DuckDuckGo is growing fast
bleepingcomputer.com
bleepingcomputer.com
People I encounter that argue the results are “not that bad” are 9/10 times ideological purists, or otherwise misguided, that’s purely my personal experience though.
That said, after a few months of frustration I switched my search engine back to Google earlier this year and almost immediately switched it back to DDG the second I needed a bang operator.
Bangs are a superpower, a game changer, and by far the best UX for mobile search I’ve seen so far. I bang everything and everyone, bang bang.
Googling with site:x.com doesn’t even come close. More characters, Google determines the sorting and mixes in marketing copy results with the UGC I’m looking for, “exact quotes” no longer work, forced AMP results for e.g. Reddit etc.
DDG as a search engine is utter crap and I’ve little patience left to hear otherwise, but as a way of turning iOS Safari into a sort of meta search engine it’s invaluable and I genuinely cannot stop recommending it to other “power users”.
Gram gram is sticking with google though, and the second Safari replicates bangs I’m outta here.
Good point. Not like "Google" or "Bing".
The name google was name chosen after Googol (https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Googol) to reflect the amount of webpages that in the founder intentions they were about to index.
Apparently when they registered the name the officer/employee was not familiar with the concept and just wrote down the name as they thought it was written: Google.
edit: source: https://www.webcitation.org/68ubHzYs7?url=http://graphics.st...
Gone are the days of search engine names that inspired confidence, like Altavista and Lycos... or AskJeeves.
Also the runners up, Bing.
I find DDG searches to generally be fine and I'm definitely not an ideological purist. Not exactly sure how I might be misguided either.
Sometimes I need to use !g if I'm looking for something very specific, but >95% of the time DDG is fine.
Say I want to find some hedge trimmers, and I search for "hekksaks" in DDG. Then I get some random videos, links to norwegian-to-english dictionaries and assorted useless pages.
If I turn the "Norway" slider on, sure I get decent enough results. But DDG remembers this, so when I later search for some programming related stuff it's awful again.
So I need to constantly flip that localized results option on and off, which is super annoying.
In comparison, Google shows great results without having toggle some option.
Two things comes to mind —
1. Would you consider this an “edge case”? Searching for things you want to buy in one language, but researching programming topics in another language?
2. Is the difference in experiences not essentially the result of Google’s data collection practices? Both specifically data about you and your search patterns and data in aggregate that DDG (presumably) does not collect on purpose.
"We also save searches, but again, not in a personally identifiable way, as we do not store IP addresses or unique User agent strings. We use aggregate, non-personal search data to improve things like misspellings."
So it sounds like they use the slippery slope argument.
There are several classes of things where I would primarily want local results for. If I'm searching for a grocery store ("matbutikk") I want grocery stores near me, not some instagram account named "Matbutikk" or some random grocery store in Spain.
Similarly there are several classes of things where I want international results, typically technical stuff.
I think DDG could improve a lot without any privacy issues. Since localized results are often decent enough, the main issue seems to be that it needs to prioritize local results automatically.
Are you search for a common product brand name, or using words in the primary language where you are from (geo-ip)? Well then prioritize localized results.
What I meant by "edge case" though was not necessarily the search term itself. It was selecting "Norway" localization for one search, and then deselecting for another. Of course I have no real insight here, but I would bet the large majority of people who toggle that option intend to keep it for all searches as opposed to just some.
E.g. searching for "matbutikk" with the Norway localization on DDG gives me different results (no Instagram account at least, but I can't really judge outside of that, hah).
There is a region parameter you can use for the search query, e.g. the query `hekksaks r:no` will set the Norway slider. It does not permanently set the region (fortunately, as there seems to be no way of specifying “no region.”)
Still this is much more effort compared to Google.
Edit: see here for some docs, but note that the list of regions they refer to is not correct
https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/settings/r...
1. Perform the modified search (hekksaks r:no)
2. Create a new bookmark from the search result page
3. Ctrl+shift+B -> edit bookmark
4. Replace the search term but not the custom logic with `%s` (in this case produces https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%s+r%3Ano&ia=web)
5. Type your desired bang into the "keyword" field (!n for example)
You can now use !n <any search term> to search for r:no <any search term>, and add/remove/edit filters from the bang as you see fit.
I get around this by adding the country/city/language/neighborhood to my search query and it works just fine for me.
It's more a plain keyword/phrase search than asking it questions
I agree. That is your personal experience. Which is, of course, the whole point of using Google. You share everything in your life with them, and let them monetize your information any way they see fit, and in return they'll provide you with better search results.
