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Comment by garyrichardson | Hacker News Reader

I've tried really hard to not use google for search. But DDG is bad. I have it set as my default search. I find myself either:

1) trying duck duck go and then immediately re-searching in google to actually get relevant answers.

2) skipping the search bar and going immediately to google when I know DDG just isn't going to work.

Feels like back in the olden days when you had to try Altavista, Lycos and Yahoo to find what you're looking for.

I can live without chrome, calendars, gmail, maps and all the others. But they're still the best at search by a lot.

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After using DDG for years, I sometimes try Google when DDG does not seem to deliver. Every time I am disgusted by the sheer amount of crap it shows me. Videos, shopping, news etc. I'll take DDGs clean result list over that any time! (And usually, Google has the same results as DDG anyway)

Another DDG user here, people forget sometimes that you need to search a bit differently with DDG, a bit more explicit as it were with your keywords.

That said, in general DDG results seems to be improving incrementally, while I can’t say the same for Google.

I've been very pleased with https://www.runnaroo.com.

Yes I really like it as well. The only thing is their image search which doesn't really give me anything useful, so I still resort to google for that.

Yandex image search is way better in my experience. At least for "search by image"

I made the exact same experience. Sometimes when I can't get satisfying results I try to use google, but in most cases the results are even worse. Googles search results just don't make any sense to me by now.

There is one feature that google has which I can't find a good alternative for: Reverse search of images. Hands down, that's a good one, Google.

Yandex has it https://yandex.ru/images/touch/

And it's much better than google's. Google will only find same image (different resolution or very minor changes), yandex finds similar images in general. That said google's image search has some use because google's index is still bigger than yandex's. (For people who prefer English interface https://yandex.com/images/)

Tineye was doing it before Google: https://tineye.com

We've done this song and dance 1000 times: Someone says "DDG is bad" or "DDG is good" and all of the replies are basically "No, DDG is <opposite>".

Let's try something new: Let's give examples. I'll go first:

Let's say I have a nebulous recollection that there is a wifi module with "NRF" in the model number. If I search for `nrf wifi` on both Google and DDG, which do you think provides better results?

Let's look at the top URL hits from both (this is in an incognito window, with ublock origin on!):

Google:

1) nordicsemi.com (the manufacturer) homepage

2) <manufacturer website> press release

3) <manufacturer website> random Q & A page

4) arduino.stackoverflow.com (question about how to use it)

5) Some blog (someone's guide to using it)

6) nrf.com (National Retail Federation) conference category: wifi and bluetooth analytics (unrelated result, but I can imagine someone going to this conference might google the exact same thing, good thing Google knows to show it...

--- A random box showing questions relevant to the device ---

7) arduino.cc (question about how to use it)

8) <electronics blog site A> (someone's guide to using it)

9) <electronics blog site A> (another page on using it)

10) <electronic parts retail site A> (sells it)

DDG:

1) <electronics blog site A> (someone's guide to using it)

2) <electronics blog site B> (someone's guide to using it)

3) <electronic parts retail site C> (someone's guide to using it)

4) <electronics blog site D> (someone's guide to using it)

5) <electronics blog site E> (someone's guide to using it)

6) <electronics blog site F> (another guide to using it)

7) <electronics blog site G> (someone's guide to using it)

8) arduino.cc (question about how to use it)

9) <manufacturer website> random Q & A page

10) <manufacturer website> another random Q & A page

As you can see, Google seems to prefer authoritative sources (the manufacturer, the conference that coincidentally has the same name and category), while DDG seems to prefer blogs and how-to guides. I won't say which is better, that's entirely subjective.

You found what you're looking for on the first page and on the first try for both. IMO that's a resounding success.

Not in 2020.

A simple keyword match, even if weighted, is no longer enough. The engine needs to grok the context of a query. Chances of someone's using a generic query to find a blog instead of a vendor's site are basically zero.

As you said it depends on the context, I agree, but thus the chances someone's using a generic query to find vendor independent resources like blogs are not zero. With regard to the given example "nrf wifi", I'd prefer DDG's results as I usually know the manufacturer of the hardware I work with but often search for solutions to problems in context of that hardware. Furthermore depending on familiarity with domain names it's possible to deduce the manufacturer's website from GP's 9th result on DDG.

Here is an interesting one: search for 'reddit conspiracy' on DDG and Google.

DDG: /r/conspiracy at the top of the list - first result

Google: nowhere to be seen

Makes me wonder what else they are not showing.

Maybe it's just a joke by Google? Showing a reddit conspiracy ( no results for /r/conspiracy ) if somebody searchs for 'reddit conspiracy'.

That would be funny, but there are other examples like that. Pick any community towards the "right" and you will probably get the same result. i.e. search 'reddit dark enlightenment'

Again first result on DDG, no result on Google.

