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Switch your default search engine to Google

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40 pointsbgaluszka43 comments

I've started to use DuckDuckGo as my default search engine in Firefox recently, but accuracy of results often falls short of my expectations. So I end up entering the same query again at Google especially when searching for technically detailed Q&A. Is there anyone who only use DDG in everyday life?

I don't use DuckDuckGo exclusively, but I switch to it as my default over a year ago. Initially I used the !g for a large number of searches, but now I rarely feel the need.

As DuckDuckGo has become better, it also seems that Google is becoming increasingly worse, at least with general searches.

Interestingly enough where Google shines is finding pages that I sort of know exists. Queries where "I know I saw this on Stack Overflow" or "I've seen this exact text somewhere" and localized searches (Although DuckDuckGo have become a lot better recently).

What are some examples of searches where DDG outperforms Google?

In my experience it is better at "general" things. Search for a company and there will be a box describing what the company is, a specially marked box for the official homepage and a wikipedia article is often highly ranked.

However, once you start querying very specific things, it tends to fall apart. Just today I wanted to see if the a particular company utilizes any Machine Learning and searched for company-name machine learning. No top hit contained all three keywords or anything related to AI. On Google the top hit was a company research institute and contained all 3 keywords.

Can you give an example term?

You probably don't care what a "Tiger" search would return, but I find the DDG results vastly more informative:

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=tiger

Recommendations: animals, military, people, movies, bands, organizations, technology, ... with a pretty picture, a subtitle, and a short description.

Top results: Wikipedia, Tiger Direct (a shop), WWF, Defenders of Wildlife, Tiger Woods, Detroit Tigers (baseball), ... (infinite list.)

https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&q=tiger

Single recommendation: Tiger (Animal), with a pretty picture, the life expectancy and the scientific name.

Top results: Tiger Airways, Wikipedia, Tiger Stores (a shop), WWF, Tiger Direct (another shop), Defender of Wildlife, ...

Special results "in the News": Tiger Airways, Tiger Woods.

I've been happily using DDG for almost a year now, but I still use `!g` regularly because it does get confused sometimes (point is: no search engine is perfect, but DDG makes it easy to redirect your search elsewhere.) I switched because google was pushing g+ too hard, experimenting with the presentation, customizing the result list based on my profile, and it was breaking my flow (like the popup "make google your default search engine", I get why they do it, but it required unwanted attention.) Somehow DDG convinced me that they would be less invasive.

DDG doesn't really outperform Google when it comes to search, at least not so far as I can see. I've had it set as my default for several months again.

But it does have a much nicer UI, and there are lots of searches that it does about as well as Google. For programming stuff, the !bang searches are nice (https://duckduckgo.com/bang.html) -- I can type "!mdn createElement" or "!php obscure_function" and get straight to the official docs.

For broader topics, DDG's Wikipedia preview is a nice feature, the row of embedded images across the top for famous people is handy, and for everything else, I find the search results to be more readable than Google's.

> Interestingly enough where Google shines is finding pages that I sort of know exists.

Well, they are in your browsing history, and Google knows it?

I only ever use private browsing mode. Firefox delete my history, cookies and cache every time I close my browser.

So unless Google have started to do browser fingerprinting, which I don't think they have, that shouldn't be the answer. At some level I believe that Google is just better at understanding my request, regardless of how poorly I formulated it, while DuckDuckGo just returns pages where some of the word match. Given that I don't know how any of the two search engines work I may be completely of.

Private browsing mode and deleting your local history doesn't stop Google from keeping its own log of your searches (and any other Google services (gmail, youtube), and pages with google-analytics, and any page with AdSense, etc)

Google clearly uses these logs to "customize" your search results, even when you check the placebo button to "disable" your history in the google account options.

Not having an account (or deleting local history) doesn't matter much, as they reconstruct a PK from all the entropy your browser leaks. (see their recent "we already ID your browser" reCAPTCHA update that no longer shows a scrambled image)

This isn't my experience, at least for YouTube. If I'm not logged into Google I only see "recommended for you" video links when I'm not in private browsing mode.

Harder to tell for Google Search - unlike YouTube I never see any indication that search results are based on my history, so any manipulation that's happening is opaque (I never search while logged in, so I don't know if the behavior is different in that case)

Just coming up on four months, here. Enter!g in your query to automatically redirect it to Google. I do this for about 50% of my searches (mainly looking for docs)

!yt for youtube is useful too, as is just ! for I'm Feeling Lucky and !wiki,!define.

This is the main reason I began DDG, so useful, faster than using a drop down or looking for the relevant site on Google. Not sure if other search providers do this, but I also appreciate the privacy aspect of using DDG.

If you're doing that, you may as well define keyword searches in your browser. Which is the ultimate privacy because redirection to the appropriate search engine happens locally.

I have g for Google, gl for feeling lucky in Google, w for Wikipedia, imdb, yt, and many more I never use.

I was doing that for a long time in Chrome. Eventually I switched to Firefox and found out that I can't do it on every site and that I often lost all the shortcuts I had created when upgrading browsers or switching machines. Now with DDG I have don't need to worry about it.

I do it on Firefox. It's just a bookmark, so you only need to synchronize bookmarks.

I use DDG in everyday life, and it has been about 3 months since I am doing so. Most of my searches are very narrow, in which case both DDG, and Google perform pretty much the same.

