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DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

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1,158 pointsbraythwayt476 comments

A few years ago I switched my desktops to use DDG while leaving my phone using Google. At first I had to !g all the time. Now that’s rare.

Now I’m starting to have the other problem. If I search for a company, product, person, etc., on DDG it’s the first hit. But on google I just get a wall of ads and videos, and it’s hard to tell where the actual homepage is for the thing I’m looking for.

So as of now I would say, google is still better if you’re looking for something obscure and especially if you don’t know what it’s called. But today I would say DDG is better if you are searching for something specific by name.

My story is the same! Also, when I want colouring pictures for my kids, DDG just lets met tap them and print them. That is nolonger possible using Google since some months. I also very much appreciate the code snippets when (already started typing "Googling"!) Searching for code related things.

I recently had to search for something similar to this:

march 12 2019 + 366 days

and DuckDuckGo gave me exactly what I wanted while Google gave me not-very-useful results.

The date command can also answer this question:

  $ date -d 'march 12 2019 + 366 days'
  Thu Mar 12 00:00:00 PDT 2020

pure gold buddy, thanks for this

I starting thinking about the Python equivalent of this and it was disgusting.

This?

  $ python -c 'import datetime; print(datetime.date(2019, 3, 12) + datetime.timedelta(days=366))'
  2020-03-12

Yes.

Raku is a lot prettier than Python:

    perl6 -e 'say Date.new("2019-03-12").later( :366days )'
    2020-03-12
    perl6 -e 'say Date.new("2019-03-12") + 366'
    2020-03-12

Probably because I have a finance background, I would go straight to Excel.

Which makes dates out of things that are not even dates! (Like gene names)

Which recently became even shorter:

    raku -e 'say "2019-03-12".Date + 366'
    2020-03-12

Beautiful.

Ruby isn't much better

    ruby -e "require 'date'; puts (Date.parse('march 12 2019') + 366)"
    2020-03-12

For GNU date, yes. BSD not so much (default on MacOS).

    MacOS$ date -d 'now + 30 days'
    usage: date [-jnRu] [-d dst] [-r seconds] [-t west] [-v[+|-]val[ymwdHMS]] ...
  [-f fmt date | [[[mm]dd]HH]MM[[cc]yy][.ss]] [+format]GNU$ date -d 'now +30 days'

    GNU$ date -u -d 'now +30 days'
    Sun Apr  5 18:55:12 UTC 2020

(In BSD date, the '-d' argument "Set the kernel's value for daylight saving time.")

assuming you're on Unix

you could be running gnu/linux or windows with msys, neither of which are unix

If you are on Windows, (or if you are on Linux but for some reason still runs) in PowerShell:

> (Get-Date).AddDays(365)

Or excel, rc[-1]+366, assuming you typed in the date you want in the cell to the left...

I literally do this with google all the time though (my girlfriend like us to celebrate N * 100 anniversaries). Every hundred days or so I go to google and type "500 days after [date]" or something to that effect and it works. It was the first thing I tried, it works reliably every time, and it's google providing the result in the results page, which is better than a link to a website that would do it for me.

What query did you do on google that didn't give you so good results?

Being the socially inept person I am, I would find this exhausting.

Depends what "celebrate" entails. The calculation of dates is straightforward at least.

The example I gave above should suffice to demonstrate the differences. Just copy the second line and paste it into both search engines.

So, to be clear, Google is lamer than DDG because it supports the natural language expression `X days after M D Y` but does not support the mathematical `M D Y + X days`

I guess Google has figured out with its trillions(?) of queries how humans search and not how nerds search.

Why not be more inclusive and enable both how humans search as well as how nerds search?

Sure, nothing stopping them, and I'm not arguing against that.

Interestingly it seems that DDG also supports "human" search: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=500+days+after+march+12+2019&t=can...

(Also interesting that you can infer that I'm on Ubuntu from my sharing of the search URL, though.)

every nerd is a human

I just pop open wolframalpha for anything that needs more meaning to it. I'll keep DDG in mind for next time.

WA is great for certain more complex mathematical or informational queries but usually requires me to dig around to find syntax since the NLP isn't as fluid as I'd like it to be.

I basically view it as a slightly more friendly/natural than traditional Mathematica interface.

If you use DDG as your universal search but want to go to WolframAlpha for your query: x + y !wa

Try answering this one without looking it up:

February 29 2020 + 365 days

Pretty sure that’s because google got hit with a lawsuit about hot linking. DDG will suffer the same fate once they get big (and rich) enough.

I can't say for sure but I bet that's a problem they would love to have.

Yep, Getty Images sued them and Google had to remove the view images button, making the process of viewing the source image more difficult and convoluted.

I've now resorted to using DDG anytime I need to do an image search, and have been using it more and more myself when searching for anything related to IT or programming.

For those interested there’s an open-source Chrome extension that brings back the View Image button:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/view-image/jpcmhce...

https://github.com/bijij/ViewImage

Awesome, thanks!

Yandex Image search is also very good, with none of the annoying limitations that Google has introduced. There also seems to be less Pinterest spam as well.

https://yandex.com/images/

Pinterest spam in DDG is a major annoyance, thou directly viewable images compensates somewhat.

I wish I could permanently remove pinterest from my version of the internet - it's literally spam at this point that never contains the content I'm looking for and adds no value while polluting search results.

ddg has -site:pinterest.com

but i dont know ho to automatically append that to every search, which is what i want.

I could at least plug that (and a few others) into my default CLI search as part of the query string.

See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22506360

You can also set your user agent to googlebot and get the old google images back. Also the search results don’t look as bad.

Regarding coloring pictures, I use coloring.ws (not affiliated in any way with the site, just a happy uncle)

Now "google" is a common enough word for generic online searches that the sentence "I googled 'australian licorice' using DuckDuckGo's image search" doesn't sound weird to me.

See definition 2, under the transitive verb form of the second etymology: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/google#English

That still sounds weird to me. I obviously understand what you mean, but I still don't like the idea of saying "I googled x on DuckDuckGo".

You can say "Have a look, I just duck this up.."

"I'll just duck on to the web and check"

It looks more and more like Google wants to convert native search hits to paid clicks...

Notice how often when you search for "company" you find the company's ad first and then below the native search result...

That’s not google’s direct doing. Google sells ads relevant to searches so you as a company want to buy ads on your name to prevent a competitor for doing the same. Imagine a competitor bought did that for tour company. Your business would take a hit.

Has anyone sued someone for buying ad spaces for one's company or product name like stepping on domain names with malicious intent?

Agreed, and the ad is often immediately above the native search result 1-2.

I'm guessing clicking the ad costs the company money per click, and the native search result doesn't? If I'm explicitly searching for a company, and I'd prefer that they don't have to incur an advertising penalty on my behalf, I'd need to scroll past the first result to the second.

The cost of an ad depends on its 'quality'. A big part of the quality score is based on a model of how useful that result will be to the user.

Therefore, ads for a company that appear when the company name is clicked are considered highly relevant and useful, and therefore have a very high quality score and therefore very low price.

Companies buy those ads on their own search results so a competitor can't target them for advertising

Agreed as that’s my assumption. Do you have first-hand experience and/or a source?

Every single company I've ever worked for that advertised online had a "cost of doing business" ad budget just for buying their own keyword on Google (and Apple iOS Store/Google Play Store if they had consumer apps). Bigger international companies often have someone from an ad consulting firm tracking the major search engines and buying keywords for all of the big ones like Google, Bing, Yandex, etc.

It's one of those "the sky is blue" type of things in advertising. You NEVER want a competitor to have a shot at advertising to your potential customers, especially when they've gone to the point where they're typing in your name into Google so their conversion rate is likely significantly larger than your average site visitor.

I'm not into that stuff much but this may be the reason why there's often bad ads if you search for popular foss software binaries like LibreOffice or Gimp.

The browser vendors are in bed with the search providers. You can't bookmark a site or go directly to it, it always goes via search. No wonder companies want native apps rather then web pages, then the user get an icon on the app drawer/desktop, and they don't have to pay the middle man.

See, this is the kind of thing I knew would happen, rent seeking from the rest of the economy because the bar has risen and you have to pay, not because you get some economic benefit from paying for ads compared to the baseline prior to Google.

Google has become a bloodsucker on the economy. You and I are the ones paying in higher goods and services costs passed on to us. Worse, the bidding has no natural upper bound.

I never click the ads and always scroll down to the native results as I don't want to get involved with their marketing games and not to put burden on the content providers.

We regularly bid for our own keyword and it is super competitive as competitors are always trying to buy our company name. It is awkward when you type "My company", and the first page is all competitor ads

> But on google I just get a wall of ads and videos

EFF privacy badger + uBlock Origin can definitely remove all the ads (as opposed to skewed search results). As for videos, I think you can get uBlock Origin to remove those too (I haven't tried because I'm ok with video search results).

For something obscure, Google ignores three out of four keywords and just produces drivel.

I have found the opposite. For obscure programming questions (_ESPECIALLY_ error codes), google always finds me the right stack exchange thread on the front page. DDG usually gives me crap (but I could see where that crap comes from).

I have noticed that Google's ads have gotten harder and harder to distinguish from the valid results. I use DDG until I have an obscure question, then I have to go back to Google.

Yeah, but sometimes Google ditches the error code because there are so many more results for a different error code.

This has become increasingly frustrating for me, and I now have to overuse quoting to get the things I want.

Why would I include a word if I wanted results that didn't include it. I could understand that on later pages to include more results, but regularly even the very first results don't include one of the key words in my search.

This drives me insane. In the early days you only got exact matches, now in an effort to sell more ads, or be more “helpful” you get random crap. I would pay for a search that only returned results with the words you entered.

Google Verbatim. It is super well hidden.

Type your Query, select "Tools", then "All Results".

Switch that to "Verbatim"

Awesome! Thanks!

However it does not seem possible to set this as default for all searches :-(

It's even worse if they helpfully replace the word with a "synonym" (which isn't!) instead of removing it.

Usually the replacement is significantly broader than the original. For example, "Debian" might get replaced with "Linux", giving lots of irrelevant results. Sometimes it will even replace e.g. "FreeBSD" with "Linux", when the whole point of having it in the query was to exclude the irrelevant Linux results.

It feels like Google's "AI" has reached the point of acting like a (rather stupid) human, complete with all the downsides. Many others I know are increasingly frustrated with this behaviour too, and one produced a very apt analogy: it's like walking into a pet store and asking for a specific type of dog, but being told by the sales assistant "would you like to see these instead" and pointing you to all the cats they have.

question: google has enough on the ball such that if it got out of the search business they could keep themselves going?

Unlikely... the bulk of their revenue is based on ad payments, either on search or on individual sites. I'd guess it's probably 70:30 roughly, since you're probably almost as likely to search on google first and click a couple results. So they'd probably take a 30% hit just from loss of ads. Behavioral information from starting from a google search should also not be under-estimated which is probably where they get a lot of their behavioral data from to begin with (you searched for X, went to Y for Z seconds, etc).

adsense, analytics and search are all pillars of their core income sources, if you take one out, the value is seriously impacted overall.

I strongly suggest installing an ad blocker. Firefox for Android supports ad blockers like uBlock Origin.

Using an adblocker won't stop an ad company from mining your search queries.

Could you give an example <company> or <person> query that gives you "a wall of ads and videos"?

I just tried a number of companies and it always shows a full column with info about the company (name, logo, stock value, founders, social media profiles, etc.)

"Century 21" for me gives me three ads.

1. Reali (Google Play app) 2. century21.com 3. Redfin (Google Play app)

These three ads take up the entire screen of my phone, with official results below this wall.

One observation is that while one of the ads was for exactly what I was searching for, they had to pay for that placement. I imagine other companies might not bid high enough for their own names in the search results.

Try searching for "Joe Biden." If you don't want his campaign to pay for an advertising click, where is the organic search link to his site? It's there but, at least for me, I now have to hunt to try and find it.

> Now I’m starting to have the other problem. If I search for a company, product, person, etc., on DDG it’s the first hit. But on google I just get a wall of ads and videos, and it’s hard to tell where the actual homepage is for the thing I’m looking for.

You should also check out Qwant if you haven't. It's like DDG in this regard, but even "more so".

The bang commands are one of the coolest features of DDG.

I'm still using g! about 50% of the time.

One thing I wish they'd add is to run the calculator if my search term starts with "=".

Their search results page has a feedback button in the corner. Use it! They listen to it.

They haven’t stopped returning results that don’t include my keywords yet, unfortunately.

I've switched to ddg for a while, and the one area where I find it really lacking in comparison to Google is that it is very poor in surfacing relevant hits from threads on forums or stackoverflow. Which is frustrating, as I'm almost more interested in results from there when looking up technical stuff than some spammy blog. It's gotten to the point where I almost always automatically bang out to Google for those types of searches.

But it is amazing how much poorer Google results feel to me these days compared to from a few years ago. For most regular searches ddg does quite well and when I have occasionally banged out to Google for the same search, more often than not I've ended up preferring the ddg search results.

I experience the same problem as a fairly novice programmer who doesn't always know the right term to stick into DDG/google.

>It's gotten to the point where I almost always automatically bang out to Google for those types of searches.

But this is why I stick with DDG, because it is very very easy to check elsewhere with a two letter bang. Even if I never used DDG search it would still be valuable to use DDG with bangs for wikipedia, google, youtube, etc.

Can't every web browser do this with keyword prefixes?

Sure, but you have to configure it to do that. There are bangs for pretty much everything, and I can usually guess them easily enough. !wayback is a favourite of mine.

I’ve been using DDG for years, but sometimes i wonder if it’s just Bing with bangs. I haven’t exhaustively crosschecked this, but the results seem to very closely match Bing’s. They say they use results from a few engines. I wonder what the percentage per engine is.

>Even if I never used DDG search it would still be valuable to use DDG with bangs for wikipedia, google, youtube, etc.

I love this about ddg. I watch to a lot of YouTube videos, and being able to just type “!yt search terms” is just too useful.

