I’ve been adopting and promoting DuckDuckGo for more than 2–3 years now. I can say that the transition period was quite long actually. I was invoking !g very frequently at the beginning but I force myself to at least probe a few first items first before trying Google. After these years I rarely use Google, and every time that I actually search something on Google, before even seeing the result, Google welcomes me by the whole TOS/Privacy stuff and I close the tab and try the DDG a few more times. I think the friction of accepting their privacy policy makes me think twice.
If you like DDG, recommend it to friends and coworkers. I usually put a link in newsletter if appropriate.
I've switched my default browser search engine to DDG, but I still find myself missing Google results. I miss those knowledge graph results (or whatever Google calls those sidebar boxes).
Also, I've found that DDG cannot consistently display a weather forecast widget for the query "[zip code] weather". Sometimes it will show a weather forecast, and other times it will not display it--very frustrating. Any idea why? Even just refreshing the results will switch to displaying the weather widget, which leads me to think it's either a bug (I'm in Firefox), or they don't actually have the data for my zip code and are going to fetch it after I make my request?
When I search !weather it ships me off to weather.com. I REALLY don't want that to happen. If I wanted to go there, I would have just typed in that URL.
I don't see why it's worse. If you want to know what the weather is, why not go to a weather site? What's the advantage to seeing the same (or less) information on a search results page instead?
I guess this boils down to what is my goal. Here's two plausible goals from my perspective. I go to DDG and ask for it to give me a sample of some sources from which I could find the weather. This is a traditional search. Or, I could go to DDG and ask it for the current weather. This is what I really want.
There's no scenario in which I already know which weather source I want to use, memorize its ! command, navigate to DDG, then enter that ! command. That's too many jumps. If I want the weather from weather underground or whatever, why would I ever go to DDG to start with?
I have DDG as my default search engine, so I just type "!wu 01234" in my address bar. This basically skips the DDG navigation and UI entirely. I like this type of shortcut for Wikipedia and IMDB too.
Anyway this is just a workaround for when the weather infobox doesn't automatically show up in the DDG UI, which it normally does.
The biggest problem with DDG for me is how easy it is to game. Try doing research on new cars/trucks and you'll find most results at the top are trash sites like 2020-make-model.com and the like.
Agreed, it’s easier to game. But often these ‘spam’ sites combined with an adblocker actually mean you get the content you wanted without ads and bloat.
Where as the ‘official’ site has a long load time due to design bloat, videos and other non-content which can’t be blocked with a simple blocker because it’s a part of the actual website.
Google seems to assume name brand websites have good content. I rarely agree.
Similar story for me. Until a few months ago probably 90% of my searches included `!g`. Then at some point I just got out of the habit, and now I usually don’t even think about the fact that I’m on DDG’s result page instead of Google’s. I have no idea if it is because the results actually got better or if I just got used to them.
I keep trying DDG. Year after year I set all of my computers to use DDG. I last a week, a month, but in the end I always give up and set it back to Google.
I was really hoping the title meant like it read. Maybe my hopefulness was reading too much into 'Search Improvements.'
It is also possible that I don't need a search engine. I'm guessing that at least half of the questions/searches result in a post on SO or Wikipedia. There's probably a quarter of them that shoot me to some Medium entry. I guess I could always just bookmark those sites and skip the search engine..
Thats kind of where i was. Now though i'm persevering with DDG. If I'm unhappy with a search i just prefix it with a !g and runs it again via google. I hope that shows something to the DDG guys to know some things we still use Google for, but overall I'm fairly happy with DDG
Same here. I tried DDG years ago and gave up pretty quickly because it wasn't there, then tried again more recently and was positively impressed, but it still lacked some accuracy, then I tried again last year and made the switch.
So is DDG better than Google to me? Nope, and hopefully it will never be, because the only way to get on par with Google, let alone beating them, would imply on DDG side to get as much data as possible about me just like Google does, which would defeat their entire raison d'etre. So I'm okay with DDG being slightly less accurate, and when it doesn't find what I'm looking for I revert to Google for that single search. Currently I use Google on the average from zero to 3 times per day, which is ok.
That's however a choice by someone who values his privacy more than having to press a few more keys or waiting a bit more time to find something; I wouldn't expect the average user to agree with this.
DDG could one day conquer hearts and minds of most technical people, but going beyond that will make an entirely different and much harder challenge.
I'm on the other side of this I think. I've been trying to use DDG for everything for the past month or so, but the number of times I'm having to stop, copy what I just searched for, add a !g in front of it, and search again is just getting silly.
If there were some way I could just use a hotkey to redo the same search in google, this wouldn't be such a big deal, but having to break up my flow with all the extra copy/pasting or retyping is getting frustrating.
Something I just recently noticed: You don’t have to put the bang in front of the search. It can actually be anywhere in there: “!g foo bar”, “foo !g bar”, “foo bar !g” all work.
Every month or two, I run into a query where I don't find anything useful via DDG and expected to, so I try it again with !g...and end up confirming that Google doesn't give me anything useful either. It's been years since I last found a search where Google gave me more useful results.
I'd love to know what those 70% of your queries look like.
(One interesting observation: when first switching, I found that I liked the DDG results a lot better when I styled them to look like Google results; they felt more "right" somehow.)
For me, there are some queries that Google usually gives me better results. I couldn't tell you exactly what (mostly obscure code snippets, I think), and they're a relative minority, but sometimes I do use !g. It's not that often, though, and I'm a happy DDG user on all my computers.
I double-search less than 10% of my queries. I’ve been using ddg for the last four years. I think people that have to double search very often have been trained by google to use queries that aren’t supported by ddg.
Google proper has several value-adds besides the search results. Solving math equations put in the search bar for example. I usually use a dedicated service for things like converting feet to meters instead of typing it into google.
I too developed this habit. Then I forced myself to stop and realized that DDG actually was working fine for the great majority of my queries. I almost wish the bang wasn't there, because it makes it so easy to second guess DDG's results and develop the habit of always using !g when in reality DDG is actually quite good at this point.
