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Comment by ed312 | Hacker News Reader

Usually in threads about DDG a common refrain is "but the results are worse!" - generally to mean less specific. I always thought that was the feature -- they don't compile a history on you, track your location, etc. As a result, they take a best guess from a global context.

FWIW, I've been a DDG user full time (mobile and desktop) for ~5 years. I have learned to increase the specificity of my search (e.g. start with a programming language before typing an error string). Feels like a very small price to pay to avoid Google.

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In my experience, being a DDG user for several years, I use search to find answers to some problem I'm facing. If I can find it, I'm happy, without caring about if Google would have given me better results. I don't spend my time comparing between the two.

Based on the above, I'm been mostly satisfied, I'll say 99% of the time. In the 1% of cases where DDG has not provided me an answer to my problem, as a hail mary I try !g (Google) and sometime I get an answer and many times not.

So, IMO the difference in search for most practical uses is minor. Now, add the uncluttered user interface on top of it, DDG wins by a huge margin.

Edit: Anecdata, an area where I've found that Google is slightly better, as in having a few more results, is in returning results from forums and sometimes Reddit. But even then, DDG results are mostly sufficient and there are only a very few instances where I've had to do !g.

I think the idea that DDG searches are "worse" is vastly overblown. But again, I don't directly compare the two. But using DDG for many years I have searched for my query, scan the title of the top 4-5 results (which are visible w/o scrolling) and click the best one I see in the results. I have managed to find what I needed now on nearly every occasion. Going to page 2 is an incredibly rare occurrence.

The one difference I notice between Google and DDG is that DDG shows more search results "above the fold", meaning without scrolling. There are some searches on Google where not even a single legitimate/organic search result is visible without scrolling. The top of the results page is cluttered with all sorts of self-promotion, info boxes, ads, maps, and other garbage. A normal search result usually yields 0-1 (or 2 max) organic results above the fold.

So in my opinion that is the trade-off. Is that experience of clutter a better search result? I guess that is a matter of preference, but for me I prefer the simpler results from DDG. I am able to find what I want and the experience is preferable, and my privacy isn't compromised. So to me that is the winner.

The one area that I will admit Google has DDG beat is local search. It isn't even a close contest. I append !g to any search query when I am looking for a local result such as costco hours, or the name of a local restaurant to find their page or address. That is the one area where DDG just plain sucks and Google nails it every time.

> The one area that I will admit Google has DDG beat is local search. It isn't even a close contest. I append !g to any search query when I am looking for a local result such as costco hours, or the name of a local restaurant to find their page or address. That is the one area where DDG just plain sucks and Google nails it every time.

I agree 100%. Not just Costco hours, but more importantly, as part of Google Maps what are the busy hours of Costco and how busy it is currently. That histogram is fantastic. With Covid that came in very handy at avoiding rush hours..

yeah, Google maps is still the way to go if you are traveling and want to find a good espresso (protip: search for "roaster" rather than "espresso" if you are a snob like me). Also for code related searches. For everything else, DDG is fine.

It’s unfortunate that feature explicitly depends on the massive surveillance dragnet that Google has with location data.

If I turn country-aware search on and add my city to the search I get much more localized results than Google was ever able to give me. And as a bonus, I can add a different city when I want.

Do you really only !g 1% of the time? I've been trying to use DDG more, but still end up using !g maybe 10-20% of the time. I don't know if the results are actually worse on DDG. Maybe I'm just so accustomed to Google that my eyes are quicker to fix on useful links. The blue page titles definitely help.

> Do you really only !g 1% of the time?

Yes, I can confirm that for me personally. Most of the time I don't even think about doing that and I'm mostly satisfied. It's only when I hit a wall then I remember to do !g. So, overall for me it's been working well.

As I noted in my edit, one area where Google seems to have an edge is results from relevant forums and the likes. So, sometimes I have to remember to do !g when the results on topics I'm looking for are mostly discussed in some forums.

Also, I've become more accustomed to DDG that I find Google different. But, I've been using DDG for longer it seems.

Same here. I do hundreds of queries weekly, and I very very rarely reach for !g, so I would say on my case it is way less than 1%. And even there once reaching !g I may have a 50% chance of not having any improvement on results. Been happy ddl user for the last 7 years and it keeps improving.

I've been using it as my primary search for a couple years now, and in the last year or so I'd say I use !g about once a week, usually for local results.

Personally, I almost never use !g, but I use !maps (google maps) about 1-2% of the time to plan out trips, find places to eat, etc.

You'll probably start to style your search queries in a DDG-friendly way over time. I couldn't describe what that style looks like, but it becomes something you don't even notice (in my experience)

Same here, 1% about fits. Most of the time I only use !g for when DDG once again decided to ignore what I search for, and even then, about 80% of the time the only difference is that Google actually tells me they ignored what I searched for.

DDG user but want to say that Google image search is still miles better.

I can search for an image based on my memory of elements within the picture e.g. compare the results I get when searching

“nwa all looking down”

https://www.google.com/search?q=nwa+all+looking+down&hl=en&p...

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=nwa+all+looking+down&t=iphone&iax=...

“Film Poster men in suits Tarantino”

https://www.google.com/search?q=film+poster+men+in+suits+tar...

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=film+poster+men+in+suits+tarantino...

My favorite part of the DDG image search is being able to locate and save the original image file without needing to navigate to the website.

Google included this feature until a few years ago where they removed it.

> Google included this feature until a few years ago where they removed it.

I vaguely recall something about a legal settlement. A quick search didn't turn anything up, though.

It was with Getty. http://resourcemagonline.com/2018/02/getty-and-google-reach-...

