DuckDuckGo search engine – The privacy browser is growing rapidly | Hacker News Reader

DuckDuckGo search engine – The privacy browser is growing rapidly

getbasicidea.com

43 pointsedgefield042 comments

It’s growing for sure but the link to the stats page is cumulative searches so it’s growing slower than the hockey stick graph would have you believe.

https://duckduckgo.com/traffic

Still impressive though

Is it? It doesn't seem to be cumulative. Although it is smoothed to a 365 days average. If you click on that number and set it to 1 you get a much noisier picture.

Unpopular to say but extremely popular to do:

I'm happy to sacrifice some of my data, in order to get top notch search results.

Funny thing there is that the quality of Google Search results have absolutely dropped off a cliff for me in the last two years. I'm finding frequently that duckduckgo provides more relevant results with a better UI and faster loading times.

That could be so, I'm willing to give DDG another try. But I use google for stock information, flight updates, to calculate "what date is it 18 days after July 13", and many other weird questions that Google answers instantaneously.

Google's gotten so good with all that, that they've got me by the balls.

https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=what+date+is+it+18+days+aft...

https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=%24GOOG+stock&ia=stock

DDG does a great job with instant answers. You can learn more about the sources at their docs [1]. PS. There are more features than just IA. You can check here [2].

[1]: https://duck.co/ia [2]: https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/features/i...

For me. I just pipe it to DDg.

If, for any reason, I want google. I just append !g to the search.

For example I prefer google when searching restaurants or brick and mortar places with a phone number. dDDG piggy backs on Yelp which isn’t great sometimes and out of date. So I just revert to piping it to google.

Interestingly IT/devops/languange related searches have marketdly improved with DDg and I can get consistent results (ie using the same search string later). Google will often give me random garbage from places that are regularly unhelpful like Microsoft’s answers pages etc.

I tried DDG and Bing and only go back to Google.

If you search anything that has a political interest, it is better to use DDG but everything else Google does it better.

Same here. The “SEO” space is way too aggressive, and while Google does a pretty good battling it in general, the searches that are not top-level mainstream consistently have a lot of noise.

Understood. DDG can be wonky at times. But just in case, you might want to give this interview/discussion a listen.

Moi? I start with DDG. If I feel I need a second opinion, I'll try Google.

https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/segments/living-und...

The thing that finally drove me off google wasn't data privacy, but how terrible it got in the past few weeks alone. It's started serving me crazy numbers of captchas whenever I'm on my VPN (personal server that I run), one after almost every query. I normally go through them with Buster, but after doing that maybe twice in a few minutes, it forces me to do the visual one.

Add to that how much google search results are these days already, and it's just not worth it anymore.

Yeah Google is unusable over a VPN. The amount of captchas is crazy. Even on corporate connections with cookies blocked it can get antsy because it can't track you well enough.

I like to start with DDG and then add a !g to the search if I’m not getting what I need.

I feel that Google Search results in most cases display the results of the companies that have invested in gaming the search engine. It is not always the best results that I am looking for.

For past year or so I have been using reddit as a search engine when looking for suggestions on products, services etc.

Google - mostly for google maps local results.

And DuckDuckGo for anything else.

Good news: you don't need to anymore.

I used DDG for a couple of years and I was recurrently reverting to Google. Since I changed to Qwant, I only use Google when looking for images. (I'm in Portugal, in other locations might be different).

Qwant is awful for spanish, and I contacted them about some issues and they just ignore you, despite being a rather small company.

I'm using DDG now.

Maybe I'm missing something but there's a severe lack of a good image search engine. Relevant results, privacy, decent UI - pick one. It's a huge technical (and financial) challenge, but still - Google is very far ahead there despite its tireless efforts to make the UI an excellent example for the problems of modern web design.

The last time I used Google those "top notch" results meant at least 5 links to pinterest and various other sites that are basically unusable to unregistered users.

With DuckDuckGo I don't get results tailored to my profile, but with a bit of time I got a pretty decent intuition what keywords have good chances for quality results. In the beginning I jumped back to Google for some tricky searches, nowadays I don't even bother because I know the results will most likely be even worse.