I haven't used Google as my main search engine, or email provider, or anything else in ages. I'll take DDG search results over Google any day.
But yes 1000% bangs are worth everything. Even if DDG weren't a search engine, bangs would be enough for me to use it as a meta engine. I still use a lot of google products so they're also super intuitive - g! is google, and if I guess I can usually get the google service I want: gm! maps, gn! news, gi! images (unfortunately gs! is shopping, not scholar which is gsc!).
And the thing about bangs is that I bet google won't implement them in such an easy way, since they wouldn't want to have unpredictable behavior for non-power users (and would never think of redirecting users before the search page)
Bangs are an absolute game changer, and they're muscle memory now so I end up throwing them into google accidentally. Some of my other common ones are a! amazon, w! wikipedia, yt! youtube, i! DDG images, and n! DDG news.
it might simply redirect your !-searches to DDG, I don’t know. but I find it pretty useful.
In fact they are way better if the result I want isn’t the topmost one because DDG displays far more results than what Google does on a page.
While I definitely believe in not having all my information with Google I’m pretty sure that’s not driving my decision because I have switched away from DDG in the past where it wasn’t meeting my needs.
I kind of feel that way about DuckDuckGo. Instead of lazyness, I guess you'd call it ideological purity. I don't care how much worse DuckDuckGo is than Google. It doesn't matter. The simple fact is the privacy implications of Google make it a deal breaker, so I'll use any alternative no matter how much worse it is.
In my mind they're not even competing services. Just like comparing a robotic vacuum to manual vacuuming. It's like saying "What's better, a square or the color yellow?" It doesn't compute.
I'd be lying if I said I never use !g. I do, when I don't find what I'm looking for and feel like I should. Half the time, I don't find what I wanted on Google either. I always hesitate though, thinking "Do I want Google to log this about me?" I rarely hesitate when searching with DuckDuckGo. There's a certain comfort and peace of mind that is worth any drop in the quality of search results.
I use DuckDuckGo not out of resolve, but because I used the Internet in the nineties, and saw how data I put out then came back in some cases a decade or two later in counter-intuitive ways.
2) Giving my data to super-credible companies, pre-spam. Wouldn't you know it? A few went out of business, and my data was neatly packaged up and resold to the highest bidder. One was an enterprise database company.
3) Personal web page ended up on archive.org, before anyone really knew others were grabbing/indexing/archiving things. It had more of the feel of your front yard. Yes, someone could take a photo, but it wasn't common.
4) The whole Yahoo thing. My emails become property of some data broker who now mines them for marketing and sales.
I obviously won't talk about more personal ones. And no one will talk about litigations. But those sorts of things happen too.
The things I worry about now are the really sophisticated fingerprinting mechanisms, where your typing patterns, your vocabulary, your linguistic quirks, etc. become biometric identifiers. I'm not sure how all that data will be archived, integrated, and combined 25 years from now.
History suggests Google won't be Google forever, though.
Oh, and let's not forget what happened with data, Jewish people, WWII, and Germany. That's beyond my timescale, but these things happen.
For my username it is here: https://news.ycombinator.com/favorites?id=fsflover&comments=...
Hmmm, that one got to me.
Of course the question arises, should you trust them? No idea, please - do your own research, maybe let me know hah. But i basically never touch Google these days, as i use DDG for all my searches and !s for any fallbacks.
Irrespective of Startpage's motives, using them provides a layer of indirection between me and Google associating every search with a Google account.
Startpage is now owned by an advertising company (reddit.com)
182 points by rahuldottech 10 months ago | 82 comments
I have no clue how trivial this is. But I'd assume it is, in which case you're only really "safe" if you open it up and inspect it yourself I guess.
I had some frustrating errors to figure out with junit5 the other day. Literally any search I did landed me to the wrong pages because it ignored parts of my query. Searching for the error is where Google seems to do a better job somehow. Ddg will just ignore the parts it does not understand, which tend to be the most significant parts of the query. Unfortunately, this something I do a lot and I need that to work reliably.
!g was pretty much the only bang I used with ddg. On mobile, don't really do a lot of searches. Besides, I have an Android phone so you are kind of stuck with Google unless you really customize everyhting.
It's like comparing a car to a bicycle. I like bicycles, but when going cross country, it simply does not work.
I use !gm a lot though.
