[HN Gopher] DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use
___________________________________________________________________
DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use
Author : braythwayt
Score : 810 points
Date : 2020-03-06 14:57 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bitlog.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bitlog.com)
| incanus77 wrote:
| Google search was an unfortunate period in my life between my
| otherwise great search history bookends of AltaVista and
| DuckDuckGo. I think I've been on DDG for probably 5-6 years now.
| Results are absolutely good enough.
| jordache wrote:
| no it was garbage for my use case of searching programming
| questions, or searching a business (where it links me to open
| street map, instead of google maps).
| vesinisa wrote:
| I don't know. I am using DDG from outside the U.S. but with
| English as the primary search language. The Google's localized
| results are just an order of magnitude better. I end up re-doing
| almost 10-20% of my searches in Google after being dissapointed
| with DDG results. Most of the time Google results are sadly
| superior.
|
| And don't get me even started in searching in my native language
| (Finnish). DDG is close to useless there, since it can not parse
| the different, obscure word forms we use (although I type word X
| in form A, I want my searches to include results in of word X in
| semantically related forms B and C). Google did not initially
| parse Finnish very well, but it eventually became amzingly good
| something like a decade ago.
| benhurmarcel wrote:
| For the same reason I find DDG very useful when I don't want
| localized results, which is hard to get with Google. I
| currently live in Spain and Google returns mostly Spanish
| results, even on unrelated queries like programming or a device
| review.
| vesinisa wrote:
| Be sure to set your search language to English. It will still
| return localized results, but in English.
| rcarmo wrote:
| I switched six months ago and never looked back. I will
| occasionally use other engines deliberately (Google when I'm
| looking for more obscure things that warrant wading through pages
| of ads and Bing for image searches), but it is now my default on
| most devices.
| Semaphor wrote:
| DDG is great for anything that has many results. Obscure errors?
| They decide to ignore half your query and show you pages of
| completely unrelated results. Even when there is no result, I
| wouldn't know with DDG. For normal searches I never need !g, for
| obscure problems I always do because DDG (or maybe Bing? I don't
| know how the integration exactly works) for some arcane reason
| deliberately breaks their own search.
| [deleted]
| thethethethe wrote:
| I use DuckDuckGo as the primary browser on my phone so I don't
| accidentally search things on my corporate Google account and I
| can say the DDG is demonstrably worse in many situations.
|
| If you have no idea how to spell a complex word, you can type
| absolute gibberish into Google and it will know what you meant.
| DDG will figure it out sometimes but less frequently.
|
| Google also has better answer cards than DDG. Try searching
| "Facebook revenue" on DDG and Google. Google gives you the answer
| and DDG shows you nothing.
|
| The notion that DDG is better than Google, which is only ever
| evangelized in these HN threads, is delusional idealism. Sure,
| DDG has some nice features (namely not being Google), but
| suggesting that it is better than Google and that the billions of
| unwashed masses are wrong about Google is silly and kind of
| elitist.
| elagost wrote:
| Most people, I believe, could be served just fine by most "Free"
| alternatives. Many people, I believe, wouldn't notice if you
| replaced 1) their desktop OS with GNU/Linux, 2) their browser
| with Firefox, 3) their search engine with DuckDuckGo, 4) MS
| office with LibreOffice or FreeOffice, and 5) their various
| smartphone apps and social media services with webapps and/or
| Free alternatives.
|
| How is this surprising? As long as it "just works" most people
| are going to be fine and won't really notice a difference.
|
| I !g occasionally in DDG (which I've been using full time for
| over 4 years) but have found that Google's results aren't better,
| just different.
| boynamedsue wrote:
| I've been wondering how much value a privacy-focused search
| engine has when the links in its search results are full of
| privacy-invading trackers.
| burlesona wrote:
| A few years ago I switched my desktops to use DDG while leaving
| my phone using Google. At first I had to !g all the time. Now
| that's rare.
|
| Now I'm starting to have the other problem. If I search for a
| company, product, person, etc., on DDG it's the first hit. But on
| google I just get a wall of ads and videos, and it's hard to tell
| where the actual homepage is for the thing I'm looking for.
