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Comment by latch | Hacker News Reader

I understand that the question is quite specific, but it seems to me that if you have these types of concerns then duckduckgo really ought to be your default search engine. I personally don't use it, but every day I'm more and more tempted to.

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I do searches for a lot of obscure stuff that only Google seems capable of finding right now (well, I haven't used Bing much, but I've been comparing the Google results to DDG, because people keep talking about it).

Here's an example. I remember reading a few months ago about how to do a hexdump on /dev/urandom to create a Matrix-style scroll, and to "look busy in front of your boss". So I did a Google search for "look busy with /dev/urandom" and sure enough the blog post I was looking for is the first result:

http://jeromenicholas.blogspot.com/2011/03/look-busy-when-yo...

Now, I don't know if it's just the first result for me (I'd like to hear what others get), but that post doesn't come up in the first 50 results on DDG, using the same search string. Whether Google's algorithms are better overall or they have been trained better by me after years of searching, the results for obscure searches are simply better 95% of the time.

Of course, there are still the 5% of searches that end in frustration. Example: there's an email product called Prayer. That's all I'm going to tell you. Go ahead, try to find it. The correct result is #1 for me right now, but that may be because I clicked through dozens of results before I found the right one. It wasn't on the front page the first time I searched for it.

We build a meta search open source layer called Seeks. We do naturally get to compare Bing, Google and Blekko on a daily basis. Bing (and thus bot ddg and Blekko that rely on it) lies behind for semi obscur queries. You can test by yourself on any Seeks instance such as seeks.fr.

I get the same result on google and in duckduckgo it doesn't appear. I think it's also worth pointing out that "/dev/urandom" doesn't show bolded (as in "we found the string in this particular search result") until the 25th or so result. I don't know if duckduckgo just shows the bolding less often or that it just sorts its results very awkwardly.

I switched to duckduckgo (ddg) earlier this year. For a while, I'd occasionally use google, but now I only do so out of curiosity to compare results. ddg has improved enormously since I've been using it. I highly recommend giving it a go.

I've always wondered if ddg's stated mission to respect privacy, etc. is in fact causing it to show worse results than Google...i.e., because Google tracks clicks, knows who from what region clicks on a link more often and ostensibly moves those results further up, don't they have better "signals" about what results to prioritize? It strikes me that ddg is handicapped in this regard as it ignores these signals that its competitors openly use.

Note: I frequent both ddg and google (more the latter as it's the default in my browser) but I've always wondered if ddg's results would be even better if the "ignored signals" were, well, not ignored.

User clicls are used to fit ranking functions. These functions typically depend on a number of signals that make their optimization otherwise intractable.

Dedicated machine learning algorithms take into account the click-bias due to the results initial position.

The main DDG limitation is that it doesn't really work well for non english resources.

Our 0-click is largely in English, but you should be able to type in non-English searches and get non-English results. If you change your region in the settings, it will also boost results from a particular language/region combo. You can also do this on a per-query basis by adding say r:uk to the end.

> Our 0-click is largely in English, but you should be able to type in non-English searches and get non-English results.

Yes, in fact the 0-click is the best part of DDG that's why it's a pity :) Thanks for the tips.

We are certainly aware of this issue :). On a related note we have a new translation platform for the interface. It is not the zero click yet but on the right track!

I use DDG as my main search engine and I'm a native Icelandic speaker. I search for Icelandic content every now and then and rarely have problems with DDG results.

The biggest difference stems, not from a limit on the language, but a simple limit of the number of search results (I have no idea whether it's the search algo, or the index that's smaller or some other reason).. Icelandic websites generally have fewer results so it's more common for me to see 'nothing here, try google' in DDG.

My only problem with DDG is page load speeds. Initial page load is slower, searches take a while, but my major problem is that even after the page loads, the results of the page aren't yet fully loaded.

We're working on all of these issues. Initial load has a lot to do with network location and we need more servers. The after-the-fact thing is by design so that some slower elements don't slow down the faster ones. We have a new design coming out that should lower the perception of things changing much though.

I like ddg and find its results far more useful.

Really? In my experience the results are far less relevant. I really tried to use DuckDuckGo, because of the privacy advantages - even set it as my default search engine - but the results just aren't as good. It's also slower - noticeably slower. I very much hope they can improve to the point where they're on par with Google in terms of quality and speed, but they're not there yet.

Thanks for giving it a go! We have improved a lot in the past year and contiune every day so I encourage you to try again in a few months if you are still inclined to do so. Result quality also of course varies by query and query type so each person can have pretty different overall experiences based upon ths types of things they regularly search.

I also encourage people to submit feedback with specific result issues.

Do you have an equivalent of Google Scholar? At least 75% of my searches recently have been through Scholar and I would love to find a useable replacement. On the other hand, most of the nasty problems on the front page aren't happening (yet) on Scholar.

No, not yet though you can get to scholar directly from ddg by doing !scholar search.

TBH speed is the most important reason for keeping me on google, even though I know privacy should really take precedence.

Our speed varies by location right now but this is changing as we get servers in more locations around the world.

also you can't use it as a verb. Google this, google that. You can easily duckduckgo my contacts... nah, doesn't sound right :)

"Search (for) it."

Most people are going to use Google, maybe Bing, maybe Bahoo!, and are barely aware of and would not use another search engine.

Those that do know about DDG will either use it or not.

Whenever I include a search link in an email (or HN thread) it's always a DDG link, except for those rare searches where I get nothing back from DDG. I think that's one of the best ways to promote DDG. Bonus, the DDG search links are unadulterated.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=duck+duck+go

Firefox, Ubuntu plus whatever 2 or 3 way deal Google has with all that:

http://www.google.com/#hl=en&cp=6&gs_id=11&xhr=t...

Chromium, Ubuntu, plus whatever deal ...

http://www.google.com/#hl=en&cp=6&gs_id=m&xhr=t&...

I didn't ask for that, and I would have to clean that up before I pasted that google search into an email.

Opera etc:

http://www.google.com/search?q=uzbl#pq=philadelphia&hl=e...

And by the way, if you want to search google a little more anonymously, do it via DDG. In your search bar or on DDG's page, type in !g your search term. You'll be redirected to Google's search, and the URL will be relatively clean:

From ddg, !g duck duck go gives you:

https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&q=duck%20duck%...

I still didn't ask for the hl=en bit, but it's much better than the cascade of line noise that Google would otherwise give you.

Edit: minor wording.

In theory you can't use the trademarked word "google" as a verb.

I have no idea if Google is still trying to stop people doing this or not.

half the world uses the word "xerox" for a copy machine, "pampers" for diapers, and "jeep" for an offroader. So, google as verb is now completely natural

...and lawyers love people who use those words as verbs, because they get paid every time they write a letter to say that the verb is, in fact, a trademarked noun and could a different word be used, or the trademark be acknowledged?

Google used to (still does?) send cease and desist letters; and they've asked people to only use google-as-a-verb when people are actually talking about Google. Thus "I'll google it" when a person is using Bing is, according to Google, not on.

You can duck or quack it!

nobody will understand it in the search context :) everyone knows how to google, and nobody knows how to duck

As my boss at Google always used to say: "Bing it!"

Yes, really. Its what Google used to be like - before every search term became a commercial opportunity to be exploited.

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