDG can't deliver the goods, !b (bing) is second choice, !mill (Million Short) probably third, then as appropriate, a mix of !azuk (amazon UK), !w, !ox (oxford dictionary) and a mix of others including !g as last resort. !g is so rarely better or helpful that I wonder why I still sometimes bother.

Edit: I think the real problem is with ICANN. .com should have been kept for global or multinational sites, and the USA used .co.us and .us generally for sites of national interest, as France uses .fr, Germany .de and UK .uk etc.

Is there a bang command for turning this on and off? I could not find any in their list.

yes, likewise, I'm in New Zealand, and trying to find local stuff on DDG is a very poor experience. I'll swap to google for this.

I use DDG, but I have the same exasperation. Even appending 'Melbourne' to a search, I'm liable to get results from a tiny town in Florida rather a metropolis in Australia.

It's frustrating, because for geographical based results, I'm forced to drop back to Google consistently, and Google's getting worse and more user hostile/advertiser friendly.

Startpage shows more relevant local results for me, it's essentially a proxy to Google search. DDG supports redirect to Startpage by using "!s".

I like the configuration options you are being offered with DuckDuckGo. So, for example, you can use your own custom font on that page.

I use the Google !g fallback for about 5% of my searches. Sometimes the google results are simply better, but the appearance just seems chaotic nowadays.

DDG and Bing are so bad, there is nothing on the market right now that can replace Google search for accurate results. The auto complete for instance in Google is no match.

What does DDG use for an algorithm? Originally Google was just using pagerank but that was too easy to game by SEO. This means DDG needed to address this, and apparently they have (e.g, search for 'favicon' like the post). How long can we rely on DDG staying neutral in their algorithm?

They use this little known "algorithm" as their backend: https://www.bing.com/.

It's remarkable, BTW, that most people at the same time believe that Bing sucks, and DDG is "just as good as Google". For me that hasn't been my experience at all: Google is far, far ahead of Bing (and by extension DDG) in terms of relevance.

It seems possible without bias, DDG went full on with instant results. I guess Bing does those now too, I don't know, but the choice of scope and resources to use can be enough distinction to colour people's perceptions.

AFAIK they don't have their own algo, they are just a front end for other search engines (Bing etc.) depending on where/what you're looking for.

They have to have some (possibly trivial) algorithm for aggregating the sources they combine.

If they're doing that, sure. I'm not sure it's that sophisticated. Last I heard they sourced different engines for different types of things/geographies not necessarily mixing results from multiple sources for a single query. But this is all based on things I've read in passing rather than any serious research/insider knowledge.

From wikipedia:

"DuckDuckGo's results are a compilation of "over 400" sources, including Yahoo! Search BOSS, Wolfram Alpha, Bing, Yandex, its own Web crawler (the DuckDuckBot) and others. It also uses data from crowdsourced sites, including Wikipedia, to populate knowledge panel boxes to the right of the results."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DuckDuckGo

this brings back memories of metacrawler

It's a nicer skin with better privacy around mainly this search engine: bing.com from Microsoft.

I think DDG is mostly just a front-end on Bing, at least that's how they've been doing things in the past.

Same here. I may hit Google at most once a month when I'm looking for something really unusual.

Didn't DuckDuckGo have the favicon next to the search results before Google did?

Same. I do research and the URL matters.

This reeks of AOL keyword BS.

Don't forget about Wikipedia citations!

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