Should be pretty easy. Create a bookmarklet that grabs the window.location.href, then appends '!g' to the beginning of the query and changes the location to the appended string.
I'm not sure DDG can actually do much to improve search results with the way they operate. They aren't a first class search engine, they get results from other search engines.
Perform a search on DDG, then do the same search on Bing. You'll notice the first results are the same.
In order for search results to get better on DDG, they first need to get better on their partner search engines (which I believe Bing is the main) so as far as I can tell it's out of their control.
> They aren't a first class search engine, they get results from other search engines. Perform a search on DDG, then do the same search on Bing
You search for the thing and you find the thing. Why do you expect the results, especially the top results, to be different? Is there any other evidence that they are not doing searches themselves?
Which keywords? I just searched (as posted above) for "extent space taco secure". It breaks bing. Yahoo returns results that are closer (including some shared oddities like storage units in Nashville), but they're still very distinctly unique.
You know there's something weird. You could prove your little hypothesis here wrong in less time than it took you to write it. So why state something that's wrong?
I tested this by choosing to search for something completely random that would return unusual results and give a decent indicator of whether or not DDG was just copy-pasting results, so to speak. I searched for "extent space taco secure", no quotations. Bing seems to have exploded when I searched for this. The results are completely nonsensical and seem to have nothing to do with what I searched for. The first two hits are to Google, the first about webhp (apparently some virus?) and the other to their chrome page. Other links include things like links to fidelity.com, americanexpress.com, and the huffington post front page.
DDG's results are [mostly] reasonable and populated mostly by things like some recent event where the head of NASA mentioned space security. Though it does have a link to the SF bay area craigslist alongside a couple of other really weird ones. In any case, you can see for yourself. Suffice to say they're definitely not just replicating results, at least not from Bing.
Where, after you get past a bunch of stuff about their "instant answers" gets to the root of it:
> We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we also source from a variety of partners, including Verizon Media (formerly Yahoo) and Bing.
So yes, maybe I was wrong saying results come only from Bing. But they definitely source their search results.
I'm not knocking DDG here, I use it as my daily search driver. If you were to try and build a search engine today with limited resources would you really try to start from scratch? The way DDG has approached the problem (by sourcing results from other search engines) seems like the only reasonable way to be even remotely competitive.
Yes, they source their results. This is not the extent of your claims. You were stating that they directly rip from other engines meaning that, in your words, "In order for search results to get better on DDG, they first need to get better on their partner search engines".
That is simply completely wrong, as my example showed extremely clearly. The one and only weakness of sourcing from third parties is that if they are not indexing some site, you also will not be indexing it. You were implying they are directly dependent on the ordering and quality of the other engines, which is obviously and provably false.
First of all, I never claimed that DDG results were exactly the same as Bing's. I said the top results were the same. Admittedly, I used less random terms than you did.
However, I did try your experiment, same terms. The top results from DDG were indeed found in the top results of both Yahoo and Bing. You are right though, not in the same exact order. Then I tried the same terms on Google. There is only one shared result on the front page (the Nasa chief one). I went through 4 more pages of Google, none of the results that both DDG, Yahoo, and Bing all seem to share were on any of them. This aligns more with the point I was trying to make:
DDG is going to have a hard time improving their results if the information they're getting is from inferior sources to begin with. It's like working on incomplete information. No matter how good their algorithm is that ranks and filters results from other search engines, if those other engines suck, there is no way their results can be that much better. If, for a given term, Yahoo returns site A, B and C, and Bing returns Site D, E and F, is there a way for DDG to determine that actually site G is the better result? The results can't appear out of thin air.
Also, you claim with emphasis, that the only weakness of sourcing from third parties is the indexing problem. That's absurd.
Obviously, a huge weakness on sourcing from other search engines is that DDG are bound to the terms of those partnerships. Or a complete severance of them. No partners, no search results.
One result of the terms in these partnerships is that DDG can't provide a search API. There was a time I thought perhaps I could write a developers search engine with DDG as the backend. Turns out you can't, and as a small search engine popular with HN types, I feel like that is a huge weakness.
Obviously yes it is possible for DDG to determine that result G is "better", and prioritize accordingly. "Better" of course is subjective, but this search is a pretty clear example that they're doing something right. They do source results from Bing yet their engine determined, quite accurately, that Bing's results are really quite bad.
But beyond that, consider the bias in your statement. You're claiming, by definition, that anything that doesn't match Google results is "inferior". I found Google's results here to be much better than Bing (not a high bar to pass) but much worse than DDG. Here are the results I get for Google, though I think it's also worth mentioning the hassle. For the privilege of being able to search I was required to go through a captcha. This is presumably because I prefer to use TOR when directly using Google. Then there's some giant "privacy reminder" at the top that requires me to agree to have all my data hoovered up and combined across services to generate a profile on me. Presumably a GDPR related thing since each time this happened it was on an EU exit node, though it used dark patterns to coerce consent which was supposed to be unlawful to my knowledge. Anyhow, after that nonsense I get:
- 4 monetizable links (Amazon 'space taco' lighter, 2x space taco restaurant facebook pages, some soundcloud 'space taco' band)
- 4 nonsensical links of google linking to its own books.google service
- 1 link to FT.com where Neumann raised $700m through share sales.
I changed my IP a couple of times and got similar results - the monetizable ones were always the same (order varied - though always at the top), so I expect this is probably at least similar to what you got. Of course it's silly to debate what results should be returned for an intentionally nonsensical query, but nonetheless I think this inadvertently ends up emphasizing what each engine's priorities are. DuckDuckGo tries to return whatever results are likely most appropriate for what you searched for. Google tries to return whatever it can make the most money from. And Bing... well Bing is "special."
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I do fully agree with you that being tied to the partnerships is potentially exploitable by the partner. And as DDG continues to grow this could become an issue if, for instance, Microsoft decides they have more to gain by undermining DDG than they do by continuing to partner and profit alongside them. My "only" was in reference to the quality of the search, which is what we were discussing.
I always end up missing Google's operator behavior.
