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Comment by sunaurus | Hacker News Reader

I love the idea of DDG, but after using it for about a year, I realized that I'm redoing most of my searches with !g. DDG seems to be quite bad at searches that are in my native language and somehow also often doesn't find good results for programming related queries.

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.

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I have the opposite: I'm in Canada and from France, but if I search for anything in French on ANY google (.com/.ca/.fr) I get Quebec stuff, whereas if I put the "France" filter on DDG I do get actual results for France. It has become one of the most convenient things for me when trying to find some news in each country (similarly, selecting "Canada" when searching in English or French for Canada or Quebec).

Oh I didn’t know about that, thanks. I tried researching a few covid things around the world and google gave me nothing but Canadian results. Even with -canada and the country name. Infuriating.

This has been coming up a lot in this thread and seems to be one of those bug vs feature situations.

- 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.

It is a difference in features indeed, and I believe the region settings can also be found when using google - they're just 2-3 clicks away in a menu and force you to reload, where DDG has them right on the homepage.

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.

Was this recent? I had the same experience but recently tried again and found that DDG was now about as good as Google. When I do try !g because DDG failed to find something then usually Google doesn't find it either.

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.

The thing that really made Google harder to use was the switch to natural language questions rather than search terms.

If you ask Google a question you get better results than if you carefully select some search terms.

Indeed, I find that for my native language (Dutch) DDG is quite bad and no match for Google. I find that for simple, mainstream programming queries DDG is also fine, but if it's a little out of that mainstream, it doesn't produce anything. It seems to have a bias toward big corporate sites (eg microsoft docs) which isn't always helpful, perhaps that is due to a bias in Bing (from which it sources search results)?

I tend to use the Firefox Search Box to access multiple search engines. Some may consider that a more convenient than using !bangs. DDG is one of the many options I have set-up but I can go straight to others from there.

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

I often find DDG better at programming related questions. Google is frequently useless there.

My experience has been the exact opposite. As soon as I need to look up something very specific or niche DDG does not deliver and that's when I need it the most.

Google's index is 4x bigger (I can't recall the specific numbers but it was mentioned in a recent competition report in the UK)- I'd expect Google to be better at returning long tail stuff where perhaps Bing (and thus DDG) simply don't have the depth of documents to return.

/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...

Not just that, but it feels like I get more results that are just rehosted StackOverflow answers when using DDG.

Really? I used to get those a lot on Google, and after switching to DDG I get real StackOverflow again.

A lot of sites try to game their Google rankings. It's possible DDG is less subject to that.

DDG is more willing to stick a stackoverflow answer at the top, which is usually what I want. When the issue becomes more language-specific or obscure then I have to resort to !g.

I think the hardest part for me is that I am so locked into Google Drive and Gmail at this point that getting off of them seems to be a nearly Herculean feat.

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.

I use DDG now for over a year and similar to you I most of the time use !g. However I still stick to DDG because of all the other bangs i constantly use such as: !w, !yt, !godoc, !yc and more.

You can find them all here: https://duckduckgo.com/bang?

used to be the case for me a couple of years ago.

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!

Maybe give startpage a shot. They use Google results but it adds a privacy layer inbetween, and have the added privacy benefit of not being US-based compared to DDG.

I liked Startpage, but a significant investor is US-based firm System1, which is, at least partially, an advertising / tracking company.

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.

But currently they have not implemented any such changes (at least that I'm aware of) - thus I will continue to use Startpage.

Or better than StartPage, try Runnaroo. Organic results are also derived from Google.

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.

[0] https://www.runnaroo.com/search?term=react.js

Out of curiosity how are you monetizing? I did a search for ”mortgages” but didn't see any ads.

Three current ways:

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].

[0] https://webmonetization.org/

Ah you’re right I was looking for ads ABOVE the SERP. Integrating web monetization is clever! I should try pitching that at my company.

Do you scrape Google results? If so, how do you deal with captcha?

Sounds interesting but your privacy policy and website lacks all information on who's actually running it and processing the data, which unfortunately makes it a non-starter for me (and is a violation of the GDPR).

This has been my experience 100%. I’d rather pay Google than use DDG for free.

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.

I’d agree it’s fair if we actually knew what all the gleaned from our searches and what they did with it. That’s sort of the crux of the problem. We aren’t fully consenting/aware of what is being harvested and where it’s going.

I've been using DDG since early 2010s and what you say was very true back then its much less so now. I still occasionally use !g but its way less of a factor than it once was.

I have a similar experience, though I stayed on DDG. It's a bit funny, but I built a habit to use !s. This means, I use DDG to use StartPage, which in turn uses Google.

>quite bad at searches that are in my native language

Just say Estonian so people don't have to figure out what you're talking about.

Is google able to track you if you use !g via ddg?

Yes, as it connects you to Google.

Of course it is. Using !g, Google knows that on one computer I use I have never agreed to the Google 'Before you continue'. Isn't agreeing to that, agreeing to be tracked?

I find !g minimally annoying to type....

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