|
| So as of now I would say, google is still better if you're
| looking for something obscure and especially if you don't know
| what it's called. But today I would say DDG is better if you are
| searching for something specific by name.
| kodt wrote:
| Yeah I am finding more often when I add !g I don't get
| significantly better results anymore. I often still do it just
| to check, but don't often find it was worth it.
| Pxtl wrote:
| I've been finding the same. When I first switched to ddg, I
| thought it just wasn't ready yet... But now i feel more like
| search is broken in general. The content farms have won.
| einpoklum wrote:
| > But on google I just get a wall of ads and videos
|
| EFF privacy badger + uBlock Origin can definitely remove all
| the ads (as opposed to skewed search results). As for videos, I
| think you can get uBlock Origin to remove those too (I haven't
| tried because I'm ok with video search results).
| sgt wrote:
| I just googled DDG and nowhere on the front page did I see
| DuckDuckGo. Interesting, although not too surprising.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| Comes up after DDG-the-artist related links at #3 or #4 on
| anonymized google. Seems ideally ranked.
| joe_the_user wrote:
| Note: The Duckduckgo site is the first result for "Duck Duck
| Go", you mean the string "DDG" in particular I'm presuming.
|
| Now, it's not Google's obligation to make Duck Duck go a
| primary result for the DDG abbreviation - DDG the artist is
| apparently quite popular.
|
| It would be nice, yes, if Google didn't just guess the best
| meaning for DDG but instead gave a spectrum of the common
| meanings (though Duck Duck Go might still not deserve to
| appear unless it's search became better imo).
|
| The way that Google has degenerated over the last 5-10 years
| is in more aggressively showing you what they think you want
| rather than what you ask for (and limiting how you ask for
| things to boot). But after using Duck Go Go for two years, it
| seems they have exactly the same problem and that situation
| explained by them being a meta-search engine leaning on Bing
| (which in turn clones Google). At least Duckgogo features
| themselves on a search for DDG but they lean more heavily on
| battleship with the name.
| jlmorton wrote:
| That's because there's a popular musical artist called DDG
| with tens of millions of streams, because guided missile
| destroyers are designated DDG by the US military and NATO,
| and because not many people refer to DuckDuckGo as DDG.
|
| If I search for "Alternatives to Google Search," I do see
| DuckDuckGo, including answers to questions like "Is
| DuckDuckGo Better than Google," with the answer being yes, it
| is.
|
| If I search for "duck search", Duck Duck Go is the first
| option. If I search for "Privacy Search Engine", DuckDuckGo
| is the fourth result.
|
| I don't think there's any conspiracy here.
| markandrewj wrote:
| The bang commands are one of the coolest features of DDG.
| nikanj wrote:
| For something obscure, Google ignores three out of four
| keywords and just produces drivel.
| epicalex wrote:
| This has become increasingly frustrating for me, and I now
| have to overuse quoting to get the things I want.
|
| Why would I include a word if I wanted results that didn't
| include it. I could understand that on later pages to include
| more results, but regularly even the very first results don't
| include one of the key words in my search.
| roydivision wrote:
| This drives me insane. In the early days you only got exact
| matches, now in an effort to sell more ads, or be more
| "helpful" you get random crap. I would pay for a search
| that only returned results with the words you entered.
| CapmCrackaWaka wrote:
| I have found the opposite. For obscure programming questions
| (_ESPECIALLY_ error codes), google always finds me the right
| stack exchange thread on the front page. DDG usually gives me
| crap (but I could see where that crap comes from).
|
| I have noticed that Google's ads have gotten harder and
| harder to distinguish from the valid results. I use DDG until
| I have an obscure question, then I have to go back to Google.
| redm wrote:
| I actually switched to Bing years ago and had a similar
| experience, good enough results 95% of the time. In the last
| year though, I switched to DuckDuckGo, for the obvious privacy
| benefits, and the results are acceptable 99% of the time.
|
| It seems there are real options in search these days.
| halflings wrote:
| Could you give an example <company> or <person> query that
| gives you "a wall of ads and videos"?
|
| I just tried a number of companies and it always shows a full
| column with info about the company (name, logo, stock value,
| founders, social media profiles, etc.)
| tylerchilds wrote:
| "Century 21" for me gives me three ads.