"Kubuntu" OR "KDE" -gnome site:forums.ubuntu.com
It's really powerful to require that every result must contain either "Kubuntu" OR "KDE" exactly, especially when searching technical projects that have variant spellings / brandings.
Google actually honors that for you? It seems for me that no matter how hard I try to tell it that I _absolutely_ want an exact search term, it tells me to go fuck myself and returns results that don't include it. DDG seems to do a much better job at honoring this.
Look Google, if you can't find any pages with my search term, it's OK to return nothing! That's valid! It means I need to change my query! Stop trying to make a square peg fit a round hole!
It may work for that query but it doesn't work for the query in general, especially with multiple words.
I run into this frequently when searching error messages. Quoting the error is useless, it still returns pages that contain parts of the quoted string.
Putting terms in double quotes works perfectly for me on Google, forcing results to contain the exact term. I use this very often and never have problems with it. So it's puzzling to see comments that it doesn't work.
I've had many cases where I put exact terms in double quotes, but the Google search results still contained pages that do not contain the quoted text at all. It doesn't happen often, but it's often enough to be frustrating.
When I first started using DDG, I had a similar experience but every time I went back I'd read some tech news that showed that I really needed to take privacy more seriously. So I'd be back on DDG again. Then I'd use the google bang for stuff that didn't seem privacy sensitive and where I was getting results that didn't seem all that great.
Ultimately though I'm a lazy person and once I figured out how to get DDG to return the results I was really looking for (e.g. the wiki bang and weather thing) I eventually quit using google for almost everything.
DDG is fine for me, even if it's not perfect and even if occasionally I have futz with search parameters or very occasionally fall back to a google bang. I guess I'll take good enough with better privacy than occasionally better with privacy baggage on the scale that I can only guess about.
I found it inferior back in 2015 for programming but not general use. Nowadays I don't ever get frustrated looking for things, whether for work or personal use. What deficiencies are you finding?
Interesting. I've been using DDG exclusivley for about 2-3 years now and I forget that I'm not using Google half the time. It's just my normal state at this point.
I always had the impression Google is pretty good at guessing what you want even if you try your best to enter crappy search terms, whereas you have to tell DDG more 'exactly' what you want, pre-Google era-style. But if you do the results are usually spot on. But I've been on DDG for years so I'm not sure if this distinction is still there.
One of the most noticeable differences for me is how much copyright cebsorship there is on google now. For many years it was possible to find a stream for most popular stuff on the first page of google, but now it can be quite challenging to find anything worthwhile. Google has ended up efficiently delisting all the good pages, leaving only attack sites and endless popup ad circlejerks for their users. It's night and day compared to ddg.
After 3 or so years using DDG full-time, it’s a shock landing back on Google and realising how many ads there are.
Out of everything on the first page of a recent search, there were only 8 actual results - everything else was an ad.
DDG feels to me like Google did when it first launched - simple, fast and unobtrusive. A world away from the incumbents, like AltaVista and Yahoo, that were intent on becoming ‘portals’, owning every moment of a user’s online activity.
I use an AdBlock Plus & uBlock Origin, and when I Google something -- by default -- basically my entire search is ads. Do you need to add some configuration to uBlock Origin or AdBlock Plus? Are you in the US?
I just use DuckDuckGo instead on Desktop. But since I have an Android phone, it's just easier to use Google.
Wait, do you use AdBlock Plus AND uBlock Origin at the same time? That might be your problem - when I run uBlock Origin alone it blocks all those Google search ads.
AdBlock Plus has a program where they allow companies to buy spots on their ad whitelist, and I imagine that's interfering with uBlock Origin's more absolutist stance.
I will be that guy and probably disliked for this but I use Bing. I get points for just doing what I always do and I almost always get what I need. I’ve got a few hundred Thousand points saved up and am waiting to get enough to buy something new. When Bing occasionally sucks like it does when searching for news, I go to Google.
I use DDG as part of TOR but the results are just not that good, and I really want them to be.
Bing was an invaluable resource while traveling in China. Wikipedia is blocked by the GFW, and I was really missing it since I use it daily. Adding "wiki" to the end of most search terms on the English version of Bing will bring up a little section with almost the entire Wikipedia article loaded through Bing's domain, bypassing the block without the need for VPN, Shadowsocks, etc.
I tried to use DDG so hard. Changed my browser, changed my phone. I have pretty much gotten away from Google for everything except Youtube. I ended up using !G around 25% of the time and got tired of it.
So I ended up switching to Ecosia which is a cleaner front-end for Bing. I never really find myself using using google for search anymore. Bing is good enough.
It takes a lot to even replicate some of the functionality of Google search. Huge credit to the DDG team for providing the second-best search results out there along with a much cleaner and privacy focused UI.
I do occasionally go back to Google but that's for less than <10% of my queries and when I do it's after a few attempts at finding something on DDG.
For those of you using a single search engine: try DDG, but if your query doesn't get the results you want (less often these days), prepend it with !g to search google instead.
I wonder, do the DDG people use the `!g` things as a way to further-refine their search algorithm?
For example, if someone does the !g thing, after searching for the same thing without !g, that implies the DDG search didn't give them what they wanted. Conceivably then DDG could run that search themselves and use that for training their algorithm a bit more, mooching off of Google's results.
There's probably some kind of horrible implication there that I'm not thinking of.
on one hand, as a dedicated user of !g on DDG for many years, my urge/need to use !g has gone down almost exponentially (despite being firmly in muscle memory)
on the other hand, when I do turn !g, I find more and more that I still don't find what I'm looking for
this is either down to:
(a) Google's results getting worse over time
(b) my searches getting more obscure over time
(c) selection bias due to DDG solving for my less obscure searches
As a frequent user of google, I think a is not to be underestimated. Google has gotten more aggressive with stemming and other forced "corrections" to your search. This (I assume) helps in general but can frequently result in undesirable search results if you are attempting to search for words like in spelling but unrelated to common words or uncommon senses of common words, both of which seem to occur somewhat frequently in technical jargon.
There's something to be said also, I think, for the ever expanding mountain (of 90% shit) that is user-generated webcontent that must be sifted through by any search engine: The problem of searching the internet is itself getting harder and harder by the day.