It also coordinates very nicely with Firefox's search bookmark feature, I just start the keywords with ! and it's just like I'm doing a normal web search on DDG

Recently, at least, DDG has been surfacing lots of StackOverflow results for me, including the relevant snippets in the right margin that sometime suffice without opening the url.

I've used DDG for a while and my impression is that it seems worse than it's been in a while. I've been looking up documentation for some rust crates and DDG has been particularly unhelpful.

What prompted me to comment was trying to find information about the latest SARS-COV-2 story from Iran that had been published on SFGate.com. DDG was turning up news sites like: Infowars, Washington Times, Daily Kos, Zero Hedge, Red State, etc.

Google put the Guardian and WaPo front and center.

Yeah I am finding more often when I add !g I don't get significantly better results anymore. I often still do it just to check, but don't often find it was worth it.

I've been finding the same. When I first switched to ddg, I thought it just wasn't ready yet... But now i feel more like search is broken in general. The content farms have won.

I just googled DDG and nowhere on the front page did I see DuckDuckGo. Interesting, although not too surprising.

Note: The Duckduckgo site is the first result for "Duck Duck Go", you mean the string "DDG" in particular I'm presuming.

Now, it's not Google's obligation to make Duck Duck go a primary result for the DDG abbreviation - DDG the artist is apparently quite popular.

It would be nice, yes, if Google didn't just guess the best meaning for DDG but instead gave a spectrum of the common meanings (though Duck Duck Go might still not deserve to appear unless it's search became better imo).

The way that Google has degenerated over the last 5-10 years is in more aggressively showing you what they think you want rather than what you ask for (and limiting how you ask for things to boot). But after using Duck Go Go for two years, it seems they have exactly the same problem and that situation explained by them being a meta-search engine leaning on Bing (which in turn clones Google). At least Duckgogo features themselves on a search for DDG but they lean more heavily on battleship with the name.

Yeah, both Google and DDG have the "we know better than you" problem with searching. I have to aggressively use the -keyword filter on searches with both.

That's because there's a popular musical artist called DDG with tens of millions of streams, because guided missile destroyers are designated DDG by the US military and NATO, and because not many people refer to DuckDuckGo as DDG.

If I search for "Alternatives to Google Search," I do see DuckDuckGo, including answers to questions like "Is DuckDuckGo Better than Google," with the answer being yes, it is.

If I search for "duck search", Duck Duck Go is the first option. If I search for "Privacy Search Engine", DuckDuckGo is the fourth result.

I don't think there's any conspiracy here.

Comes up after DDG-the-artist related links at #3 or #4 on anonymized google. Seems ideally ranked.

I actually switched to Bing years ago and had a similar experience, good enough results 95% of the time. In the last year though, I switched to DuckDuckGo, for the obvious privacy benefits, and the results are acceptable 99% of the time.

It seems there are real options in search these days.

Correct.

Google is over. A zombie behemoth that will continue through sheer inertia.

FWIW you would have had a similar experience using Bing. I built a script based on some principals that were in place at Google when I was there to measure search quality[1] and have watched Bing steadily improve over time. I attribute it to a combination of more click stream data as more traffic has been funneled their way (through DDG and others), and algorithm rot at Google which is putting more and more paid content into their results.

[1] And no, I'm not going to release it because as far as I know Google has never released any information externally about how they compute search quality and so its still protected by my NDA with them.

What about DDG? Has their quality increased by your metrics?

Without the !g tag DDG usually gets their results from Bing (sometimes Yandex). So they track Bing's increase in search quality nearly exactly :-)

yeah, i used to find ddg good enough for normal searces, and a bit off for specialised e.g. api help, for which a !g was necessary

nowadays, i get different results for those specialised searces, but they aren't better. i much more rarely bother with google now.

Have been using DDG for a couple of years. Am satisfied with its english result. One area for improvement would be non-english search results. For me it's non-english results are largely irrelevant, compared to google

Yeah I agree, in some rare cases Google is better, in most cases DDG is best from my experience

I find it's okay for desktop use, but frustrating on phones, because of the far inferior search suggestions. When I'm banging out nonsense on the shitty touchscreen keyboard, Google usually figures out what the hell I'm trying to search for. Duck Duck Go fails miserably at that, unfortunately.

Exactly the same experience here! It's incredible how Google looks like a storefront rather than a search engine now, if you have off of it for a while.

I think I've figured out what is happening when people tell me that DuckDuckGo's results "aren't good enough".

What's really happening is that they've been trained to search a certain way to using Google and because DDG doesn't have all the historical data of your searches on their platform they can't fill in the gaps as well.

After a couple days using DDG I found the right vocabulary to get good local results and which bangs to use to get results from the sites that I want. It's a more effective tool if you learn how to use it.

Can you share what is the right vocabulary for example?

I have DDG as main engine for the phone and unless it’s Wikipedia level question, I have to use g!

Don’t use natural language, use keywords and quotes. Essentially the way people searched 5-10 years ago. I rarely need !g

This is the trick. Google got good at letting people search using 'natural' language. DDG is just a bit different. In some ways, I think it's better because my results are more specific in a lot of cases. I look up a lot of academic stuff where Google has the tendency to feed me a lot of garbage that DDG doesn't.

> Don’t use natural language

So... its worse. People want to use natural language.

If I wanted to search using natural language, I'd use Ask Jeeves. DDG is just fine in my experience.

I have to ask, in 2020, or any year, really, was Ask Jeeves ever good at this? Empirically? I can anecdotally it was terrible

I somehow doubt that changed.

Edit: Well I be darned, turns out it was their bread and butter:

https://econsultancy.com/the-state-of-natural-language-conve...

...For certain values of "people", sometimes. I sure don't, it is imprecise, more failure prone and generally gives worse results.

This reminds me of telcos trying to get in to content. "Humans appear to value short audiovisual bursts of stimulation. We shall conquer all by providing all the memes!" And then they knife Tumblr.

It isn't that "people" "want" one search method over another. The search grammar is not why they're there.

It depends on how you look at it. I want to be specific in my searches, which is why I often use quotes, things like `site:somedomain.com`, etc.

That said, that means that DDG is not for everyone. If people want to use Google because they prefer NLP, that's fine, but Google users who trash DDG because it's not smart like Google are totally dismissive of DDG's utility or why people choose it. DDG users on HN, on the other hand, at least seem to understand why people choose to use Google, and I don't think any appreciable number of them expect a large portion of the market to shift towards DDG. In fact, I don't think they believe that DDG is necessarily better. A lot of users, such as myself, use DDG because the UI is a little simpler and because they don't want Google to dominate their life, the compromise being a more stupid but still useful search engine.

Not everyone wants NLP. I dislike NLP and think that it's turning out to be a joke in a lot of ways. When I use natural language with Google, it often doesn't understand my intent, and it even ignores obvious keywords. This is true for pretty much every service or device I've used that has NLP. I don't want it. If others find it useful, that's great, and they should use Google in that case. I don't want it, and that doesn't mean that my chosen tools are "worse".

> which is why I often use quotes, things like `site:somedomain.com`, etc.

this might be true for technical people that don't need accessibility. Nowadays people prefer to use natural language to search, with many people using voice search, either because of preference, or because they need to

I think it is fine to say that DDG targets a different userbase and that the tech community is far more comfortable thinking about computer interfaces and keyword search. But that's not the conversation that people always have about DDG. The conversation is always "why does anybody use Google anymore" and "DDG is a replacement".

A lot of DDG fans on HN blame the user or social conditioning and use that as a crutch. It’s BS.

You need to provide clear examples of the differences in order to really make this argument to someone who might switch.

What specifically are the differences? The last time this topic came up someone told me I was a total noob because I didn’t know how to use search and that was basically the extent of it.

One could ask that you provide clear examples of searches that don't work right for you, then maybe we can provide advice.

Have you tried it recently?

I generally agree that people made excuses for DDG when it was clearly worse and unusable, but today it’s good enough to use instead (I think it’s better).

I’d try it again if you haven’t for a while. Maybe your needs are different than mine, but since we’re both on HN there’s probably pretty good overlap.

Small thing, but I really like how DDG results are primarily links to websites and I can see a bunch of links on the first page without scrolling. I think with google the last search I did had 3?

I suspect the article is right about google being better about low intent searches (and just generally bad search queries from regular people which probably make up the vast majority of users), but I don’t care about that. I think DDG is probably better for more technical users.

I have tried it recently and my co-founder and I are literally building a new search experience because we are deeply unsatisfied with the current ones.

Any links to your new project?

Yup there is (alpha.whize.co) the question mark at the top links to a blog post with our broader goals though we've refined them a bit since that post.

I'll warn you though, the alpha has a really limited index (github results) but was meant to showcase how we think we'll initially prioritize results and gauge people's interest versus this is the final version because as you can imagine crawling the larger internet is a bigger task and if no one was interested we weren't going to do it.

That said we did have a healthy amount of people try it out (over 2000) and are still seeing people use it now over a month out so we've been full steam ahead on our generic crawler, plus a few social media specific crawlers and we expect to have our beta available mid May.

No offense, but I literally cannot find anything on GitHub with this search engine.

It's tuned towards discovery, so if you search a topic you'll get results for smaller, new repos that do something around that topic. We deliberately hard downranked common repos but it's also 2 months out of date now since that was to test the waters and we didnt set up recrawling at the time. That said we shared your concerns and have changed things up with how we are approaching it for the beta

> We deliberately hard downranked common repos

Wasn't google criticized here on HN for downranking specific results? If I'm looking for something, probably I'm looking for the most common, I think

So we didn't pick specific repos, but we crafted a function based on some metrics we we're using from Github that had a sharp drop off after a certain point and basically -any- super common or well known repo would be down ranked based on those metrics.

I can appreciate your thought on that but we're not necessarily geared towards the most common per se (though this might be me misunderstanding what you mean) as we have experienced multiple times the most common result being wrong or outdated and the way things are now it takes a long time for those to slide out of the rankings.

We've been asking around for a while now to flesh out what our actual thought is and the description for the problem we're solving right now is "information staleness", you search for something and it leads you to a reddit post but that's outdated by 5 years and then you wind up actually having to do a deep dive and it turns out there was actually a more accurate post from a year ago but it just hasn't crept up to the top yet because everything references the 5 year old post.

With our alpha we actually think we went too much in the other direction we focused on it all being super super new but the reality is there is nuance between different topics for what timeframe information decays in, if that makes sense, and now we're for the beta trying to strike a better balance.

Right, it makes sense. What I end up doing a lot of times, is manually filtering by "last year". It's good to give preference to more recent results. Thanks for the explanation

I’ve always had the opposite experience with DDG. Technical queries gave just garbage results, where as I got meaningful hits on google each time. </anecdote>

Agreed. Each time I see something about DDG on HN I try to switch and it never lasts. I don't like the results on DDG and as much as I'd like to move away from Google they've got search on lock.

I don’t fully buy the whole “need to move away from google” part. Yes privacy, yes ads, yes SEO gaming, yes monotechopocolpyse. But the reality is they don’t sell my data, they’ve been a good steward of my search queries over the years (and have tools to clear my history or log me out and not save them), and their product is still the best over two-ish decades.

If you’re going to convince me to move away from them, you gotta 10x it, not give me a poor clone with ! tools to force me to compensate for a not great search engine. Give me a fundamentally different experience that actually innovates in this space. I’d love to see the competition, but somehow it hasn’t materialized in all these years.

> If you’re going to convince me to move away from them, you gotta 10x it,

The fact that you don't start all your searches in Google is sufficient reason. You could always jump to Google if DDG has bad results, but for many searches you don't need to leave Google traces.

Why is that sufficient reason? I'm not particularly concerned about Google having my search history. As I've said before, they've been good stewards with it over 20 years.

The same thing was true for me until it wasn’t, I stayed on DDG after trying it again probably three months ago.

<anecdote>This thread made me change to DDG (again). A few minutes later gimp was crashing on me, so I did the lazy thing: C&P some of the error into the search engine.

This is the result of my fist search switching to DDG: https://i.imgur.com/05LxLDv.png

DDG results are utterly useless, while google gives three highly relevant results solving my issue within a few seconds. Happens all the time. DDG: I want, I just can't.

PS: And I'm not a person searching for anything gimp all the time, my browser history shows three prior "how to x in" gimp searches over the last year. Adding to that this is google.com not logged-in in a Firefox container solely for google searches where storage is scrapped somewhat regularly. </anecdote>

This query seems to work a lot better:

    "the program gimp received an x window system error"

DDG used to have issues with responsiveness on their page. Years later I tried it again and it actually feels right. A lot of work has gone into performance optimization and it has sucked me in.

It might be more effective if you try it yourself. Google something you normally google, then repeat the search with &pws=0 at the end of the query string.

Interesting, what is the pws arg?

It turns off personalised (based on your browsing/search history) search results.

I think it's something like 'personalized web search' so you turn it off. That used to be the way to do it anyway.

Considering the base idea isn't that DDG's search is better, but that their privacy is better, it's kinda the opposite. The people not using DDG would have to provide clear examples. (Or just say that they don't care enough about Google's privacy issues to switch.)

I agree. I’ve been in the DDG camp for a little while, but I finally had to switch back to google as my primary search engine on my laptop - fixing searches was taking too much time. That’s after two or three months of using DDG and Bing exclusively

> You need to provide clear examples

Nope, I don't. I don't care what search engine you like. I do want to see Google knocked down several pegs, but fan rants aren't going to do that.

I just keep using DDG as it gets better while Google gets worse and sometimes think a little about the variety of the human experience.

Google gives me bad results. It ignores some of the words in my queries, and the context boxes are generally spammy and irrelevant. Even if the correct information is somewhere in the results page, I bounce before I can find it.

From what I can tell from the article, this might be because I type too much stuff into the search bar, and because Google’s manually curated semantic web stuff is not relevant to me.

However, I’m really not sure why I can’t use Google anymore. It was better when I switched away, so I definitely used to be able to use it (I didn’t log in back then either).

Ddg is fine, and more respectful to its users. I don’t have a practical reason to figure out what the problem is.