The !g is so habitual that I find myself typing it on Google too now
DDG is also very slow
Google's search results are good because they're spying on you and they already know what you want. DDG does not do this, so you have to be more specific. If you would search Google for "django", you should search DDG for "django python" or "django framework". This is not DDG being wrong, this is you needing to relearn your habits.
Google assumes it got it right and you just haven't found the right site for it even if you're 100 results pages and 20 "we think you're a bot" captchas deep. DDG is not so arrogant and tries different things once it's obvious you didn't find what you were looking for or are looking for serendipity.
I think it may not so much be a regression in their algorithms, but that there's just more blog spam than ever. There's a reason I'm hearing the phrase "blogging is dead", and I believe it's because advertising and social media have incentivized more bullshit blogs than ever to pop up. I've come across tons of "blogs" that are really just listing products from Amazon but don't actually do any real analysis on them or tell you which ones are better than the others. In order to get an idea of what products people actually like, you've got to do either `site:reddit.com/r/<subreddit>` or search on YouTube.
I wish people would save and share with us these supposed failed DDG queries
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22docker%22%20%22unable%20to%20fi...
Contrast that with the !g of the same query
And after grinding on search permutations this was what I was looking for: https://github.com/portainer/portainer/issues/4319#issuecomm...
Or this would have been fine, too: https://www.mail-archive.com/debian-bugs-dist@lists.debian.o...
Maybe people who are unhappy with DDG results are just extraordinarily technical, but in the absence of a regex powered search engine, the least DDG could do is honor my quotes and index GitHub issues and major Linux mailing lists (I have some sympathy for not finding that mailing list entry since it is only hours old, but I know for certain that GitHub offers a firehose stream of events that will proactively tell DDG of changes, no crawling required)
Also I actually find lot lesser clutter on DDG because SEO folks pretty much optimize for Google, no amp or other google policies to game .
I feel like we're aiming pretty low if the best UX you've seen so far requires 3 taps to input ! followed by one or more taps to input the rest of the operator plus a space, all before you can begin typing your query.
Wouldn't a better system be a grid of icons to choose from, with the ability to rearrange them as you see fit, like the icons on your phone's home screen? That would be much faster than DDG's keyboard dance on mobile.
The names of recent IPOs and direct listings: Unity, Sumo Logic, Asana, Jfrog, Snowflake, Amwell, Ant Financial.
25 years ago we had "Google" and "Yahoo".
(Disclosure: I live in the US, so it's possible Google is far better at search in other countries/languages than DDG)
Alfred provides similar functionality on OSX, allowing you to create a key sequence shortcut for any search engine that can parse URL params.
If it works for you, more power to you. Otherwise assuming 65 millions of people use anything by ideology is a huge ask. For some Google's results didn't just cut it, and they had to try something else.
1.1. Far more websites. Reddit, Flicr, Youtube, hell Yahoo, GMaps, Youtube, HN... Google Scholar, Semantic Scholar, DBLP... pretty much all the places I would want to search on are available.
2. Cross browser. I use Chrome on my phone, and FF on my laptop. Safari, when the battery is below 30% and I'm not near a power outlet. Setting default search engine as DDG brings me the bangs across all these places.
Moreover, some of the bangs suck. Like for example !hn. I’d rather search HN via Google, with my own keyword, because that Angolia engine is crap.
Want to save urls in archive.org? You can add a keyword. Want to search a private list on Twitter? Add a keyword.
DDG bangs can’t do what your browser can. Also, for privacy purposes, sending your Google searches to DDG first is stupid.
On iOS btw, Safari doesn’t do custom search keywords, but Firefox does, and it can sync your keywords across devices.
My speculation is that it's all in how you search. When I first started using Google, I learned how to craft my search precisely to get the exact results I needed. More keywords, filtering based on the site(s) that I might want, etc. Years later, this influences how I search considerably.
In contrast, most people I know who use Google tend to use much looser terminology and Google gets it roughly correct regardless. When searching for more obscure information I can generally outperform them but otherwise they're getting 90% of the way there
As a result my searches on DuckDuckGo haven't given me any worse results than Google would give me. If anything, they've gotten better (even setting aside bangs)
A real-world example from work recently is the query “vertical flexbox animation css”. In DDG, 0/5 of the top results are about animations and flexbox. They are just generic flexbox documentation. If I search the same phrase with google, 4/5 of the top results are about animations and flexbox. And I would think that CSS is a relatively popular technology compared to some things I could be thinking about!