|
| 1. Reali (Google Play app) 2. century21.com 3. Redfin (Google
| Play app)
|
| These three ads take up the entire screen of my phone, with
| official results below this wall.
|
| One observation is that while one of the ads was for exactly
| what I was searching for, they had to pay for that placement.
| I imagine other companies might not bid high enough for their
| own names in the search results.
| mmhsieh wrote:
| question: google has enough on the ball such that if it got out
| of the search business they could keep themselves going?
| tracker1 wrote:
| Unlikely... the bulk of their revenue is based on ad
| payments, either on search or on individual sites. I'd guess
| it's probably 70:30 roughly, since you're probably almost as
| likely to search on google first and click a couple results.
| So they'd probably take a 30% hit just from loss of ads.
| Behavioral information from starting from a google search
| should also not be under-estimated which is probably where
| they get a lot of their behavioral data from to begin with
| (you searched for X, went to Y for Z seconds, etc).
|
| adsense, analytics and search are all pillars of their core
| income sources, if you take one out, the value is seriously
| impacted overall.
| koheripbal wrote:
| I'm still using g! about 50% of the time.
|
| One thing I wish they'd add is to run the calculator if my
| search term starts with "=".
| ThePowerOfFuet wrote:
| Their search results page has a feedback button in the
| corner. Use it! They listen to it.
| teekert wrote:
| My story is the same! Also, when I want colouring pictures for
| my kids, DDG just lets met tap them and print them. That is
| nolonger possible using Google since some months. I also very
| much appreciate the code snippets when (already started typing
| "Googling"!) Searching for code related things.
| lobotryas wrote:
| Pretty sure that's because google got hit with a lawsuit
| about hot linking. DDG will suffer the same fate once they
| get big (and rich) enough.
| minikites wrote:
| I can't say for sure but I bet that's a problem they would
| love to have.
| robotnikman wrote:
| Yep, Getty Images sued them and Google had to remove the
| view images button, making the process of viewing the
| source image more difficult and convoluted.
|
| I've now resorted to using DDG anytime I need to do an
| image search, and have been using it more and more myself
| when searching for anything related to IT or programming.
| SeekingMeaning wrote:
| For those interested there's an open-source Chrome
| extension that brings back the View Image button:
|
| https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/view-
| image/jpcmhce...
|
| https://github.com/bijij/ViewImage
| gman83 wrote:
| Awesome, thanks!
| dublinben wrote:
| Yandex Image search is also very good, with none of the
| annoying limitations that Google has introduced. There
| also seems to be less Pinterest spam as well.
|
| https://yandex.com/images/
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Pinterest spam in DDG is a major annoyance, thou directly
| viewable images compensates somewhat.
| vorpalhex wrote:
| I wish I could permanently remove pinterest from my
| version of the internet - it's literally spam at this
| point that never contains the content I'm looking for and
| adds no value while polluting search results.
| galangalalgol wrote:
| ddg has -site:pinterest.com
|
| but i dont know ho to automatically append that to every
| search, which is what i want.
| AJ007 wrote:
| You can also set your user agent to googlebot and get the
| old google images back. Also the search results don't
| look as bad.
| HenryBemis wrote:
| Regarding coloring pictures, I use coloring.ws (not
| affiliated in any way with the site, just a happy uncle)
| eindiran wrote:
| Now "google" is a common enough word for generic online
| searches that the sentence "I googled 'australian licorice'
| using DuckDuckGo's image search" doesn't sound weird to me.
|
| See definition 2, under the transitive verb form of the
| second etymology:
| https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/google#English
| buzzerbetrayed wrote:
| That still sounds weird to me. I obviously understand what
| you mean, but I still don't like the idea of saying "I
| googled x on DuckDuckGo".
| rapnie wrote:
| You can say "Have a look, I just duck this up.."
| bloodorange wrote:
| I recently had to search for something similar to this:
|
| march 12 2019 + 366 days
|
| and DuckDuckGo gave me exactly what I wanted while Google
| gave me not-very-useful results.
| schoen wrote:
| The date command can also answer this question:
| $ date -d 'march 12 2019 + 366 days' Thu Mar 12
| 00:00:00 PDT 2020
| thewebcount wrote:
| assuming you're on Unix
| tus88 wrote:
| I starting thinking about the Python equivalent of this
| and it was disgusting.
