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I've also noticed the quality of DuckDuckGo search results has been steadily improving, especially over the past year. I would encourage anyone who tried it and went back to another search engine to consider giving DuckDuckGo another shot--you may be pleasantly surprised!

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I just read Gabriel's post, and I pretty much agree (and do) with what he says. Due to these shared believes I've been using DDG quite a bit, I even deleted the Google search app from my phone, and instead been using DDG's iOS app as my default mobile search engine.

However, every time I use DDG it hurts a bit. The quality of the results are very far behind from that of Google's. I many times end up doing a Google search in incognito mode because DDG just doesn't cut it. I hope DDG improves, because I haven't seen that improvement during the past year.

Specific examples you're willing to share really help us improve. Feel free to send them to us at inbound at duckduckgo.

I found DDG commonly does worse than Google on long natural-language questions, especially ones that are mainly made up of common words, and also seems to have more trouble than Google with automatically splitting queries into relevant noun phrases (like if a query included "vegetarian restaurant new york", I expect Google more reliably to decompose that into (vegetarian restaurant) (new york) than DDG).

But I'll keep an eye out and actually write down particular queries where I see these phenomena, and send them along.

We've actually been working on improving relevancy for queries like your example ("vegetarian restaurant new york") -- check it out!

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=vegetarian+restaurant+new+york

Huh, it sure got that one right! Way to go. I'll keep an eye out for cases where this does or doesn't work in the future.

Or something like "movie with andre the giant". Google gets Princess Bride as result #2. DDG doesn't have a direct link to that in the first batch. I think Google handles ambiguity better (what users are searching for when they don't know how to express it). Of course, Google tends to overdo this too such that simple keyword searches ain't what they used to be.

Google also apparently entirely eliminated the verbatim search mode (some time after making double quotes no longer perform a verbatim search). People now complain that there is no documented way to perform verbatim searches with Google.

At least from Australia, you can still perform a verbatim search by clicking "search tools", "all results", then changing the option to "verbatim". I still sometimes forget I can do this and wonder why Google is ignoring several of my qualifying terms. The deprecation of the plus symbol and double quotes for coercion is the single biggest piece of vandalism I've seen Google commit on their interface in over fifteen largely restrained years.

Aha, that exists in the U.S. too; thanks for the tip. I think I heard a complaint that the current implementation doesn't truly always do a verbatim search, but I tried a couple of experiments and so far it did appear to have the behavior I expected (at least when putting the entire search term in quotes).

I agree with your chagrin at the loss of the plus symbol.

My biggest pain point with DuckDuckGo, is locality. I search for "hdmi cable" on DuckDuckGo and it gives me links to products that are sold in BestBuy and Walmart... They don't exist here in the UK. It also gives me links to Amazon.COM and Ebay.COM...

I do the same search on Google and it gives me links to Currys, Tesco, Argos and Maplin (all UK shops/sites). And it links me to Amazon.CO.UK and Ebay.CO.UK.

I don't use DuckDuckGo for searching for products which I want to buy, because this is always what happens.

I suspect DuckDuckGo is a much better search experience for people inside the US than outside.

EDIT: Ooh. I've just noticed that if I set my region to "UK" in DuckDuckGo the results suddenly become far more relevant. Why isn't this set by default? Not only am I coming from a UK IP address, but my browser is sending "Accept-Language: en-gb"

I expect if they did use these signals to automatically set geography, some of their user base would assume that their location is being "tracked".

I find the auto-correct to be over-zealous. If DDG decides that what I've entered is a typo, It will only show me results for the "corrected" word, so I'll have to quote uncommonly searched words. This usually happens when the search is similar to another one that is much more common.

That isn't really different from Google, though, is it?

It is, because sometimes DDG is so sure you made a typo, they don't bother to mention it and just search the correction. Try searching "president ovama". The first one or two pages of results are almost exactly the same as the results for "president obama", with no mention of the correction. I know this is sort of a contrived example, but you get the point.