I checked Wikipedia : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Enlightenment

It's a bit more than "towards the right" IMHO. I don't mind this reddit community being ignored by Google Search.

Well, another one - 'donald trump reddit'.

I get results about the subreddit the_donald, which has been deleted by reddit.

For me:

Google: No reddit entry, with "The_Donald" entry from Wikipedia

DDG: /r/donaldtrump, /r/donald_trump, /r/AskTrumpSupporters as first 3 results.

Maybe google just don't like reddit (or.. online forum)?

Try 'biden reddit'

Biden doesn't return results on google, which is interesting. But it doesn't seem to be because google doesn't like reddit. It typically returns results even for niche sub-reddits.

"reddit sorcery of the spectacle" works, for example.

However "reddit married red pill" doesn't (works on DDG).

There must be some kind of censoring going on. Maybe Donald Trump and Biden are somehow influenced by elections. But this wouldn't explain the others.

This has convinced me to try DDG

Odd: I just checked, and /r/conspiracy was top of the list on both. (I'm not logged into my Google account.)

OTOH I can confirm Google did not show /r/donaldtrump in the first page for "reddit donald trump" (no quotes), while it's the first result on DDG.

>Let's try something new: Let's give examples.

Maybe better: Let's make (or find) a benchmark for web search.

So here is an interesting one, I’d just searched import plugins for Wordpress, and the top result from Google is a 5 year old review website, while DDG gives me one from this year. The latter being more relevant to my search.

I've fully switched to DDG. I still bounce over to google maybe 5-10% of the time, but to me that's a pretty big win. 90-95% of the time I avoid being tracked by google at the cost of 5-10% of the time wasting a few seconds skimming results on ddg before jumping to google.

You can make a more specific query instead.

Actually, this in anecdotal, but i believe most of the cases where ddg lets me down are when the query is VERY specific. More general searches seem to have no diff between google and ddg results.

This is my intuition as well. As soon as the query gets too specific, I'll just tack on a "!g".

This is precisely my approach. I’m an engineer so sometimes need to make very esoteric searches, but I’ve been using DDG for coming up on 10y.

This is an unfortunate paradox of a new search engine: the results suck because no one searches and no one searches because the results suck.

I try to continue to work at it until I get a result I’m looking for in the hopes that it helps improve the search results for myself and others.

I can say that the ddg results today are good enough that I can actually use it as my default, but this was not true several years ago.

Not only has DDG become better, especially for regional/localized searches, Google has become worse.

What Google has done is to prioritize mainstream sources over correct matches. In the old days you could get a match for small unknown blog on the first page, today it is very rare for me that I get that. It is usually mainstream sources on the first page, except when the search is very technical like programming.

This becomes even more apparent for Google’s affiliate YouTube where you can search for the exact title and it doesn’t show up on the first page. Related videos is also broken.

What drives clicks on YouTube today is the very curated home page for a user. This was not how YouTube used to work.

These factors has changed how we, at least for me, consume content. In the old days you found small independent sources much more easily, which meant that it was up to you to make a judgment if that source was interesting or not. Today it is the opposite, "here is a clip that has been viewed 20 millions times before you, enjoy!". This has made the web much worse.

One thing that Google do better is grouping result from same source, like here is all matches from Reddit, this has two main benefits. First it easy to view that group separately. Second is that you can view more matches on the first search page.

> One thing that Google do better is grouping result from same source

This seems trivial compared to the search problem. I wonder if something like this is on DDG’s roadmap.

> One thing that Google do better is grouping result from same source

This seems trivial compared to solving the search problem. I wonder if something like this is on DDG’s roadmap.

I have had the polar opposite experience. After many unsuccessful trials of DDG in past years, I recently switched my default engine to DDG about 2 months ago on all devices (desktops and mobile). Since then, I have been pleasantly surprised. I would say I end up prefixing !g (to redirect to a Google search) once every 200-500 queries. For the remainder, the DDG results page is such a welcome change from Google’s, which basically has gradually morphed from its original 10 links only into a glorified link farm run by a surveillance megacorp.

Duckduckgo id basically anonymized bing.

I'm a little bit surprised that http://startpage.com isn't on the list, it's anonymized google in the same way ddg is anonymized bing.

A year ago StartPage sold a majority stake to, what essentially is, an advertising and marketing company - System 1 Group.

Not necessarily a bad thing, but I have zero trust that these new owners will not succumb to some common and oh-so-effective shenanigans to improve their ad performance in the StartPage search results. That's like selling a rehab facility to a drug cartel. A match made in heaven.

I really like Bing these days. Google has sanitized it's results so much that anything interesting is gone. Things off the top of my head: finding technical docs via searhing pds, "Index Of" listings, adult content (not even meaning porn, per se) - NSFW forums to come to mind (just look at how many subreddits are set to nsfw now), forums, etc etc

Your experience matches mine exactly.