I think, on reflection, the issue is that typing “harry potter sport” and clicking on the wikipedia article at the very top of the page (above the first ad) is a much lower cognitive burden than the Google way, where I guess people are trained to type “harry potter” and then skim an entire page of ads, search results and noise to find the word “Quidditch” (which doesn’t appear, I just checked).

If I google harry potter sport, it presents the Wikipedia article in a context box, then the same article in a differently formatted context box, an ad, and then a third link to the same article at the top of the organic results.

Duck duck go displays the same link twice (once in a big context box). This seems better, though arguably not great.

A Google search for me produces the word "Quidditch" in a box along with a link to the Wikipedia page for Quidditch and the first paragraph of that article. The box appears at the very top of the results. I'm not sure how a search result for that query could be much more useful.

I can confirm that I also see this, both in my regular Firefox instance where I do everything and in an incognito Chrome window. Specifically, I get, in order from top to bottom, with only trivial differences between those two cases:

A box with "Quidditch" in big letters, a picture and a brief description.

Some "People also ask:" with questions that do seem to be reasonably relevant.

The Wikipedia page about Quidditch.

Some video links, all relevant.

Some images, all relevant.

Another Wikipedia page about Quidditch.

A page about the "Department of Magical Games and Sports" from some Harry-Potter-specific wiki.

Same wiki's "games and sports" category.

"Beyond Quidditch: games and pastimes in the wizarding world" from www.wizardingworld.com.

NPR article about real-world quidditch games.

Quora question about other sports in Harry Potter.

Related searches: a bunch of Harry Potter things which seem pretty relevant.

Related search: "Quidditch teams".

A bunch of "Searches related to harry potter sport" which mostly also seem relevant.

So ... the organization of the page is a little weird in places, but this seems like an excellent set of search results for that query. The DDG results are also perfectly fine, though they feel slightly worse than the Google ones to me.

Might have wanted to try this, before using this example. As other commenters have noted, this immediately offers up ‘Quittich’ at the first result.

I have this same problem. I use the same "subject sub-subject (...) specific query" tactic I've been using since forever and Google search has been becoming less effective for me over the years. I switched to DDG a couple of years ago I think, and it's better for handling that sort of thing.

Is there a search engine out there that respects quotes, and, or, case-insensitive when asked for, etc? In some ways I miss the days of altavista and similar search engines which had "advanced" tabs you could use to craft your query as closely as needed to find that one web page you know has what you need to find that you stumbled upon years ago.

The only time I use what the author refers to as "low intent searches" is when I've just heard a term or phrase I don't understand and don't know enough about it to ask specifically for something.

Go into google search options and select verbatam to include all search terms.

What's going on is those of us who have been using the Web since Google was brand new (or earlier...remember AltaVista?) expect a search engine to find text on web pages.

What the average user in the post-smartphone world expects a search engine to do is deliver an answer to a question. These are basically incompatible, and it seems like a progressively smaller circle of the Web is being surfaced by Google these days, as they focus heavily on popularity and novelty.

Just a heads up; post-smartphone means the era after the smartphone.

Maybe you intended to say this, then I'm really curious about your perspective?

> Google gives me bad results. It ignores some of the words in my queries

This is the problem I've been having with DDG, where it will aggressively rewrite my search into something completely unrelated

I switched for about a month... for most general searches ddg was as good or better... when searching for development terms as a programmer, I found that the ddg results were often worthless to me. The context that google has associated to you specifically adds value to the results.

Since most of my searches were for technical libraries, components, etc, I found myself searching again with !g more than half the time... after the month was up, I switched back. There are a LOT of things I like about ddg though.

It would be nice if DDG offered search roles, that could prioritize certain associated terms together for someone that is say a programmer, engineer, social media person, etc. This could be opt-in to maybe a dozen categories to skew results on one way or another, but not tied to a person per-se.

Also, a shorter domain name would help.

> Also, a shorter domain name would help.

I'm surprised your browser doesn't just search from the "awesome bar", making navigating to the domain a non-event

However, the answer to your question is ddg.gg (unknown if that's short enough, but it's only 3 keys to press)

I use DDG for 2 years already, and I'm a developer, I've never experienced ur problem, and I do search for technical stuff all the time. I dont see how DDG can fail to show u a documentation or library result, especially if you know what u are looking for

duck.com :)

I've said this before, but I really don't get any useful results from Google at all anymore. I have to prefix Reddit for every search to at least try to get a vaguely human answer to a question.

Of course Reddit is still gamed and has plenty of other issues, but far less than Google at this point.

Just to be clear, are you saying DDG gives you better results? I was just thinking about how google has this problem

> A lot of DDG fans on HN blame the user or social conditioning and use that as a crutch. It’s BS.

That's no more or less BS than people saying that "DDG results are shit". I don't see anything wrong with trying to guess why DDG doesn't work well for some people, even if the conclusion happens to offend someone's personal choices.

An example of a difference: I live in Bristol. If I search for things like "car mechanic bristol", DDG comes up with lots of results from Bristol, Tennessee. It's not that DDG is worse than Google, it's just that DDG isn't tailoring the results to what it knows about me. The solution is to be more specific: "car mechanic bristol uk", for example, does the job.

Have you tried switching `United Kingdom` to on?

https://imgur.com/6ydSWAF

I have exactly the same issue with it in Wellington, NZ.

Even with "New Zealand" turned on at the top, it gives me quite a few results for things in Wellington, Florida.

If I don't specify "Wellington" or "NZ" in the search terms, results are even worse, even with "New Zealand" turned on: I get results from Australia, Dubai, even the UK for various search terms. (and some of the TLDs are things like "com.au" or ".co.uk" so it should be trivial to filter those out.)

Google's not perfect in this regard, but it's an order of magnitude better in my experience for localised queries, even with both in Incognito/Private mode.

> If I search for things like "car mechanic bristol", DDG comes up with lots of results from Bristol, Tennessee. It's not that DDG is worse than Google, it's just that DDG isn't tailoring the results to what it knows about me.

If I wanted a car mechanic in San Francisco, I would usually search for "car mechanic 94105" rather than "car mechanic san francisco". Regardless of search engine.

Do postal codes not work to refer to particular areas of the UK?

The Bristol postcode is the letters 'BS' followed by a one or two digit number, so it's not particularly good for finding a service provider in a large area.

UK postcodes are somewhat more useful when you want to narrow a search to a small area, especially for small towns and London districts where the number is a useful identifier and the area itself might have multiple or non-unique names

> it's not particularly good for finding a service provider in a large area.

Unless I'm misunderstanding something, this doesn't make much sense.

For example, running a search for "car mechanic 94105" doesn't restrict your results to car mechanics that are located inside the 94105 zip code. It restricts your results to car mechanics that are near the 94105 zip code, where "near" is a fuzzy term. I just ran this search myself, from outside San Francisco, and there's just a single result in the 94105 area. But there are plenty shown in 94107, 94103, 94102, 94111... (primarily 94107).

The zip code is a cheap, easy, and unambiguous way to tell the search engine what you want. It's on the search engine to decide how to respond.

> For example, running a search for "car mechanic 94105" doesn't restrict your results to car mechanics that are located inside the 94105 zip code

I am seeing literally that issue with both Google and DuckDuckGo so maybe that depends on the region. My search results, both logged-in and in a private window, are limited to car mechanic websites that mention the zip code. The Google Maps search is not limited, but it's not very good in general, so I usually avoid it. DuckDuckGo finds practically no results in the map view (Apple Maps).

> The zip code is a cheap, easy, and unambiguous way to tell the search engine what you want. It's on the search engine to decide how to respond.

So is "car mechanic bristol uk". The parent's entire point is that DuckDuckGo doesn't consider context for natural language searches and claiming that everyone else is searching wrong is completely missing the point.

Lithuania, Slovakia and Indonesia also have 94105 as a valid post code.

Post codes are not particularly human friendly (though British ones like N1C 4AG are a bit better than just numbers; it's easy to see the N, N1, N1C prefixes in that).

Couldn't DDG use the users location in a non evil way instead of not using it at all, like 1998 Google?

> A lot of DDG fans on HN blame the user or social conditioning and use that as a crutch.

The tools are different, though, so searching the same way on DDG and Google will lead to different outcomes. This is no different than adapting you speech when speaking to an infant or speaking to an adult. [1]

For example, I use DDG as my primary search tool, and I have a habit of using "keywords", rather than natural language, when I search DDG. (This may be an outdated habit from my long exposure to search tools.) With modern Google though, I find that if I follow my habit and use keywords, my search results are poor. I have better results using natural language. As others have noted, I have better results when searching Google when I don't know what the thing I'm looking for is called, or when I'm looking for esoteric content (like code samples.)

[1] I'm not saying that switching is easy or even ideal, I'm just underscoring that different tools are... different. ;-) And "knowing" how to use search well is kinda hard these days, as everything keeps evolving, and we're all busy doing other things.

I have a hard time believing there's actually much google-specific adaption going on for anyone except the biggest HN nerd.

My girlfriend types whole sentences into it. People in this thread have search examples like "harry potter sport". I look at my google search history and it's just generic search strings that DDG has no excuse to struggle.

Having to "tweak your language" just sounds like a cop-out to me. And I think people really just mean you have to add more context to DDG queries because it's easily confused. Like how "elm list" gives great results in google and bad results in DDG.

> Having to "tweak your language" just sounds like a cop-out to me.

Totally agree. But even Google is nowhere near perfection here, so we’re left with the same two strategies we all use when searching:

* try over and over * continually tweak queries

It’s especially easy to forget that we often actually search multiple times, because we do it so quickly that it’s an ingrained habit.

Actually the article in this post provides exactly that. https://www.bitlog.com/2020/03/06/duckduckgo-is-good-enough-... Look for the bit about Harry Potter.

Let's say there's a new can opener in the drawer [1], it's the same size and shape as a can opener but because it's not what you're used to you try to use it in the normal orientation and it doesn't work.

Even though the tool can open cans, rounds off the sharp edges and requires less grip force you reply with: a lot of OXO folks blame the user or social conditioning. It's BS.

Is that a reasonable response?

I'd argue that it isn't.

But to answer your question I use more precise language for what I'm looking for, specifying the city and state I want results from, specifying the type of thing that I want.

A lot of my searches are !bangs,

!godoc - for searching Go packages !gems - for searching ruby gems !sx - for getting only stack overflow results !w - for jumping to a Wikipedia article !gh - for searching github

- [1] https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000079XW2?tag=duckduckgo-ffab-20&...

Funnily enough I just got an example of this from a friend who is trying DDG this week.

Her example query that did better on Google than DDG:

> why did robinhood go down feb 29 2020

What I would search for the same question that does better on DDG:

> robinhood down

She's 24 and I'm 29 so it's possible that difference is real, people who are younger may be tailoring searches in a way that benefits Google (in which case they may not benefit as much from DDG or really would have to change behavior).

GP isn't a peer-reviewed journal, it's an opinion insight.

For me the differences are:

Google is better at dealing with topics that are trending and providing data right on the SERP without having to click through. If I want to look up the latest Corona Virus stats, I'd do so on google. As the article states, things like Google's stock panel are just superior to other options.

But DDG is better at historical searches. It's like they try to 'understand' you less and want to provide you with all possible things you could be looking for. Like Google used to do and like I prefer. I've looked up old articles I had read and wanted to reference when writing an article. On Google and they just don't come up. No matter what I do: use the date tool, use quotes, etc, it's like Google thinks it's too old/irrelevant for me, so no matter what I search, it won't give it to me. But on DDG, they are there and will come up with the right set of keywords.

I uaed google the last 3 years on my desktop while I used DDG on my phone, so I have a pretty good feeling about the differences. I started using duckduckgo because I accidentally set the default search engine to it and thought: OK I might as well use that for a while.

The question you ask is hard to answer because the differences depend on the thing you are searching for. My feeling: for searching code stuff google is a tad better, while for everyday stuff duckduckgo seems to display more relevant results.

It is definitly worth trying, just to notice the subtle things google does sometimes.

Trained in what way? I type a couple words(misspelled) on Google and it magically returns me exactly what I need. Typing special keywords back in the day sucked.

I've been a DDG booster for a while. Their search results are usually good enough. Except after longer use I've found two major issues that eventually forced me back to Google:

1. I can Image Search the most basic of terms and literally get "No Results Found" once or twice a day. Sometimes I'll get like... 8 photos.

2. I will weirdly get the Wikipedia link for a relevant query, but the British or Spanish or some other version often isn't even in English. And I do have "Canada" toggled on.

3. You can't search for "older than" results. For example, if you want news reports about Ukrainian corruption, but only from before 2015, you're out of luck on ddg, have fun reading about Trump.

> ... the British or .. some other version often isn't even in English.

There's only one regular English version of the Wikipedia, unless you're refering to the Galic one, which would be a little odd (https://ga.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pr%C3%ADomhleathanach).

I'm surely messing up the details. I just remember getting other versions of Wikipedia as my main result.

I got the scots one once when I searched for the Hoover dam.

https://sco.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoover_Dam

At first I thought either I was going crazy or the article had been vandalized. But then I figured out that DDG hadn't taken me to the English result.

I find DDG works for most purposes but I sometimes have to use !s to get meaningful results; even with very specific search terms such as a part number. These days I rarely find a need to use !g but it does happen a few times a week.

Please teach me how to use DDG, as I’m clearly missing something. I’m happy to switch to a service that provides better results in exchange for a bit more effort in constructing search queries, but the results I get for that effort really do need to be better.

The only specific advise I’ve ever seen is “use !g if you don’t get good results the first time”, which really isn’t encouraging.

It’s not about better results. It’s about good enough results without all the spying.

Today I was trying to find info about Corpus Christi - a Polish film that won some awards lately. DDG gives me information about a place in Texas, including stuff from the local newspaper and attractions. I'm searching from a Poland IP btw. Anyway, the actual film was at the very end of the first page of results for me.

It certainly feels like it priotises things weirdly.

Google Maps has a similar issue though: plenty of US placenames are just stolen from European places and oftentimes I'll be trying to get directions to a nearby town and instead it'll navigate to someplace in Alabama instead. Strangely enough, not where I want to go...

Did you include the word "film" in your search? Otherwise there's no reasonable expectation for it to show up. It's like searching for "Philadelphia" and expecting the movie to show up and not the city.