This happens to me with so many queries throughout the day, that I often end up using !g whenever I have a technical-ish query because the top results are usually a lot more relevant.
Maybe you are right, and I just need to phrase that better, but most permutations of that string don’t return much clearer results.
The exact quotes issue is absolutely infuriating, especially when I'm trying to find some very specific, obscure technical issue. I know what I'm looking for DDG. Either give it to me, or tell me you don't have anything. It'll save me some time.
Other than that, I agree with what you said. Bangs are extremely useful, and are the primary reason why I stick to DDG as well!
Seriously. Please don't instantly down-vote. I think a serious conversation needs to be had around this topic. If you don't agree, I'd love to hear a thought-out answer as to why such a silly name is supposed to be taken seriously.
When you get outside the geek bubble, the name is SO important.
I honestly believe the name is killing DDG's ability to grow. That, and not having a private email solution. But I don't want to tell someone I'm @ duckduckgo either so...
For example, I tried to get my parents to try DuckDuckGo and they giggled, stumbled with the name, and then said they'd stick with Google.
I know people giggled at Google when it started too, but it was so easy to start letting "goooogle" roll off the tongue. PLUS it became a VERB! I do not think duckduckgo has that ability.
Unfortunately "uck" is NOT a friendly, comfortable sound. It sounds like a profanity. If feels angry or sinister.
But "oogle" is comforting, fuzzy, and fun to say.
This may sound silly, but I think it's a very real problem DDG has and they should address it so we can move from G to DDG.
My experience is that the name ‘DuckDuckGo’ gives a bad first impression and is holding back growth for the product. IMO the brand is in an uncanny valley where the individual words do mean something to everyday people (unlike, say, Google), and there’s a vague allusion to a children’s game, but the concepts don’t come together or inspire confidence. It’s not so much about being ‘childish’ (re: other threads on this page) as it is about being unpolished and a little nonsensical.
They would be better off with 1) a simple one-word name or 2) a more complete name with an obvious and thoughtful layer of meaning, even if more than one word.
EDIT: Actually, even now, rereading your post I feel like your accusation of me cherry-picking is not fair. Your entire message was about the name of DuckDuckGo. You said "the name [...] gives a bad first impression", "it's not about [...] as it is about being unpolished and a little nonsensical.", "They would be better off with [...] a more complete name with an obvious and thoughtful layer of meaning."
I don't understand how I could have interpreted your message incorrectly.
Person B: "I don't know, duck it."
Person A: "What did you just say‽"
Person B: "I said Duck it, not F..."
Also, doesn't help that 'd' and 'f' are right next to each other on a qwerty keyboard.
I will try telling others to "quack it" :-) Thank you!
Your parents can't handle a highly-memorable name like "Duck duck go"? It sounds like the childhood game "duck duck goose".
You even admit that they couldn't handle Google at first either. You can't win with your parents.
Google only became a verb because of what it was, not because of the name.
"uck" is not unfriendly. It's a duck! Ducks are adorable. It's friendly.
Google is a misspelling of a word that most people STILL don't know to this day, despite using Google for 20 years.
If the name mattered, Yahoo should be kicking Google's ass right now. Or Bing: Short, easy, fun.
None of it matters.
I ended up switching back to Google. It was painful from a privacy standpoint, but what good is privacy if I don't get useful search results.
Sadly I think that the way that DDG caught up was that Google got worse because of SEO spam, while only DDG got a little better.
If you ask Google a question you get better results than if you carefully select some search terms.
You can find them all here: https://duckduckgo.com/bang?
They say they won't change privacy policies etc., but we've often seen that such words don't mean anything a few years down the road, so I'm a bit skeptical.
Search quality is subjective, but in this case I mean better because it respects your search terms, quotes work for phrases, and organic results are enhanced with additional data sources like Stack Overflow [0].
I am the creator of Runnaroo.
1. Server rendered ads. They were there, you must have just missed them (it's on the SERP under the search bar). I don't have the search volume for context based ads (and none of the the available search ad networks are suitable), so the ads are just direct ads that display in rotation for a predetermined amount of time and do zero tracking (i.e. pay X and the ad is displayed for Y amount of time, win win for all).
2. Affiliate links. There is only one today, but I am testing it out to see if they are worth it.
3. Direct user monetization programs (i.e. Web Monetization protocol through Coil and the Brave publisher program). We are actually the first (and maybe still the only) search engine to integrate Web Monetization [0].