I only really find myself consistently needing to g! for super recent results, like breaking news or a sports score.
Admittedly some of Google's advantage here is the sheer scale of the compute resources they throw at their crawlers, and I don't know if DDG actually maintain their own index, but I'd love it if they noticed and slowly added those sites to some kind of more-frequently-updated list.
The horrible implication is something like searching for:
> "is satoshi nakamoto really tombert from hacker news?"
Logging the searches back at the Duckquarters is exactly the kind of privacy invasion you use DDG to avoid. Also they would have the burden of proving it's not PII for GDPR purposes even if they don't log any IPs etc.
You don't have to put "!g" at the beginning of the query. Just put it somewhere in the query -- at the end, or in the middle, anywhere where it is separated by whitespace.
Also, many soft-keyboards these days let you type common symbols, including "!", by holding down some key, or holding down a key and dragging across a popup. This makes re-searching on google take 5 or 6 taps -- one to edit the query, an optional one to drag the cursor to be between search terms, three for " ", "!", and "g", and one for the "enter" "search" button.
That's nice but (you guessed it) I don't have iOS. I think it should just be a part of DDG, as it is also the simplest solution. Perhaps they can just show a bunch of common "!..." buttons, so they don't even have to use the name of Google.
I recommend going with !sp or !s instead of !g, so you use Startpage.com. It is a search engine that uses Google as the back-end, but removes all trackers and logs.
My startpage results are a subset of my Google results with poor relevancy. I understand it's supposed to be the same, but in practice it's not, and no amount of tweaking settings, cookies, etc fixed it. It's so odd.
The problem is google isn't just a search engine it's the information seeking megalith of our time. That little text input takes what you give it, determines what the hell you're trying to figure out, and delivers results on a level that just vastly supersedes anything else. I love the concept of DDG and would greatly prefer to use it, it's just a painfully inferior tool and shows no signs of coming close to what google offers.
That's great if it works for you, but doesn't match my experience. I've been using DDG for years now, and rarely bother with Google any more. If I can't find what I need with DDG I have better luck with Bing than with Google.
The simplest explanation is that you don’t know how good Google is anymore.
I use DDG because I think it’s important and have family members doing it too, but it costs us time when we search because the search completion is poor and the results aren’t as intelligent as I expect. Perhaps maintaining those expectations is my problem to solve, but that does not make the product’s deficiencies go away.
The amount of user-specific customisation Google does is generally overrated. For the vast majority of searches, I see only minor shifts in ranking when comparing logged-in to anonymous. Case in Point: [crystal] currently gives me meth and stones before programming, even though I have done quite a few programming-related (and even crystal-lang specific) searches.
Yes, because their search completion is very good, they still have great local data if you give them a city or a zip, and they’re better at inferring what you meant to search for when you make a mistake.
That could be. Unless I'm actually using it, I block all requests to Google servers. I have good enough results with DDG and Bing that it's not worth enabling Google's spyware.
I don't bother with google anymore. In fact, google's search results for me have actually declined over time (maybe because I'm using it less?). DuckDuckGo is designed for someone like me. The Bang syntax is very tech friendly and it provides me with instant search access to hundreds of sites saving me precious time. It's faster if I know where the data is than google.
> That little text input takes what you give it, determines what the hell you're trying to figure out, and delivers results on a level that just vastly supersedes anything else.
Do you mean, for everyday services, for general knowledge, or for specialized information? Personally I am distrustful of "intelligent" results, but that's because I assume they will be gamed (especially for services). Although it's probably silly for weather or something.
The most aggravating thing is trying to ask about something specific and being flooded with content about something basic and probably more popular (of course stripping rarer keywords because why not). But I'm personally interested in search, so curious about people's experiences.
I've been using DDG for a half year now, and I'm digging it. A feature request: A quick language filter! I use three languages in my daily live. However, false friends (similar words with different meanings) and the fact that some topics are more relevant in some languages make searching sometimes an agony. Google suffers from this too; I can change languages from the settings, but what I really want is a quick language filter, similar to the date filter, since I tend to juggle with that many, many times per day. Or would, if it weren't painful.
I use DDG daily and have been for nearly 2 years now. My biggest complaint UI wise is that there are no page numbers. Yes, you can keep pressing "More results" but you can't easily resume or share search result pages etc. It's an insanely useful feature that is missing and I have no idea why.
I tried DDG for around a month. I really wanted to like it, but the results were just too inconsistent. I ended up using !g about 90% of the time after getting unsatisfactory results, which just doubled my time spent searching for what were sometimes quite simple things.
I know it's more, but DDG really just feels like bing with privacy.
I ended up using startpage.com which basically gives you Google results without all the stalky tracking nonsense. Now I only resort to Google for about 10% of searches.
I've been using duckduckgo as my primary search engine for a few years now, since 2014. It has improved significantly over that period of time and I am happy that it has come so far. I used to use g! flagrantly, but now I find myself using it less and less. Still, I wish there was some way to stop using yt!
I think it's time to switch to the dark theme. Thanks duckduckgo!
Something that just strikes me as weird is how the tabs (for images, videos, news, etc.) aren't really tabs to different pages, but rather some sort of inline expansion thing. When I look at images, the regular results are still there if you scroll to the bottom. They're there for a second until infinite scroll triggers and loads the next batch of images, pushing the regular results to the bottom again.
It's not really an inconvenience. It's just weird. Why do it like that?
Search is broken, almost all searches I do now, the first dozen links are all crap (no content, gamed the algorithm). This is for Google or DuckDuckGo. I hate the modern internet.
I wish Google introduced a dark theme too. Hopefully all sites on the internet become dark friendly one day without using external software to make it happen.
The idea is to have one OS-wide dark theme switch and your browser to expose that preference to the websites. Latest iOS/Android/Windows already have that OS-wide preference, but, you know, it'll take quite a while before your favorite websites start supporting it.
As your link says, it already works for Firefox, Safari, and Chrome, which to me makes it "a thing." The only big browser that (apparently) doesn't support it is Edge.
