Some surprising things about DuckDuckGo | Hacker News Reader

Some surprising things about DuckDuckGo

gabrielweinberg.com

164 pointsArmageddonIt132 comments

A surprising fact I /do/ know about DDG: they don't update bang searches anymore, which was one of my favorite differentiators. This feature adds a lot of utility to DDG as a browser default search engine.

You can search "!w Gabriel Weinberg" and it will open the Wikipedia article because of the leading exclamation mark and w. If a site changes their search url, you can submit the precise new pattern they should use for a redirect. If a new service pops up, you can use the same form to request a new search prefix. These form submissions could give someone at DDG an easy interface to verify quickly and approve or reject them.

These form submissions get ignored and have been for years at this point.

A primary problem is we get overwhelingly spammed with submissions. They are not completely ignored. We have maintainers, but as a relatively small team given the surface area of what we're working on, they have been de-prioritized. That said, I think some better tooling could probably get be put in place at this point to help us.

Are you aware of Firefox's search keyword feature? You can bookmark the URL of a web site's search result page, replace the search text query parameter with %s, and enter a keyword in the bookmark details. From then on, entering that keyword followed by some new text in the address bar will perform the new search.

You can choose keywords that don't start with !, so typing them is easier than using Duck Duck Go's bang feature.

I use this a lot, but the problem with this, that still hasn't been fixed after all these years, is if you have 2 or more keyboard layouts, you can't make more than one bookmark pointing to the same URL with different search prefixes.

So if, for example, you wanted to make

> x <search_term>

and

> y <search_term>

both work the same, x and y being letters from 2 different alphabets but mapped to the same keys, you couldn't, without some JavaScript. If you just added those 2 keywords, even if you manually edited or created your bookmarks, one bookmark would override the other and the other would appear empty with no keyword.

The workaround I found was using a bookmark with this code in it (instead of the usual URL):

javascript:(function(){var keywords="%s";var mainURL="https://<URL>/";var searchURL="https://<URL>/<params>-"+keywords;if(keywords==""||keywords=="%"+"s"){window.location=mainURL}else{window.location=searchURL}})();

Where https://<URL>/<params> is something like https://example.org/search/q-.

It's slower and sometimes doesn't work if you type "y" and then the query too fast, especially if you're pasting the query. So sometimes it doesn't work and searches with the browser's default search engine for "y <query>".

I'm guessing the number of people this affects is approximately 1.

The number would be most of the people who use the keyboard shortcuts && who use 2 or more layouts && who don't want to change languages to search for something.

It's just muscle memory for me.

CTRL+T -> x <search_term> -> ENTER

Most often I enter <search_term> with CTRL+V, so the sequence is:

CTRL+T -> x CTRL+V -> ENTER

Nowhere in that sequence is the keyboard layout important (if you don't write anything, but just paste).

Just like CTRL+T works even if you're not writing in a layout where the "T" key is mapped to the letter "T", so should "x" work no matter what it's mapped to.

At least 2.

Being able to put language-specific shortcuts on keys that change with the keyboard layout is damn useful.

Why does software have such powerful modes for Python and JavaScript, but never for French or English?

I think everyone who regularly writes eg both Spanish and English, or Chinese and English etc will be affected. That's a LOT of people. Not all languages rely heavily on accents or special symbols but those do. (For example in Spanish you don't want to mix up 'año' and 'ano' :)

You can make the URLs slightly different, with the same result on most sites, by adding an ampersand:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=%s

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?&search=%s

Each of those can have a different keyword.

You can also use a self hosted searxng as front-end. It's got many options for things like Wikipedia and it is being properly maintained. It's also really nice and 'quiet'. No ads or AI shoved in your face.

You can also just right-click on a text field and select "Add Search Engine" and it creates it for you, no need to manually edit URLs

Thanks for pointing it out. I actually use a plugin which rewrites search queries for custom "bangs" which I switched to after waiting for others to be fixed. I didn't realize that the same exists built in.

> You can search "!w Gabriel Weinberg" and it will open the Wikipedia article because of the leading exclamation mark and w

Just for anyone else who isn’t aware, the bang commands can be anywhere in the search string, and need not necessarily be at the beginning.

All these queries will take you to Wikipedia for the term:

"!w Gabriel Weinberg"

"Gabriel !w Weinberg"

"Gabriel Weinberg !w"

Many a times when I find the default DuckDuckGo search results inadequate and want to go to Google search, I just put a “!g” as a separate term anywhere within the search string and hit enter. This is especially useful on mobile where the search string may be a lot longer than the visible text box and I can’t be bothered to move the cursor.