/edit here's the quote/source
"We found that Google’s index is larger than that of Bing in terms of number of pages in the index. Based on submissions from these parties, Google’s index contains around [500 -600 billion] pages and Microsoft’s index contains around [100- 200 billion] pages."
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5efb1db6e90e0...
A lot of sites try to game their Google rankings. It's possible DDG is less subject to that.
Just say Estonian so people don't have to figure out what you're talking about.
My business runs on gdrive with over 1 TB of stuff on it currently, I’ve been on Gmail for over 10 years, I just don’t even know where to begin. I feel like if I actually want to reap the benefits of leaving chrome, not using Google search, etc. then I need to get out of their ecosystem entirely or it’s not really worth it.
- Google sees you are speaking French and that you are located in Canada so they assume you want results from Quebec.
- DDG sees you selected France, so you get French results.
Google uses context/history/etc whereas DDG ignores all of that. From a privacy perspective DDG's less localized default results are a feature, and in your situation they are actually better results, but there are people in this thread who have run into issues where DDG just assumes US for any queries in English, or where switching location gives bad results for programing stuff.
It's interesting seeing people's different reactions to this.
Basically Google assumes that I want stuff that is tied to my region regardless of who I am or what I do to hide/block any history tracking or browser fingerprinting. That has its own logic, and really for the average en-US user that works well enough anyway.
The user expectation becomes a bit different if you're British living in the US or Australia, or if you're Spanish living in Argentina, or if you're French living in Canada, etc. Or if you need to find help about a product that isn't dominated by the US, a programming language that isn't developed in English first, etc etc. Probably not the bulk of the requests from Google's perspective, I guess.
Now I use DDG and DDG only for 80-90% of queries. It can even be better, since I can switch location and it doesn't have one page of commercial results before anything useful, like Google does!
Which is exactly what I do. I trade them some of my privacy and data in exchange for the best search results available (in my opinion).
It’s a fair trade for me.
If you care about your privacy a lot then this in-depth independent review should be interesting. https://digdeeper.neocities.org/ghost/search.html
Full disclosure: I'm CEO of Mojeek
Most people don't realize this, but DDG doesn't sell their own advertising, they use Microsoft's advertising network! This just seems bizarre to me that they're outsourcing the whole reason they're supposed to be independent of the other search engines.
I tried signing up for Microsoft's network, but it was a bad user interface (typical MS), very confusing, and I couldn't really figure out how to specifically target DDG and only DDG. I just gave up.
DDG needs to bring advertising in-house, or I don't see why they have a reason to exist. They're almost a subsidiary of MS at this point.
Over the last few months I have been working on an alternative search engine. Maybe naively, I thought the most difficult part was going to be to convince people to use it, but the real challenge if figuring out a way to monetize the service in a way that maintains privacy and respects users. The more I go down this path, the more I realize the next big search engine will be one that provides better results AND comes up with a better way for monetization.
I wrote a little about it here [0] if anyone is interested.
[0] https://coil.com/p/runnaroo/Privacy-and-Search-Engine-Moneti...
"Display advertising that is not provided by Microsoft on any page that displays any part of a response."
DDG is big enough that they are probably on a completely separate agreement than the standard TOS though.
[0] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cognitive-services/bi...
Though "elm list" is still my classic example.
I can see this being a legitimate gripe of an end user that just compares search engines, but I was under the impression that this crowd understands the proposition of DDG and doesn't complain when it's working as designed.
Frankly, when I compare my logged-in, static-IP Google results to anonymous queries, I can see that the degree of "personalization" that people claim is vastly overstated; not much seems to change.
It just seems like wishful thinking when the obvious reality is that Google is just more advanced in its ability to semanticize input.
DDG "rust cargo" gives me images and results for cargo ships.
On DDG the first result was elm-lang homepage but the second was a tutorial on lists in Elm. Down the page I also saw a wikipedia entry for a list of elm trees. Seems ok overall to me.
Then I tried the same thing with Google and first I was stopped by captcha and had to spend a minute clicking hydrants and traffic lights. Then I got a whole page of results about various programming discussions on lists in Elm, but nothing in the entire page about the trees. That does not seem right, I think regular person would be much more likely to search for a tree, not for an obscure programming language.
Verdict: I found DDG results better as in more relevant for general population while still surfacing the programming ones. Also no hydrants on DDG.
Also, ddg's first link is programming related, it's just a worthless result (Elm's homepage).
You ask how someone/something could know that "elm list" is programming related, but I don't see why you think it's unfeasible for someone/something to come up with confidence levels for the various possibilities.
