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Comment by JohnJamesRambo | Hacker News Reader

DuckDuckGo is really changing my world. It’s like I’m seeing a whole other internet I was missing before with Google search results. I get much more relevant answers and less SEO targeted garbage that says all the right words usually while saying nothing at all. I was skeptical, but I encourage you to give it a try if you haven’t before.

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I'm at about 90% Duck these days, and 10% Google. But I'm not sure it's because Duck got better, or because Google got worse.

Google's results just seem less and less useful for the kinds of searches I do.

A recent example: There was a news event near where I live earlier this week. It made national headlines briefly. Yesterday I wanted to know if there was anything new about it. So I hit the duck with my search query and it showed newspaper web sites that had updated the story about three hours before, and some TV web sites that had stories from the previous night.

I wanted to make sure I wasn't missing anything, so I did the same search in Google. Big G's results were all at least three days old, and most were re-posts of re-posts of re-posts published on random web sites on the other side of the planet.

So, I continue to use the duck. And I've learned a lesson that I really shouldn't second-guess myself and think that maybe Google, with its trillion dollars to spend, isn't any better after all.

I use Duck for most searches now but I find if I'm trying to ask a question or search weird error codes or something Google is still better for that. I still use duck to input but use the g! command.

I think google has stayed the same for the most part. But because they want to crack down on misinformation, and things of that nature they have said recently that when it comes to political topics/news they want to stick to "trusted" sources. That's why if you search for a political topic on google/youtube, you're probably not going to get many non mainstream sources

Google got too polluted with adverts it became intolerable. More or less across the board.

Someone should start a company called "Google 2010".

I just recently realized that myself. I'd add "!g" to my searches about 1/3 of the time. That's been going way down lately. I'm probably more at 10%~15% on Google, but the majority has switched to DDG.

That being said, I still wish there were more alternatives. I have a lot of RSS feeds and there are big lists of tech blog RSS feeds. At some point I just want to index all of those so I can search for recent tends in the blogs of independent tech people rather than the big articles.

I'm consistently surprised that this comment comes up here so often. I've tried DDG at length, many times, and I always go back to Google because I find it SO much better for programming-related questions. Maybe the denizens of HN are accustomed to using SO's built-in search? But that's still only a piece of the larger puzzle. I get a lot of mileage from blog posts as well.

You're not missing anything. Google is far better than DDG and I'm shocked people claim otherwise because it's so fairly self evident.

That said I try to use DDG when I can but I don't lie to myself that I'm using it because it has better results -- it doesn't. It has better approach to privacy and thats why I use it. The fact that they know less about the searcher intrinsitcally means the results of searches will be worse.

I sometimes feel that we are in this echo chamber.

These threads always follow the same patterns, someone asks if they know of an alternative search engine and a HNer quickly mentions they have gone to DDG and haven't looked back.

DDG is decent but not even close to the search quality of Google. I know the folks here want to see Google dethroned but DDG won't do it.

I find a big reason to use DDG is because it has "!bangs" that allow you to redirect your search to other site's native search engines by appending/prepending them to your query. I can use "!pac" to search for Arch Linux packages, "!aw" to search the Arch Wiki, "!gh" to search Github, etc. So the quality of DDG's search may be lacking but I generally know the site I want to search and can use their native searches. Any way, if you want to get away from Google but can't get by with DDG, consider Qwant.

Firefox has it built in, no redirect necessary, and you don't even need the bang: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-search-from-address...

You are not alone. It highly depends on what you search for even if it's programming related.

Google provides great results for common old-ish and repeated questions but you will notice less diversity - which can be pretty frustrating when you aren't looking for a definite answer.

You will find that it will give you old results from w3schools, codeacademy, SO, etc. Some of which shouldn't go into production...

Just set your default to DDG and, when you can't find something, search again with "!g". DDG also lets you jump to specific sites ("!w for the pedia, !yt for the Youboobs, !imdb, !rt, etc).

Google is better. Bug DDG is good enough for 98% of what I need. Searching is mostly finding the right website, or an explanation of a specific problem. Sometimes I have a search query that doesn't give any usable results with DDG, and then Google comes to rescue. That happens about once a month.

So I need a 1m long C7-C8 extension cord. Not a 30cm, not a 50cm, not a 1.8m, I need 1m long. Let's search:

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=c7+c8+extension+cord+%221m%22&t=h_...

let's force the titles:

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=intitle%3Ac7+intitle%3Ac8+extensio...

That's completely broken, the titles contain none of the three things asked for.

yeah, I am not hopeful with duckduckgo either. I mean, Google is just as bad but I am pretty dismayed by the results these days.

DDG's quality actually decreased in the past year as now they seem to ignore explicitly required stuff in a query quite often. It used to be you just used quotes and got what you wanted, but these days that might get ignored. "-" for excluding similar popular words also seems to have stopped working.

I thought it was just me remembering incorrectly if DDG supported quotes and includes. Could have sworn this worked before. Thanks for confirming you're also having this problem.

First result for me on DDG is that very thing on Amazon.co.uk

if you put a space between 1 and m your results get better.

> I was skeptical, but I encourage you to give it a try if you haven’t before.

I have - I found the results far less useful than Google's, the whole experience far more frustrating and it noticeably slowed down my work.

I find it's a mixed bag -- sometimes DDG is better, sometimes Google is. It kind of reminds me of the old days pre-Google-dominance when you'd try Alta Vista and then Lycos or Excite if you didn't get what you were looking for.