I think it's utilized more than we might think. DDG put up pretty big bill-boards around a lot of small and large cities. I believe those were mostly around "tech-forward cities" because it might be an easier crowd to get under the fold. They have a neat stats page where they track site traffic. https://duckduckgo.com/traffic It certainly looks promising. I've switched to ddg as my primary search, and I regularly do find queries that goog answers better. My partner often uses one of my devices and they have not complained about not being able to find what they were looking for.
There's certainly power of default at play where people just don't want something seemingly unfamiliar, but there's also plenty of queries that the big G answers without a sweat that DDG just can't seem to gather info on.
Anyways, that's a long winded way of saying that yea, I think a respectable number of "real world" people use dduckgo.
I actually emailed them (the have a specific address for suggestions) with this idea. It would be useful if there were topic specific search modes, coding would be an example, that weighted certain domains over others (like stackoverflow and readthedocs). You could imagine this being useful for other topics as well.
Of course I never got a response. I think it might be impossible due to their model. They aren't really a search engine, more like a search aggregator, they get results from Bing mostly if I remember correctly.
Genuine question, what would putting StackOverflow first improve compared to running "!so query", redirecting to SO's own search? These bang notation commands are often easy to guess, similarly !gi (I use it often, maybe should try more of DDG Images after reading the OP), !gscholar etc.
I do like having an alternative general search engine, for one. So imposing a "coding" restriction would be a little sad.
Maybe bangs could also indicate topics inside normal search. (edit: sorry, already suggested by a sibling!)
It seems to only be UI improvements - the search itself is still terrible. I have DDG as my primary search engine, and I would say I have to repeat 50% of the queries in google, which has actual useful results after the first half page of ads.
In the past year or so I feel like I've had to resort to bangs like !g more and more. It's like Boolean searches don't work with DDG anymore. Quotation marks in particular seem meaningless to it.
One thing that makes it impossible to switch to DDG for me is how bad the automatic correction is for simple typos and such. Google is incredibly good at offering to correct your search to what you meant if you completely botch the typing, eg. mashing “havlrt news” is fine to get here.
DDG often can’t even correct single letter typos where the character is adjacent. On a phone there is usually no autocorrect or word suggestion in the search box as it doubles as the URL bar, so this means you have to manually fix typos to get the right results.
I'm a fan of ddg but have recently switched exclusively to ecosia. Sure, it's Bing. But the results I get are pretty decent. Only occasionally do I have to go to Google for better results.
Last week I had a lot of issues with DDG where it barely returned a single page for some development-related queries it shined on before. I am wondering if something went wrong with their algorithms? I also periodically observed disappearance and reappearance of certain sites as a result of the same query (and not just different ranking, but them either completely vanishing from the results or you could get to them at some point).
I've now completely switched to DDG. I still occasionally use !g, but it's quite rare.
The results have been getting much better over time and I'd argue that the quality of Google's results is actually declining. Some queries return almost an entire 1st page full of ads.
Please make search the focus of the mobile app. It’s more like a browser and it’s much too hard to tap the top of the phone for the search box. It should be more like the Google app. Make it easy to quickly search.
If every search engine, and most websites, could stop displaying local results (which have nothing to do with what I search) that would be fantastic.
Why in the world would you show me local results in the local language when I'm searching in English? Google is the worst offender, they so "helpfully" run stuff through their own translate, resulting in a special kind of garbage SERPs.
Yes, I know there's settings, but I just can't be bothered to login every time on a different device or browser. And personalized search has its own problems.
I noticed Past Year a few days ago. I had hit the drop down to use Past Month, saw Past Year and thought, whoops I'm on Google. This eliminates the top reason I fallback to !g.
Background Color: #002b36
Header Color: #073642
Result Title Color: #fdf6e3
Result Visited Title Color: #93a1a1
Result Description Color: #839496
Result URL Color: #268bd2
Result Hover, Module, and Dropdown Background Color: #073642
> If you've selected a different theme (or have customized your theme) you can open the settings dropdown on the SERP and click the theme that matches your OS theme, and DuckDuckGo will begin matching your OS theme automatically moving forward.
Unfortunately this has the side effect of clearing all my three customizations and forcing me to use the default. Is there a way to keep the theme colors but use my own font?
Daily users and lately I use !g three out of ten searches which is a decrease. Apple Map integration and its recent satellite view is great!
Things I still use Google for are...
- getting Distance from one city to another
- getting X business locations nearby with hours
- movie times/listings
And unfortunately
- email...would love to use a DDG email service .. wish DDG would somehow let me use my iCloud email through its interface. I and I think millions of others would move away from Gmail then.
I've been using DDG for the past three years and I'm impressed. The first few months of transition wasn't that easy as I' missing those Google results with dates. As of now, I would fall back to !g to get a quick overview of events(those tabs when you search e.g. champions league, whatever Google called it).
I prefer DDG over other search-engines any day, the thing I love best is that the search results are impersonal to me, the problem with Google is that it learns your preferences and ends up being just an echo chamber for your own opinions
I have recently switched to DDG as the main search engine on all my devices, home and work. My estimate that 80% of all my queries are done with DDG, turning to Google and local Yandex only rarely.
I'd use the DDG iOS app if only the search field wasn't at the very top, out of reach in one-hand phone typing... It's terrible UX on anything but the smallest phones out there.
For some unknown reason, nobody can post a criticizing comment on HN about DuckDuckGo poor search engine and the excessive and aggressive marketing used by the company without being punished, his comment getting buried and even getting banned.
DuckDuckGo has one of the most successful and complex shilling online campaign armies on "tech"-related forums for years and years now.
Would you please stop breaking the site guidelines with accusations about astroturfing and shilling? These perceptions are overwhelmingly in the eye of the beholder, and posting them casually without evidence is one of the worst discussion-degraders. Moreover you did it in another context recently too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20882548. Not cool.
Okay, but how do you know Duck Duck Go is privacy orientated?