Same here! Especially in an iphone, where for some reason moving the cursor was made extremely difficult compared to Android

Just press and hold the space button is not that difficult?

I’ve gotten used to it over enough time using an iPhone, but it is still both more difficult to use and less discoverable than the Android equivalent.

How does it work in android-land?

Tapping in different parts of the text box, or dragging the finger in the text box, allow a lot more precise control than what one can easily do by dragging the space bar in the iPhone keyboard, much closer to what you can do on a full computer with regular keyboard and mouse.

The difference is especially noticeable for tasks like editing / deleting / selecting specific parts of long URLs, and on smaller phones where the iPhone space bar is smaller than on larger phones.

I ended up just putting together my own bang provider (and stole the snaps feature from Kagi).

https://search.vale.rocks

I use bangs a lot in duckduckgo but this is my first time seeing the snaps feature from kagi and I feel like it can be useful too so your website is definitely really cool to see!

Like till now If I wanted to search something on reddit from duckduckgo, I would search "<search query> reddit"

But it was also an hit or miss sometimes so you are telling me that snaps can just @r <search query> and guarantee its from that is amazing!

Your list of resources feel good too, https://time.fyi and other tools are good too!

I would love it if your resources also included open source resources similar perhaps as I prefer open source tools mostly but even these resources are good too so thanks!

I use a similar system but inside of Alfred mac app, and they open in default browser app which routes the open request to the most recent browsers I've used. Enables me to work between different browsers more easily.

Then why not steal the shortcode list from Kagi as well to have much more websites supported? Their bang list is open source

Given that my search router is completely client side, importing such a huge collection would be huge and slow things down considerably.

This functionality has always been available in Firefox: Just add a keyword to a bookmark.

But not in Firefox Android, without a third party add-on

Well, not directly. When adding a keyword, I put it in the name of the bookmark in parentheses. Thus eg. https://news.ycombinator.com/newest is with the name "(hny) HN new" and keyword hny. When typing hny in the address field the bookmark comes up and I'll just tap it. You can also search only from the bookmarks.

Kagi has this bang redirect feature too.

> These form submissions get ignored and have been for years at this point.

Hmm, when I added !mt more than a decade ago it went live almost immediately...

How many people know about https://lite.duckduckgo.com/lite/ ?

Is a version of DuckDuckGo without Javascript. Very fast and compatible with minimalistic web browser like lynx.

> DDG without Js

Also https://html.duckduckgo.com/html/

I used it on my really old dell laptop with tinycore 32 bit and dillo

Awesome stuff.

I was able to run modern firefox on that 1 gb puny laptop too but it took 800 megabits of ram but I was able to run https://pomodorokitty.com/ on it.

What's up with all the space waste, the search button is almost as big as the input box, so you can't fit a long query on a phone (and the query box doesn't expand to fit more than one line)

I went to DDG to get away from all the Google AI stuff being shoved down my throat.

While it seems DDG is on the same path of AI / chat centric search UX, at least they allow me to turn off all that stuff. But... search has gotten so bad in general, DDG is having the same results issue I had on Google. I don't see DDG as a player in the Ai space so I think my usage will only decrease as search result quality continues to decrease.

I am hopeful in the long run that search index / results will become better as the core UX for most people becomes chat, search result pages become low human traffic (meaning ads are worthless), and search becomes one of many research tools for to the agents

If you don't like all the fluff on the results page, DDG provides two alternative interfaces [0] [1] with much simpler layouts.

[0] https://html.duckduckgo.com/html

[1] https://lite.duckduckgo.com/lite

This is my first seeing https://html.duckduckgo.com/html and surprisingly I am enjoying it

I would prefer if there was a way to have dark mode or similar things in it tho. It was really really fast.

cool, but they block curl requests with an iframe and such

I would pay DDG if they gave me an API for search, ideally pay-per-request. I'm not paying them for Ai, I can get that much better elsewhere

IIRC the reason they don't (can't?) provide a search API directly is because they're pulling from other search sources, e.g. Bing, and can't provide an API without licence violations.

Agreed that a DDG API would be pretty great, though.

IF they wish for an API, I think brave search supports API because they are an independent search index.

