About 6 months ago (a year? I can’t remember) I switched and haven’t looked back. Now, when I look at google, the results actually look less relevant. As well, the ads on Google have become very obnoxious. I don’t feel like I’m being served the best results but instead results of companies who paid the most.
Despite both failing I tend to be a lot more lenient to google.
I’ve been using the web since the best option was Yahoo’s hand curated directories. Google is in really serious trouble. These search engine switches happen very quickly, as soon as one of them is showing better results, the switch happens abruptly and it’s one way.
For your convenience:
https://www.google.com/search?q=keris
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=keris
https://www.bing.com/search?q=keris
Now I use DDG exclusively.
!stack 'Error message'
Overall I still believe for sloppily constructed queries for which I want specific results Google seems to read my mind better and produce better results than DDG, but Google is very quirky.
[0]: http://jakegoulding.com/blog/2011/02/06/sqlite-64-bit-intege...
For me, on DDG, it's the first result on the 2nd page, on Google, it's the third result.
It would appear that DDG and Google's results differentiate in a way, that the sequence of words probably don't matter on DDG, but do matter on Google.
I love that DDG has almost no spam and the fact that it's so on point to the queries and doesnt perform the wide search. My dad has a few websites that he's visits daily, and he just goes to them directly. Since Google and DDG cant differentiate themselves much any more, I feel like the next direction for every tech company is a larger emphasis on user privacy and it's only going to be more important for already established markets as a differentiator.
Once DDG grows by 2x more, it'll become a significant competitor to Google. At the point, that additional data advantages likely approaches diminishing returns. Remember, network effects arent exponential in real life, they follow an "S" curve.
You can switch to country mode but then it stops including loads of results.
A perfect example is when you search for a product or book or something. Without the switch, it returns the company website and amazon.com, the latter being utterly useless and irrelevant to anyone outside the US.
But if you turn the switch on, the company website disappears, but you get amazon.co.uk.
Or another example, I was searching for a butternut squash soup recipe. Oddly DDG had no BBC food results. Until I clicked the switch, then it did, but loads of good other recipes completely disappeared.
As for bar, restaurant, etc. names, ugh. DDG is useless.
They need to figure out how to do local searches with privacy, a way I can set a rough location and they remember it.
At the moment their location centric searches are a decade behind Google.
Conversely, I find it annoying when Google gives me Swedish results, just because my VPN happens to route through Uppsala today.
I've searched for books, bars, restaurants, opera, and plenty more in many countries (with VPN routed to plenty of other countries) in the last several years on DDG without any issues, and with no need to switch to other search engines.
While you might enjoy fiddling with your search engine every single time you want to do a location search, the vast majority of users don't and won't.
They've got to solve the problem of location searches if they want to move from being a fiddly niche product to a mainstream Google competitor.
I want them to because I would like to see them have wide spread adoption.
As well as change the stupid name.
Inevitably, Google has succumbed to the same temptation that AltaVista did, and now there's a neat new upstart to come along, with a clean user interface and minimal cruft: DuckDuckGo.
Lather, rinse, repeat.
DuckDuckGo is 12 years old. They're far away from being a new upstart.
To put that into perspective, AltaVista's prime years only lasted six or seven years (~1996-2002; sold off in 2003). DDG is now one of the oldest independent search engines in Internet history.
Their very long-term, very slow, grinding upwards is one of the most amazing aspects of what they're accomplishing. It's incredibly difficult to do versus an entrenched monopoly (and one of the most powerful brands and corporations in the world at that). You almost never see it happen in tech once a monopoly is stable.
They seem to only use their crawler for Instant Answer type results while all their "traditional links" come from "a variety of partners, including Verizon Media (formerly Yahoo) and Bing".
As others have shared I've used DDG off and on for a few years. In the beginning if I didn't see what I wanted I switched to google for that search but left DDG as the default. It's been quite a while since I last had to to this, DDG's results seem to be on par with G these days, at least in my experience.
> 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.
Hmm I think the Bing is overemphasized if we say that "DuckDuckGo uses Bing underneath so the company whom you should really be complaining to is MSFT."
CMIIW!
It’s like saying “google just wants to create the illusion that they are more than a glorified frontend for a big iterative eigenvector solver”.
Maybe I should give Bing another go?
Why don't people use ad-blockers?
Now I almost never even use the bang commands, just pure DDG.