I understand what you're suggesting but for fun I did that search on DDG and the film was the 8th result (on the first page of results ;)

The experiment was a success

So does Google, "Corpus Christi" is too ambiguous.

"Corpus Christi polish film" is good enough. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Corpus+Christi+polish+film&t=ffab&...

"Corpus Christi film" also works, results look relevant, but knowledge graph shows the old 2014 Venezuelan movie. This is where Google is way superior, it showed me average score on imdb and even local showtimes.

I imagine that if you were searching from a Polish IP, Google would infer that you meant the movie, not the city. For anyone in the United States, however, I'd expect the city to be the more common search.

Corpus Christi is the name of a major Christian festival and is a holiday in many countries with a large catholic population, including Poland. The city in Texas and the movie are named after it.

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

Wait a second. You can't use a privacy themed search engine and expect them to lookup your ip, figure out what city you are in. The entire point of using ddg is to avoid this.

DDG does use ip address to locate you.

It already knows I’m in the UK from my IP address. I get a UK toggle at the top of the page.

When I search for Fish Tacos on DDG's maps and Google, it's night and day.

DDG gave me 4 results, none anywhere near me.

Do you have a suggestion for how I could have been more effective?

DDG is not good for local stuff. That's in the linked article.

'Fish Tacos [X]' where X is the name of the city - or turning on your region toggle is usually enough to solve that problem.

I do not use DDG for map queries. Google Maps is still light years ahead of anyone else for maps. For non-map queries, DDG is now well ahead of Google except for long tail stuff, for example: technical error messages.

I currently also use Google Maps for map queries.. But I use it through DuckDuckGo, with !gm. I actually find this a better experience than navigating to Google Maps before entering my query.

For POIs, Google Maps is out in front. For motoring directions, Apple is catching up. For walking and cycling, OSM is streets ahead.

I find DDG more useful when I treat it like it's trying to help me use the internet, rather than like it's trying to replace the internet.

try "fish tacos !yelp"

then, why not just use yelp?

The same reason that any ddg bang is useful: fewer keystrokes, one less page load.

IDK, for all sites I use I have them as custom searches. So Yelp would be: "y" -> tab -> search -> see Yelp results page

For me part of the problem is that DDG feels slow to index new results. Trying to search for anything that’s happened in the last week almost always is a swing and a miss for me.

It’s a stark contrast to google, where the results seem more or less live, including updated auto complete for things that have happened recently.

And that doesn’t seem like an issue at all related to privacy, it’s just a problem space that DDG doesn’t seem to handle well.

Ironically Google changing how it responds to my search queries, and me finally figuring out that's why my google experience has degraded, is what actually made me switch to DDG as my primary search engine.

I use DDG on a daily basis, being my default search engine for the past two years.

However I don't agree — many of my searches have awful results on DDG compared with Google and I often find no words to make it better.

Local searches are an obvious candidate, DDG is awful for my native language, giving me results in Spanish (I'm Romanian).

But lately I'm noticing programming-related results being worse on DDG as well. I'm not sure why because they used to be similar, but now some of the results DDG is giving me (for very specific search terms) are really, really bad, many times DDG ignoring my keywords and giving me something else entirely.

It's fine for now, I prefer the privacy, but they'd better improve and fast.

My experience with DDG has been exactly the same, not just with programming- and, in my case, math-related search terms but also when I look for personal websites of people in academia. On Google, it's usually the first search result but it often isn't even among the first 10 in DDG.

I think you inadvertently hit the nail on the head here, in that DuckDuckGo requires you to know its incantations, and Google has gotten really good at not having you to know any incantations at all. I can even obliterate the spelling of words and it often knows what i'm looking for.

Now, with that said, if your target is power searchers (like myself) I think you have a better argument, because Google often lacks in some of these areas (like being able to filter by a specific grouping of sorts, like if I want a "dev focused" search, not just filtering by a specific site, DDG has some methodology here that I haven't been able to easily surface with Google)

But there are cases where I've noticed DDG falling behind, like indexing newer content, or being able to filter by time accurately.

> Google has gotten really good at not having you to know any incantations at all.

I disagree -- the decline of the quality of Google's search appears to have begun when it started trying to second-guess what I'm searching for, and has continued to decline ever since.

DDG doesn’t work well for my language, but it works perfectly well for my English searches.

I'm using DDG but I have to "!g" a lot. The English language results are quite good but the German results are often not what I'm looking for. I'm assuming this will improve with time so I'm not too worried but DDG search results can still be improved a lot (imo). That being said, I'm not switching back anytime soon. Pretty happy so far.

FWIW I use uBlock Origin and Privacy Badger.

I use it regularly, but for some programming queries the results could be better and I have to use the Goog.

I've made a promise to myself to start paying attention to this when I do searches, but so far that promise has gone unfulfilled.

If I had to hazard a guess, I'd say that I think I see quite a few SEO hackers pop up on the first page, to the point that it's sometimes difficult to find anything meaty.

I'll try to keep an eye on it this week so the next time DDG comes up I can contribute something substantial (and substantiated).

I never log in to Google’s services in the browser[1]; clear my cookies on browser close; use several other blocking methods for privacy; and have been using DDG as my main search engine for years.

Yet, I’ve used `!g` more in the last months than ever before. In my usage, DDG’s results are getting noticeably worse. It’s unlikely I’ve forgotten “how to use it”.

[1]: I only log in to a Google account for Gmail, and always on an app.

On the other hand, when people say you need to learn how to search DDG, they basically mean you need to add more context to your search because DDG is easily confused and categorically worse.

Having to "retrain" yourself to use DDG is the most romantic way to say "it's a worse tool so you need to give it more context."

I switched over to DDG a few weeks ago. I slowly regressed to more and more !g usage, and finally switched back to GOOG a couple days ago. Then just an hour ago I searched for "google fiber stadia", because I was curious how well they work together. The main reddit result opened in an amp page (and of course reddit pressured me to install the mobile app). I went back to the results and started scrolling down. I honestly couldn't tell at a glance what was ads, amp, or normal links. I personally feel like I'm in a bit of a no-man's land right now when it comes to search, but I think DDG really has a window of opportunity.

You can use !s in ddg to get google results without google.

Does that bring up Startpage results?

Yes

Use !sp for that

I'm redirected to startpage for both !s and !sp from duckduckgo. Is there a setting I need to flip?

Startpage is a privacy-oriented proxy of Google search results.

Weren't they bought by an ad-company recently? I used their anonymous browsing extensively, even if it was slow. I've all but stopped using them now.

Hi - Startpage person here. Sorry to hear you stopped using Startpage. We hope you'll give us another chance. Here's more info on the investment by System1/Privacy One: https://support.startpage.com/index.php?/Knowledgebase/Artic...

Just FYI: We don’t collect or share your personal information. The Startpage founders continue to run the company as before and they have control over the privacy components of Startpage. With this investment, we hope to further expand our privacy features & reach new users. You may have already seen some of these new initiatives taking place. 1) Unfiltered News Tab launched in November: https://www.startpage.com/blog/product-updates/launching-unp... 2) Privacy Please! Newsletter launched in last month: https://www.startpage.com/blog/company-updates/welcome-priva... 3) We're pushing out more info via our blog & social than before, giving greater insight into how we make money (https://www.startpage.com/blog/privacy-awareness/advertising...) and how we keep your search private (https://www.startpage.com/blog/privacy-awareness/how-does-st...)

Try using a google mirror instead, like Startpage. The google results without the spying.

Startpage is in bed with an advertising company.

Google is an advertising company, so Startpage isn't any worse.

There are other choices, such as SearX, DuckDuckGo, and Ecosia.

Recommended read: "Detailed tests of search engines: Google, Startpage, Bing, DuckDuckGo, metaGer, Ecosia, Swisscows, Searx, Qwant, Yandex, and Mojeek" [1]

[1] https://libretechtips.gitlab.io/detailed-tests-of-search-eng...

DuckDuckGo works with the CIA so whatever.

Whataboutism 101.

There are more options than these two.

Startpage is a search engine so it doesn't really sleep, hence no need for a bed or any bed-sharing. And we don’t collect or share your personal information.

And yes, we announced last year that System1/Privacy One invested in Startpage. Rest assured, the Startpage founders continue to run the company as before and they have control over the privacy components of Startpage. With this investment, we hope to further expand our privacy features & reach new users. More info on the investment: https://support.startpage.com/index.php?/Knowledgebase/Artic...

Similar. DDG just wasn't quite as good, and Google is getting too sleazy.

Same boat here. Even for technical searches, which ddg is supposed to be good at, I would routinely find the Google results of much more accuracy and quality. Finally switched back.

Luckily, for the things I search, ads are not usually a problem.

I found that searching was more difficult nowadays. Result from Google is becoming worse, filling with content farm and ads. In some sense, that gave opportunity to become a better search engine without any technical improvement, but better marketing.

I don't know if DDG is better or good enough - maybe I'll start using it.

But I do know that google has gone far downhill. and I think that is partially its fault, and also the fault of the internet as a whole. It's just become such an infested ad machine.

Search "phrases" are starting to return more and more useless results. I typed in some phrase as a question and got back a list of news articles about coronavirus. Can't recall what it was but it had nothing to do with coronavirus.

More and more often it will drop words out of my search; import words. I can't help but suspect it's because it has more ads to show me without the most contextually important bits of my search.

Half the first pages are ads. The next few pages may be shopping results even though I'm not searching for something to buy.

Something.. Happened on mobile. The search results now have a bunch of BS "sections" before the actual search results section! WUT.

Seems to be getting harder and harder to craft the right searches to get good results. I miss the days when people would write articles with headlines of "<topic> sucks". Was so much easier to find counter opinions to stuff :/

Mobile Google search is atrocious for my preferences. I pretty much avoid it entirely at this point.

I tried DDG half a year ago when I also switched back to Firefox, but didn't like the results at the time, so I switched to Startpage. Then for the past couple weeks, Startpage has been having technical issues, so I tried out DDG again. And it's nice. Like I don't even think about it. I'm actually impressed

Hi! Startpage person here. Sorry to hear you've been experiencing issues with Startpage. You can always reach out to us via social or our support page: https://support.startpage.com/index.php?/Tickets/Submit/Rend.... It helps us let our team know of any issues that may affect users at large.

FYI: We're rolling out new privacy features this year. We hope you'll give us another chance. Thanks!

There's also Qwant. I've been using it a for a while on PC and found it to be not bad. On Android I kept running into no results a few times, I don't know what that was about.

It's only good enough when you're in the US, I live in the UK and DDG consistently returns non local results even though the country is set correctly, it's especially annoying given how many US cities are named after their UK counterpart.

Also in the UK. It's noticeable that for many search terms, DDG's top autocomplete suggestion is the term you just typed, with "uk" tacked on the end of it. That suggests that many users in the UK are finding DDG's search results to be too US-centric.

This is _by far_ my biggest issue with DDG. I've been trying to use it for most of my searching and I'm fine with having to append '!g' to ~25% of my searches, it's not ideal, but whatever, I can manage.

Having to append 'uk' to 90% of searches after the first results page is full of useless American shit, for search terms that Google UK handles flawlessly, gets old, very quick.

Do you have United Kingdom toggled on?

The results did get better after I discovered that setting a while back. But it's still not close to good enough and I still have to manually stick 'uk' onto a search to find relevant results for most queries.

It's not just US-centric. DDG is just a little bad about local queries in general. With Google, if I'm looking for a local business, or something in the news locally, there's a decent chance I can just search for it and I'll find what I'm looking for. With DDG I need to explicitly tell it the locale I'm interested in.

On top of that I live in a small city that shares a name with a larger city. Google understands this and gives me results for my local, smaller city, but DDG needs to be explicitly told city name, state name.

This is my only gripe with DDG.

For daily use, it's fine, but it's awful for local results or anything that requires a map or directions.

I agree, I use it as my main search engine as I'm trying to go Google-free at home but finding UK-centric things is annoying. I guess we must just be a much smaller market for them.

Unfortunately this is the same for Romania as well, no local results are returned even though the country was set correctly.

Same for Australia. I use DDG exclusively on all devices for a few years now, and overall it works great for me. I probably use !g once or twice a month, if that.

But..

Even though I have the Australia button turned on, it doesn’t seem to do anything. So every time I need something local, I add “site:.au” to the end of the query then it works great again.

That means I should try DDG. I NEVER EVER want local results, and Google always gives me local results. If I'd want local results I would put my country or my city in the search query.

DDG has a toggle to choose whether to prioritize local results or not. Try a search, and then it's prominent enough that I don't think I need to describe its location; you'll find it if you're looking.

That's great!

I use DDG, I'm not in the US and I never really felt that was an issue. If I'm looking specifically for something local I'd sooner use google maps directly anyway, not just a random web search.

Do you have the UK toggle turned on? Improving local results internationally is a major priority for the team currently - if you find queries where this isn't working well, hitting the feedback button in the bottom right of the screen is a huge help!

Why not default to having the UK toggle on for UK users?

All you need to do is type "uk" at the end of the query. I now do this automatically if I want UK-specific results, it's not a problem.

That's the reason I much prefer DDG over Google. When I want the news about politics in my country or restaurants in my town, I switch to local results in my language and region with the simple click of a button.

Sometimes I want results from StackOverflow, in English. On Google getting this right was a PITA.

It's not even good enough in the US.

I'm from the UK and have used duckduckgo as my default search engine for about 3 years. It's probably due to my specific searching habits but I have never noticed the issue you have.

It’s not. Not even close. There should be some sort of “search benchmark” that could show this more objectively.

A table of searches with search queries and the correct first resukt. In maby cases it’s clear what the correct result is (Search for a major company and I want their website index page for example). In other cases the expected result is “what google does”, e.g when searching for “123 GBP in USD”.

It’s not that DDG doesn’t let me find what I want eventually, it’s that it doesn’t have the right result as #1 which is extremely frustrating when you are used to the I’m feeling lucky-click on the first result without reading.

