Over one billion searches were made on DuckDuckGo in 2013
duck.co
duck.co
So for those of you who find DDG's generically mediocre retrievals sufficient, I am interested to know what you use for my other cases. When you want to eat Chinese food, do you always use Yelp? What do you use for recent event news?
⚫ Stick with it. DDG's improved hugely in the past 12-18 months.
⚫ Report your problems to DDG. I've done this in a few cases, and have been stunned to get personal replies in a couple of days. Try getting that from Google (without landing three stories on the top of HN for a day or three).
Hitting Google is a "!g" away -- just prepend / postpend that to your search and hit enter, you'll get Google's results (as I've noted elsewhere here: I usually try "!sp" first, as it's close to, but not quite, Google. What I noticed in my first weeks was that usually the initial results were actually very, very similar, if not identical. Since DDG has the same search syntax ("site:example.com" restricts to a domain or host, "quoted words" are searched together, (either|or) will do booleans), if you're a Google search power user, it's all familiar territory.
DDG's information and support pages tell you a lot, and the !bang search syntax is very much worth knowing about. If you want to search !so (stack overflow), the bang syntax is great: https://duckduckgo.com/bang.html
There are things DDG doesn't do, which I've also noted. Date-restricted searches and localization are two of the big ones. I don't avoid Google entirely, but it's way down my list.
I did enter into this with the mindset of intentionally taking a choice that's not Google, and that I'd have to make some compromises, but that I'd get better privacy as a result. The compromises really have been few, and I'm saying that as a long, long term Google user (since 1998) whose been increasingly disturbed by the company's direction.
In the end it's definitely a huge adjustment.
I don't want "personalized" search results. I don't want Google's algorithms second-guessing what I searched for. If I want current news, I'll read the BBC. If I want a stack overflow result, I'll do a search on SO.
So "pull" is more favored than "push". See the book:
"Pull - The Power of the Semantic Web to Transform Your Business" by David Siegel.
But I do like personalized information storage. Maybe you want to reference to the blog post:
Why do we need the Private Web? http://bit.ly/1c2DzN6
this is very true. You have just listed a billion dollar idea. If I search for an adidas shoe or just go to a company website then I start seeing ads related to those just visited sites - how boring. Retargeting just seems to be plain stupid instead consumer should be showed more variety
But from an idea to a popular web application has long way to go. We just kicked off our first Kickstarter project to spread the message out here: http://kck.st/JNqv8z
Some people gave me negative points, maybe they don't like the BingoBo.com website because it does not provide enough data. Please read today's update here: http://kck.st/1exzNy6
Enjoy!
McDonald's is the only "restaurant" in town that's open today.
My four-year-old is "helping" me build a table.
Please escort this "gentleman" to the exit door.
For example:
I don't want the kinds of results Google calls "personalized".
Using the quotes elsewhere alludes to that same sort of sentiment – referring to something that others do literally call "personalized" – but in not so many words.
There may also be a slight implication of a "scare" second-level of meaning – maybe when Google claims the results are "personalized", that's really just cover for "revenue-optimized despite what's best for me". But that sinister reading isn't required by the quotes, just vaguely hinted.
I get a bunch of stuff about restaurants in small-town Missouri, which is somewhat reassuring, since I live nowhere near there, then actual information about the Chinese language. Awful.
So how did people manage then? If they did it then, they can do it now, too, if there are other factors that are of higher priority to them, such as privacy. This feels like the "but Intel will always be more powerful than ARM" kind of argument (which hopefully, many have learned by now that it was a pointless and irrelevant argument when it came to the success of ARM).
That is completely on purpose.
When I search for a word I'd like the euro language translation of that word to also be searched, and returns returned.
Yes, i know that I'm going to get a bunch of lousy results. But I'm also going to widen my web horizons and see more of the Internet.
One of the things that I find frustrating with DDG is the UScentric results.
(1) Many people don't search local often.
(2) People can type their location in the search engine for local results.
(3) There are alternatives like Yelp as you mention.
"DDG doesn't have recent news"
(4) !gn
(5) DDG doesn't give me news links when I'm not looking for them.