There are lots of options outside of the companies that make browsers and search input boxes on websites

SERP, EXA, Tavily... they are becoming a dime-a-dozen with the Ai hype b/c (1) making the process of fetch/scraping easier (2) being the primary end user of search API (3) making the creating of such an API easier

I haven't dug in enough to any of them to get a sense of result quality or consistency

You might like Kagi. The ability to upvote/downvote/block domains completely transforms the product.

It looks like just another search engine trening towards Ai UX. Do they have an API?

I'm now looking for APIs to integrate with my custom / personal agent setup. I'm done outsourcing my UX to Big Ai/Tech. I don't think we should repeat the same mistakes of outsource a core human/digital UX to Big Ai/Tech. We (HNers) complain so much about all the bad stuff the prior iterations (social media, saas out the wazoo), are we going to repeat it again by defaulting to whatever they give us, misaligned incentives and all?

That’s cool. I’m going another route, where I’m trying to pay for independent apps that give a shit about quality. I want nice things, but I also want to back the people who give a shit about craft and don’t have the time to DIY my own universe anyway.

If you’ve got screenshots or details on your personal masterpieces I’m interested to see it.

I pay for things that I care about the quality for. Seeing another search company trending towards Ai centric means, to me, they are not focused on search quality any more. They have bills to pay and everyone is chasing that Ai revenue now, to the detriment of their primary product before the hype cycle started.

The neutral reviews of Kagi I have seen don't lead me to believe there is some superior quality awaiting me if I just give them the money

> If you’ve got screenshots or details on your personal masterpieces I’m interested to see it.

Saying something like this, in this way, is not constructive and not how to bring people towards your way of seeing things. You, specifically with this comment, make me even less likely to use Kagi, and pay less attention to things you may say in reply or otherwise in the future

Huh?

You may have misread the thread. I'm saying your note that "I'm done outsourcing my UX"—the very thing that makes both DDG and Kagi unsuitable for you—sounds like you're building something novel, even if it's exclusively to scratch your own itch.

If its ever in a place where you'd be open to sharing, that's the sort of thing I come to HN for.

I share my work on GitHub, if you want details, go read there. I'm not going to copy and paste for you

They have an API but they're pretty costly(search is actually pretty costly).

One thing not mentioned in TFA but I came across following the 'we're hiring' link to the Back-end Engineer role. They use PERL (v5). That certainly surprised me!

DDG has been around for a long-long time, and when it started Perl was an old fashioned choice but still very reasonable. Even if they moved to other languages they probably still have old bits of Perl code running somewhere.

For about first 5-10 years of its existence DuckDuckGo also promoted their use of Perl, and afaik they contributed to Perl development.

We're still supportive, donating to the Perl foundation the last two years: https://duckduckgo.com/donations

I applied with twenty years experience + with perl and was unceremoniously denied quickly. Looking for unicorn or ghost job, take your pick.

I did not know you can actually find good results with DDG. :>

All search engines got so much worse in the last years - it is so sad. We lost some of our knowledge that way.

This already started before AI, but AI further reduces the quality now.

> I did not know you can actually find good results with DDG. :>

As someone using Duckduckgo a lot, I feel the opposite sometimes regarding google :>

I still use google occasionally for its google search image option but yea thats about it

DDG is great for literal searches. You can use !g for more exploratory stuff where google tries to guess what you want instead

I've noticed literal searches really went to crap for my DDG searches just the last month or two. Lots of gaps and sometimes empty results when there are relevant matches out there.

The reason I don’t use DuckDuckGo is that when you sell keyword based ads on your platform, it really isn’t private. If you’ve ever worked with keyword based ads, they might be anonymous, but anything you are searching is showing up somewhere to some third party.

I really like Kagi, becuase I can pay for the search and my searches aren’t being leaked to third parties.

Ads are optoinal and private; you can turn ads off in the settings if you want. Per our privacy policy: "Viewing ads on DuckDuckGo Search is anonymous, like the rest of our search results (as described above)." More info at https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/company/ads-by-....

Not really. Ddg sells the right to show ads on a search with a given keyword. They don't send your query keywords to an advertiser or whatever.

I don't understand how this would compromise one's privacy.

I don't like the current AI trends much, but I've found duck.ai the best way to experiment with AI. I've had mixed results with DDG search and the site is sometimes slow to load.

Your comment here made me go and try it. It's quite polished and smooth for an ai ux. I'll have to use it more for quick queries.