| michael_j_ward wrote:
| This? $ python -c 'import datetime;
| print(datetime.date(2019, 3, 12) +
| datetime.timedelta(days=366))' 2020-03-12
| tus88 wrote:
| Yes.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| For GNU date, yes. BSD not so much (default on MacOS).
| MacOS$ date -d 'now + 30 days' usage: date
| [-jnRu] [-d dst] [-r seconds] [-t west]
| [-v[+|-]val[ymwdHMS]] ... [-f fmt date |
| [[[mm]dd]HH]MM[[cc]yy][.ss]] [+format]GNU$ date -d 'now
| +30 days' GNU$ date -u -d 'now +30 days'
| Sun Apr 5 18:55:12 UTC 2020
|
| (In BSD date, the '-d' argument "Set the kernel's value
| for daylight saving time.")
| skratlo wrote:
| pure gold buddy, thanks for this
| zaat wrote:
| If you are on Windows, (or if you are on Linux but for
| some reason still runs) in PowerShell: > (Get-
| Date).AddDays(365)
| savanaly wrote:
| I literally do this with google all the time though (my
| girlfriend like us to celebrate N * 100 anniversaries).
| Every hundred days or so I go to google and type "500 days
| after [date]" or something to that effect and it works. It
| was the first thing I tried, it works reliably every time,
| and it's google providing the result in the results page,
| which is better than a link to a website that would do it
| for me.
|
| What query did you do on google that didn't give you so
| good results?
| bloodorange wrote:
| The example I gave above should suffice to demonstrate
| the differences. Just copy the second line and paste it
| into both search engines.
| LMMojo wrote:
| Being the socially inept person I am, I would find this
| exhausting.
| a_t48 wrote:
| I just pop open wolframalpha for anything that needs more
| meaning to it. I'll keep DDG in mind for next time.
| Frost1x wrote:
| WA is great for certain more complex mathematical or
| informational queries but usually requires me to dig
| around to find syntax since the NLP isn't as fluid as I'd
| like it to be.
|
| I basically view it as a slightly more friendly/natural
| than traditional Mathematica interface.
| feanaro wrote:
| > Now I'm starting to have the other problem. If I search for a
| company, product, person, etc., on DDG it's the first hit. But
| on google I just get a wall of ads and videos, and it's hard to
| tell where the actual homepage is for the thing I'm looking
| for.
|
| You should also check out Qwant if you haven't. It's like DDG
| in this regard, but even "more so".
| _coveredInBees wrote:
| I've switched to ddg for a while, and the one area where I find
| it really lacking in comparison to Google is that it is very
| poor in surfacing relevant hits from threads on forums or
| stackoverflow. Which is frustrating, as I'm almost more
| interested in results from there when looking up technical
| stuff than some spammy blog. It's gotten to the point where I
| almost always automatically bang out to Google for those types
| of searches.
|
| But it is amazing how much poorer Google results feel to me
| these days compared to from a few years ago. For most regular
| searches ddg does quite well and when I have occasionally
| banged out to Google for the same search, more often than not
| I've ended up preferring the ddg search results.
| ImaCake wrote:
| I experience the same problem as a fairly novice programmer
| who doesn't always know the right term to stick into
| DDG/google.
|
| >It's gotten to the point where I almost always automatically
| bang out to Google for those types of searches.
|
| But this is why I stick with DDG, because it is very very
| easy to check elsewhere with a two letter bang. Even if I
| never used DDG search it would still be valuable to use DDG
| with bangs for wikipedia, google, youtube, etc.
| ce4 wrote:
| It looks more and more like Google wants to convert native
| search hits to paid clicks...
|
| Notice how often when you search for "company" you find the
| company's ad first and then below the native search result...
| willturman wrote:
| Agreed, and the ad is often _immediately_ above the native
| search result 1-2.
|
| I'm guessing clicking the ad costs the company money per
| click, and the native search result doesn't? If I'm
| explicitly searching for a company, and I'd prefer that they
| don't have to incur an advertising penalty on my behalf, I'd
| need to scroll past the first result to the second.