As far as I can tell, Google will always tell you when it thinks you made a mistake, and provide a link to search for your exact query.

So... two poorly designed sites?

As a workaround, you can prefix the word in question with a +, and DDG will recognize that you really did mean to search for that specific word.

I agree with this criticism. Making auto-correct optional would help usability a lot.

I'll frequently run the searches from within DDG as !g or !scholar searches (my most frequent variants).

Lack of date-bounded search is a frequent reason to resort to Google. Special collections (Scholar, Books, News) others.

I'm actually relying far more on DDG image search than even a few months ago -- the results are getting good. Also the instant answers, which are getting good.

There have been a few times in recent past where DDG searches have turned up empty (or unsatisfactory results) while Google's nailed it. Actually went hunting for an example and got lost which is why this comment is so late. Couldn't find the example though I'll try to remember to submit it when I do.

Huge fan of DDG, but overseas speed is a problem for me. I find DDG amazing in the States, but when I'm in Australia the extra tiny bit of latency can be frustrating (in the most First World Problem kind of way, of course).

> many times end up doing a Google search in incognito mode because DDG just doesn't cut it

The sample is only searches where DDG fails; inevitably, every other search engine will provide better results.

(That doesn't mean DDG is better or worse than Google; it only means that this methodology doesn't provide infromation on that topic.)

    The sample is only searches where DDG fails; inevitably,
    every other search engine will provide better results.

That's not guaranteed. You could try the search on Google in an incognito tab and decide you think the results are actually worse.

(But yes, it is a skewed sample.)

I find the "!g" to perform an anonymous Google search works great, and has very little added effort.

I'm just curious if when you say incognito mode that you are using Chrome? I am assuming that changing the default search engine from Google avoids sending partially typed searches to Google, and the privacy policy seems to state that limited personally identifying data is still transmitted but I'm still somehow a bit wary of chrome. Is it fairly substantiated that other than having a different search engine and not signing in, that chrome behaves in a trustworthy fashion? There is still the odd translation suggestion and double click definition that I suppose would also have to be turned off. (From their privacy policy they claim no identifying data is sent along with these requests but the IP alone is an obvious identifier)

I've been using it for a while too now and my verdict is that i can't remove google from the second row in my search bar but i find the results of ddg to be good enough to use as my first choice.

80% searches work flawlessly on ddg, and for the remaining part you learn which kind of searches that will work and which ones doesn't. Many times i know in advance that this particular query will probably not work here but on google it will and i'll just append !g to the search to go straight to google.

What i find mostly interesting is that I have re-learned to use multiple different search engines, you know like we all did back before in the days, and that it actually helps me find more relevant information. Not only because the quality of Google has dropped significantly the past 5 years but even when google delivers a pretty solid result i check DDG after and i might find an even more relevant result, or an opposing story in a political topic etc. We all learn to check your information sources, this includes your search engine!

I've had this question for awhile ... What is the advantage to using DuckDuckGo, with respect to privacy? All I've found is that they say privacy is important and that they don't track users. But I see no way for them to prove that. So you still have to trust them not to spy on you. Perhaps on the whole that is better than alternatives. "Google is definitely spying on me" versus "DuckDuckGo might be spying on me". Is that the only difference, or am I missing something?

If that's the only difference, isn't Google-over-Tor a better option? Known privacy with world-class search results?

Just did a surface audit.

They set and read no cookies. You can test this yourself.

They set etags on static assets, and those theoretically could be used to track you as an identifiable visitor.

How else would they track you? By IP address? That would make any kind of tracking useless -- how would you deal with trying to track 100,000 connections from behind NAT, individually, other than cookies or etags?

There's browser fingerprinting, but I don't see any evidence of that either.

What evidence of browser fingerprinting would you expect to see?

a bulky or obfuscated javascript file probing the standard fingerprinting areas of your browser

Correct. The standard reference is https://panopticlick.eff.org/.

> If that's the only difference, isn't Google-over-Tor a better option?

No, DDG is better because they don't limit or captcha you over Tor.