Consider a "wide scope" search: "how to write a modular app in ruby". In such cases, most of the times the results in the both the search engines are very different. See DDG: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=how+to+write+a+modular+app+in+ruby... and Google: https://www.google.com/search?q=how+to+create+a+modular+app+...

Also, for images, you will have to go back to Google. DDG image search is simply not good enough. And DDG often pops up images in search results when they are not called for (and those images are mostly useless), which is kinda annoying.

Same here, I tried really hard to use DuckDuckGo and lasted with it as my default for around a month. I started using !google a lot and had to switch back in the end as I found it was just slowing me down.

It's fine for basic searches but the results really lack when it comes to any kind of technical query.

This is exactly what happened to me. DDG is good for my basic searches, but anything more complex often results in me having to fall back to Google.

Unrelated: I hate that DDG doesn't show dates, which I find invaluable for many of my searches. Is there any way to show those in DDG?

Sure. DuckDuckGo handles most of my searches perfectly adequately.

For the cases when it doesn't, consider !sp for Startpage: "the world's most private search engine. (enhanced by Google [results through proxy])"

or !iq for "Ixquick"

!s works too. Quite nice. I'm building my own "search engine" to use in place of DDG[0]... we'll see how far that gets.

[0]: As in, it impersonates DDG so I can use it on my phone when I am on local wifi, but DDG when I'm not—my raspberry pi is both a DNS and HTTP(S) server.

Been using it for over two years now. It works just fine for me, it seems to match my way of writing search queries well. I rarely have to try elsewhere to find what I'm looking for. (Hint: Add !sp to search google without much of google's tracking).

DDG is definitely not for everyone. My parents tend to search Google by entering questions into the search box, and Google does a great job at working out what they mean and want, while DDG is IMO a much more literal search (as in, are the words you typed in the page results).

Its unlikely that anyone _can_ get as good as google since what others have searched on previously is one of the major paramters in their search algorithm, more people that search on google, the better it becomes...

Theoretically yes, but Google are crippling their own search results to drive traffic to adwords.

Using DDG in daily life with the !g or !g+cc (country code, quite useful) and with FF. So this new Google "ad" gets really bothering everyday and a quick "block element" with uBlock fixed it !

For all things mainstream ddg is perfect. As soon as you dig on the sides it's very frustrating.

Add !g to search on google. Or !gi for google images, !gn for google news, !w for wikipedia, etcetera. See https://duck.co/help/results/syntax for more tricks.

And yes I'm using it in daily life.

I have used startpage for about a year now. I like it but it's not as good as google.

> Is there anyone who only use DDG in everyday life?

Using DDG. I pretty much always forget that Google is an option nowadays.

I am quite satisfied with ixquick[0]. It forwards google results over a Proxy, utilizing TLS and it relinquishes cookies. Pretty neat if you ask me.

[0] https://www.ixquick.de/eng/?

Startpage (https://startpage.com) does the Google proxying, not Ixquick. If you like the results of Ixquick though, that's even better than sending things to Google.

Also, their redesign is the first in a while that I actually prefer over the old one. Aside from the hamburger menu (and, yecch, sort-of-half-floating title bar) it's much better,

Actually they are both the same company:

https://startpage.com/eng/company.html (also look at the logo here)

https://www.ixquick.de/eng/company.html

And both introducing new redesign

The bigger question is: how does Google know what your default search engine is?

Are they tracking referrers from DDG, or what?

Or anything else it seems. As in, I'm making my own search engine that can redirect to Google and http://10.0.1.42/?q=google+whatever will do it too. What really confuses me is that people will still try to link to Google results in forums and it might say that (which could get really confusing).

Quick test of that: https://www.google.com/search?q=google

Yeah, the box shows up if I click that in Firefox, even in private browsing. You'd think they could make it show up on the homepage when clicked from Yahoo, which most Firefox people would probably do if their default got changed. But anyone who uses DDG probably did it on purpose.

Err wait, this might be just me as I disabled cross-site referer header in about:config.

I do not think what your default search engine is really matters. I see that Ad all the time even when Google is set as my default search engine.

I've been getting this only when redirected from DDG via !g in FF (and not Chrome for example). I've this even if Google is set as my default search engine.

I use DDG by default on all of my devices and the main reason is because DDG makes it easy to switch to any search engine I need.

So, if I can't find anything in DDG (usually very specific), I'll just type !g at the end, and it'll take me to Google's search engine (encrypted version).

If I want images, I use !bi or !gi.

The bang ! is pretty much the most powerful feature that DDG has.

Browsers have been doing this for at least 15 years. Is there anything especially strange here you wanted to point out?

I only see this if coming from DuckDuckGo. It's interesting to see Google copy DuckDuckGo!

My default search engine is Google and for the last couple of weeks I've seen that box several times. It hasn't bothered me enough yet to try figure out what is going wrong, but it does feel pretty silly.

Reminds me of my attitude on banks. I would never recommend a bank to someone unless they asked. I barely know anything about banks, even my own, and I'm in no position to determine another's decisions.

You might want to take a look at the link. It is not waht you are assuming.

DDG-user for about two years now. With the latest iterations of Apple-updates, I'm using it on my iPhone as well. Using the terminal-like style :-)

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