I tried to use DDG for a whole year only to realize I was constantly typing !g

Have you tried the comparison within the last year? You will probably find that while DDG Search is still just as bad as you remember, Google Search is no longer much better. I use Bing quite a bit, too, which is even closer in quality to Google Search.

My problem with bing, and I could be wrong for it, is I’m not looking to replace one data mining company with another. I’d much rather give a smaller, up and coming, company my searches.

Oh, I'm not thrilled to have Microsoft track me. Google disturbs me much more, though, mainly because their footprint is larger (Youtube, Gmail, etc).

Also, I don't live on Windows, which limits the amount of my data MS can get its hands on.

And with a pi-hole, you can easily block all windows telemetry domains. Which is about half of the requests on the DNS at our house...

That an endless cycle. You give your time and money to a 'smaller' company (thinking they're not as evil), but soon they become big corporations and start doing the same kind of things. :)

I switched search engines several times, had no problem with it. If you're afraid of abstinence syndrome, you can rotate them: monday - searx, tuesday - qwant, wednesday - mojeek, thursday - duck, friday - yandex, saturday - ecosia, sunday - gibiru.

I totally agree. Depending on which field I'm working on I know right away when to skip DDG entirely. Makes me sad I wish I could skip google but unfortunately there are a lot of topics where DDG misses the mark.

This is so weird to me. I use DDG on my home computer, but Google at work, so I have experience with both.... and they're basically indistinguishable to me.

I use DDG as my default and it gets me 90% of the way there. Sometimes when I search for programming syntax and I know there is one canonical answer that should be the top link, DDG doesn't show up but google does. My !g bangs have become rare now. Becoming used to a new search engine was worth the trade in privacy in my opinion.

You can use Google Search and tell Google not to log your search history or use the data for advertising purposes. See my comment [1] for how to turn on these privacy controls.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25383289

> not to log your search history or use the data for advertising purposes

People already know/feel that when Google states that it will not do something with people’s information but it does not say what it does... well, that doesn’t feel very comfortable. In fact, it’s so uncomfortable, that people avoid asking what does Google do with that not logged or not for advertising data. On mobile, being the only alternative a device that costs about 5 months of my work, I may not what to know the answer for that questions too and just hope for the best

I have the exact opposite experience. I find DDG's searching to be much better than Google's - which has turned to garbage. Having said that, I've noticed the quality of DDG's search results have dropped quite a bit in the past couple of months. Don't know what could be causing that.

Try Runnaroo. In many cases it's results are better than of anything else, including Google.

It's good if you're in the US. Doesn't give localised results for the UK.

I'm in the EU and it works great. I rely on it for my daily tasks and have no problems finding local services there. In fact I have already paid thousands Euros in contracts to local businesses I've discovered via Runnaroo.

Occasionally I still have to scroll down to click "Search on Google". I wish that link would be in the page top rather than bottom, especially for the picture search (where it is almost impossible to click as more results get shown as soon as you scroll down). It would also be cool if they would add a link to search with the local country-specific search engine (i.e. zoznam.sk, seznam.cz, yandex.ru etc.) for those located in respective countries.

I got better results once i set the location to the country I live in

This thing used to work until maybe half a year ago.

Before, I was getting proper localized results. Even searching in Japan with English keywords gave me Japanese results.

Nowadays when I search even for simple things it does not work. If I look for "dominos pizza" in Japan, I get:

dominos.com

allmenuprice.com

dominosaruba.com

dominospanama.com

dominos.ca

dominos.com.au

dominos.co.in

dominos.co.nz

...

And it goes on and on with multiples pages, but I have to go to Google to actually get dominos.jp

I consider that a feature. I really do not want my search results to depend on where in the world I am searching from. If I am looking for something regional, I can always add country name or "site:XX" to the keywords. But ultimately it is me who decides that I want a regional result.

This works rather well with DDG (I've been a happy DDG user for many years now).

On the other hand, I understand that I'm probably a minority in this, most people just want their search engine to essentially read their minds and they do not want to think about it too much.

Sorry, I actually meant "with Japan selected", I also appreciated to be able to choose rather than it being automated, but now it does not seem to work anymore.

Location and local results are separate settings so that you can have global results without changing location. In case of pizza you will probably want to narrow down your search to city instead of country. Pretty sure it's impossible to break japanese search, when I search for ドミノピザ dominos.jp is the first result.

One problem with most of the comments here that are claiming one is better than the other is that the "quality" of search results is still a very subjective term. I wish just like DxOMark Score for mobile cameras, there is a Search result quality index that makes us take more informative decisions (not sure how feasible is that though).

P.S. - I realize even DxOMark scores and ranks may be disputed, but that's still one (close to objective) index and it's used just as an example here.

