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Comment by burlesona | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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"

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.

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).

> 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".

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 :-)

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.

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.

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 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.

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

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'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 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 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.

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

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.

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.

Correct.

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

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