I love that duck.ai provides a more private way to use different smaller and medium (?) scale LLMs.

I don’t like the duck.ai interface much (choosing a different LLM is not easy once you’re already in a conversation), but I use it a lot more than I use the DuckDuckGo search engine (the results from the latter aren’t great).

Just like with DuckDuckGo search, where I start a search and then use the !g bang command to go to Google for better results if needed, I try duck.ai and then move to ChatGPT (without any account) when even the best models in duck.ai aren’t good enough.

For most simpler queries though — where I’m just looking to learn a bit about something as opposed to finding a solution for a specific (more complex) question or problem — duck.ai with its GPT 5 models are more than adequate (even the 4o mini is fine).

I really love duck.ai's minimalist approach to questions when I search on duckduckgo and overall enjoy it more than say chatgpt etc. as an normal consumer and even more than occasional google ai's search (I have been fully using duckduckgo for 3 years or 4 years at this point)

Its just the right amount of AI with all the other things and I can have a lot of freedom/customizability/block AI and they provide subdomains for a lot of things (I found out about noai.duckduckgo.com from here and other things too) and overall feel like its one of the best search engines.

I wish if they could create their own index tho because I do not trust microsoft so much.

I wonder why people still use google when there is duckduckgo. I suppose monopoly might be the answer but I wish if there was more awareness about duckduckgo.

Firstly, Thank you to the entire DuckDuckGo team. DuckDuckGo is the browser I use most all the time. Any product that stops or reduces tracking and surveillance capitalism, I am happy to use and support.

Do you have plans to build an email service without the tracking? Would love to hear thoughts about this. There may be users willing to pay a small monthly fee for this.

We offer Email Protection: https://duckduckgo.com/email

It isn't full email, but removes trackers in your email before it gets sent to you, which is the most privacy-invasive part of email. More info at https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/email-protectio... and

Ever since I started getting captcha prompts on DDG I had to stop using it (same for google).

https://0x0.st/K4kE.png

Human traffic really shouldn't be seeing that -- if you want to email me I can try to sort it out to improve our systems.

I see it occasionally. I haven't investigated it properly, but I suspect it's either the outdated version of Safari Technology Preview I use on an old Mac with an old version of macOS, or it might be NordVPN or perhaps a specific one of their endpoints that triggers it.

I get so frustrated with the damn "are you a human" checks for Google search. My default search tool from Brave. I had gotten in the habit of searching quickly for something while reading a web page, etc. Worked find for years. Now some days I get results directly. Many days, though, I am getting 2-3-4 prompts. Getting pretty used to jumping over to Edge to do my searches now. On Starlink in a rural spot. Not sure why Google has flagged me. Do not care I guess. Should probably set my Brave default to Bing, but I do find Google's AI summaries helpful. Just not enough to do a bunch of "find the bicycle" "find the bus" "find the traffic light" captchas. One less Google search customer is not a concern of theirs methinks.

Often, the "are you a human" checks, are to force people to turn off privacy protections, so that they can clearly fingerprint their potential customers. When they sell your information or spy on you, they may want to make sure they have properly identified the target.

Only takes a few clicks most days for the annoying captcha to trigger for me. I never complete it on principle, but maybe that's why it keeps coming back.

Anyway the DDG html search site is next to useless now, and I'm fed up of the AI nags, so I'll be right behind you once I have searched for my coat.

DDG bangs is a nice feature. But feels neglected. No way to see a changelog and lots of old broken bangs. There is a form to submit new bangs suggestions but unclear if anyone reads the submissions or how the acceptance process works. No forum or other channel where users can discuss or upvote suggestions for new or changed bangs.

We do, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46259412 -- that said, I take the point and will circle up with the team.

Reading the mentioned How We Work[1] page made be curious about how things are handled across timezones. E.g. A Friday all-hands meeting is mentioned, but wouldn't that either be Thursday or Saturday for some? Not to mentioned possibly being in the wee hours of the morning?

For context, my team lives in a timezone ~17 ahead of the parent company and they seem to really have difficulty grappling with the idea of not scheduling meetings with me for three in the morning.

(Seasonal related practices like taking holidays during our summer in the other hemisphere also seems to be perplexing.)

[1] https://duckduckgo.com/how-we-work

The slow speed at which DuckDuckGo loads/responds to searches from Asia is quite apparent. I don't know if supporting IPV6 would improve this (will they?), but I see faster results from almost every search engine compared to DDG, which is unfortunate.