To switch I’d want google quality results with zero added effort on my part e.g in learning better DDG-querying or accepting a slightly longer time to browse results. That’s pretty tough to pull off without the resources and data that Google has.

If such a test existed, i would expect ddg to be on par or better than google. For finding index pages, I prefer ddg because the actual company isnt placed below advertised results of competitors. Currency conversions are supported. It also shows SO answers, github project info, latex commands and more on the results page. I'd recommend revisiting it.

Absolutely. Completely anecdotally I know but I switched to the Brave browser recently to try it out. It came with DDG installed by default so I started using it in the omnibar or whatever it's called. Like many here I do some coding so I've been looking up stuff to do with Ruby, Vue.js. APIs, and the lambda calculus. DDG results were not very helpful so I've gotten used to navigating to google.com just like the old days.

As in, I'm so used to ctrl+t and type something to search that I had to train myself to type begin typing google.com again. Yeah, I could switch the default search engine but being forced to compare results is a good habit. These articles about how DDG is hit the front page time and again on Hackernews, this has never been my experience. I appreciate the privacy aspects 100% so I'd actually prefer if it was genuinely competitive with the big G but sadly this has never been my experience.

I’ve been using ddg for a little over 5 years. Those first few years of use I found myself using !g a ton, but I think ddg’s results are actually better now. Not that the search is necessarily better, but I don’t have to wade through a bunch of ads. I know this is a tired position around here but honestly there’s very little I get out of google’s search that I don’t get from ddg.

I'd say I still do the !g thing about 10% of the time. DDG is good for my average search case of "I really just need to get to the wikipedia article but I don't know quite what it's titled", or finding an answer on StackOverflow, but if I'm doing anything that's kind of niche, I end up having to use Google.

I totally agree with you. I have made ddg my default search on browser but many times I end up Googling. It has increased the time to get the final answere to 1.5 times atleast.

I've been using DDG for about three years now and I still use !g a lot, but I really shouldn't. Google practically never finds what I'm looking for if DDG can't.

90% of the time I use !g, google doesn't have anything in the first few pages either.

To my knowledge duck duck go uses Bing's search API to get their results. To me Bing and Google have not been sufficient for my searching needs and the needs of a large group around me for a long time now.

On a separate but related issue because DDG is using Bing the overall experience is lackluster, as other user's have noted things like very slow to re-index new results, new information climbs up to the top very slowly and often times I have to switch off their search with a ! command to get my results because they just aren't working. But if I have to do that I'd rather be on that other search site entirely.

To be fair google also for the last few years has also started providing a very lack luster search experience and using dark patterns around their results to get you to click ads.

They all kind of suck.

My opinion is biased though because I'm currently working on a new search engine to solve these things.

> To my knowledge duck duck go uses Bing's search API to get their results.

And their own crawler and wikipedia and stackexchange and about 400 other sources: https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/so...

That said, yeah it is mainly a better Bing.

That page basically confirms this. It says

> 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.

A search in Bing for "cult of the dead cow" seems to give me some localized (Japan) results, while DDG has a bunch of American Beto O'Rourke politics news pieces added.

The Bing API provides a different set than Bing itself. Compare "cult of the dead cow" on Ecosia Japan (which is a straight-up Bing API proxy) with DDG Japan and you will see that the results are identical.

It's actually Bing+ other sources, there's a page on their site that explains it.

And I had the same opinion as you, until I started using it every day. My habit was as follows: When I didn't get good results, I would switch back to Google and run the same query. Over time I found more "purple" links in Google indicating DDG was giving me almost the same (sometimes better) results.

That's an interesting process, I'll have to give it a try ;)

I mentioned it above but Google has also been giving me worse results in recent years so I genuinely believe there's a better way to do these things and do them in a way that is also more respectful of the users.

If that’s the case, then I’m sticking with Ecosia since it uses Bing as well. Not sure if Ecosia has it’s own crawler, but at least they appropriate some profits to plant trees.

They also have an alias to redirect the search to google if the initial search doesn’t yield anything useful.

Compare searches between Ecosia and DDG. Same results.

I use DDG as the primary search engine on my own devices and Google at work.

DDG is still worse than Google in the following aspects:

- autocompletion is crap, DDG thinks that "lyrics" is a word that improves every search

- DDG is worse at searching SO/Reddit/GitHub. Just a few days ago I was looking for a solution to an issue with my 3D printer, and DDG missed the most useful Reddit post

- a filter bubble is often a good thing, I don't search for political news, but Google knows I usually search for technical issues, so where DDG is happy to return results about tabletop games, rock formations and corrosion, Google knows I am looking for Go, Nim, Crystal and Rust.

I’ve been using DDG exclusively for years. People talk about how hard it is to switch, but I’ve never had any trouble getting exactly the results I’m searching for. I sometimes wonder what makes google search results so amazing, but not enough to risk it.

The quality of my Google results plummeted when I blocked and opted out of as much tracking as I could. I'm not really happy with Google or DDG results at this point.

It doesn't help that search engines have been progressively hiding more and more functionality. Just last night I was trying to search for results within a window of "published after 18 months ago" but couldn't figure out how to do it. It was probably just another search away from finding the answer, but why are search UIs removing/hiding their best Advanced Search features?

Guess it depends on domain. I've changed the default in Firefox a few weeks ago and find that for "regular" searching DDG is enough that I don't go to Google.

But for specialized searches I frequently reach for the Google override, and sure enough Google has significantly better results. Like searching specific, weird errors messages and such.

That’s the thing. The vast majority of my searches are development/coding related. I always find what I’m looking for in the first few returns. I sometimes wonder if I’d get even better results on google?

In my experience yes. But as I said, often the DDG is good enough.

Agreed. I tried it a few times over the years and found the results to be pretty poor, but I tried again recently and found the results to be good enough to fully switch both my computer and phone to DDG.

Although I'm fully switched over, there are 2 drawbacks:

* Since DDG tracks you less, the results for local searches may be worse. If you're in Boston, TX you'll probably want to search for "boston, tx restaurants" whereas I'm guessing Google could handle "boston restaurants" if your location is in Boston, TX.

* Finding brand new results seems a bit harder. I found this especially true when searching for election results. Searching for, e.g., "nevada election results" was showing me results from 2016 and 2018 on the day of those elections this year. Now the DDG results seem to correctly point to 2020 results.

Yeah I don't like that DDG interface limits you to timeframes of Last Day/Week/Month/Year. There are lots of good reasons to want to search a particular timeframe!

> Google could handle "boston restaurants" if your location is in Boston, TX.

Location is the single biggest implicit factor for Google search results; "restaurants" would probably get you what you are looking for (well, ignoring that it's an overly broad query, and most places have too many restaurants for a simple ranking of them to really be that helpful).

I live in Rochester, MN, and that's how I can say with some certainty that google doesn't do a good job of using your location in their search algorithm. If you just search for something simple like "Rochester library hours", it'll default to Rochester NY. Everybody in my town has learned that we have to use "Rochester MN library hours". I get that the one in NY has ten times more residents than we do, but it's not like we're some backwater here!

I'll believe this when the third result for "filled torus" isn't "Cum Filled Pussy Porn Videos" unless safe search is enabled. DDG's contextual awareness is abysmal.

Confirmed. Wow!

I do find that I get... a lot of porn images in any DDG image search past, say, the 20th image result. For literally any search term, it seems.

i'm not getting porn but this is nonetheless a perfect example of how bad ddg is. first result is the "torus" article on wiki, which is _not_ what the query asks for. by contrast, google's top result is the "solid torus" wiki article - much better.

I reproduced OP's search result by turning the safe-search from "moderate" to "off", and searching for "filled torus" without quotes.

That's fascinating. If DDG's whole shtick is not profiling, what accounts for the difference?

Maybe you just under-estimate the prevalence of porn searches on the Internet? Once could easily argue that your esoteric geometry search is likely not nearly as common as the results they returned you on what they surmised was a porn search with a typo for instance.

If the query engine cannot recognize that nothing in "filled torus" indicates anything remotely close to a desire for porn results, then it's just not good.

A DDG search for "full prison" with safe search off returns, in order: xvideos.com, pornhub.com, xnxx.com, xnxx.com, serco.com (holy shit something actually about prisons sort of), xxxparodyhd.net, pussyspace.com, fox.com/prison-break, youtube.com, youtube.com

That's ridiculously bad. I'm not sure it could be worse if they tried.

If there's one astoundingly obvious way that Google's results are superior, it's that apparently they first ask themselves "is the user looking for porn? [Yes/No]" and then proceed from there.

Maybe they should simply re-label their settings, for starters.

The safe search has three levels: "off", "moderate" and "strict".

I would call this the "Adult content" setting, and the choices would be "prefer", "neutral", and "suppress". These would just map exactly to the semantics of the current three choices.

Transitioning to the "prefer" option could require some dialog or check box tick-off to state that the search engine will emphasize adult material, and the user must confirm their adulthood to enable this mode.

Thus under the "Adult content: prefer" setting, you would then be getting what you asked for. Your queries are interpreted as searching for porn, and "filled torus" behaves accordingly.

Since the very presence of such an option might be seen as offensive, or as promoting pornography (i.e. that DDG is effectively a porn search engine since it has an option for preferentially finding adult material), that option could itself be hidden somehow. To access the option at all would require confirming through a dialog.

Also, there should be a "kid friendly" version of duckduckgo at an alternative URL, with immutably safe settings and and possibly altered search behaviors for even greater safety. Parents could point at that, and block/redirect the main one.

With that idea, what if simply one had to go to adult.duckduckgo.com to be able to search with safe-search "off", regardless of their settings? I.e. if you go to duckduckgo.com, then "off" is treated as "moderate". Only at adult.duckduckgo.com is it actually "off".

> I would call this the "Adult content" setting, and the choices would be "prefer", "neutral", and "suppress". These would just map exactly to the semantics of the current three choices.

I honestly think a better idea would be tagging all results. A lot of the irritation with search engines seems to come from the fact that words can be so overloaded and ambiguous. It's unreasonable to expect that any search engine could return what you want in the first 20 results if there's no way to narrow down results by tags and categories. Porn shouldn't be the only category that gets special treatment.

For example, sometimes I want to search about how to make foo, and I get pages and pages of results about... crafting foo in games. At that point I'd like to turn off all results that have to do with games or fiction. Or enable categories about.. actually making stuff?

And speaking of games, it's fucking irritating that the results aren't tagged so when you try to look up information about a game in a series, you get tons of results about more recent sequels and it can be really hard to filter those out.

OK,though is "filled torus" even a proper name? Looks like Google recognizes that you probably really mean solid torus.

Fine. Search for "full prison" instead.

Worse yet, search for "middle school".

Hell, searching for "cat" results in "Cat Porn Videos"!

Searching for "zebra" results in "Zebra Porn Videos"!

Searching for "dolphin" results in "Dolphin Porn Videos"!

"ballet" gives porn!

I don't know. I am using DDG from outside the U.S. but with English as the primary search language. The Google's localized results are just an order of magnitude better. I end up re-doing almost 10-20% of my searches in Google after being dissapointed with DDG results. Most of the time Google results are sadly superior.

And don't get me even started in searching in my native language (Finnish). DDG is close to useless there, since it can not parse the different, obscure word forms we use (although I type word X in form A, I want my searches to include results in of word X in semantically related forms B and C). Google did not initially parse Finnish very well, but it eventually became amzingly good something like a decade ago.

For the same reason I find DDG very useful when I don’t want localized results, which is hard to get with Google. I currently live in Spain and Google returns mostly Spanish results, even on unrelated queries like programming or a device review.

Be sure to set your search language to English. It will still return localized results, but in English.

Like the author, I switched over when the google ad thing happened, and for the same reason. But instead of DDG, I decided to try out ecosia ( https://www.ecosia.org ) which is a wrapper over Bing. But they'll take all the ad revenue and use it to plant trees. So I get decent search results (bing isn't quite as good as google, but it's pretty decent for what I need) and also get to save the earth a little bit.

To add a little data on this thread, here's a list of queries that I subsequently !g'ed over a 30 day period. Maybe Duck/Bing developers will find it useful: https://gist.github.com/typpo/605a7cd9da88c3be061c6958a31fa2...

Aside from a limited set of head queries where they've added their own custom stuff, DDG is a wrapper around Bing. The results are identical and any webmaster can tell you that Duckduckbot is not crawling the web like Google/Bing.

In the same way that "Google is an advertising company", I see DDG as a marketing company. They've done a good job marketing Bing results with a privacy wrapper. I recognize the value, but it's different from competing directly on search.

I strongly disagree, especially when you have all the Wikipedia / contact / google map embedded into Google search, with one click it can call phone number from a restaurant.

Edit: To add more, it's all those details that makes Google better than other, search engine are not just for searching things it's all about the display and relevance.

Mmmh, if you search for a place in the maps tab instead of the general one you usually have a telephone url you can tap to start a phone call.

I still find that you're using a very specific use case of a search engine to completely dismiss not using a different search engine.

it's not a specific case. if I type federer on google I get a list of all his recent matches and live scores so it is easy to follow. A lot of my searches on google are like that. I don't even have to click on any links.

DDG does that too. Most restaurants I search for have a box on the side with phone number and info pulled from Yelp, and a map in whatever provider you want to use.

I don't like that stuff in Google, so I'm fine with DDG not over-doing it. Wikipedia overview is fine, but the many widgets just get in the way IMO. If I want a map I go on maps. If I want reviews I go on a review website.

Like if I type "apple" on Google search the only web result I get is apple.com, everything else is taking with tangentially related widgets: https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=apple

Special points for the IMO completely useless "people also search for" widget.

DDG tones it down a lot more: https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=apple&ia=web

Here without scrolling I can see potentially useful links to iCloud, Apple TV, Apple's support etc...

Back when I first used Google its main selling point was that it was lean and clean and with decent results. DDG is like that for me these days.

No it isn’t. I try to switch every few months, usually sticking with it as my only search engine on mobile and desktop. The results suck, and it is completely lacking in information about real-time topics.

Just compare the results for a live sports game across DuckDuckGo and Google. Or the query “democratic primary”.

In both of these google presents relevant accessible information while DDG does not.