Let's say you were sufficiently omniscient to know about the Elm language, elm trees, the elm email client, Professor Elm from Pokemon, and the tiny town of Elm, Switzerland. What do you think is a better result for the query "elm list"? If you can form an opinion, why couldn't the world's most lucrative machine learning project form a similar one?
Google, instead, shows me a list-extras package first, followed by one tutorial on lists, one on types, an unrelated blog, a SO answer for "are Elm lists faster than JS arrays", followed by a bunch of random stuff, including the Facebook profile for A Elm List.
"fiction perspectives" brings up an article titled "Fiction: Jewish perspectives on Niue" in DDG. In Google it brings up an info box titled "Here are the four primary POV types in fiction".
"US military clacker" (searching for the name of that thing the player often squeezes in first person shooter games to set off explosives) brings up "U.S. WWII D-Day Signaling Cricket Clicker Clacker" in Amazon.com in DDG. In Google it brings up the Wikipedia page for the Claymore mine and chooses to show the sentence "The M57 firing device (colloquially referred to as the "clacker") is included with each mine".
"lua_pcall example" brings up a thread titled "PCall function?" on the Roblox Developer Forum in DDG. In Google it brings up the page "Calling Lua Functions" from the official Lua manual.
Many of these are still usable. There are some articles about perspective in fiction writing further down but none that address the topic quite so directly. The clacker search on DDG has pictures of clackers (which Google does not) which you could click on and investigate to work out the name of it. The Lua DDG search has the right page as the third result. But those little imperfections do add friction and make me reach for the g! flag for those trickier queries.
2. What's New In JDK 14 Latest Release? 80 New Features ... - I was not asking for JDK 14
3. What's new in Java 15? | Learn To Code Together - sort of ok
4. JDK14: Java 14 Features - What's New in Java 14 - wrong JDK version again
5. whats new in Java 9 | Java 9 features | corejavaguru - getting even worst
6., 7. some links to Java 12 and 13
8. What's new in Spring Boot 2.3 (Java 14, OCI images, etc ... - totally unrelated stuff.
From that point results are utter crap, duplicated multiple times.
Google at least provides links to JDK 15 official java.net page and to release notes, plus it gets the version right - no links for other Java versions.
As much as I would like DDG to be successful, it is not yet there.
I'd tried DDG in the past but found their response times a bit slow (perhaps due to Bing API?) but that does not seem to be the case now, moreso because they switched from Amazon to Microsoft servers.
DDG is perhaps the best known private search engine, though Mojeek and Startpage were pro-privacy a good number of years earlier.
searchenginemap.com is quite useful for exploring some of the alternative private engines, and shows who powers their search results. It is English focused.
Not a huge DDG fan but appreciate they're offering privacy on a larger English speaking search index, and would prefer people use it over Google if they can help it.
- I've noticed DDG's quality slowly improve, while Google's slowly decrease. But Google is still on top.
- When I really want to search for something, I'm using a mix of Google, Yandex, DDG, and sometimes another weird one like Dogpile.com
The times they are a-changin', but slowly, over time.
It's quite ironic now that when I want to do some Internet searching, I will use search engines - NOT (just) Google.
If I want to 'use google', I use Google. They're definitely not a pure search engine anymore, for better or for worse. What they offer is nice very often, but sometimes all I want is the ability to do some deep searching and nothing be withheld from me. Google increasingly censors and filters out information for an increasing number of their own reasons, none of which I ever asked for. That's not why I fell in love with the Internet.
Google is now fundamentally out of sync with the soul of the Internet at the core level. Thankfully, the Internet is bigger than it.
This is exactly me - I moved back to google for search when I realised I was subconsciously adding `g!` to every single search
Maybe I've mastered DDG-fu or something but I also cannot stand looking at Google results anymore, especially not if there is page upon page from the same site (e.g. if the thing I'm searching for has results on Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, experts-exchange, etc, etc - it often has page upon page of mild variations of the same link) which DDG doesn't seem to do.
The bangs are what wins me though. Their value to me dwarfs that of the privacy concerns (which is really important to me, anyway) it's like a curated list of specific searches available to me as long as I can get online, and I don't need to sync anything. So good.
It basically boils down to two things: a) bangs, and b) just seeing the same results as everyone else does.
Usually when I can't find stuff on DDG, I can't find them with !g neither. I don't see myself switching to anything else unless I'm forced to (if it goes out of business or something).
