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I absolutely cannot stand the quality of DuckDuckGo results, programming related or not. I use !g on almost any general search query out of a conditioned lack of faith in the ability of DDG to surface anything useful. The name is childish and doesn’t inspire confidence either.

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.

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Before I bought a robotic vacuum cleaner, I read lots of reviews from people saying it wasn't as good as vacuuming manually. It misses areas, it has a hard time in corners, it takes forever. I bought it anyway. The simple fact is it doesn't matter how much worse it is than vacuuming, because I'm not vacuuming.

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.

Give this person a cookie, for exhibiting sheer resolve, something that's becoming all too rare in the manipulated, instant-gratification culture we're heading deep into.

Given their privacy focus, do you think that poster is just going to accept random cookies on the internet? ;)

Hah! I heard Santa dropped 120lb when he found the 'do not accept from third parties' checkbox :)

It's not resolve. It's experience. At a young age, you think through short timelines. Crises don't happen. At an old age, once you've been through a few crises, wars, pandemics, law suits, and whatnot, you start calculating expected outcomes a bit differently.

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.

I am curious to know more about such experiences.

1) Interacting in online forums, pre-search engine, where such discussions where considered more-or-less ephemeral, and only available to a closed group of "Internet users" wasn't super-public. All of that is now archived and indexed. If you search for me, you'll find it.

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.

Thank you, added to favorites to show to skeptics.

It sounds like you're keeping a list. What's on your list so far?

You can look at anyone's favorites list here: https://news.ycombinator.com/favorites?id=USERNAME&comments=... (replace USERNAME with the actual name of the user).

For my username it is here: https://news.ycombinator.com/favorites?id=fsflover&comments=...

> history shows Google won't be Google forever

Hmmm, that one got to me.

You should be able to take your personal webpage off archive.org if you don't want it there. I think the mechanism is via the current robots.txt file.

The comparison for me is more like a bicycle, which is really nice, but when going cross country, a car is required.

agree. Mostly I stick with DDG, but, especially for nitche queries, if I don't like the DDG results I give it a try again with !g. And as you say, 1/2 the time it doesn't give better results (but, 1/2 it does)

Sidenote, i am with you fully - and you may be interested in `!s` - Startpage. I know very little about them, so please - do your own research, but supposedly they straight use Google, so your results are basically Google without giving your info "directly" to Google.

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.

I use Startpage for certain escalated queries as well.

Irrespective of Startpage's motives, using them provides a layer of indirection between me and Google associating every search with a Google account.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21371577

Startpage is now owned by an advertising company (reddit.com)

182 points by rahuldottech 10 months ago | 82 comments

If Duck Duck Go is free, doesn't it fundamentally have the same business model as Google. I don't understand how there can be no privacy implications, and search is free. At some point, something has to give for DDG to be profitable-- it is a business, after all. There is no way to measure if they're living up to privacy claims, either.

https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-revenue-generation-model-f...

Insightful. When DDG hits critical mass and investors expect greater returns, or if they ever go public, there will be immense pressure to collect/store user data. It's too valuable to pass up.

But until future happens, we're stuck with the present. And in this present DDG doesn't do weird tricks with your data.

Privacy is the reason they're growing at all, it's their competitive advantage. I think even investors are smart enough to not kill the chicken that lays golden eggs.

Why are you concerned about search engine privacy but also happy to have a robotic vacuum that likely sells maps of and data about your home (such as Roomba does)? Seems to invalidate your point about convenience over purity a little bit.

You don't have to tell your wi-fi password to your robotic vacuum. It will work without it.

This is something I think as well. But what's stopping manufacturers from putting 4G chips inside of it?

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 have an older Roomba from before they did mapping and before they had internet connectivity. I would never buy an appliance that required an internet connection.

> 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

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.

Same, I use !g very rarely, and when I do I only get a better result maybe 1/8 times.

Agree. I’m perfectly satisfied with native DDG results most of the time. !g is the exception; I use !w, !hn and !gh much more frequently.

One area where DDG is _much_ worse is when it comes to localized results.

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.

Interesting example. And I can replicate it pretty much exactly as you describe.

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.

IP address at a minimum gives you a coarse location anyway so this isn’t even DDG going out of their way to collect personalization information to provide a better result. Alternatively maybe they view any personalization data as a slippery slope and avoid it wholesale.

According to DDG's Privacy page[0] --

"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.

[0] https://duckduckgo.com/privacy

DDG does have a switch to enable location aware search (coarse at the level of country).

I would consider this a typical case.

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.

Yeah, I think that is a fair assessment.

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).

This is what I find annoying as well.

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...

With DDG + firefox (desktop or mobile), you can create your own custom bangs!

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.

Well that's by design. How can ddg give you localized results without knowing your location.

I get around this by adding the country/city/language/neighborhood to my search query and it works just fine for me.

> The name is childish and doesn’t inspire confidence either.

Gone are the days of search engine names that inspired confidence, like Altavista and Lycos... or AskJeeves.

I guess people forget that Google is an unintentional misspelling of Googol, a word chosen because it sounds funny.

Nothing inspired confidence like the sound of joy after one found answer they looking for....Yahoo!!

Also the runners up, Bing.

I use DDG and I usually have a pretty ok time without swapping back to google, or when I do I frequently don't have a better time (although much of the time I do!). Also for programming, DDG has a really nice stack overflow custom result.

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.

be aware that an extension ('Search DuckDuckGo bangs') provides DDG bangs to Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/fr/firefox/addon/search-duckduckg...

it might simply redirect your !-searches to DDG, I don’t know. but I find it pretty useful.

> 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.

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.

> The name is childish and doesn’t inspire confidence either.