They removed it because photographers and publishers complained about how easy it was for the average person to just take images from the results and use them elsewhere without attribution. The funny thing is, all you need to do now is to right-click on the image and open in a new tab. But based on your change in behavior I guess that little bit of obfuscation was a lot more effective that I thought.

Fortunately that's not a problem of needing user specific information. I'm sure by hiring the right engineers they can start improving on some of the search algorithms in this arena.

DDG is a Bing frontend.

They don't have budget or staff for building search indexing/ranking like this.

Yandex is pretty good. But where it really got Google beat is in reverse image search.

To me using duckduckgo feels a lot like what using google used to be like. Basically it's all about picking the right keywords. This has the advantage of giving more predictable results, but has the disadvantage that it's hard to find something with vague queries (e.g. good luck finding a quote from a movie you've half forgotten).

I documented (a subset of) my experience in [1]. I don't think any of the Google victories there can be considered to be because of personalization.

[1]: https://www.arnavion.dev/blog/2020-12-05-ddg-vs-google/

Very informative write-up.

Thank you for documenting it so thoroughly. My experience totally agrees with this. DDG often returns a lot of irrelevant results and they are not irrelevant because they're not personalised to me, but because they do not include terms in my query - even when those terms are in quotes! I simply cannot tell DDG: "unless that exact string is in the page I don't want to see this result"! (To be fair, I cannot tell Google that, either, but it still returns better results.)

Today's example: I searched for

> linux nic bonding "bond-mode"

The second result is https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterp... which does not include the string "bond-mode" (nor "bond mode").

I use Duckduckgo as my main engine and it works well for most of what I search, but for some specific things I have to use other search engines (Google for local results and "guess what I'm thinking" results, Yandex for reverse image search and search in general). Fortunately, bangs make it easy to do it when necessary.

I gotta say, of all the searches to not let Google track one on, local seems like second after baby-related.

I find “things to do in X city” is “companies in X that paid us the most”

I like DDG, i use it as my go to. That being said, it's very very USA centric. It will default all my searches that are place related (weather, restaurants, addresses) to the USA.

Same. I only use DDG for web search and never feel the need to use Google search. I suspect the people who complain about the result quality either have very specific needs or could actually improve their query quality. I use Google's image search occasionally, because I feel it has more results.

The part that is really hard to degoogle for me is Youtube. There just is no alternative (if you factor in the available content).

I am fine using DDG except for one specific thing. I am a big sports fan and check scores for soccer and hockey all the time.

Being able to search "NHL" or "MLS" on Google brings up the days games and scores at the very top of the search. I don't get that with DDG and every time I try to switch, I always come crawling back to Google for that feature alone.

I found a self hosted whoogle[0] to be a good middle ground.

[0]: https://github.com/benbusby/whoogle-search

Been using DDG for the past 3 years without any complaints except the lacking restaurant information. Everything else is on par with or better than Google.

Startpage gives me wildly better results.

There are some searches that just aren’t going to happen in DDG.

Can you elaborate?

I don't think that argument holds very much water. You can test both in sanitized environments, and Google's search is still better. Their algorithm is so much more than "surface content based on personal data" but people are so quick to deduce it down to just that.

I want DDG to succeed, but their search product sucks, and its not because they don't collect data.

I use DDG for years, and it's at most once a month when I can't find something and need to fall back to Google. Maybe I got used to the suckiness? Or maybe it's relative?

Any time DDG fails me, I just append "!s" to proxy the search through StartPage instead. I've found it scratches the itch pretty well for 99% of my use cases.

Which is just google, right?

In the same sense that "DuckDuckGo is just Bing".

I thought Startpage is literally a privacy layer over Google Search and DDG has their own webcrawler and algorithms built on top of Bing.

I found myself typing !s so much I switched my default to start page. DDG results are really bad imo

DDG = Bing

Startpage = Google

Bing/DDG results suck (when localized to Sweden), so I use Startpage.

I know it's owned by an ad tech company now, but I haven't seen any proof that will affect me. Its reach can't be compared to Google's, which has its trackers on just about every web page (Google Analytics and Fonts).

Looks like Startpage is now what Scroogle was roughly up to a decade ago.

https://www.ghacks.net/2012/02/22/scroogle-founder-pulls-the...

I use Google for work DDG for play.

Google is just so much better at finding technical related content.

What does better mean? I've never had any trouble finding exactly what I am searching for when using DDG. As long as I find what I want, does it matter if Google is "better"?

The last time that I checked, DDG was buying search results from Bing (as does Ecosia).

Is Bing that terrible?

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

"It uses various APIs of other websites to show quick results to queries and for traditional links it uses the help of its partners (mainly Bing) and its own crawler."

Bing isn't too bad. I've actually half-migrated to using it since the results are often relevant and usually even better than Google.

From my experience, Google is better at searching for programming-related topics, but anything specific and it starts to fall apart. I can make an exact phrase query on Google and it will drop words out of the phrase for no reason. Bing doesn't do this.

Bing has been caught stealing results from Google too. https://www.wired.com/2011/02/bing-copies-google/

It seems like every search engine that isn't google, is still just google but with extra stuff mixed in. It'd be nice to see a competitor that didn't rely on anyone else's search results and only developed and gathered results from their own index.

Apologies for self-promotion. Mojeek Independent and no-tracking https://blog.mojeek.com/2021/03/to-track-or-not-to-track.htm... Gigablast is another and one of very few https://blog.mojeek.com/2021/05/no-tracking-search-how-does-...

Unfortunately, from what i've learnt from HN that this is not really possible. Most websites ban crawlers\bots with the exception of those run by google and maybe bing. It seems that this market is hermetically sealed.

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