Duck Duck Go is:
- A privately-owned, for-profit corporation based in the U.S. and subject to its laws
- Closed source software that is not open to the open-source community
- Not doing third party privacy or security audits to verify claims of privacy
- Basically a reskin of Bing (and Yandex) search engines while trying to masquerade as one
The social media (and HN) comments promoting it are nearing creepy levels considering there is nothing to back up it's claims of privacy. Throw in their online promotions across Quora and other sites and their privacy-oriented branding efforts are suspicious considering they don't back them up.
> Okay, but how do you know Duck Duck Go is privacy orientated?
My privacy results are not different than yours (assuming we have the same region set up). Ads that are shown are purely context-based. There's no account to which my search data is tied to. My device makes no third-party connections when opening the results page.
That's better than 95% of the web. Perfect is the enemy of good.
If you like DDG, recommend it to friends and coworkers. I usually put a link in newsletter if appropriate.
Also, I've found that DDG cannot consistently display a weather forecast widget for the query "[zip code] weather". Sometimes it will show a weather forecast, and other times it will not display it--very frustrating. Any idea why? Even just refreshing the results will switch to displaying the weather widget, which leads me to think it's either a bug (I'm in Firefox), or they don't actually have the data for my zip code and are going to fetch it after I make my request?
!wu = weather underground !owm = open weather map !nws = national weather service
to name a few alternatives.
curl wttr.in
Weather.com is pure evil when it comes to tracking and clickbait. It's also slow as hell.
There's no scenario in which I already know which weather source I want to use, memorize its ! command, navigate to DDG, then enter that ! command. That's too many jumps. If I want the weather from weather underground or whatever, why would I ever go to DDG to start with?
Anyway this is just a workaround for when the weather infobox doesn't automatically show up in the DDG UI, which it normally does.
Maybe try that?
You can also go directly there. [1]
Change the 1000000 to however many results you want to remove from the top of the results list.
1: https://millionshort.com/search?keywords=weather+22222&remov...
Where as the ‘official’ site has a long load time due to design bloat, videos and other non-content which can’t be blocked with a simple blocker because it’s a part of the actual website.
Google seems to assume name brand websites have good content. I rarely agree.
I was really hoping the title meant like it read. Maybe my hopefulness was reading too much into 'Search Improvements.'
It is also possible that I don't need a search engine. I'm guessing that at least half of the questions/searches result in a post on SO or Wikipedia. There's probably a quarter of them that shoot me to some Medium entry. I guess I could always just bookmark those sites and skip the search engine..
If there were some way I could just use a hotkey to redo the same search in google, this wouldn't be such a big deal, but having to break up my flow with all the extra copy/pasting or retyping is getting frustrating.
Saves quite a lot of time.
I'd love to know what those 70% of your queries look like.
(One interesting observation: when first switching, I found that I liked the DDG results a lot better when I styled them to look like Google results; they felt more "right" somehow.)
Google proper has several value-adds besides the search results. Solving math equations put in the search bar for example. I usually use a dedicated service for things like converting feet to meters instead of typing it into google.
Perform a search on DDG, then do the same search on Bing. You'll notice the first results are the same.
In order for search results to get better on DDG, they first need to get better on their partner search engines (which I believe Bing is the main) so as far as I can tell it's out of their control.
You search for the thing and you find the thing. Why do you expect the results, especially the top results, to be different? Is there any other evidence that they are not doing searches themselves?
100% match between DDG and Yahoo from my tests
I tested this by choosing to search for something completely random that would return unusual results and give a decent indicator of whether or not DDG was just copy-pasting results, so to speak. I searched for "extent space taco secure", no quotations. Bing seems to have exploded when I searched for this. The results are completely nonsensical and seem to have nothing to do with what I searched for. The first two hits are to Google, the first about webhp (apparently some virus?) and the other to their chrome page. Other links include things like links to fidelity.com, americanexpress.com, and the huffington post front page.
DDG's results are [mostly] reasonable and populated mostly by things like some recent event where the head of NASA mentioned space security. Though it does have a link to the SF bay area craigslist alongside a couple of other really weird ones. In any case, you can see for yourself. Suffice to say they're definitely not just replicating results, at least not from Bing.
> Because of the way we generate our search results, we unfortunately do not have the rights to fully syndicate our results, free or paid.
That page links to: https://help.duckduckgo.com/results/sources/
Where, after you get past a bunch of stuff about their "instant answers" gets to the root of it:
> We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we also source from a variety of partners, including Verizon Media (formerly Yahoo) and Bing.
So yes, maybe I was wrong saying results come only from Bing. But they definitely source their search results.
I'm not knocking DDG here, I use it as my daily search driver. If you were to try and build a search engine today with limited resources would you really try to start from scratch? The way DDG has approached the problem (by sourcing results from other search engines) seems like the only reasonable way to be even remotely competitive.
That is simply completely wrong, as my example showed extremely clearly. The one and only weakness of sourcing from third parties is that if they are not indexing some site, you also will not be indexing it. You were implying they are directly dependent on the ordering and quality of the other engines, which is obviously and provably false.
However, I did try your experiment, same terms. The top results from DDG were indeed found in the top results of both Yahoo and Bing. You are right though, not in the same exact order. Then I tried the same terms on Google. There is only one shared result on the front page (the Nasa chief one). I went through 4 more pages of Google, none of the results that both DDG, Yahoo, and Bing all seem to share were on any of them. This aligns more with the point I was trying to make:
DDG is going to have a hard time improving their results if the information they're getting is from inferior sources to begin with. It's like working on incomplete information. No matter how good their algorithm is that ranks and filters results from other search engines, if those other engines suck, there is no way their results can be that much better. If, for a given term, Yahoo returns site A, B and C, and Bing returns Site D, E and F, is there a way for DDG to determine that actually site G is the better result? The results can't appear out of thin air.
Also, you claim with emphasis, that the only weakness of sourcing from third parties is the indexing problem. That's absurd.
Obviously, a huge weakness on sourcing from other search engines is that DDG are bound to the terms of those partnerships. Or a complete severance of them. No partners, no search results.