| mekster wrote:
| I never click the ads and always scroll down to the native
| results as I don't want to get involved with their
| marketing games and not to put burden on the content
| providers.
| Balvarez wrote:
| Companies buy those ads on their own search results so a
| competitor can't target them for advertising
| joshspankit wrote:
| Agreed as that's my assumption. Do you have first-hand
| experience and/or a source?
| akiselev wrote:
| Every single company I've ever worked for that advertised
| online had a "cost of doing business" ad budget just for
| buying their own keyword on Google (and Apple iOS
| Store/Google Play Store if they had consumer apps).
| Bigger international companies often have someone from an
| ad consulting firm tracking the major search engines and
| buying keywords for all of the big ones like Google,
| Bing, Yandex, etc.
|
| It's one of those "the sky is blue" type of things in
| advertising. You NEVER want a competitor to have a shot
| at advertising to your potential customers, especially
| when they've gone to the point where they're typing in
| your name into Google so their conversion rate is likely
| significantly larger than your average site visitor.
| ce4 wrote:
| I'm not into that stuff much but this may be the reason
| why there's often bad ads if you search for popular foss
| software binaries like LibreOffice or Gimp.
| pishpash wrote:
| See, this is the kind of thing I knew would happen, rent
| seeking from the rest of the economy because the bar has
| risen and you have to pay, not because you get some
| economic benefit from paying for ads compared to the
| baseline prior to Google.
|
| Google has become a bloodsucker on the economy. You and I
| are the ones paying in higher goods and services costs
| passed on to us. Worse, the bidding has no natural upper
| bound.
| z3t4 wrote:
| The browser vendors are in bed with the search providers.
| You can't bookmark a site or go directly to it, it always
| goes via search. No wonder companies want native apps
| rather then web pages, then the user get an icon on the
| app drawer/desktop, and they don't have to pay the middle
| man.
| londons_explore wrote:
| The cost of an ad depends on its 'quality'. A big part of
| the quality score is based on a model of how useful that
| result will be to the user.
|
| Therefore, ads for a company that appear when the company
| name is clicked are considered highly relevant and useful,
| and therefore have a very high quality score and therefore
| very low price.
| lobotryas wrote:
| That's not google's direct doing. Google sells ads relevant
| to searches so you as a company want to buy ads on your name
| to prevent a competitor for doing the same. Imagine a
| competitor bought did that for tour company. Your business
| would take a hit.
| mekster wrote:
| Has anyone sued someone for buying ad spaces for one's
| company or product name like stepping on domain names with
| malicious intent?
| coldpie wrote:
| I strongly suggest installing an ad blocker. Firefox for
| Android supports ad blockers like uBlock Origin.
| vstuart wrote:
| Non-Docker Local Installation of searX on Linux |
| https://persagen.com/2020/02/02/searx.html
|
| searX is a free metasearch engine with the aim of protecting the
| privacy of its users. * searX does not share
| users' IP addresses or search history. * Tracking cookies
| served by the search engines are blocked. * searX queries
| do not appear in search engine webserver logs.
|
| In addition to the general search, the engine also features tabs
| to search within specific domains:
|
| General | Files | Images | IT | Maps | Music | News | Science |
| Social Media | Videos
|
| Notably: * Each search result is given as a
| direct link to the respective site, rather than a
| tracked redirect link as used by Google. * When
| available, these direct links are accompanied by "cached" and/or
| "proxied" links that allow viewing results pages without
| actually visiting the sites in question. * The
| "cached" links point to saved versions of a page on archive.org,
| while the "proxied" links allow viewing the current
| live page via a searX-based web proxy.
|
| Tip: I do a lot of technical searches (StackOverflow ...) and in
| my preliminary use of searX
|
| I find that selecting "General" (only) as the Default Category
| (in Preferences) gives the best results.
| ara24 wrote:
| I have been using duckduckgo on all browsers, including mobiles,
| for 2-3 years now. There are occasions when I don't get good
| results. But when I try the same query on G, the results are
| equally useless. So, I have since stopped using anything else.
|
| Although, I should say, bing was equally good when I used it
| before duckduckgo, until they added that horrendous news feed in
| the bottom.