You can't really 'sacrifice' data. A more technically correct phrasing would be "I'm happy to reveal some data about me in return to get top notch search results".

But even that obscures the most important considerations: what does "some data" mean, and to whom are you revealing it? So if we make it a bit more verbose (but still keeping to the facts), it's more like: "I'm happy to reveal my browsing and purchasing history to unknown third parties, in unknown juristictions around the world, in order to get top notch search results." If you're happy to do make that trade, great, but I'd argue it's not such an obviously good deal as you make it sound.

It is not a privacy browser, they track you

It's proprietary

They refused independent source audit

Their android app was leaking your browsing history to their servers: https://github.com/duckduckgo/Android/issues/527

They are operated from the USA, so government (CIA/FBI) has all the data they want, whenever they want

Are there any better alternatives than DDG, or is it just the lesser evil of the two?

Stop thinking random american services will solve your problem

That is not how internet works

Work on hidding/spoofing your identity, and use what everyone uses, you better hidden if you are one of the billions of users than one of the thousands

Until ddg indexes themselves I don’t see much of a point in switching. Will they be reliant on bing forever?

Even if duckduckgo stored all searches and shared it with advertisers, it would still be better than giving all that data to Google.

I've started using Bing. It's actually pretty good, but I do go back to Google for some stuff, usually looking up locations/stores etc.

Also pays in Tesco Supermarket vouchers (£5) every month or so for doing their little quizzes and then combined desktop/mobile searches which is nice.

I've been using Ecosia as my default search engine on desktop. It's fine for most things - but I sure miss the google cards... type NBA to get the games coming up and the recent scores... same thing for other sports... then I can type the name of a song and it shows me the lyrics and the music video... it's really convenient and that's the reason why I keep going back to google. If DuckDuckGo would implement that same style of cards I would switch to it.

As an alternative I've been using Ecosia, it seems to donate 80% or more of its profits to planting trees where they are needed most (from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecosia)

Also considered Privacy friendly: https://blog.ecosia.org/tag/privacy/

Does anyone have any tips for using ddg? I feel like maybe I’m just not conditioned to how it thinks cause I seem to have terrible luck with my search relevance. People here seem to love it and I would love to switch over from google but I just can’t get the knack.

Just set it as the default and just add !g to the end of your search query if you don't find what you're looking for to try the same query on google. Eventually you'll figure out which queries work better on which search engine.

In my experience duckduckgo tends to behave more like how google used to work, so if you pick a few well chosen keyword you tend to find stuff pretty quickly but it doesn't respond too well to ambiguous terms or full sentences, google is better at those.

Take a peek at https://duckduckgo.com/bang

The trick is to append !g to almost every search.

Sorry, but I have to agree with you. I don't understand how people treat ddg as a viable alternative to google, and I'm surprised by this community's enthusiasm for a search engine whose first result for 'hacker news' is thehackernews.com.

The thing I think people usually forget is that because it doesn't track you it doesn't have a lot of the context that google infers. For example when you are searching for restaraunts you will probably need to add your city or town as a search term to get relevant results.

Can someone just add sport scores to DDG. I used it as my phone's default search for a while, but ultimately had to keep going back to google to get live results and schedules.

Getting API access to stuff like that costs a surprising amount of money for what it is. I guess they’ve worked out that the cost isn’t worth it.

I've tried and keep trying every search engine worth looking at. I really want to get away from Google as much as possible. However I have yet to find anything that gives me anything approaching quality of results. This is of course my private opinion based on my needs and your mileage may vary depending on what you're looking for.

https://ddg.gg is the official shortcut in the faq

When I'm recommending it to friends I direct them to https://duck.com. Easy to remember.

Ha, never knew this one. This is so much easier!

Interestingly enough duck.com was owned by Google and they transferred the ownership to DuckDuckGo.

I'd also add https://start.duckduckgo.com which is intended as start page and does not contain the suggestion to add it as default search engine.

I switched because I got sick of Google telling me to get Chrome when I was using the new Microsoft Edge (which is a fork of Chromium like Chrome is).

Their pop ups when using Edge are an unjustified FUD campaign.

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