Cynically, I wonder if Google has gotten to the point where they realize that serving the absolute most relevant results means they sell less ads. Of course, I don't think anyone is ordered not to make search quality better, just that incentives/resources get reallocated to things other than ten-blue-link quality.

I agree entirely with how you described the search experience. I would often try three or four ways to get a website I wanted back in the day. I am finding myself learning what search engines I like more for specific types of searches. Some times that means google, some times DDG, and who knows throw Bing int here.

I agree that the DDG results, especially for software development related searches, are often worse than searching Google or StackOverflow directly. So here's my workflow:

1. Search DDG. If I find a decent result, I stop here.

2. Append !so to the end of the search. This searches StackOverflow directly. If this works, I stop here.

3. Append !g to the end of the search. This searches Google directly.

This way Google becomes a last resort.

Also worth noting that you can actually navigate DDG search results using vim keybindings without the need for a plugin: something Google dropped support for a few years ago.

My concern about Google isn't big enough to justify going through this.

I tried DDG, I actually try it out intermittently. I ditched it again, this time because when I searched for an address it doesn't seem to scope the results to where I am located and gives me a similar address somewhere else.

Small little things like that are a pain to work around and something I take for granted in Google search. It's taken a long time for Google to get so good at what it does. I notice that if I am watching a YouTube video and then go to Google to search for something related, the autocomplete basically knows what I am likely to search for. Say what you will about that but it is pretty amazing technology.

To each their own. The things you have listed as advantages of Google are basically the same reasons I do my best to stay away.

I totally get that. It's a paradox that to have super useful search results you step very close to the edge of what's acceptable for the search provider to know about you. The amount of shit Google knows about me is quite honestly frightening. Google has over 10 years of my emails. That alone is more than most people know about me. Then there is years of search history, and location history (yes, I have both enabled). And finally a Google home in almost every room in the house. Oh, and a Pixel phone. And Google drive, photos... You get the idea.

I think at this point it's too late to save my privacy. I am apathetic and resigned to hoping the future isn't as dystopian as it is often feared to be.

DDG is awesome. They have been experiencing a surge of growth, https://duckduckgo.com/traffic

Yandex is another site I've been using for reverse image searches. I find it to be better than Google and Bing. Bellingcat has a great article on it, https://www.bellingcat.com/resources/how-tos/2019/12/26/guid...

Using DDG with Bangs ( add '!G' to a search string to query google, '!W' for Wikipedia, etc.) has really eased my transition.

When somebody brings up DDG's bangs, someone else will often chime in "yeah, but you can make your own in browsers so who cares?" That was often my response.

But the fact that there are community-maintained bangs is really nice. Bangs for all kinds of websites I probably wouldn't have made, but there they are. And since I'm often jumping on new computers, I don't need to bring/import my preferences. Just change the browser's search to DDG, then all my known bangs (and unknown!) are there.

I don't think that's the best criticism of bangs. The best criticism is that your query already gives you what you want if you just type it into Google without the bang.

DDG fails on "Single Unix Specification Issue 7".

Google takes you straight to the online installation at https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/

DDG finds this: https://publications.opengroup.org/c181 where the "Read HTML Edition Online" button is a non-working dud.

Still switching to DDG for most searches, though.

DDG is bad as soon as you're not in the US of A and/or speak any language that is not english.

It's not very good for english speakers in the US, either. The bang syntax is fantastic, but the search results are crap.

Didn't someone demonstrate pretty conclusively that underneath all of the specialization it was just bing?

It's Bing and a few other sources.

They also claim to have their own web crawler but I've never seen it crawl any of my pages before.

What about Russian? I'm not sure if they still do, but at one point they licensed a large chunk of their index from Yandex.

As I don't speak russian, I can't answer you.

No idea but I’d be curious to know the answer.

Same for me. It’s “good enough” and the results page is cleaner. I used to get poor results for dev topics and image search but both have improved over time. I only use google for shopping searches, because it gives me better results for my country (belgium).

I tend to switch over to Qwant when DDG fails to deliver sometimes. That combo works quite well.

I find myself increasingly wishing they'd have some sort of subscription or something. Even if it did nothing to start, I'd like to be a customer, instead of an eyeball. Otherwise as nice as it is now, it's still inevitably headed down the same trajectory as Google, just not as far along yet.

If you do need google Startpage.com is anonymized google.

My wife still uses Google as her default search engine on her phone while I switched to DDG years ago. I dread using her phone to search anything.

And the first page of results isn’t mostly ads.

... yet,

DuckDuckGo can't even answer simple queries like "how old is Donald Trump", "president of France", "how tall is the Eiffel Tower", "distance from earth to Moon", and "distance from earth to sun"; it forces you to search its results for the answer. For all of queries, Google and Bing give you the answer front and center without making you click links or read the result snippets. Bing even has an interactive solar system viewer when you search for that last query.

These days search engines are supposed to be able to surface and present information from sources without user intervention. DuckDuckGo cannot do this (yet).

Neither did Google back in the early 2000s. But people still used it and loved it. I would say DDG2019=Google2007 or better in terms of search quality.

Instead of thinking that I must use the best search engine, regardless of the ethics of its business model; think that I will use the good enough search engine from among those with ethical business models.

Edit: I would additionally like to add that Google's search quality peaked early to mid 2010s, so DDG is not far from peak known search engine quality.

People got along just fine before the Internet existed too. This mode of argument is not particularly constructive.

Just tried. PoFrance: answered in first 3 blurbs (link not needed). Eiffel: 1st three. Moon distance: Fifth.

DDG will answer some directly, like "10 feet to meters". Could be better.

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