"DDG does not have the coverage to answer a narrow technical question"
(6) Google wins on your example but the answer for your example can most certainly be found in one of the top links on DDG.
(7) !so > site:stackoverflow.com
...
(8) "Duck Duck Go is a good search engine" is not incompatible with "Google has better search results than DDG" or "Google has faster search results than DDG".
Also, I just found a ton of other cool features: https://duckduckgo.com/goodies#Programming
such as qrcodes and regular expressions.
Also, it will give news stories if you put "news" in your search query.
That, and the convenient info boxes for most sites (it even supports arch packages and bulbapedia articles) solve 90% of my queries.
Incognito mode or a different browser brings Google back to sub-second speeds, but it's frustrating enough that I set DDG as my default so that straightforward searches resolve quickly. I switch over with !g whenever I need better search results, news, etc.
Maybe it's because I grew up with web search as just that -- a way of finding websites. I don't search for information; I search for websites which provide me the information I need. I can see how Google's algorithms work for some people, but for me, DDG is exactly what I want. If I typed everything I ever wanted to know directly into Google, then I'm getting the information Google wants me to see, including if someone pays for the placement. I don't like that kind of control, and I don't like the idea of a single entity controlling the flow of knowledge over the internet. So I don't use Google.
Do you assume that Google is the way a search engine should work and all other search engines should follow that? That is, should all search engines produce the same output given the same input?
For local searches, I use my GPS. Google often errors by 100 kilometers when trying to localise me, so local search is a pity. Otherwise, I use pagesjaunes.fr which does not work in your country.
I don't search recent news! I read news on some newspapers websites. Whenever I want to search for news, it is for old articles I remember having read but cannot find anymore. ddg is good enough for that.
I discovered stackoverflow through ddg, so when searching for answers to technical questions, ddg is also good enough for me. For your question, I believe that clicking "more from stackoverflow" gives an answer in the first five results.
The case where I used to bitch about ddg's search results was when pasting error messages, but either ddg improved, or google degraded as recently, whenever ddg did not answer satisfactorily to such requests, google did not either...
2) DDG doesn't have recent news Don't you love it when searching google with keywords vital to your business' placement in the results, a few News headlines show up, pushing you from 4 down to 8 or 9?
Me neither, if I want news, I'll go to the BBC, NY Times, etc.
3) DDG does not have the coverage to answer a narrow technical question valid use case, yes
4) What DDG does have is plain old search results Yes! Remember in the early days when Google was just that? I do. Google has become something else in the meantime, and organic search results are not at the top of their priority list (read: advertising is, they spam my gmail account pretty much daily with advice on how I can reactivate the adwords campaigns that I suspended, how, if I call now, a Google rep. will advise me [try to upsell me in everyway possible] on how to get the most out of my campaigns, and so on).
Google rules the search engine landscape (basically a monopoly); that's not a great situation as we (site owners, admins, etc.) are all completely beholden to a single corporation and are forced to play by their rules whether we agree with them or not.
2) I don't go to a search-engine for news. There are better tools and sites for that.
3) Excuse me. I just suffered a parsing error.
4) And this is why I use it. Google search has become a bloated UX disaster and Google is a creepy company. Just plain search sounds great!
If I search for "Chinese", I explicitly don't want restaurant results (I would have specified that).
If I search for "earthquake", I explicitly don't want news results (I would have specified that).
The fact that Google makes assumptions about what I want rarely benefits me.
It's important, because if you live in random country, you don't especially want to get news from what-the-search-engine-believe-that-people-want-to-read-in-random-country. In other words, tell people what they should read or not using computation and / or economic, politic rules.
When I live in random country, I'm often interested to know what newspapers from another random country can tell about random country. It makes me feel safer when obtaining the same result than you do.
Edit : more => DDG do have a region parameter, see https://duckduckgo.com/settings
Sorry too much facepalm here.
I's just that you've become accustomed to the way Google works, not vice versa.
Maybe switching back to Google would be the easiest step. But there is more involved in this decision than comfort. It is futile to rely on one service. The customer never benefits in a monopoly or oligopoly scheme. Google is the enemy of anonymity on the web and collects quite a lot of data from anybody. Google is doing a lot of evil these days, such as pushing DRM into HTML5.
