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Agreed, with one caveat: DDG image search, in my opinion, is far superior to Google Images because it still allows you to right click -> save image and right click -> open image in a new tab (and it actually opens the image, not the page that contains the image).

Google Images has been deteriorating every year for over a decade now.

About Google Image, it stopped doing direct links as a result of a lawsuit by Getty Images. How does DDG get away with it?

Another advantage of DDG/Bing is the ability to really turn off safe search. Unlike Google, it will not try to guess if you want nudity or not based on your search query, resulting in weird situations where you have to look for porn in order to get "anatomically correct" pictures.

In Google you can manually turn off safe search too https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/510/filter-expli...

That forces it off no matter what your query is.

I, err, only know this because of anatomy class homework.

Google filters out what it thinks are pornographic results for non-pornographic queries even if SafeSearch is explicitly turned off.

How do you know?

By searching for adult webpages I know exist, and not finding them until I add an adult word to the search query so they're not filtered out.

They should have just stopped displaying Getty Images in results. They're scam artists anyway, claiming to own public domain historic photos and selling them for a thousand bucks a piece.

DDG has a better image search b/c Bing has a better image search and the grand majority of DDG results are just scraped Bing results.

It's probably not scraped, FWIW--Bing has a paid API:

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/bing/apis/bing-web-search-ap...

(Can't find a source indicating that they're using this, but I'd be surprised if they weren't.)

they're probably using it. with the volume of traffic they're using, and the fact Qwant and every other 'private' search basically uses Bing results, paying for API access makes the most sense.

If that's the only thing holding you back from Google Images, this is a useful extension:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/view-image/jpcmhce...

(not arguing for GI over DDG or any other image search, just pointing out that those UI issues -- which were coerced by publisher lawsuits, not Google's own preference -- can be trivially fixed with extensions)

I'd also like to avoid using Google Search when possible to support alternatives.

Sadly, your link is a Chrome extension, and as a Firefox user, it doesn't really resolve my problem at all.

I don't use Google but as far as I can tell the behavior is very similar on both sites. (right click -> open image in new tab) on Google links directly to the image like DDG, though some are links to a data URL or cached versions of removed images on encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com

Exactly. The view file button is also very useful.

My counter experience - after giving DDG a chance for more than two years, two days ago I replaced my default search browser to Google, and never looked back.

In my experience I had to add g! to 90% of my search to get useful results, except for the most trivial searches. It was so much so that I would often add one in the beginning and one at the end, resulting in my google query ending up as "search term g!".

"Never looked back" is a bit hyperbolic for an action you took two days ago, isn't it?

It's a comic nod referring to the common description of the experience shared by the DDG converts

This fully coincides with my experience. Every once in a while, I hear about how much DDG has improved and how its results are now better than Google. I switch to DDG for a few days, get fed up with the (low) quality of the results, eventually start adding !g to all my queries because I _anticipate_ the results to be terrible, and at some point, I switch back to Google. Every single time I try DDG, this happens. Without exception.

I know not everyone shares my viewpoint but I wish people on reddit and HN would stop hyping up DDG. It will likely never be real competitor to Google. I don't mean to blame them in any way. Even Microsoft, with all their might, still fails to match Google's capabilities.

I was sort of in your boat, but is google really working out for you? It sure isn’t working out for me. I still use it out of familiarity and because DDG isn’t working either, but almost all the time that I want to find something that isn’t on Wikipedia or related to me buying something, I end up needing to do multiple search typically ending up doing something like site:these-are-all-the-bees-in-the-world.com because I was trying to identify the huge bee my cat almost ate, not trying to buy honey, or bee coloured dresses, or plush bees or bee branded diapers or whatever else.

Some of it isn’t Google’s fault or course, all the hobby stuff that happens in the blood bowl community group on Facebook never ends up in a search engine, but some of it is certainly Google’s fault. I’m just not sure how much privacy helps though, sure DDG might not try to sell me diapers because their advertisers might not know I have a two year old, but it still tries to sell me honey.

Google isn't really working for me either. I mean, it isn't the effective tool it used to be in the distant past.