Good point. Not like "Google" or "Bing".

Exactly.

They should just call it "Bang" or "Bangs" and be done with it :)

bing's not a good example here - everyone took the piss out of its name when it was released (and it still said in mocking tones), and it isn't all that popular as a search engine either.

I think they were being sarcastic

Funny... Google was a name specifically coined by a child so he has no leg to stand on with that complaint

No, that's not the story I know.

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...

And Googol was coined by a 9 year old.

"Coined by a child" and "sounds childist" are separate concerns though.

I'm going to go against the grain here. For me, Duck Duck Go's results tend to be better than Google's results. For searches that are even just moderately complicated, Google has a tendency of giving me results that contain none of the search terms I give it, making me wade through pages of junk that I didn't actually search for. DDG makes better assumptions in that regard. And when I don't get the exact results immediately in DDG, rather than just slap a !g at the end, I have the audacity to actually refine my search by adding additional search terms and get what I want.

(Disclosure: I live in the US, so it's possible Google is far better at search in other countries/languages than DDG)

You're probably using modern Google-fu if you're anything like I was when I first tried DDG. To get the best results you have to go back to your 2005-10 search skillset I've found.

It's more a plain keyword/phrase search than asking it questions

I see this kind of comment pop up every time DuckDuckGo is brought up. It makes me wonder what the disconnect is.

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)

Part of the issue for me is that what I’ve learned from searching with google for so long might not translate to DDG very well.

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.

Since this topic keeps coming up, I wish people would save and share with us these supposed failed DDG queries. I wouldn't say that DDG's results are better than the Google of 10 years ago, but I rarely have problems finding what I want. I don't understand how anyone can go as far as to say that DDG is "crap".

I don't understand how anyone who isn't only looking up error strings can say Google results are not crap? For normal human things, DDG seems a little worse than earlier Google and Google seems a lot worse. Or maybe people like sifting through the SEO drivle and vaporous landing pages Google has motivated everyone to create?

Both DDG and Google seem to have regressed to only surfacing lots of blog spam in response to my technical queries, perhaps with a few useful StackOverflow discussions.

That's my experience, although I still prefer DDG's results and design over Google's.

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 actually do one better: I use the Feedback link at the bottom of the bogus search results to formally tell DDG about my bad experience. After having done that for years with no improved outcome, it sure does feel like spitting into the wind, but it also has a higher probability of change than just swearing at my monitor

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)

I’ve rarely had an issue with DDG results.

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.

You can increase the number of results Google shows, up to 100. I have mine set to 30, which in my experience is plenty.

I agree that bangs are a killer feature of DDG, but I often see the problem of results quality brought up and I have to speak up about it.

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.

I searched for Django on DDG. It alternates between results for the framework, Django (1966), and Django Unchained, getting less specific as it goes down until it shows a result for a restaurant in Des Moines, Iowa at the bottom of the first page. It keeps adding more range in as I click to new results. This is much better than how Google shows page after page of the same thing.

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've been pleased with Searx[1] compared to DDG or Google, given that it aggregates search results from multiple search engines. You can self-host it or use one of the public instances[2].

[1] https://github.com/searx/searx

[2] https://searx.space/

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

Even if the search results are bad that 10/10 I have to use !g .I will still want to use ddg just so that they have the data on search strings which perform poorly and can improve their systems.

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 .

Do they track this? I vaguely recall a similar comment in the past where the founder or someone else clarified that they don't keep track of which queries get banged.

According to their privacy page they do save search strings without PII information for product improvement. I guess that includes !bang searches. The 2B searches a month should logically include bangs too.

I use DDG, I don't think I've ever used !g directly, but have used google a few times if I'm on a borrowed computer for instance, I'm shocked how bad the results are in google compared with DDG.

I use !gm a lot though.

I've been using DDG for almost a year now, and as time goes on, I'm less and less confident about the results. Not enough to make me go back to Google, but I'm definitely quicker to try Google these days.

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.

I don't understand the needs for !bang's, I've had bookmark keywords in Firefox a decade. I simply type "a something" in the URL bar and it looks up "something" on Amazon etc. yt/d/g/t/w for youtube/duckduckgo/google/twitter/wikipedia etc. What do DDG's bangs offer over this.

1. You don't have to manually add keywords.

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.

I switched back to Google this week after a few months of having ddg as the default. It's actually fine most of the time but when it's not you end up wasting time before you figure out that Google has answers.

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.

Bangs are a superpower, a game changer, and by far the best UX for mobile search I’ve seen so far.

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.

Why would you use bangs, when Firefox and Chrome have perfectly usable custom search keywords?

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.

Because setting them up is a pain in the arse

Google is highly tuned for the user. More so if you are actually logged in without account, so what you are seeing has almost no incidence on what kind of results other people are seeing.

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.

I am also using ddg, but I also use !g on 9/10 searches. Spending that much more time on figuring something out due to the missing or incorrect search results is simply a price too high for me. I would love it if it was just as good as google, but it simply isnt right now.

It's like comparing a car to a bicycle. I like bicycles, but when going cross country, it simply does not work.

As someone who doesn't actively use google and mostly uses DDG, I find google's results worse precisely because google hasn't personalized their results for me. So without the personalization, the google results based on my search query seem worse than DDG.

The name being childish is not really relevant imo. What's so mature about "google" or "facebook"?

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!

"The name is childish"

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".

Also, "google" :)

Huh. TIL the "bang" feature.

Alfred provides similar functionality on OSX, allowing you to create a key sequence shortcut for any search engine that can parse URL params.

This broadly reflects my experience too

The !g is so habitual that I find myself typing it on Google too now

DDG is also very slow

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