One result of the terms in these partnerships is that DDG can't provide a search API. There was a time I thought perhaps I could write a developers search engine with DDG as the backend. Turns out you can't, and as a small search engine popular with HN types, I feel like that is a huge weakness.
But beyond that, consider the bias in your statement. You're claiming, by definition, that anything that doesn't match Google results is "inferior". I found Google's results here to be much better than Bing (not a high bar to pass) but much worse than DDG. Here are the results I get for Google, though I think it's also worth mentioning the hassle. For the privilege of being able to search I was required to go through a captcha. This is presumably because I prefer to use TOR when directly using Google. Then there's some giant "privacy reminder" at the top that requires me to agree to have all my data hoovered up and combined across services to generate a profile on me. Presumably a GDPR related thing since each time this happened it was on an EU exit node, though it used dark patterns to coerce consent which was supposed to be unlawful to my knowledge. Anyhow, after that nonsense I get:
- 4 monetizable links (Amazon 'space taco' lighter, 2x space taco restaurant facebook pages, some soundcloud 'space taco' band)
- 4 nonsensical links of google linking to its own books.google service
- 1 link to FT.com where Neumann raised $700m through share sales.
I changed my IP a couple of times and got similar results - the monetizable ones were always the same (order varied - though always at the top), so I expect this is probably at least similar to what you got. Of course it's silly to debate what results should be returned for an intentionally nonsensical query, but nonetheless I think this inadvertently ends up emphasizing what each engine's priorities are. DuckDuckGo tries to return whatever results are likely most appropriate for what you searched for. Google tries to return whatever it can make the most money from. And Bing... well Bing is "special."
--
I do fully agree with you that being tied to the partnerships is potentially exploitable by the partner. And as DDG continues to grow this could become an issue if, for instance, Microsoft decides they have more to gain by undermining DDG than they do by continuing to partner and profit alongside them. My "only" was in reference to the quality of the search, which is what we were discussing.
"Kubuntu" OR "KDE" -gnome site:forums.ubuntu.com
It's really powerful to require that every result must contain either "Kubuntu" OR "KDE" exactly, especially when searching technical projects that have variant spellings / brandings.
Look Google, if you can't find any pages with my search term, it's OK to return nothing! That's valid! It means I need to change my query! Stop trying to make a square peg fit a round hole!
It works exactly as expected. If you want an exact match you need to quote the search terms.
I run into this frequently when searching error messages. Quoting the error is useless, it still returns pages that contain parts of the quoted string.
When Google ignores it for me, it is usually on "high value" terms, with lots of potential ad views.
But to say "It works exactly as expected" is only correct for you and your machine.
I think I'll analyze my browser history of Google searches that are similar enough because I'm tweaking the query to match what I want.
Ultimately though I'm a lazy person and once I figured out how to get DDG to return the results I was really looking for (e.g. the wiki bang and weather thing) I eventually quit using google for almost everything.
DDG is fine for me, even if it's not perfect and even if occasionally I have futz with search parameters or very occasionally fall back to a google bang. I guess I'll take good enough with better privacy than occasionally better with privacy baggage on the scale that I can only guess about.
https://twitter.com/ylogx/status/1131152424591339520?s=21
When scrolling with mouse, it feels convenient to have this as a button instead of typing it manually.
Out of everything on the first page of a recent search, there were only 8 actual results - everything else was an ad.
DDG feels to me like Google did when it first launched - simple, fast and unobtrusive. A world away from the incumbents, like AltaVista and Yahoo, that were intent on becoming ‘portals’, owning every moment of a user’s online activity.
Google has become a portal.
I use an AdBlock Plus & uBlock Origin, and when I Google something -- by default -- basically my entire search is ads. Do you need to add some configuration to uBlock Origin or AdBlock Plus? Are you in the US?
I just use DuckDuckGo instead on Desktop. But since I have an Android phone, it's just easier to use Google.
AdBlock Plus has a program where they allow companies to buy spots on their ad whitelist, and I imagine that's interfering with uBlock Origin's more absolutist stance.
I use DDG as part of TOR but the results are just not that good, and I really want them to be.
So I ended up switching to Ecosia which is a cleaner front-end for Bing. I never really find myself using using google for search anymore. Bing is good enough.
I do occasionally go back to Google but that's for less than <10% of my queries and when I do it's after a few attempts at finding something on DDG.
Definitely recommend to anyone for use.
Or use Firefox's smart keywords https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-search-from-address...
You could configure it to use:
The `!g` can show up anywhere, not just at the beginning of your query.
Also, other possible `bang` shortcuts: https://duckduckgo.com/bang
For example, if someone does the !g thing, after searching for the same thing without !g, that implies the DDG search didn't give them what they wanted. Conceivably then DDG could run that search themselves and use that for training their algorithm a bit more, mooching off of Google's results.
There's probably some kind of horrible implication there that I'm not thinking of.
on one hand, as a dedicated user of !g on DDG for many years, my urge/need to use !g has gone down almost exponentially (despite being firmly in muscle memory)
on the other hand, when I do turn !g, I find more and more that I still don't find what I'm looking for
this is either down to:
(a) Google's results getting worse over time
(b) my searches getting more obscure over time
(c) selection bias due to DDG solving for my less obscure searches
I suspect (c)
There's something to be said also, I think, for the ever expanding mountain (of 90% shit) that is user-generated webcontent that must be sifted through by any search engine: The problem of searching the internet is itself getting harder and harder by the day.
Admittedly some of Google's advantage here is the sheer scale of the compute resources they throw at their crawlers, and I don't know if DDG actually maintain their own index, but I'd love it if they noticed and slowly added those sites to some kind of more-frequently-updated list.
> "is satoshi nakamoto really tombert from hacker news?"
Logging the searches back at the Duckquarters is exactly the kind of privacy invasion you use DDG to avoid. Also they would have the burden of proving it's not PII for GDPR purposes even if they don't log any IPs etc.
DDG actually says that they track queries, just no identifying data to them.
So nice to type "vintage flute !e" and land on eBay or "john 3:16 !bLb" straight to a Bible verse.
Do you realize how inconvenient this is on mobile?
It requires 7 (!) taps on the screen to restart the search.