Having saying that, yes, Google does work for me more than any of the alternatives and most of the times I can find even the most arcane and niche stuff I'm looking for, after investing few hours. Investing this level of efforts in DDG have never been fruitful and I have given up long ago trying anything but the most trivial stuff.

You just said you where using g! constantly. As someone that never had that issue I can only assume you simply never learned how to use DDG.

For example, it’s not using your location behind the scenes so “restaurants near me” doesn’t work. But swap to say “restaurants near ZIPCODE” and it’s fine.

I bring this up because oddly enough I had the opposite problem yesterday. When using a friends phone I just couldn’t find what I was looking for until I swapped from Google to DDG. From 15 useless queries to first try third result.

No, I have no issue or interest with finding restaurants near me. I'm talking about researching stuff, finding solutions to technical issues, old manuals, stuff that is a little bit more challenging than the basics. I used g! constantly because most of the times the results for non trivial stuff are worthless

Yet, I and many others can find solutions to technical issues easily on DDG. Hell that’s what I was trying to find on Google and failed.

If it’s a frequent issue for you perhaps you could provide some examples? I only ask because I hear people agreeing with you and yet I have never seen an actual example.

One recent example - for some reason I had to find a bunch of RPM packages for i386 arch from RHEL/CentOS 5 era. I'm not talking about the easy stuff that I could find on old mirrors or rpmfind, though even those would rarely show up on ddg, but the more obscure ones, which I could never find without google.

i switched to a self-hosted searx instance and it was way better than ddg for me, although i do still have to switch to google in very rare cases

The problem with self-hosting your own instance that you are only using is that Google can still make a profile for you based on your search history.

This does look interesting. I might give it a shot sometime soon

I still have DDG as default but almost always add !g on my queries, it's such an instinct I am regularly adding it when I have my secondary browser open with google search.

Try !s instead for startpage. For my searches, I tend to find more with a DDG and Startpage search versus DDG and Google.

I use DDG as my main search engine since a year or two, and I add !g for 90% of my technical searches, but for everything else it's more like 10% or less.

I switched to DDG in 2013 or before, and been on it since. This is very true for technical searches, I actually set my work machine's default engine to Startpage.com for that reason. I don't always remember to check other engines when I'm focused on something, so SP (anonymous Google results) bumped off DDG for me there.

On my machine, it's the !bangs that keep me hooked. I realize the results aren't quite as good as Google's, but it's usually just the top few results that seem to be key ones missing from DDG. I'm really surprised at the lack of popularity of SP, it's been my Google reference for a long time now.

> Image search is nothing to write home about

DDG has my favorite image search.

Generally, I haven't used Google in years. If DDG isn't finding something, I use some other privacy-oriented search engine.

After the recent censoring of "tank man", I don't trust DDG's (Bing's) image search anymore. I'm not sure about their search engine either.

Has DDG published a statement about the whole deal? I've only seen the Microsoft's response ("oops something went wrong we only intended to censor a little bit") but I don't think DDG even said anything.

It worked for me, either the API worked or DDG was caching results or something. That said some DDG users did mention an issue so who knows.

I've found image search better, because every result isn't pintrest.

You can do "-pinterest.com" to avoid that.

-site:pinterest.* is better. It filters the site specifically and includes all TLDs.

Even then, google likes to link to a twitter account (that is, main account) of some random person who reposted the image three months ago instead of the actual tweet, or author's twitter, or anything usable

Yes, but the fact we have to do that…

That's just the nature of the game. Pinterest figured out what the google algorithm wants. At least we can easily filter out results with the advanced search operators that google has.

Instead of going to Google, if you are looking for local businesses in a particular category and their opening hours or contact information, then one recommendation that would preserve privacy is using OSMAnd on your phone for looking all that info up without requiring any network connection. Of course, that assumes that your community is well mapped on OSM.

I have DDG as my default, except sometimes I switch it back to G for a few days.

I do something both odd and inefficient for local business search: I open the Apple Map app, and restaurants and other businesses show up, especially when I zoom in. I live in a small town, and seeing a map (with satellite imagery enabled, of course) and zooming in on different areas reminds me of where I might want to eat, etc. Fun.

After I realized you could theme DuckDuckGo, I switched.