So yeah I often go back to Google Search. But I hope this will decrease over time. Meanwhile I help and support one of the few serious contenders to Google.
And it's not that Google Search is perfect. It constantly tries to second guess you and nowadays I end up constantly adding more and more quotes to my search terms to somehow prevent that.
DDG is for definitions, wiki lookups, unit conversions, some random stuff, and SP is for the specific searches, like for programming help.
There is a specific syntax for news (sort:date, IIRC) albeit it has a smaller index.
I don't have the numbers, but I believe DDG indexes a sufficient portion of the internet to answer satisfactorily a great portion of my queries. Sites like StackOverflow must be as indexed as Google at about 100%. The differential must be on sites with a very low pagerank which are quite irrelevant for the great majority of queries. If your query returns more than half a dozen pages on google it's probable DDG would also yield usable results.
>>>EDIT: region:cn returns results from Chinese sites I prefer this to the alternative of the search engine guessing if I want information about Chinese people and culture, Chinese restaurants, or from China, but I guess Google adds value after you train it a bit and learns what do you usually mean in your queries, while on the other hand DDG requires that you learn how to use it effectively. This value added from Google comes at the price of privacy which is much more valuable for me.
You search DDG differently than you search Google. And let's face it, you're already well trained in searching Google, even though you don't really think much about it. If you doubt me, ask someone new to the web try to use Google. The way they search will make your eyes roll. Because you know better how to use it.
Same with DDG. You're just not there yet. Besides Google has a more opinionated search, so it will more aggressively attempt to exclude parts of your search query and infer other possible meanings from the words left. And then it will search on what it assumes you meant, no matter if it is right or wrong.
DDG will search for what I ask it to search for. As a technical user and pedant, that suits me better.
I also have to say that your queries sounds very unnatural to me. They go along as if they were almost English. With DDG I just search for the basic keywords. If I know I need/want domain-specific limitations, I can apply bang-operators for that !so to get stack overflow, !w for wikipedia, etc.
In complex matters like these, there's obviously room for taste and opinions. But with that said, I'm getting fed up with the meme that DDG is inferior to Google. For my needs, I consider Google search the inferior product by now.
With the Snowden revelations and the abundantly clear trend of Google to aggregate as much personally-identifiable information as possible, I made a clean break in June, 2013. The performance and search quality are vastly improved. And while I don't eschew all Google products (though I'm making drastically less use of them, and as little as possible while authenticated), I find that using DDG as my first cut generally works.
For fallback, my usual scheme is DDG, !SP (StartPage, another proxying search aggregator making more full use of Google), and if I'm still not fully satisfied, Google itself.
There are areas in which Google's search tools are still hugely superior:
⚫ Searching within a date range. DDG doesn't offer this option.
⚫ Some specialized search, in particular Google Books and Google Scholar. Where Google focuses on its core competency of providing search and not on grabbing as much user data as possible, I find the company far more acceptable.
⚫ Some deep-site searches. Google seems to crawl sites more deeply and in more detail than DDG. I particularly rely on it for Reddit, whose own site search excludes comments.
As I've noted, Google's biggest liability is that, no matter its best intentions, it cannot provide any guarantee against a government-size advanced persistent threat, especially not one with the law (constitutional or otherwise) at its disposal: http://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1u356d/schmidt_...
But overall, I'm hugely impressed with DDG.
For those who use console / terminal browsers such as w3m or links, the 'lite' version puts the "search" button one tab following the search dialog: https://duckduckgo.com/lite
And DDG's TTY mode (command-line interface) is teh awesomenessedness:
DDG could be forced to put an upstream intercept which would log searches by specific IPs, but that's outside their normal operational scope. It also applies only to data-on-the-wire, not data-at-rest. In Google's case, your aggregated history is sitting on their servers to be collected at any time.
If you don't trust DDG not to log your searches, going through Tor will give you yet another degree of separation (there are also browser extensions such as DisconnectSearch: https://disconnect.me/search).
As sobering as the disclosures from Snowden, Applebaum, and others have been, the news appears to be that cryptographic methods do work to protect privacy or at the very least greatly increase workload for surveillance.