Also, brand names do matter. If DDG has staked their reputation on privacy, it's a safer bet. It would be difficult for them to be monetizing personal data when it's their stated policy not to. You'd have to hope the people you're selling this data to keep their mouths shut and so do DDG (ex)employees.

It's worth supporting companies who are using a privacy-centric business model.

Well, it's very unusual in this day for a company to proactively protect your privacy. Whether they actually do is unknowable without encryption.

Actually, I've noticed that DGG is way overdoing guessing. More often than not I get results that are only similar to the search query in some way instead of actually what I'm looking for. This has been getting worse over time for me.

Both DDG and Google hatefully over-guess. I understand their motivation -- people typing natural-language queries with smartphone-level typos and expecting to get answers -- but as someone long used to simple keyword queries, I wish I could have the old system back. Programmers trying to make computers "smart" seem not to understand that unless they're almost flawless, users will just have more trouble trying to work around the "smartness" to tell the computers what they actually want.

Of course, because DDG can't build a profile of you, it would have to resort to some guessing.

For example, if you search for "python", it would have to guess whether you are a programmer, or a biologist, in order to present the most relevant results. And of course, Google already has all this information...

...not that kind of guessing. Obviously. That's not "similar to the search query", that's just different meanings of words/phrases. I didn't say anything about that, but it looks like you didn't read past the first sentence anyway.

Example of what I meant: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=BMW+723i

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22BMW+723i%22

Seriously, quoting that is a reasonable solution. Given the comparative popularity of the two, it seems statistically likely that most people actually wanted a 323i. Having said that, I note that Google doesn't show 323i results for 723i, so... hm.

I do think explaining the substitution that was done and linking to the exact search (ie, how Google does it) would be a good feature though.

No. If the search engine thinks I meant something else, it's supposed to ask "did you mean [something else]?" and not guess that I'm incapable of writing 4 characters correctly and serve me the wrong results.

That's over-guessing.

Agreed. By using them more often, you're only going to help them improve.

I just put DDG as my default address bar search, and taught myself a bunch of !bang commands, since for much of the stuff I'm looking for I already know what site I want to end up any way (!w, !wnl, !yt, !gi, !wayback, etc).

In the mean time for general searches, I either use DDG's results or slap on a pre-emptive !g on a hunch, randomly or just-in-case. My idea behind this is that, as DDG's results become better, I'll habitually start using !g less and less.

And indeed, DDG's results have become better, and indeed I have been using the !g command less and less.

Google Search with !g is slowly becoming "just another one among the predefined !bang commands", a command I will append after my searches when I specifically desire to find out what Google has to say about a certain query. Though in comparison I hardly ever use !y and !b (Yahoo and Bing, respectively), mostly because I have no clue in what vague sense those results would be better (with DDG vs Google, I sort of have a feeling when asking for something really mundane and stupid, Google always hits the spot exactly, DDG sometimes misinterprets--though less so lately).

For image searching I really use !yi, !bi and !gi pretty much randomly. They all give quite different results, but as far as I've been able to determine, none of them are of particularly better quality than the others. Yahoo Image Search has a nice integration with Flickr though, so I tend to use it more when my target may be found between high-ish resolution photography.

I already named !wayback, anyone got any other cool !bang commands they use often? For instance, any good documentation searches for JS/DOM/HTML/CSS etc? I tried !mdn but I don't like their search result pages. Same for !python, if I do "!python itertools", I want to be taken straight to the itertools module documentation, not a results page of all python docs that contains the term "itertools".

While also not as good as google from a result standpoint I have been using ixquick.com for several years now and have seen a steady improvement in it's results as well.

They claim to be "the world's most private search engine: https://ixquick.com/eng/protect-privacy.html?

I also recommend people try startpage.com

+1, Starpage uses Google's search index and DDG uses Bing's. Yet it seems that Google is delivering clearly weakened search results for them?

I hope i don't see very irrelevant results again cause i might not return again if it fails again.

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