| [deleted]
| syphilis2 wrote:
| I'd really like to see people post screenshots comparing Google
| and DDG results for cases where they consider one better than the
| other.
| valleyjo wrote:
| So is bing
| TheRealPomax wrote:
| It really isn't. It was great for a while but has become
| progressively less useful and more nonsense filled in its results
| over the last 2 years to the point where today I still have it
| set as default search engine, but for almost everything
| immediately go "oh ffs" and research with !g added.
| k_bx wrote:
| What's interesting, for me, a Ukrainian guy, it became better
| than Google as a default. Google ignores my settings that set to
| only Ukrainian and English results and constantly throws Russian
| at me, be it Russian Wikipedia (horrible place) or Russian
| version of MDN articles and similar things.
|
| DuckDuckGo is "ok", and often times when you think "omg, results
| are shit, Google would work here", Google shows same results.
| mdrachuk wrote:
| I have ddg setup as default on my laptop, phone and iPad for over
| the year. I'm using google fallback almost half of the time. In
| particular, non-English queries and software development queries
| are way better in google.
| alkonaut wrote:
| It's not. Not even close. There should be some sort of "search
| benchmark" that could show this more objectively.
|
| A table of searches with search queries and the _correct first
| resukt_. In maby cases it's clear what the correct result is
| (Search for a major company and I want their website index page
| for example). In other cases the expected result is "what google
| does", e.g when searching for "123 GBP in USD".
|
| It's not that DDG doesn't let me find what I want eventually,
| it's that it doesn't have the right result as #1 which is
| extremely frustrating when you are used to the I'm feeling lucky-
| click on the first result without reading.
|
| To switch I'd want google quality results with zero added effort
| on my part e.g in learning better DDG-querying or accepting a
| slightly longer time to browse results. That's pretty tough to
| pull off without the resources and data that Google has.
| kjgkjhfkjf wrote:
| If you ask a question at work, and the answer is in the first
| page of Google's search results, then you risk being ridiculed.
|
| Saying "I looked on DDG" will not help you in this case; it will
| likely make the ridicule increase.
| crashbunny wrote:
| Everyone is talking about the quality of results, but how much
| better is it in terms of tracking and sharing data?
|
| ATM I'm using quant.com, a french company bound by European
| privacy laws. It has its own index and I rarely need to use
| google.
|
| I have no idea who is better in terms of privacy but I'm
| preferring the french company over the American duckduckgo atm.
| eddhead wrote:
| Switched to Bing a while ago and have stayed put. Never needed
| Google cos the results are garbage nowadays.
|
| DDG isn't there yet, but Bing reminds me of Google 5 years ago
| encoderer wrote:
| I tried it when I switched to FireFox.
|
| Switched back after 30 days. Still in Firefox.
| k_bx wrote:
| What I don't get is why DDG has no "google it" button. I mean,
| typing !g is not convenient, esp on mobile.
| rovr138 wrote:
| My only issue is with some of the operators. Sometimes they break
| the results in really weird ways.
| zeta0x10 wrote:
| For people complaining about worse local results:
|
| You can also use the `site:` argument on TLDs. E.g.
|
| "kino dresden site:.de"
|
| If you can guess the TLD obviously.
| computerex wrote:
| I have tried to do this a couple times and have always had to
| resort to switching back to Google. As a software engineer I use
| Google heavily and do dozens of searches a day. In my personal
| qualitative experience Google seems to return better results for
| technical queries.
|
| For day to day use I think DDG is more than sufficient however. I
| think DDG is certainly usable even for my work related searches
| but it simply takes longer to arrive to the answer in my
| experience.
| tomxor wrote:
| > Most of my searches relate to my job, which means that most of
| my searches are technical queries.
|
| Recently I've found google infuriating for technical searches
| because it has started automatically searching for "what it
| thinks you meant", which when using technical terms or program
| parameters etc are always wrong.
| jryb wrote:
| I exclusively used DDG for the past couple of years but gave up
| on it recently. I never kept track of how often I used the "!g"
| google fallback but in the past year or so it started to be the
| overwhelming majority of searches, even for simple things like
| the name of an organization.
| allovernow wrote:
| I think this is more of a reflection on how far Google results
| have fallen. But I really glad to see someone gaining at least
| some ground against Google while at least claiming to be privacy
| focused.