And another aspect is that by encouraging and promoting alternatives to Google, we're carving out at least a small niche in which privacy-focused entrants to a vastly concentrated search market (Google scores in the neighborhood of 85% of all search according to some metrics I've seen) might be able to thrive.
DDG doesn't operate that way. Access it through a sufficient diversionary proxy (Disconnect Search, TOR, what have you), and you're simply another (unknown) IP address making another (known) search request. While I won't say it's impossible to tie the two together, the cost is far higher than the case where 1) user search history is explicitly stored or 2) a direct IP history is connected.
Scale your countermeasures to suit your paranoia level / risk model. If you're concerned over browser fingerprinting (https://panopticlick.eff.org/), you'll want to include privoxy as well as TOR.
Note that even unauthenticated users to Google are issued cookies, and undetermined amounts of browser state are tracked. I've got a statement from a Google engineer on G+ that such indicators aren't used to identify accounts, but whether or not they're used to identify end users at all is an unanswered question.
So, short answer: you're right, using DDG of itself isn't a perfect guarantee, but it's a much smaller risk envelope than Google offers, and it can be reduced to pretty near nil with a few additional provisions, all of which hugely increase intercept costs.
So if you're using Google directly via TOR, you're back in the risk case that your data-at-rest identify you. They can be linked by various means: your username, if that identifies you, by patterns of behavior across multiple sites, by ad syndication networks and shared cookies, etc.
So, no, TOR alone isn't sufficient security in the case of Google.
If the NSA is tracking you across the internet outside of Google's Search Box, you've got bigger problems than Search History. Searching for "Bomb Making 101" is the least of your problems if they see you actually visiting BombMaking.com as well as BombMaterialsShop.com
You're postulating a threat model in which anonymized and proxied browsing isn't good enough, because somehow they'll capture all your behavior anyway and then tie it to anonymous search history. My point is, if they can do that, frankly, the fact that they have your search history is the least of your troubles.
This appears to be a threat model specifically designed to sell the DDG use case and fight the notion that using Google un-logged in via a privacy browser isn't "good enough". I'm not sure the case can be made that the DDG scenario is marginally better enough to justify worse search results.
DDG's safety from the NSA is inversely proportional to its success in the market.
It's not just a question of NSA snooping, some of us simply do not want our online behaviour tracked and recorded by companies to such an invasive degree.
DDG does not know when I print to my desktop printer or how often (but Google does if I'm using ChromeOS).
DDG does not know my journey within different websites, but Google does via it's analytics service.
DDG does not stitch together seemingly disparate journeys that I make online (e.g. browsing a product on a shopping site that uses Google Anlaytics, then going to YouTube to search for said product - Google undoubtedly connects these journeys)
DDG does not record every website I visit, every link I click. Google does if I'm using ChromeOS or if I'm signed into a Google account and using the Chrome browser.
DDG can not track my online behvaviour across desktop (Chrome and ChromeOS), mobile (Android) and tablet (Android) to the degree that Google can.
The extent to which Google can track and record online behaviour simply has no equal among online companies. No company that collects such a staggering amount of data about users should be free from scrutiny.
And finally, it's also about taking a principled stand rather than just shrugging your shoulders and thinking "Well, the NSA will snoop on me whatever service I use, so I'll just stick with Google even if I don't like their online practices"
I did Bing's search comparison again just today and came out on top for Google 3/5 and even on 2/5 searches.
Seems I'm stuck with Google, just wish it was old Google with booleans and code search and such.
I fully admit this is one of my biggest gripes with DDG, though it affects far less than 10% of my searches, likely fewer than 1%.
Google is the government-sized persistent threat. The NSA didn't start demanding Google collect as much information as it can on you, Google did. The NSA just wanted a piece of that spying action after the fact.
I still find myself looking at Google for some queries, but this seems to happen every day less and less.
Mostly local searches, as DDG is still very "english-centric". I don't know if they trying to "fix" this, but I sure hope so.
Overall I still find it an awesome search engine, thanks to the 0-click box, and the !bang syntax.
As a command-line junkie, I like it that I can access everything in one place. Admittedly, maybe 1/3 of my DDG "searches" are actually commands (I can type an address and then !map to go directly to the map for that address, for example, or a term and then !img to go to an image search for that term). I think of DDG more as a command line than a search engine.