I'm getting 'forbidden'on https://noai.duckduckgo.com/lite/, or there is some other way of getting there?

I understand that having the DDG browser on Linux is difficult. It would be great if there was a way to just sync bookmarks and passwords using the browser extension for other browsers.

I use DDG browser for work and mobile and Firefox on Guix.

This was an interesting read. I'm surprised by the market share statistics especially. It feels higher than my lived experience would suggest, but I am likely missing context on broader population usage.

Since this is turning into a DDG AMA thread of sorts --

I love DDG! However it's search term autocorrect is really broken when DDG decides for me I must not be looking for exactly what I typed.

It seems to assume that if there isn't a lot of results then it's my fault for typing a "bad" query? Sometimes it makes up a new search out of whole cloth in this case with terms not even close to what I typed.

I get the utility for detecting+correcting typos but DDG often takes this way too far. Posting this in friendly criticism, happy user otherwise!

Looking for the Nicolas Cage movie "Lord of War" on Google, around the time the game "God of War" came out: "Did you mean 'God of War'? Here are search results for this video game"...

All modern search engines (except Kagi) seem to do this and I find it incredibly disrespectful and worse than useless.

I avoid DDG and all search engines that do this. Forcing me to manually sort through garbage because you didn't want to render an empty page is a huge waste of my time. If you don't respect my time, I'm just not gonna interact with your service.

Do better.

I'm certainly in the minority on this site, but I love that they offer noai.duckduckgo.com - I'm really, really tired of AI everywhere. It wouldn't be so bad, if the results were accurate (no idea about duck.ai, since I avoid it) and didn't take up a solid third of screen real estate. Until AI results get vastly better and stop hallucinating, I will suppress them if I can. Please keep this feature.

     we don’t censor search results

Sure they do. They preemptively censor entire torrent sites. Everyone one they can, from what I can tell.

> They preemptively censor entire torrent sites

They don't do that. That is a story that comes from a case of Bing, their upstream results provider, doing that, before quickly reverting the block.

> that comes from a case of Bing, their upstream results provider, doing that,

Bing is just one of their sources. They run their own crawler. They source data from multiple 3rd party providers.

I know. I'm talking specifically about the source of the "DDG censors torrent sites" story.

I'm saying DDG has spiders that index the web - and for ~every torrent site found by DuckDuckBot, DDG scrubs every bit of it from it's search results.

I searched torrent sites on DDG just to test what you are saying and this isn't true or maybe I am not understanding but it shows me torrent sites links so I am not aware what you might be talking about.

>> [DDG] preemptively censors entire torrent sites.

> I searched torrent sites on DDG ... it shows me torrent sites links

I can't speak to your search because you didn't post it. For my part, here are DDG results for widely used torrent sites (per reddit).

    https://duckduckgo.com/?q=site:1337x.tw
    https://duckduckgo.com/?q=site:rarbgdump.com
    https://duckduckgo.com/?q=site:limetorrents.fun
    https://duckduckgo.com/?q=site:torrentdownloads.pro
    https://duckduckgo.com/?q=site:extratorrent.st

Interestingly, I did find that DDG isn't scrubbing Russian torrent sites from it's results. I think this makes sense if DDG is trying to compete with Yandex (who doesn't censor like DDG).

    https://duckduckgo.com/?q=site:uztracker.net
    https://duckduckgo.com/?q=site:rutracker.org
    https://duckduckgo.com/?q=site:piratesparadise.org (eng, hosted in Moldova)

To be fair, 1337x.tw is a fake 1337x domain [1, 2]. It's bad that it's even indexed by DDG higher than the official one, I think it would be better if it was completely hidden from results. The .tw is a malicious website that actively tries to mislead users. For example, on the main page it says "1337x.to is our main domain", but when you click on that, you get redirected to "1377x.to" (notice the swapped digit), yet another fake clone website that conveniently lists the .tw as one of the official mirrors.

Searching for site:1337x.to, which is the official domain, does give results.

[1]: https://1337x-status.org/

[2]: https://fmhy.net/unsafe#torrent-sites-clients, see "fake 1337x sites"

I had just searched 1337x and nothing too much else so it seems that duckduckgo may (sensor?) the site:1337x.tw or similar but also I feel like ddg doesnt really censor the ability to find the website by just searchign 1337x

Although I still agree that this is interesting discovery but I didnt know that these sites allowed to be indexed in the first place and that the issue was from ddg site, I always thought it was the opposite or didnt really give much too thought into it but interesting, I would love to discuss more about why you might think so this is the case or how it can meaningfully impact I suppose.

