Ask HN: How are you finding DuckDuckGo? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How are you finding DuckDuckGo?

8 pointslbj11 comments

I've tried replacing Google with DDG for 3 months now. Im finding that about 80% of searches aren't satisfactory and I have to repeat them on Google.

Note: This relates to English searches, for Danish searches 99.9% need to go through Google.

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I think even if DDG is not as good as Google in certain types of searches (like more general queries, hyperlocal searches etc.), setting it as default is wise. Since it will not forward your keypresses to Google by default. To search google you can always do !g.

I set it as a default over 6 months ago. I get a pretty high fraction of unsatisfactory results, whenever I'm trying a non-trivial search. End result, I've trained myself to reflexively prefix my Google macro ("g "). I'm quite unhappy about this.

My concern isn't the search results I *notice* coming out not quite right, but what I'm missing out on when I *don't* notice. When I don't know what the result should be and so don't realize that it's not present. I don't want to artificially handicap myself.

As a secondary concern, the response time is no longer that great (even with HTML & Lite versions). There's noticeable friction having it as the omnibar default.

Google’s UI is so terrible I can’t use it. Most of the results page isn’t search results, but ads, Twitter, news story, or other asides, and way too much whitespace.

That’s why I use DDG, it has almost nothing to do with privacy or quality of search.

Used it as my primary for almost 3 years now. I often enjoy the variations in search terms that DDG offers me. Usually I am searching for something which I can articulate clearly and is straightforward to find. I would guess <2% of my total searches end up going through google. Probably 20% of my nontrivial searches end up having !g added to them.

The exception to this is mapping, which is just so awful I probably resort to Caltopo>50% of the time and google maps maybe 10%.

I've been using DDG for 5 months with FireFox ESR. My searches are in English and mostly for software engineering terms. I haven't noticed any deficiency in the results. Mind you, I don't repeat searches with Google to compare. But I still use Google Scholar for academic paper searches.

I wonder whether DDG operates differently through different browsers, e.g. DDG with Chrome?

Have been using it for well over a year (2 years maybe?). It's not great, but Google's also bad. When I don't get the results with DDG and try Google, 50% of the time the entire first page of results is ads, so on to the second and third page...

I wish search would turn into a public-good utility the way Wikipedia turned out.

I’m using DDG as my default search engines on all devices and browsers for 5+ years. Lets say that about 15% end’s up being sent to Google via g!. I already know in advance when I will need g!.

I’m very disappointed with Goggle search results and AMP was a final straw.

EDIT: I was talking about english language. When I’m searching on mine language then I need Google more than 50-60%.

Been using it for years, love it and will never go back to Google, which I resort to on no more than 5% of my searches in English.

Whats your secret?

I have tried switching many times to DuckDuckGo over the years. The most recent time, I had heard that they had improved the quality of search results. After using it for a week or two, it was just not possible to find the things that I needed.

I've been using it for quite some time although the searches not as good as google but some of the results that are censored in google might be found in DDG

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