The search results are generally pretty adequate, too. If you search for a simple term, you get relevant Wikipedia or IMDB results for that term, which is often exactly what I want.
And if I feel like Google would be more relevant, I can just slap a !g on there. I realize "ease of access to a competitor's product" is not a fantastic selling point, but for me it's enough.
100% personal preference, obviously, but it works for me.
http://www.technologyreview.com/view/419965/the-search-engin...
The content he’s blocking includes everything from “Made-for-Adsense” sites that offer no content at all to sites that offer only, in Weinberg’s judgment, low-quality content designed specifically to rank highly in Google’s search index.
“Usually the stuff I’m blocking is pretty straightforward, i.e. not really on the line. The few that have been somewhat on the line are usually big sites, and I’ve asked users or they have been driven by user reports followed by my subsequent investigation,” says Weinberg.
I have to say, I was really taken aback when I found that, and it made me wonder if I was doing the right thing promoting yet another censorship engine. Needless to say, I haven't changed anyone's homepage/search to DDG since discovering that as it took a bit of the wind out of my sails.
>We also save searches, but again, not in a personally identifiable way, as we do not store IP addresses or unique User agent strings.
To give you an example, say the government passed a new law (which happens every day), if I try searching at DuckDuckGo 9 out 10 I won't find anything closely related. If I search Google the most prominent newspaper headlines (along with notorious news-sites) pop-up and I find what I need.
I know that Google closely monitors my clicks (I own a Chromebook and Chrome is my default browser everywhere) and shows me different results than other users. But thing is, for non-English content it's too far ahead of the competition for the time being.
Using DDG started off awkward, but the bang syntax is muscle memory now. I would say my breakdown of providers is as follows: !g: 50%, !w: 30%, !gi: 10%, !az: 5%, !yelp: 5%
I never use DDG directly.
On the occasions I forget, the DDG results seem to be improving. However, ~90% of my Google queries are computer related, and DDG (and even the !so bang) are not as relevant as Google yet for me. As soon as this use case improves enough, I will break my bang habit and use DDG directly for most of my queries.
Now I use DDG mostly with the !g...
For example, `!wa ...` will query Wolfram Alpha, `!m {location}` will give me a map, `!w ...` will search Wikipedia, and `!g ...` will redirect me to a google search if DDG's results aren't comprehensive enough.
For 90% of my queries, DuckDuckGo gives me exactly what I need, or enough data to drill down and make a more effective query. And, more importantly, it provides a single interface to all other major search engines, making it a hell of a start page to have[2].
[1]: https://duckduckgo.com/goodies [2]: https://duckduckgo.com/
That aside, I especially love DDG's Goodies: https://duckduckgo.com/goodies
I use it for simple password generation, lorem ipsum text, color code conversion, etc. I know Google has its extras but I don't believe it comes close to DDG's goodies offering
And we don't have ads, so there is that too.
We want to make search better. Not out of the goodness of our heart, but because we figure if we do a good job someone will buy us, and then we will get paid, and the bad guys at Google or Bing will at least offer you better results when they are being creepy. That's what it is all about right?
We are about 1% the size of DDG.
I've visited your search engine. Looks like you call Bing's API to get the result. The catch is: you don't get the images back since Bing does not have them either.
So why shall I just use Bing instead? Perhaps you are stronger in the "News" search?
I just thought personalized results are better for users. Does that make me a bad person?
PS: I work at Google though not in search.
... but I don't agree with your point of view. Personalised results are obviously better for Google because they're an advertising company. But they're not necessarily better for users, particularly the HN crowd. Beyond a certain level of computer savvy, I suspect the user prefers to have control of the output via keywords and regex, rather than have an algorithm decide for them, no matter how smart that algorithm is.
File duplicates if you want it as Apple counts dupes as up votes.
I wish they'd allow people to change the Omnibox search engine, though, or offer DDG and Startpage as options, especially if they can partner up with them and take a cut of revenue, but I guess it's not a huge deal breaker.
Current Google UI features every block with different margin and content which is neither trivial nor worthwhile to copy.