DuckDuckGo wastes your time but protects your privacy. At the moment Google‘s results are so much better that I am willing to give up privacy in exchange for convenience.

I will continue trying DuckDuckGo every few months. Hopefully someday I will not feel drawn back to Google.

DDG is my daily driver and I do not miss Google Search in the slightest. I rarely need to !g and its often futile because Google returns nearly the same results.

However, my favorite feature of DDG is it's native dark theme.

I just decided to try DDG out because of this post and am so happy there's a native dark theme. Now if only Github would release one!

I recently switched to DDG after giving it a shot 2 years ago and finding it wanting.

Good, bad, or indifferent, I land on the same 5-10 platforms (or did Google only promote those platforms??) for 95% of my searches. This makes DuckDuckGo's !bang commands more efficient than a Google search.

Google wins for completely agnostic default searches and rich map functionality. For everything else, I am very satisfied with DDG.

Most people, I believe, could be served just fine by most "Free" alternatives. Many people, I believe, wouldn't notice if you replaced 1) their desktop OS with GNU/Linux, 2) their browser with Firefox, 3) their search engine with DuckDuckGo, 4) MS office with LibreOffice or FreeOffice, and 5) their various smartphone apps and social media services with webapps and/or Free alternatives.

How is this surprising? As long as it "just works" most people are going to be fine and won't really notice a difference.

I !g occasionally in DDG (which I've been using full time for over 4 years) but have found that Google's results aren't better, just different.

It's not. I'm not a big fan of Google the company, but Google the search engine finds what I'm looking for.

If I type "the two magicians from TV" in Google, I get what I'm looking for (Penn and Teller). It's way down the list in DDG.

I suspect DDG is a glorified regex, whereas Google is able to infer connections and figure out what I meant.

Switched to DDG 3 years back! Only to check if Google lists anything different, checked it rarely. DDG is very GOOD imho. Since, you see organic results mostly based on the ranking rather than preference to mobile sites, AMP & advertisers, it feels refreshing and good.

I care about true privacy and transparency...so I use the Epic Privacy Browser and their ad-free and transparent EpicSearch.in.

The claim in the blog post and by DuckDuckGo "They do not collect or share personal information" can not be true depending on how you define personal information since search ads are localized on DuckDuckGo. Incidentally, DuckDuckGo refuses to disclose what data they send to Bing/Yahoo to retrieve search ads (forget about open source, they're not even transparent). This claim is further in question as their search ads link directly to Yahoo/Bing so they direct your IP and personal information directly to them -- while one can see those links while hovering on the links, it's not plainly disclosed (especially for non-technical users). Fundamentally their business is built on sending your personal information to Bing.

The results in EpicSearch aren't as good as Bing/Yahoo/DuckDuckGo nor as Google...but they are quite close to any intuitive idea of being private and are as good or better at times at least 80% of the time...so from there I'll click on to Bing or Google if I need more results.

If we are comparing anecdotes, like in this article, DDG is still not good enough for me for certain kinds of queries. My default search engine is DDG, but even today I had to switch to startpage (!s) for some searches. IIRC, these were just some searches related to some themes and features of Ghost (the publishing platform), Hugo (static site generator), etc. In my daily use, I still rely on startpage, and the next level, which is Google (!g), to get to what I need.

Forget about instant answers and similar things. DDG’s index of the web is not as vast as Google’s...or maybe it is but it’s unable to figure out relevance as well as Google does.

I still recommend DDG to people and tell them about a few bang commands. But as of today, DDG is not something I can totally rely on within the scope of its search results.

The new Edge browser from Microsoft uses Bing as the default search engine. It works better than DDG for several cases (for me), but whenever it doesn’t, I miss the bang commands that make the act of performing the same search on another engine so quick and easy.

I switched for a month and went back to Google.

DDG is about 95% there for me, but that missing 5% is the crucial on point results for technical questions I rely on.

In these cases DDG point me at useful stuff, but not as useful as Google, and that edge costs time spent traversing and sorting information.

I’m happy there is a good competition here and I’ll try again, but for now I’m happy with Google results even with the ads.

I've been using DDG for about the last 2 years. The only thing that throws me for a loop once in awhile is that some local businesses only have their open hours entered with Google. Searching for that business in DDG will show their address but not their open hours. Their hours are also not listed on facebook, Yelp, or TripAdvisor. Where as on Google, it's right there in their little knowledge panel on the right.

A business where this is happening: Pho 5 Star Vietnamese Cuisine - Whitehorse Yukon

Other than that, most of the time DDG gets me better results than Google. I work in the trades and look up a lot of tools/tool reviews and google results are a dumpster fire of bad results full of these odd adsites that all look similar, have obvious generated URLs, and clone amazon descriptions and reviews. They are also ranked high on page 1 of Googles search results, and the trust worthy sites are getting pushed down or even to the next page.

I switched from Chrome/Google to Firefox/DDG three months ago, as part of a larger switch from macOS to laptop Ubuntu. There are things I don't like about DDG. DDG continually offers to play YouTube videos in its own window due to privacy concerns, and it's not clear to me when it redirects and when it offers its own window. Some searches don't work well; for example, "weather 22203" returns weather for Arlington, TX instead of Arlington, VA in the DDG modal, and for things like precipitation I still need to g! the query.

These minor concerns are all peanuts compared to the benefits though. I've found I'm very much a "live free or die" kind of guy, and I like how both Firefox and DDG care about the user. I also like how they work well without too much configuration out of the box :P

I moved away from Chrome and Google about 6 months ago.

There are two places where I find DDG to be better:

- when I know specifically what page/site I am looking for, but don't know the address

- when I am looking for results that are heavily monetized (like, say, which pedal steel guitar amp might be suited to my project)

I still find myself using g!, especially when the first couple of results for, say, a cryptic log message or esoteric programming term aren't giving me what I want.

If I know it's a hard to search term, or a specific image result, I will just default to g!

But even if, say, 60% of the time I'm using g!, I still feel better because I feel like DDG is a less "creepy" system and using it as a default at least leaves some amount of a hole in one company's records of my activities. (admittedly, that's a goofy and questionable reason).

I switched over from Google to DDG back in 2013 and never looked back. I use it heavily on a day to day basis ranging from obscure java error messages for my job to just general searches and once in a great while I have to throw a !g in front of the search, but that's really it.

I switched a few month back and it's still painful for me. Plain search results are OK but Google is so much better with deep integrations.

Some examples:

- I google a sports team, it shows me most recent results

- I google a flight number, it shows me flight status

- I google.g. nyse djia, it shows me the current stock value

Unlike the author of this post I very much miss these. Now this means having to click through and find this info on flightaware, ESPN, some finance page, etc. instead of just immediately getting what I want

I switched to DuckDuckGo not for privacy, though that is nice, but to get away from a horrid misfeature Google introduced a year or so ago that moves links out from under my cursor right as I try to click on them. Specifically, it's Google's "People also search for" links.

Those links used to appear as just another box in the search results. But then Google made them appear when you click a search result and then navigate Back to the search results page. When I go back, usually I am planning to click on the search result below the one I had just clicked on. But right as I move my mouse to where the next search result was and click, a box expands under the link I had just visited with suggested searches. Whenever that box appears, I always end up clicking one of the suggested search links instead of the search result I was aiming for.

Google's testers probably don't notice the problem because they are slow to acquire targets with the mouse. They probably click on the Back button with their mouse instead of using a keyboard shortcut like I do. But I'm sticking with DuckDuckGo, because it doesn't ever shift the search results around on the page while I'm looking at it.

Funny you should ask. This morning I was apparently talking in my sleep, angrily saying "Don't delete my fucking search terms!" I've been using DDG for about 5 years but I feel it's actually been getting worse in that it more often randomly deletes terms when whatever I'm searching for is too specific for it's heuristic. On the other hand, Google does the exact same thing.

I use DDG, but do not currently recommend it to others. I think you still have to be cautious about the results it surfaces b/c it doesn't have the same anti-spam mechanisms in place that Google has. For instance, I recently searched for holding mail for the USPS and the first result was a scam site that looked pretty convincing. So, I like the idea of DDG but still do not fully trust it.

Switched 6 months ago on all devices, I actually prefer the experience, I have discovered a bunch of really interesting small independent websites and blogs through it too (wasn't that the original idea of the internet!?).

Once or twice a week I need !g to search for a programming specific query. There's still some improvement needed when searching for all the weird characters we use in software.

At the moment it's pretty good if you want to fact check something, for almost everything else google is way better (especially for news).

Agree, news search is the thing I go back to google most for.

I switched to DDG soon after they launched. I've been using search engines since the days of WebCrawler and out of habit still search today like I did back then. I don't do natural language queries, I search for keywords and want to use logical operators to narrow down my search. I also usually know some sites to search for things so I regularly limit searched with "site:...".

For most of the past decade Google's support for the way I think about searching has sucked. They got obsessed with tailoring results to users and linking everything to their profiles. They also went nuts with natural language search, filling results pages with bullshit, and letting paid placement overtake meaningful search results.

For me this was all made worse because I don't stay logged into accounts and I don't use GMail as my primary e-mail. When I need to log into account I do so in a private browser window. I also use ad blockers and have for decades now.

This all adds together to make Google useless for me. I'm sure plenty of people like their features but they don't do me any good.

It's aggravating to me because for a while in the 00s, before the DoubleClick reverse buyout, Google's search was vastly superior to the competition. Where all others were inundated with keyword spam and other early SEO bullshit Google returned germane results for just about everything. Their search page ads were even relevant because they were looking at what I had searched for instead of some historical profile.

DDG is closest to what old Google search used to be. I don't want to ask questions in an NLP search box most of the time. When I do I'll go to WolframAlpha. I'm really interested in just a full text search of the web with good result sorting. This is what old Google did fantastically and current DDG does well enough for my needs.

Very strange timing on what is unfortunately a horribly inaccurate title based on my personal experience.

I tried swapping to DuckDuckGo yesterday on my iPhone as the primary search tool and reverted unfortunately back to Google after only two hours.

It’s hard to define all of the reasons the ‘mobile’ experience is so unbearable, but I’ll try:

1) No video or image results at the top of the page when that is most relevant.

2) No IMDB/overviews for movies, music, books, etc.

3) I am used to one of the first results in my search consistently being Wikipedia. This was the case about 1/3rd of the time vs. Google.

4) Results often appeared extremely out of order in terms of relevancy vs. Google, with the actual relevant like often being on the second(!) page.

5) Personal taste, but super relevant - In terms of UI/UX, the interface feels dated, actually harkening back to the days of AltaVista - I’m unfortunately honest when I say I feel like I’m using something designed 10-15 years ago.

6) Autocomplete seemed to have significant issues, and, for some reason, sometimes even taking several seconds to appear.

I couldn’t express my disappointment enough. I really wanted to give up the ghost, and just move on from Google - but I am so used to so many of the apparently fantastic nuances of Google, I believe it will unfortunately take 4-5 years before I can even get past enough of these significant issues to make it worth using.

On Desktop - the experience seems to be significantly better. I can’t even point out enough reasons why it’s so poor on mobile, it could unfortunately fill several blog posts and I don’t have time to point out the myriad of issues and inconsistencies here at this time.

If there’s jobs available at DDG - I’d love to help, in all seriousness.

It's not going to be convenient to get off any Google product. If privacy and escaping algorithm bubbles is important enough to you, DDG can probably be "good enough".

Unfortunately I need a search engine to be functional. The trade off privacy is certainly not worth it, and the algorithms aren’t half as good, at least in terms of search results. It’s a damn shame.

It's Lent, so I just searched for "Fish Tacos" and clicked on Map. It showed four places, none of which are anywhere near me. I click on Directions and it takes me to Bing.

Do the same thing on Google, see a dozen places in my neighborhood, and I get Google Maps navigation.

What do you get in your searches for Fish Tacos? Do you have a better experience with DDG?

I'm a die-hard DDG fan, but for some things -- particularly mapping related issues -- google maps is so superior. I append a !gm to my searches for stores and it automatically opens in google maps.

Google Maps has a number of features that contribute to that:

* maps timeline (location recording)

* maps "local guides" status with

* Gamification for POI data enrichment

* Google Survey app with payouts per survey finished

Don't make the assumption that a privacy-centered search engine is going to look at your location data. Add your location to the query itself.

Yeah, but it did. It knew where I was, based off of IP I presume.

I'm surprised by that. I guess I shouldn't make the assumption that a privacy-centered search engine isn't going to look at your location data.

I find myself using !g more than I'd like to, even before I even look at DDG results. I just don't seem to trust it with complex queries and go straight to google. But it has gotten better, that's true.

Side effect - I started using built-in Firefox wikipedia and Stackoverflow search way more, skipping DDG and Google altogether.

Anyone got a specific search term that gave poor results on ddg compared to google or vice versa?

I see zero specific examples in the comments right now. For all I know, you people are searching for “howbakecarrotsovengsgshd”. In my experience there’s no difference in quality worth talking about between any of the popular search engines.

> Most of my searches relate to my job, which means that most of my searches are technical queries.

Recently I've found google infuriating for technical searches because it has started automatically searching for "what it thinks you meant", which when using technical terms or program parameters etc are always wrong.

It really isn't. It was great for a while but has become progressively less useful and more nonsense filled in its results over the last 2 years to the point where today I still have it set as default search engine, but for almost everything immediately go "oh ffs" and research with !g added.

I agree. I have switched and used to feel like the switch was failing when I had to use Google for some things, but realized that's just fine. I also occasionally use Wolfram Alpha for things too. Both there if needed, but otherwise getting great results from a company that respects me.

I use DuckDuckGo as the primary browser on my phone so I don’t accidentally search things on my corporate Google account and I can say the DDG is demonstrably worse in many situations.

If you have no idea how to spell a complex word, you can type absolute gibberish into Google and it will know what you meant. DDG will figure it out sometimes but less frequently.

Google also has better answer cards than DDG. Try searching “Facebook revenue” on DDG and Google. Google gives you the answer and DDG shows you nothing.