I don’t use bangs frequently although they are neat.
I don’t think I’m some search savante, or a hardcore purist/idealist despite moving to DDG for the privacy reasons.
Maybe it’s because generally I’m looking for docs rather than specific answers these days.
Does DDG allow "and", "or", parens, etc? I tried a query of the form A and (B or C) and it brought back things but I can't tell if it just ignored the parens and "and" and "or" keywords or if it actually used them. Does it honor double-quotes and plus and minus signs?
I tend to give DDG more information than it needs, such as "c programming enum" instead of just "enum" for example. I'd love to be able to treat it as a pseudo sql query instead.
https://www.semanticscholar.org
The DuckDuckGo bangs for Semantic Scholar are !s2, !semantic, and !smsc.
It's an uphill battle though unless they have algorithm superiority - Google has many years of experience working through issues and establishing infrastructure, and they have a lot of money to pour into maintaining their lead. I do hope DDG comes out as a long term viable alternative, but they are going to need a lot more money to do it and they're going to need to develop more differentiators than bang operators and ideology.
(For example the parallel universes like wibbly wobbly world, and the non-existent village of Basingstoke)
There's no benefit to !g if you use it for 4 out of 5 searches.
Google results are sometimes better but most of the time, I find search results heavily biased towards “social platforms”, commercial and otherwise SEO’d resources. Old content is just hard to find, whether it is a prominent news paper article, a niche personal website, etc.
I don’t know how this search engines rank their results today, but I would pay for a way to filter out « big names » out of the search results and explore this long tail set by published date, etc.
Use cases are very different between « searching » and « researching ». I want a research engine :)
The bigger issue for me is that if DDG becomes popular, they might chart a path similar to Google in terms of privacy. It's another ad supported search engine after all.
[1]: They show dumber results on Firefox and should be in anti-trust territory, but that's a different discussion.
This has been such a noticeable problem that a Firefox add-on (Google Search Fixer) was created to fix it:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/google-search...
Google Search Fixer is currently available on Firefox Nightly for Android.
It is better multiple companies have parts of my data than one company that knows where I am , who I meet , what I search , use , and even say in my house
For those not in the adv area, we saw billboards, radio and TV spots, and transit posters (vehicle side and station walls)... On top of their growing digital spend, all emphasizing privacy.
Apple is obviously taking this push too, and some folks will care.... But is this positioning enough? <popcorn><couch>
But there is no way around maps for me - at least for driving - for outdoor stuff I generally use Locus Map on my phone
My most common bangs are !w (Wikipedia), !wde (German wikipedia), !ddgde (DDG toggled to German results), !rt (Rotten Tomatoes for TV reviews), !imdb (looking up actors) and !gm (Google Maps. Sadly still the best results if I search for a name instead of an address)
!g maps
!g <obscure programming error>
I still recommend it to everyone though.
There's also !osm for OpenStreetMaps.
!yt
!cache
!maps
The have a searchable list for every bang they support. https://duckduckgo.com/bang
Neither DDG or Google are very good at that, but those sites are consistently the best and most honest results.
On Google many searches give mostly affiliate blogspam articles unless I append "reddit" or "forum" or "stack" to the search, at which point I get great results.
It isn't as automatic as you are asking for but that is probably more than you can really expect for what seems like a very niche desire.
Bangs: https://duckduckgo.com/bang
Bang search: !bang <site description>
The bang hacks are convenient though.
In those cases I prefer DDGs inaccurate results.
For the past few years I noticed that if DuckDuckGo can’t find anything relevant, then neither can Google.
DDG: You meant this.
Google: Did you mean this?
The only thing I'm really missing from Google is the integration with Maps, Google Search is so convenient for finding a good restaurant, shop or bar around you. There were alternatives in the past (like Yelp) but Google killed them all, at least in France.
I'll keep using it because at this point my brain is wired to !g when I can't find something, and the benefits outweigh the lack of results, but I do hope they can improve and continue to grow.
When I use g!, I find the Google experience horrible. The UI/UX sucks, it surfaces a lot of irrelevant results. I also find that the AI meant to improve the experience is rarely a benefit, and often makes it worse. And Google seems so far out of its depth in AI that its systems meant to promote "social justice and equality" often seem to backfire and fail on their own terms.