I think that the issue here could be that there might be some censorship from big upstream or that ddg does it to prevent any legal issues which I am sure can open a load ton of questions if you scrape something tangentially related to copyright/similar so it might be understandable why they might do this I suppose.

I did different searches and am getting some more results than I used to.

This hash search gives one site: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%229623748B411A3CD02DE8F332820C4C7...

This way also gives one torrent site: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=all+quiet+on+the+western+front+193...

> I feel like ddg doesnt really censor the ability to find the website by just searchign 1337x

For us users, the point of search engines is to index the context of sites and tell us which one(s) have the info we're looking for.

There isn't much point to a search engine that just tells us where a site is. Even less to tell us for a site we already know.

Hello duckduckgo team! I have been using ddg for a long time and I really enjoy it

Although I occasionally have to use google for https://images.google.com/

Is there any way that duckduckgo can have something similar or perhaps there already is and I am not aware of it, either way, I would love to know more about it and have a nice day!

Yes, we have image search. If you do a search, just click on images. We also recently added the ability to filter out a large portion of AI-generated images.

Hello sir! Have a nice day and thank you for responding to my message

What I meant by the abilities of image search was being able to provide an image as a search query and then it can find similar images basically.

Like if I have a picture of wikipedia's logo (as an example) in my clipboard or as a png saved, is there any particular way I would be able to upload that picture from my clipboard/my desktop to duckduckgo and then duckduckgo can query for similar pictures basically similar to the camera feature of images.google.com which has this camera option where I can paste the clipboard image

This is honestly one of the biggest reasons that I ever use google (which is rarely nowadays but still) and I would love to use duckduckgo for this use case.

Sorry but I am unable to find it and I would love to know more about it/ ideas on it. And have a nice day sir and thanks for responding to my message! :D

I just hope you guys are sincere and not doing shady things to people who are trusting you. Your mission is noble, I really hope you keep succeeding.

Wow. You launched in 2008? Congratulations!!! 17 years, privately owned, in the business of search which is tough because google just dominates. I wish you another 17 years bro. DuckDuckGo is my primary search now.

Thank you

I use the DDG browser about 80% of the time. Duck.ai is an interesting product, like Proton’s AI chatbot - both privacy preserving.

They've never allowed a third-party to audit the "privacy" inside their code/platform that is claimed.

Suspicious as heck to have enough money for supporting +300 employees plus all other operating costs without an obvious money cow for those costs.

Rather use Qwant, Brave or even Ecosia.

We actually have, as part of https://natlawreview.com/article/nad-examines-privacy-statem... "The NAD found the claims supported by the evidence which included a third-party expert confirming that the company’s measures (encryption, tracker blocking, and private searches) protect against the three largest categories of personal data collectors."

In terms of money, as the article notes we have 3% of U.S. search market share. That's a lot if you consider how much Google makes. Now, in part because of our search privacy, we make way way less, but it is still enough to be profitable. That said, that means we could be way way more profitable if we tracked people, which we don't.

You must be kidding, right? The article you mention is the same as claiming that a car is "secure" because you look at it from the outside and base the audit on their own statements.

That is not a serious review.

There is no way you are supporting +300 people per month, which equates to a minimum of 36 million USD per year without even counting infrastructure expenses, fancier salaries for management and associated costs for business building.

By all means feel free to present more detailed documentation about your expenses and sources of income. I'll wait, will even grab a chair to avoid getting tired after waiting a few more years.

All dodgy.

Back of the envelope for you: Google does about $200B in search revenue, about half in the U.S. (so $100B). We have about 3% markt share in the U.S., which would equate to about $3B in Google monetization. Now, we make way way less than Google per search, in large part due to our privacy policy, but 10x less is still on the order of 300M per year. So, you can see how we can easily take in more than 36M per year.

Also, NAD is a very serious review process as NAD refers any unsubstantiated claims directly to the FTC. Lots of evidence, vetted by a third-party.

I found it interesting that they have an article saying "we don't censor search results".

Who is "we"? Don't they get their results from Bing?