>But DDG is bad. not necessarily. Depending what you searching. I do find looking for tech documentation, google performs better. Then use something like startpage.com (google proxy) for that. Something I find that google is censoring them, and I can find it on DDG more.

In the end it is all about having good search engine options.

What I don't like about DDG is that they use bing. Hope they start using their own search now that they are getting big.

I dont' trust MS as much as I don't trust google.

This is so weird to me to read. I've DDG for years, and I'm not sure whether their results have gotten much better, or I've trained myself to "search the DDG way," or both, but I find what I want in almost all cases. When I (rarely) don't, I try a !g search, and have never gotten better results. Not in years.

I believe you, I'm just saying that's not my experience at all.

Meanwhile, I struggle to give up GDocs and remind myself to use Zoho instead.

I found DDG to give me better results for everyday things except for work related.

Google is good at finding very specific error messages and other strings.

I have a theory: Technically Google is better but the search results suffer from every marketer and publisher trying to game the system.

I got into the Neeva alpha recently and within the first few days I've noticed it is on-par with Google for what I search and need information for. Check it out here https://neeva.co

Yes, imho DDG really needs a button at the bottom of their first search results page that redirects you to the equivalent Google search.

This feature would make me switch to DDG.

(I tried DDG, but got tired from typing "!g")

`!g <search>`

that opens google search

They can't expose such a feature, at least until they're sure that their results are better than Google's in most cases (otherwise it'll be like shooting themselves on the foot).

Besides, a userscript that does what you want could be written very easily I guess.

> They can't expose such a feature, at least until they're sure that their results are better than Google's in most cases (otherwise it'll be like shooting themselves on the foot).

Perhaps, but here I am: a potential DDG user who is instead using Google because of this missing feature.

They could of course put a nice privacy warning next to the Google button. Or they could label it "!g" to avoid using Google's name.

> Besides, a userscript that does what you want could be written very easily I guess.

I thought of making a "!g" bookmarklet, but I wouldn't know how to deploy it on mobile (Firefox).

Do you (or anyone else who finds Google significantly better than DDG) search Google as a logged-in user, and is perhaps this the reason you find their results to be better?

I never log in, since I mainly use the only sign-in-mandatory service, Gmail, on my phone. DDG and Bing suck balls compared to Google, sadly. Google has been worse too over the years .

The past few years, I'm sure I've wasted a lot of time searching on the net, looking for relevant articles while Google spouts out BS.

Thanks. This Google vs. DDG discussion keeps coming up and I'm baffled by the strong opinions because to me, the two seem about the same. But I'm never logged in to Google and I set my browsers to aggressively expire cookies so I'd imagine I'm not getting any personalized search results.

Isn't DDG just a frontend for bing.com?

DuckDuckGo's results are a compilation of "over 400" sources,[8] including Yahoo! Search BOSS, Wolfram Alpha, Bing, Yandex, its own web crawler (the DuckDuckBot) and others.[3][8][9][10] It also uses data from crowdsourced sites, including Wikipedia, to populate knowledge panel boxes to the right of the results.[10][11]

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

Why is a direct quote being downvoted?

The Wikipedia article makes it sound like their search results are from "over 400" sources and their own bot. That's just for the widgets and Instant Answers.

Their own Sources page makes this distinction more clear:

"To do that, DuckDuckGo gets its results from over four hundred sources. These include hundreds of vertical sources delivering niche Instant Answers, DuckDuckBot (our crawler) and crowd-sourced sites (like Wikipedia, stored in our answer indexes). We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we also source from multiple partners, though most commonly from Bing (and none from Google)."

https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/so...

It's interesting that they write "none from Google". Because you never know, Bing might be copying some search results from Google in turn [0] ;).

[0] : https://www.wired.com/2011/02/bing-copies-google/

Mostly.

you can '!g search' in ddg to search google instead

I found myself increasingly doing this to the point where I just gave up and submitted myself to Google once more. It’s still king.

I wonder if they log those searches. To be clear: in a privacy-friendly way. It would be a treasure trove to them as they basically get statistics on which searches do bad on their engine. Focus on the most '!g'd search term, and then just work down the list.

"""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."""

- https://duckduckgo.com/privacy#s4

That adds more time since the query is sent to DDG and then bounces the browser to Google. For searches where one prefers Google, using it directly (which is easier in Firefox for me) is a better option.

The latency is fairly negligible, to me at least. Plus if you're already searching in DDG it's faster to input !g than to go to Google. Also I think it's nice to give them that info where they could be done better.

Do you really notice the extra milliseconds?

What’s even the point of using !g to go to google it just redirects me last I checked so it’s still giving you your personalized searches (thus not a solution for privacy.) Am I missing something here?

I think it lets DDG know you weren't satisfied with the results for a particular query.

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