I just now tried to search "black man" in both Google images and DDG images, and the results are exactly representative of my problems with Google's failure as a search engine. The top two G results are George Floyd and Ahmad Arbery, and the fourth is actually a white boy accused of stabbing a black man. The pièce de résistance was two or three rows down, where G suggested "related searches" and the top one was "black man funny" and a thumbnail of a picture that at the very least was mockery (including it as the representation for "black man funny" is just racist). The full list of results included what looked like literal minstrelsy and other mockery. I am by no means a social justice activist, but I detest racism and this is what Google was promoting. And regardless of my views, Google clearly holds itself up as some sort of agent of social change, so why is it so racist?
DDG, by contrast, showed pictures of professional men in the top results.
(Just as an aside, one of the common themes black people call out about racism is that poor black kids - boys in particular - are indoctrinated to believe that sports, entertainment or crime are their only avenues for opportunity in life. This is usually portrayed as a systemic issue, which teachers, institutions (banks, potential employers, government bureaucracy) and the media perpetuate with a sort of resigned, inertial Kafkaesque belief that things will never change. If we are to accept the views of social justice activists, how do the top Google results not literally reinforce these stereotypes, before promoting a literally racist set of search results?)
In my experience, Google started declining when it doubled down on AI far too early, and now their system is too complex for anyone to understand or wrangle. Google is the present-day Leviathan, and independent of their horrible privacy practices and political-ideological alignment, their software just seems defective.
So cue the usual HN DDG responses of "I switched to DDG and it's fine", "I used DDG and went back to Google" and "I use DDG but !g everything".
I personally think DDG is founded on two false premises:
1. People care about privacy. 99% of people don't; and
2. Personalized search doesn't have value. I think Google's dominance here is a good example of why it does.
At the end of the day, you can search Google incognito if you want to. People do this.
DDG is inserting themselves between the user and Bing/Google. I just don't see how it survives long term doing this.
Try writing out more words that explain what you are looking for. This always works for me. If it doesn't then do !mill and enjoy going down the rabbit hole.
Also, so many folks here are saying they use the bang option to search Google, through DDG. So either they’re using google’s search api or scraping on the background, both of which are expensive in their own ways.
Beyond technical, at a business level, how are they actually pulling this off?
90% of of the time, if my first search didn't produce a useful result on DDG, I end up !stackoverflow or !stackexchange.
The other ~10% of the time I do use !g, it's almost always if I'm looking for something very specific, e.g. that one article on markov-chains from HN years ago.
Frankly I don't understand how someone can go back to googling after using the DDG interface for so long. There are so may ads on Google now it takes forever to get to the relevant results.
Runnaroo seems to always surface wikipedia, stack overflow and github which is almost always what I'm looking for. And if it's not there a quick scroll to the bottom gives me a Google link I can click.
Like others, using ddg previously have trained me to add !g automatically meaning I almost never looked at ddg. I can still add !g to runnaroo but since i know google (or ddg) is just a quick swipe away I never type it.
I would definitely move back to ddg (anything but google) if I ever have a reason to stop using runnaroo.
See the arrow in the below: https://imgur.com/sY4qi63
Always room for improvement with it though.
If it gets even worse, I’d have to give up and choose something else.
I love it, as I’ve said here in the past. I came for the privacy and have stayed for the bang syntax. Paradoxically it lets me search with google products better than google.
Under google I type in “Boston, MA” then need to click with a mouse.
Under ddg I type “Boston, MA !gm” and am brought right to the map.
Same thing for the hundreds of other bangs
If google is any better (I’m sure it is) it is not better enough to matter.
Id still like to see more competition and disruption in the space.
Google's captcha DoSing me drove me to DDG not privacy... Much of the time the results are poor but I just cannot endure google any longer.
I wonder how many others have the same reason. This affects mobile internet users particularly badly.
Image search on DDG is awful though.
Google search has gotten so bad lately. I'm sure Apple could make a product that is "good enough."
I'd like to see:
- A semi-log plot. Or underlying data.
- Comparison to overall Internet usage growth.
- Comparison to Google search growth.
Before you get all bent out of shape: yes it's less evil, yes it's better for privacy, etc. But it really doesn't compete on a fundamental level of search.
For some things Google is better, namely for stuff where you have almost no clue ("song with children screaming over tv noises").
However for searches where you do have some clue ("error code 456 when installing xyz"), Google will drown you in AMP, useless "answer boxes" and scammy sites while DDG will generally find you the vendors site and some Stack Exchange discussions.
It’s just a different ad model on someone else’s (Bing) search engine, without actually learning from customer behavior unique to their search engine.
So it's convenient for that, but can't say I use it very often still.