We = DuckDuckGo. As the article notes, we are increasingly relying on our own search technology. For example, our Search Assist (our version of AI overviews), local results (maps, business listings, etc.), knowledge graph stuff (wikipedia, answers, etc.) don't come from Bing. That said, if Bing happens to removes something, we can add it back, which we do. We do not censor anything ouselves.

But DuckDuckGo does censor search results, if DMCA takedown requests are countered as censorship (which they should be because the system is abused).

Eg, DDG always fail the "watch (specific movie or tv show) online" search query test. Many other search engines like Bing and Google also fail. It's a quick censorship influence test as DMCA takedown requests have a clear track-record of being abused.

One search engine that succeeds is Russia's Yandex. I'm sure they censor plenty of things (eg, material sensitive to Russia), but that censorship set may not intersect with the Google, Bing and DDG sets.

> Eg, DDG always fail the "watch (specific movie or tv show) online" search query test. Many other search engines like Bing and Google also fail.

DDG results are mostly Bing results, so if a page doesn't show up on Bing, it probably won't on DDG either. That doesn't mean DDG themselves censored the results.

As a user that distinction is meaningless. I don't care what they use as a backend, and I shouldn't have to. If their source provider censors search results it means their own search results are censored too.

They do track what you click as well. Need privacy badger to rewrite their tracking urls or adguard to block their links.ddg site. Combined with MS stink, not sure how they have such a rep for privacy.

“We don’t censor results”… well…

Either that is completely bullshit, or it’s technically-bullshit.

1. They don’t have to censor because their sources censor for them. “Oh we’re just an aggregator of censored results” doesn’t mean “this is an uncensored search engine” like the claim would have you believe.

2. Proof of this is evident in by comparing Russian yandex.com, my now go to for anything related to hacking, pirated anything, topics of censorship or controversial discussion, even “legit” but rarer information like how to train or use X or Y AI model, etc. The domains that appear on yandex remind me a time gone by. Like image search before Pinterest, unreliable but not sterilized.

3. I use DDG everyday. In the last year or so, I have found myself going to Google, Bing, Brave, Yandex, SearX, and other more than ever. The quality of DDG has for me, unquestionably slipped. I have a strong distaste for Google, and have used them this year more than ever.

They are not uncensored, although maybe they allow that burden to be done for them to keep their nose high in their air on the topic.

However, I fear it may be a moot point as I find myself looking elsewhere often now.

It's neither, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46259466 I just made.

If you see results missing, I'd be happy to look into them. My email is in my profile.

“We do not censor anything ouselves.”

I mean… that’s exactly my issue. That’s just another way to say “we present censored results”.

To be fair… my real issue is the last year or so the results have been noticeably sub-par for me.

I knew there would be no point discussing a subjective matter like that. So I brought up statement that I found misleading.

We monitor closely and if something is off then we correct it. If you have particular examples in mind right now, please share them with me so I can look into them.

Maybe it's time for a !yandex flag? ;-)

Not sure what you mean, it already exists

Ha, of course it does. I should have checked. (I should have been using it for years)

Sounds like their claim was technically-correct and you even acknowledged it... I don't see a problem with DDG itself in this aspect.

Why do you feel that the actions of a search provider(s) should be reflected so negatively and angrily on the aggregator?

You used technically-correct, and I used to technically-bullshit. We can both be right. The difference what he is intending to convey when they say they’re proud their product lacks censorship and is banned in China.

It’s not like anyone can go and see the CCP scoresheet for DDG.

> They don’t have to censor because their sources censor for them.

If the source has not put something on the web... how is anyone supposed to get past that? Or am I misunderstanding your statement?

Hacker News sneakily censors and manipulates what you see too, not just DDG. The abuse is inescapable form Big Tech and only getting worse. That's why the next level is trying to force showing IDs to more websites and acting like it's everyone's destiny to be characters from Minority Report or 1984.

Brave search is far better. It does it's own indexing which is better than google or bings, and lets you up rank or down rank websites without having to set up an account

~3 years off google search.

Funny how people are still making jokes about yahoo search, when it works better than google.

I don't think Google, Bing, or anyone else plan to syndicate their AI results the way they did their search results, so DuckDuckGo will go from being unnecessary to obsolete.

duck.ai is nice

the most surprising thing is why they didn't change this terribly long and impossible to remember name which completely killed them after all these years

yes, yes, I know why it's named like that

https://duck.com

the fact that I didn't know about this shows you the problem

The article has some details btw.

Brave has a much better AI search than either Google or DuckDuckGo.

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