I'll switch to DDG as soon as they implement a "search on Google instead" button at the bottom of their first results page.
Also, many soft-keyboards these days let you type common symbols, including "!", by holding down some key, or holding down a key and dragging across a popup. This makes re-searching on google take 5 or 6 taps -- one to edit the query, an optional one to drag the cursor to be between search terms, three for " ", "!", and "g", and one for the "enter" "search" button.
Search DDG by default —> can’t find results —> click browser search bar again —> click Google icon and does a Google search
Google's results for you are better for you because Google knows too much about you.
A tradeoff for privacy is less relevant search results, or as I like to think of it, access to pages that Google was hiding from me.
to search Google Maps
I use DDG because I think it’s important and have family members doing it too, but it costs us time when we search because the search completion is poor and the results aren’t as intelligent as I expect. Perhaps maintaining those expectations is my problem to solve, but that does not make the product’s deficiencies go away.
I try not to give them any more hooks into my privacy than I need to, so I never search while logged in.
Google is like word, and DuckDuckGo is like vim.
Do you mean, for everyday services, for general knowledge, or for specialized information? Personally I am distrustful of "intelligent" results, but that's because I assume they will be gamed (especially for services). Although it's probably silly for weather or something.
The most aggravating thing is trying to ask about something specific and being flooded with content about something basic and probably more popular (of course stripping rarer keywords because why not). But I'm personally interested in search, so curious about people's experiences.
I know it's more, but DDG really just feels like bing with privacy.
I ended up using startpage.com which basically gives you Google results without all the stalky tracking nonsense. Now I only resort to Google for about 10% of searches.
I think it's time to switch to the dark theme. Thanks duckduckgo!
It's not really an inconvenience. It's just weird. Why do it like that?
The idea is to have one OS-wide dark theme switch and your browser to expose that preference to the websites. Latest iOS/Android/Windows already have that OS-wide preference, but, you know, it'll take quite a while before your favorite websites start supporting it.
There's certainly power of default at play where people just don't want something seemingly unfamiliar, but there's also plenty of queries that the big G answers without a sweat that DDG just can't seem to gather info on.
Anyways, that's a long winded way of saying that yea, I think a respectable number of "real world" people use dduckgo.
None of these improvements point to helping fix that. You've got my attention, but search results need to be better.
If you just focused on "coding related" search results that would make a world of difference. Maybe just put stack overflow on top.
Of course I never got a response. I think it might be impossible due to their model. They aren't really a search engine, more like a search aggregator, they get results from Bing mostly if I remember correctly.
I do like having an alternative general search engine, for one. So imposing a "coding" restriction would be a little sad.
Maybe bangs could also indicate topics inside normal search. (edit: sorry, already suggested by a sibling!)
I know this search was weird...but no I was not trying to type an order for chicken wings.
DDG often can’t even correct single letter typos where the character is adjacent. On a phone there is usually no autocorrect or word suggestion in the search box as it doubles as the URL bar, so this means you have to manually fix typos to get the right results.
* the way they do scrolling by up and down arrow buttons.
* "load more" button instead of normal pagination.
But sometimes I have to use ddg when google forces me to solve recaptcha (this often happens when I connect via mobile network).
The results have been getting much better over time and I'd argue that the quality of Google's results is actually declining. Some queries return almost an entire 1st page full of ads.
Why in the world would you show me local results in the local language when I'm searching in English? Google is the worst offender, they so "helpfully" run stuff through their own translate, resulting in a special kind of garbage SERPs.
Yes, I know there's settings, but I just can't be bothered to login every time on a different device or browser. And personalized search has its own problems.
pro tip: Use !s for StartPage instead of Googling. It is a privacy preserving Google proxy.
https://duckduckgo.com/settings#appearance
Unfortunately this has the side effect of clearing all my three customizations and forcing me to use the default. Is there a way to keep the theme colors but use my own font?
Things I still use Google for are...
- getting Distance from one city to another
- getting X business locations nearby with hours
- movie times/listings
And unfortunately
- email...would love to use a DDG email service .. wish DDG would somehow let me use my iCloud email through its interface. I and I think millions of others would move away from Gmail then.
I wish more sites would do this, but I have an extension for that.
DuckDuckGo has one of the most successful and complex shilling online campaign armies on "tech"-related forums for years and years now.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
What's next, HN commenters hyping Tor and Signal?
Duck Duck Go is:
- A privately-owned, for-profit corporation based in the U.S. and subject to its laws
- Closed source software that is not open to the open-source community
- Not doing third party privacy or security audits to verify claims of privacy
- Basically a reskin of Bing (and Yandex) search engines while trying to masquerade as one
The social media (and HN) comments promoting it are nearing creepy levels considering there is nothing to back up it's claims of privacy. Throw in their online promotions across Quora and other sites and their privacy-oriented branding efforts are suspicious considering they don't back them up.
Yahoo itself is running on top of Microsoft Bing which explains some similarities you have seen.
DDG's official address even was duckduckgo-owned-server.yahoo.net
When you click on ads, of course your IP and search query is sent to Verizon, and Microsoft.
It's even directly sent by the client browser.
My privacy results are not different than yours (assuming we have the same region set up). Ads that are shown are purely context-based. There's no account to which my search data is tied to. My device makes no third-party connections when opening the results page.
That's better than 95% of the web. Perfect is the enemy of good.
Recommending DuckDuckGo is like recommending Ghostery for privacy.
For now the chain looks like this:
Amazon Web Services -> DuckDuckGo -> Yahoo -> Microsoft
Privacy is not the more intermediaries you add, the more private you become.
Same as adding a VPN or a proxy, you just become vulnerable to the proxy operator and all their intermediates and dependencies.
And yes DuckDuckGo is tracking, for example, everything you buy on Amazon.
They are Amazon Affiliates, and as part of how Amazon Affiliates work DuckDuckGo has access to the precise list of items that users bought.
Yes, Cloudflare, NordVPN and DuckDuckGo and Brave and you have the perfect "privacy" setup.
If you want to believe, then go ahead.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html