The notion that DDG is better than Google, which is only ever evangelized in these HN threads, is delusional idealism. Sure, DDG has some nice features (namely not being Google), but suggesting that it is better than Google and that the billions of unwashed masses are wrong about Google is silly and kind of elitist.

Can somebody explain why anyone should use DDG instead of Google when they are both free and ad funded?

I just issued my last Google query (some Mac OS troubleshooting) and the results were not even close. I understand that they try to differentiate by claiming they don't store previous queries and are stateless and not personalized in a sense which is a bug IMHO not a feature. Yet they sell it as privacy.

If one doesn't like their search queries stored remotely the real private solution is for the search engine to run locally which sounds technically hard/infeasible or some differential privacy magic to obscure individual queries (I'm not sure how exactly) but DDG doesn't seem to have any benefit over Google in a meaningful way.

That said, extra competition is always good for consumers

I use DDG as my main search engine - for most things it works just fine, when I can't find what I'm looking for I go to google. I find it hilarious that the image search function works a lot like Google used to in the past - I'm constantly looking for reference when drawing and more often than not if you type something innocuous like "man with hand in front of face" you'll end up with a first page full of porn in DDG whereas it's all SFW in Google, even with all restrictions off. Luckily DDG offers a nudity filter which works pretty well - even if it still fails to catch the odd gore picture.

i've been using DDG for a few years now. i generally like it a lot. however, i have decided to stop using them for image search. their filters are just not good enough.

two examples: I've searched for some kind of speedo (jammers?) and got to see a really problematic image I thought of reporting to the police. and just recently, i image searched 'martin from the simpsons', because I came across his name and forgot which character that was. near the top of the results were some really wtf images (now removed). I don't want to see that stuff - so if anyone at DDG sees this: please up your image filters.

I have ddg setup as default on my laptop, phone and iPad for over the year. I’m using google fallback almost half of the time. In particular, non-English queries and software development queries are way better in google.

I switched to DDG for my desktop, laptop and phone a few weeks ago.

I'm on the fence about switching back: I find myself using g! all the time to get (better) Google results.

I want anything related to soccer (national competitions standings, live results, match results, ...)? DDG doesn't have it.

Anything where I know up front that the result will be in some forum? DDG almost never has it.

Some kind of local news event, whether recent or not? Don't count on DDG.

Typo correction is worse. Relevance of the result is worse. Contextual understanding is close to non-existent.

Only for the most basic search operations, DDG is fine for me. Other than that, it's g!.

I wish it were different.

Soccer is a great example. Searching "Chelsea" in Google vs DDG demonstrates the differences between the two.

DuckDuckGo has certainly been good enough for my regular use for several years now. Switching the search engine to DDG is part of my standard new-browser setup, along with resetting the "new tab" content to blank and installing uBlock Origin.

I may have had an easier switch because I never used a google account, and thus never had to deal with personalized search results. I also never liked the natural-language style of search query - too fuzzy - and have continued using the same kind of keyword-based searches that worked when the web was young.

I have DDG set up as the default search engine and it works quite well. I would think that I don't need to use g! about 75% of the time. When the result is from wikipedia or stack overflow or some similar popular site, DDG works alright but seems to miss specialized blogs. So if I don't find the answer on the mainstream sites I find myself doing g! more often.

75% is not bad at all and if you approach with that perspective then DDG works just great but if you think you should never have to use Google, then please wait - not sure how long.

A bit tangential but related: has anyone else noticed an increased frequency in the desired result of a Google search being the first one on the second page?

Particularly for things involving reviews or booking, I have noticed an uptick in the (subjectively) “right” result being kept off page 1... it seems almost like some post processing logic to favor specific sites/companies. The fact that the “right” result in these instances is almost always the first result makes me think the true Ranking function knows the result’s actual value.

DuckDuckGo actually does a better job of indexing all of my blog posts than Google does. I discovered this when attempting to use Google to search for one of my blog posts using a domain specific query("site:myblog.com") and was unable to find the post I was searching for. However, I was able to easily find my blog post using the same query on DuckDuckGo. This made quite an impression on me as it was the first chink in Google's armor that I've seen.

I have tried to do this a couple times and have always had to resort to switching back to Google. As a software engineer I use Google heavily and do dozens of searches a day. In my personal qualitative experience Google seems to return better results for technical queries.

For day to day use I think DDG is more than sufficient however. I think DDG is certainly usable even for my work related searches but it simply takes longer to arrive to the answer in my experience.

I've been using DDG on my one browser for the past 3 years and the amount of things I have to search twice, once through DDG and then again in google is absurd.

What's interesting, for me, a Ukrainian guy, it became better than Google as a default. Google ignores my settings that set to only Ukrainian and English results and constantly throws Russian at me, be it Russian Wikipedia (horrible place) or Russian version of MDN articles and similar things.

DuckDuckGo is "ok", and often times when you think "omg, results are shit, Google would work here", Google shows same results.

I am really trying to use DDG more but I dunno, it's not very good in my experience.

Specifically these use cases fail:

  * When searching for local business / places.

  * When searching for something I want to buy.

  * The news index doesn't seem very real-time.

However it has some things I love:

  * !twitter to search Twitter!

  * Sometimes non-personalized results help me find something outside my bubble

DDG is great for anything that has many results. Obscure errors? They decide to ignore half your query and show you pages of completely unrelated results. Even when there is no result, I wouldn’t know with DDG. For normal searches I never need !g, for obscure problems I always do because DDG (or maybe Bing? I don’t know how the integration exactly works) for some arcane reason deliberately breaks their own search.

I tried switching a bunch of times over the years but finally in the last six months or so I've found DDG to be good enough to use full time.

I probably went three or four months without even using the "!g" command. I actually just yesterday ran into some issues and had to use "!g" - for some reason DDG struggled with the concept of "fish shell" and kept bringing me back results about seafood.

Strange, my top three DDG results for 'fish shell' are for the friendly interactive shell. Maybe you just have really good seafood around your area?

How sad is it that this is the best way to make a substantial announcement on Twitter. A pixelated image of text. Twitter should work on some less-frequently-used tweet mode that allows for more characters for stuff like this.

https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/1220768243318571008

I wish DDG all the best but for me, "good enough" isn't enough. I don't care about tracking so that isn't a real incentive for me either. I use Bing for my main search because they bribe me with points I can use to buy Amazon gift cards. It regularly isn't good enough so I regularly end up at google.

I want more competition in search so I'm glad people use DDG but it isn't for me yet

The only thing that Google is significantly better at than google in location based searches in the UK i.e. local businesses. DDG map search is wrong for me about 50% of the time.

Everything else is pretty much the same as google or better in some cases (google seems to de-rank certain things). The code snippets when just quickly searching "How do I do <X> in <programming language L>" is quite nice.

I love duckduckgo, but for some reason my home ip address (new-to-me but fixed) seems to be banned on at least one server, and I have to flush my dns cache often to be able to reach duckduckgo.com . I've tried reaching out to info@duckduckgo.com but only got a generic "thanks for the feedback response", and I don't have twitter. Is anyone from duckduckgo reading this?

I have been using duckduckgo on all browsers, including mobiles, for 2-3 years now. There are occasions when I don't get good results. But when I try the same query on G, the results are equally useless. So, I have since stopped using anything else.

Although, I should say, bing was equally good when I used it before duckduckgo, until they added that horrendous news feed in the bottom.

Non-Docker Local Installation of searX on Linux | https://persagen.com/2020/02/02/searx.html

searX is a free metasearch engine with the aim of protecting the privacy of its users.

    * searX does not share users’ IP addresses or search history.
    * Tracking cookies served by the search engines are blocked.
    * searX queries do not appear in search engine webserver logs.

In addition to the general search, the engine also features tabs to search within specific domains:

Notably:

    * Each search result is given as a direct link to the respective site,
      rather than a tracked redirect link as used by Google.

    * When available, these direct links are accompanied by “cached” and/or
      “proxied” links that allow viewing results pages without 
      actually visiting the sites in question.

    * The “cached” links point to saved versions of a page on archive.org, while
      the “proxied” links allow viewing the current live page
      via a searX-based web proxy.

Tip: I do a lot of technical searches (StackOverflow …) and in my preliminary use of searX

I find that selecting “General” (only) as the Default Category (in Preferences) gives the best results.

It really is, I've been using ddg for a few months now near exclusively. The bangs, though I still haven't gotten particularly fluent in them, really help sell it for people who aren't sure (like I was). Now like others in this thread have said, for more obscure things like when im bug fixing I use google but for most things ddg is sufficient.

Everyone is talking about the quality of results, but how much better is it in terms of tracking and sharing data?

ATM I'm using quant.com, a french company bound by European privacy laws. It has its own index and I rarely need to use google.

I have no idea who is better in terms of privacy but I'm preferring the french company over the American duckduckgo atm.

It’s gotten better! I still use google for very obscure things but the vast majority of my searches these days are duckduckgo

Does anyone know if there is a way to emulate DDG's bangs using Firefox search engine keywords?

I tried forcing myself to use keywords but apparently they only work on the address bar (and not on the search bar) and also only if you type them at the start of the query. DDG bangs also work on any part of the query, including at the end.

Been using DDG now for over a year and I would say, for me, it's about 95% accurate in finding what I want found. It's rare now that I go to Google to search for anything.

DDG is the default search engine on Firefox and Safari for me. I no long use Chrome (it's not even loaded on this computer) and rarely Google.com itself.

I've switched to Qwant a few months ago at home. Aside a few usability issues (like hijacking the space button), the search results are fine both for random searches and for programming-related ones (aka. SO, JavaDoc, cppreference search). Their map search is not great, so had to switch back to google for that.

I will give DDG in a similar try, but I am more like the HN crowd than the average user....lots of searches for statistical and programming functions/ideas that most people have never heard or think about :e.g. "model selection among non-nested fractional polynomial mixed level models"

I noticed the same. It wasn’t fit for my use a few years ago but I think the user uptake has helped somehow, or inspired their devs. Now I feel like it’s more about not being quite used to the results. It’s just a matter of unlearning the old though, with Google’s overly strong echo chamber results.

I exclusively used DDG for the past couple of years but gave up on it recently. I never kept track of how often I used the "!g" google fallback but in the past year or so it started to be the overwhelming majority of searches, even for simple things like the name of an organization.

Feel like DuckDuckGo has been good enough for regular use for awhile. Search results are decent and what seems like an absence of ads is great.

The only thing I miss from Google? The giant cards that show up with an answer if I ask something like "How old is [Insert Celebrity Name Here]"

The main thing I still use g! for is "wolfram lite".

I just tried "3 watts * 4 hours" on Google, it gave me the answer in joules (which, I think situationally watt-hours would be the better unit, but...) and DDG gave me a top hit of a site that could do the conversion for me.

DDG is fantastic and now my preference. I tried it a couple years ago and was constantly second guessing their results.

To have come this far as to it now becoming my daily preference, the team has come a long way and has instilled great confidence that they will continue to improve the platform

Question for google search users on HN: Do y'all use adblockers? I noticed less of a difference in my one-off searches after I had been using an ad blocker for a while, so I wonder if using an adblocker would be a way for people to transition away from Google.

DuckDuckGo is a for profit company. There are no guarantees it will not seek more profits at a later date. See: Google.

That being said, competition that hurts Google’s bottom line would likely result in better behavior.

Ddg has a long way to go to be an impactful competitor in the market, though.

Agreed, I've switched my work computer to use it by default and the only place I've noticed it falter is when searching domain-specific niche technical information. Otherwise it works fine, though I still need to switch all my personal computers to it.

I switched six months ago and never looked back. I will occasionally use other engines deliberately (Google when I’m looking for more obscure things that warrant wading through pages of ads and Bing for image searches), but it is now my default on most devices.

I switched to DDG pretty much as soon as they were on the scene and it's been awesome watching them grow. Several of my team members have switched to DDG after watching me use it for so long too. I can't recall the last time I had to !g.

I'd go further than damning with faint praise and say that it is more than good enough for regular use.

Common wisdom is that it isn't as good as Google, but whenever my results are bad and I fall back to a !g search, those results are also bad.

The only thing I miss in DDG is number of results. I use it often to check for the right way to compose a phrase. If there is a significant difference in numbers between the two alternatives, it pretty much indicates what's the right one.

The only reason I am not using DDG for everything is because location based search simply suck. I live in Europe but all the search results default to US. I wish I can tell DDG that they can use my rough location for search queries.

I've been using DDG for years. It's perfectly fine. What I've found is I don't use general search engines much in general anyways - I use ddg macros like !rust to search rust docs, or other common places I search.

Ive been using it for 4 years and rarely need to try google. Set it as your default!

If you ask a question at work, and the answer is in the first page of Google's search results, then you risk being ridiculed.

Saying "I looked on DDG" will not help you in this case; it will likely make the ridicule increase.

Google search was an unfortunate period in my life between my otherwise great search history bookends of AltaVista and DuckDuckGo. I think I’ve been on DDG for probably 5-6 years now. Results are absolutely good enough.

I've been using DDG forever. I do !g once in a long time, but not often. I think the most common use case is Google's excellent calculator. DDG is buggy, and when it works, just isn't as good.

I switched to ddg because google is acting politically and I no longer trust them to act as responsible stewards of information and search.

But ddg isn't as good as google and just barely qualifies as good enough.

I don't know. Ddg is my default but I still !g most of my searches after not getting what I need in the top 3 items. Beyond that I need to scroll and I'll probably try a different query

They should shorten the name - DuckDuckGo.com is too long to type out.

Try "duck.com", or "ddg.gg".

General day to day searches? DDG is great for me Niche or deep dive searches? Still !g I'm afraid

Big plus is that DDG is getting better every month. Google seems to be getting worse (ads, fluff etc).

My primary work use of search is looking for academic papers. I understand its a rarer use-case but DDG just isn't there yet unfortunately. Looking forward to when they are!

For query "malesia bus conections search" DDG gives me porn results (I have safe search disabled). That doesn't make me thin it's "good enough".

I'm on DDG on all my devices for more than a year. Tried to use Google recently on a friend's computer, was shocked by horrible UI and lack of links. Not OK,Google.

Similarly, ecosia is now my daily search engine with little search on Google for comparison. It's good enough and (quoting Peppa) "it's for a good cause"

I tried using duckduckgo for a period of about two months.

It's great that it's not monetized through ads, but it's main function, search, is not best in class.

I do not use duckduckgo anymore.

I've been using it for about 18 months now. I find myself barely using !g anymore, and usually it's when I'm looking for something really specific.

I think what finally sold me was the bangs. For example I can search "Array !mdn" and get right to the MDN docs and not worry about w3schools stuff.

Switched to Bing a while ago and have stayed put. Never needed Google cos the results are garbage nowadays.

DDG isn't there yet, but Bing reminds me of Google 5 years ago

I'm wondering about why, unlike Google, DDG doesn't display the number of results for a particular search query. It's quite frustrating.

I've been wondering how much value a privacy-focused search engine has when the links in its search results are full of privacy-invading trackers.

The author does not remove ads. That skews the comparison relative to my experience.

Anyway - in my experience, DDG is good enough for most of my searches, but not all.

I exclusively use DuckDuckGo mostly because google results got worse. What worries me though is that I get different results when I browse with tor.

It'd be awesome if they had an mirror that starts with "go", so we can reuse muscle memory and browser's url autocomplete.

I'd really like to see people post screenshots comparing Google and DDG results for cases where they consider one better than the other.

this is most likely not true. i keep trying ddg every now and then - last attempt was ~ 6 months ago - and every time i have to return to google search with renewed appreciation. i have no idea why it's so bad - i think my queries should be very easy because most of the time i google referential material (e.g. information on a widely used api) and not something obscure.

It has been for a while. I occasionally need to do !g when I'm searching for obscure errors, but it doesn't happen often.

I have been using DDG for years and did not know the !g I copy paste search often when DDG results are lacking, I feel so stupid.

What I don't get is why DDG has no "google it" button. I mean, typing !g is not convenient, esp on mobile.

For people complaining about worse local results:

You can also use the `site:` argument on TLDs. E.g.

"kino dresden site:.de"

If you can guess the TLD obviously.

The article is about how the results are worse but the author doesn't like the way things are shown on Google.

I’ve been using DuckDuckGo for years now. It’s great. I probably use the !g fallback to Google a few times a year.

I think I switched to Duckduckgo about 3 years ago and I have not done any searching on Google since then (with a very few exceptions just to compare).

I have been very happy with the results Duckduckgo provides.

The only exception, which is something I find really annoying, is when you want to limit the search to something specific using quotes and it ignores the quotes and provides results that are completely useless.

Startpage.com respects the quotes.

I still end up reverting back to google a lot, especially for more natural language question-type searches.

My only issue is with some of the operators. Sometimes they break the results in really weird ways.

Startpage is falling apart. DuckDuckGo is good enough by virtue of being the only option.

Switched to the duck 3 months ago. Don't really feel any pain really.

I switched over to DDG + brave about 6 months ago. Haven’t looked back.

Of the google bangs, I find myself using !gm (google maps) the most.

I tried it when I switched to FireFox.

Switched back after 30 days. Still in Firefox.

recently i found myself switching to yandex.ru when i can't find it on google - and it worked. I guess it's better not to be too fixed on any single search engine;

Sooo, when do you guys think Google will pull the plug from ddg?

You mean Bing?

Would any other DDG users like to see

- DDG Mail service

- DDG News.. i still use Google News begrudgingly

- a DDG Video site.. Youtube replacement (not easy to do with Youtube having so much content)

Personally, I'd drop all Google services if such were available. Maybe others would too?

No, it's not. I've tried DuckDuckGo countless times, it only works for common search keywords. For the rest it fails spectacularly. I'm tired of typing the same keywords with !g in front of them.

I would like to take any chance I can to avoid Google products, but I dont agree with this.

DuckDuckGo is using the infamous "More Results", essentially infinite scroll. Until that changes Im not using DuckDuckGo.

You can turn that off in the settings: https://duckduckgo.com/settings

No you cant. You can turn off auto loading, but you cant set it so that results are paginated.

This is true. Unfortunately DDG is flatly not interested in offering paginated results, if this 2 year old post by the staff member 'moollaza' on Reddit still applies.

https://old.reddit.com/r/duckduckgo/comments/757gde/how_to_m...

My post there as 'the_minion_in_red' details how turning off "Auto-Load" works inconsistently depending on how you scroll, anyway - a behaviour which I see is still present and incorrect today.

And the 'lite' and 'html' views I suggest for the benefit of another poster, I don't much like because they're doing something to make the address bar URL not change so I can't easily bookmark a search.

So, DDG is good enough - but, is it better than Google?

> DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

This is news to people?

No, it's not

Edit: this is coming from someone who wishes it was

I am a regular user.

Is there a way to report bad search results ?

To people who use DuckDuckGo: how do you deal with its inability to answer simple queries with factual answers? Things like “distance from Los Angeles to New York”, “Joe Biden age”, “knives out cast”, “capital of South Africa”, etc. The time it takes to click a result on DuckDuckGo and navigate to the answer is so much longer than just getting the answer at the top of the results page, as google (and even bing) provide. This is the main reason I can’t use DuckDuckGo, as much as I’d like to

For facts like these, I use WolframAlpha. For everything else, it's DDG.

I use my search engine to direct me to a source. I do not expect it to be the source. That is just how my brain sees the purpose of the engine.

I can, however, understand why anyone would like it to provide you with instant factual and reliable information! That would be a godsend.

I do not trust the instant answers most of the time. I like seeing forum answers and comments, finding age in wikipedia and stumbling upon more information, and generally getting lost in the web.

Either it appears as part of the first result or one of the top results have it. This is the case for all of your queries, and the result to select is obvious - normally wikipedia or imdb.

This is arguably harder (+1 click and page load).

However for capital of south africa this is arguably more correct. My google test shows no distinction between the capitals, whereas the wiki page does.

Of course the wiki page is accessible on google as well.

I'm wary of cases when these facts are incorrect. Google declares them while trying to hide the source. This was very important recently when a friend googled for caucus winners and recieved an incorrect fact at the top of Google, something that would have rang alarm bells when seen on its candidate affiliated source page

You don't need the extra click and page load. Try these:

"joe biden !w"

"Los Angeles to New York !wa"

"knives out !w"

"south africa !w"

"ddg bangs !hn"

That seems like more of what WolframAlpha caters to. Personally, I don't like assuming an engine has interpreted what I'm looking for correctly - I'd prefer to maintain some of the load of personally understanding the source of information and it's context. So here is what I do:

>> distance from Los Angeles to New York

!m los angeles to new york

>> Joe Biden age

!w joe biden

>> knives out cast

!imdb knives out

>> capital of South Africa

!w South Africa

And that last one is a really good example of why I don't want to trust an engine to interpret what I'm looking for, because Wolfram Alpha just tells you Pretoria, and if I hadn't spent a large part of my life there I wouldn't know that's probably not what people are looking for. Economically? They probably want to know that Johannesburg is the largest city. Just like how people are sometimes surprised when they learn that New York City and Los Angeles are not state capitals, even though they're really important cities. Politically? Well the roles of the government is split between 3 cities and that's not a simple thing for an engine to comprehend. And I didn't even know Bloemfontein held that kind of status until I just read it on Wikipedia. Neither I, a former citizen of the country, nor WolframAlpha, was aware of that.

Google and Bing both list all three capitals of South Africa. They also write out how they've interpreted your query so you can tell if they're giving you the answer to the right question.

Color me impressed by them, then - but it's still not the kind of thing I entirely trust to an engine. Even though in this specific example we're discussing in detail, it's doing the right thing. Hard to know when it's not. The "explanation" of how it was interpreted isn't much.

I'm also biased by the fact that I'm constantly delighted by the random things I learn by consulting Wikipedia about virtually every topic I encounter.

In the last couple of months my experience With DDG has been very good. I consistently got better results than Google.

Same, DDG works better for me.

According to which benchmark?

Engine search global market share:

Google 92.54%

so, who cares?

I switched after Google's redesign too, this time it's good enough for good.

Indeed, been using DDG for a couple of years now, and since Google's redesign I've been using a lot less "!g".

If you’re in US yes.

I have used DuckDuckGo a couple of years back, but, after some more consideration switched back to Google. Apart from privacy I never really liked the direction DuckDuckGo was going in (more below). Just recently I decided to search for an alternative search engine once again.

Things I want to consider are:

1. Reasonable privacy - I don't want the search engine to take super invasive steps to track me (but still keep in mind that I need to send my queries to someone, so there's really no expectation of full privacy)

2. No personalization - I want to be sure that only obvious parameters affect the ranking of search results (e.g. manual language or location selection, manual time selection, ...). Want to avoid personalization and a search bubble at all cost.

3. No results processing - I want links to original sources, not processed or aggregated information with little or no references to sources.

4. Independence - I'd like to support a search engine that can operate as independently as possible. A search engine with it's own crawler seem far more resilient to external influence than a meta or proxying search engine.

Google falls short on 1, 2 and 3. But holds up very well on 4.

With Bing or Yandex I don't have much experience, but expect something similar.

DuckDuckGo heavily advertises 1. I guess 2 follows from it but didn't find it mentioned as an explicit goal. On 3 and 4 it falls short. If I remember correctly DuckDuckGo was one of the first to offer processed results (Instant answers). I'm not sure about the situation now, but I believe it started of as a meta search engine and proxied most searches to Yahoo, Bing or Yandex. https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/so... still lists Bing prominently.

Startpage.com seems to get me 1 and 3. But 2 is questionable since the results are still tailored by Google (not to me personally, but it's still not clear what factors into ranking). And 4 obviously doesn't apply.

To find a better alternative I started looking for search engines with independent web crawlers. So far I found mojeek.com, beta.cliqz.com and qwant.com. mojeek.com looks good on 1,2,3,4 but results aren't quite good enough. With Cliqz I'm not sure about personalization, but otherwise looks good.

I finally settled on Qwant.com for now. It promises privacy and no personalization explicitly. Has an independent crawler. Sometimes it tries to provide a processed answer card, but so far I managed to ignore that. Results are surprisingly good.

no it was garbage for my use case of searching programming questions, or searching a business (where it links me to open street map, instead of google maps).

So is bing

Indeed.

DDG crossed this threshold for me years ago, and I've been using it consistently since 2013. (With fairly frequent statements to that effect on HN.)

For much of that time the principle justifications were 1) It Is Not Google, 2) results are roughly comparable, and 3) an improved privacy impact.

Over the past year or two, the rationale's shifted: results and most especially experience are markedly better.

Google's polluting the SERP with advertising, bringing to mind the environment into which Google first emerged in the late 1990s, with what many at the time considered a mature search-engine environment, is most especially notable.

My use of console browsers and commandline queries (not a typical use case, though extraordinarily convenient) is another huge factor.

Google is now utterly unusable in console-mode browsers.

By contrast, the default DDG site works, and works well, and the "lite" site is ... amazeballs: https://duckduckgo.com/lite

As a Bash/bourne shell function:

    ddg () 
    { 
        /usr/bin/w3m "https://duckduckgo.com/lite?q=$*&kd=-1"
    }

As of a few weeks ago, DDG added "region" and "time" selectors to the lite results page, matching the capabilities recently added to the default DDG site. The fact that "lite" not only works but is actively maintained speaks volumes.

The search box is one tab away (it's 12 in Google).

Search results are directly clickable. I don't know what new idiocy has infected Google, but when I view a Google results page in, say, w3m, I cannot click the links:

http://www.google.com/search?ie=ISO-8859-1&hl=en&source=hp&b...

(This is beyond the "the links are redirected for tracking", not the case on DDG with a URL parameter, but Google has broken its own search links.)

I can only assume Google are telling advanced users that they are no longer of interest to the firm.

In a graphical browser, results are crammed with ads and filler, annoying, hard to parse, and quite frequently just not very good.

There are occasional exceptions:

1. For date-ranged search, Google (and specifically desktop) is the only option.

2. Some older content isn't accessible on DDG. Generally this is pre-2005 / pre-2000 content.

3. Some obscure content only appears on Google, though to a vastly lesser extent than was true only a few years ago.

Also, again, DDG's bang searches are hugely useful, with at least a couple dozen in frequent use by me.

The broader picture, though, is that Web search seems generally less useful than it was 5-10 years ago.

That seems to be a mix of far more crap online, as well as black-hat SEO winning over Web search companies (death penalties really ought to be a thing), and far more "traditional" content (books, scientific articles, other published sources) now being accessible online.

I'll hit up Wikipedia, search for references, and follow those, or go to Worldcat and run a subject search, then read books, magazines, or articles directly (through Library Genesis or Sci-Hub), rather than waste my time on Web glurge.

Yes, there are still some good voices out there, but between crap content, crap Web UI/UX, and general web annoyances, it's become a net negative.

AdTech and Surveillance Capitalism destroy everything.

It used to be that Google would handle unstructured queries better for me, but lately things I'm looking for are, without explanation, invisible, or demoted to the fifth or sixth page.

For me at least, the average search result quality from DuckDuckGo for me is better than Google.

I think there three main difficult scenarios remaining with DuckDuckGo:

1) If your query is very abstract, and you don't know what to call the thing you're talking about, DuckDuckGo will less often be able to figure out what you're talking about.

2) If your query is not in English, Chinese, or Russian (and probably a handful of other languages which they/their vendors support well), it may have a hard time making your query general enough to return results.

3) If you really care about local results, you may not be satisfied unless you provide location information in the query, and maybe not even then.

I've been been using DDG since 2012. No significant complaints. And !bangs (shortcuts to search on other sites) are awesome.

One major annoyance for me is the keyboard shortcuts don't work on iPad external keyboards.

I think this is more of a reflection on how far Google results have fallen. But I really glad to see someone gaining at least some ground against Google while at least claiming to be privacy focused.

i just recently switched to DDG as my primary search. It's not as good as google, especially when it comes to software engineering documentation and maps, but everything else is fine.

Was it not yesterday or the day before?

It's not

You can't get direct links to images when using Google Image Search, but you can when using DuckDuckGo Image Search. That should be enough for you to switch.

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