| mcyukon wrote:
| I've been using DDG for about the last 2 years. The only thing
| that throws me for a loop once in awhile is that some local
| businesses only have their open hours entered with Google.
| Searching for that business in DDG will show their address but
| not their open hours. Their hours are also not listed on
| facebook, Yelp, or TripAdvisor. Where as on Google, it's right
| there in their little knowledge panel on the right.
|
| A business where this is happening: Pho 5 Star Vietnamese Cuisine
| - Whitehorse Yukon
|
| Other than that, most of the time DDG gets me better results than
| Google. I work in the trades and look up a lot of tools/tool
| reviews and google results are a dumpster fire of bad results
| full of these odd adsites that all look similar, have obvious
| generated URLs, and clone amazon descriptions and reviews. They
| are also ranked high on page 1 of Googles search results, and the
| trust worthy sites are getting pushed down or even to the next
| page.
| guerrilla wrote:
| Funny you should ask. This morning I was apparently talking in my
| sleep, angrily saying "Don't delete my fucking search terms!"
| I've been using DDG for about 5 years but I feel it's actually
| been getting worse in that it more often randomly deletes terms
| when whatever I'm searching for is too specific for it's
| heuristic. On the other hand, Google does the exact same thing.
| scarecrowbob wrote:
| I moved away from Chrome and Google about 6 months ago.
|
| There are two places where I find DDG to be better:
|
| - when I know specifically what page/site I am looking for, but
| don't know the address
|
| - when I am looking for results that are heavily monetized (like,
| say, which pedal steel guitar amp might be suited to my project)
|
| I still find myself using g!, especially when the first couple of
| results for, say, a cryptic log message or esoteric programming
| term aren't giving me what I want.
|
| If I know it's a hard to search term, or a specific image result,
| I will just default to g!
|
| But even if, say, 60% of the time I'm using g!, I still feel
| better because I feel like DDG is a less "creepy" system and
| using it as a default at least leaves some amount of a hole in
| one company's records of my activities. (admittedly, that's a
| goofy and questionable reason).
| smeeth wrote:
| My primary work use of search is looking for academic papers. I
| understand its a rarer use-case but DDG just isn't there yet
| unfortunately. Looking forward to when they are!
| ct0 wrote:
| Ive been using it for 4 years and rarely need to try google. Set
| it as your default!
| duncan-donuts wrote:
| I've been using ddg for a little over 5 years. Those first few
| years of use I found myself using !g a ton, but I think ddg's
| results are actually better now. Not that the search is
| necessarily better, but I don't have to wade through a bunch of
| ads. I know this is a tired position around here but honestly
| there's very little I get out of google's search that I don't get
| from ddg.
| tombert wrote:
| I'd say I still do the !g thing about 10% of the time. DDG is
| good for my average search case of "I really just need to get
| to the wikipedia article but I don't know quite what it's
| titled", or finding an answer on StackOverflow, but if I'm
| doing anything that's kind of niche, I end up having to use
| Google.
| johnydepp wrote:
| I totally agree with you. I have made ddg my default search
| on browser but many times I end up Googling. It has increased
| the time to get the final answere to 1.5 times atleast.
| CivBase wrote:
| I've been using DDG for about three years now and I still use
| !g a lot, but I really shouldn't. Google practically never
| finds what I'm looking for if DDG can't.
| beckingz wrote:
| 90% of the time I use !g, google doesn't have anything in the
| first few pages either.
| iamaelephant wrote:
| It's not
| habosa wrote:
| I am really trying to use DDG more but I dunno, it's not very
| good in my experience.
|
| Specifically these use cases fail: * When
| searching for local business / places. * When
| searching for something I want to buy. * The news
| index doesn't seem very real-time.
|
| However it has some things I love: * !twitter to
| search Twitter! * Sometimes non-personalized results
| help me find something outside my bubble
| madoublet wrote:
| I use DDG, but do not currently recommend it to others. I think
| you still have to be cautious about the results it surfaces b/c
| it doesn't have the same anti-spam mechanisms in place that
| Google has. For instance, I recently searched for holding mail
| for the USPS and the first result was a scam site that looked
| pretty convincing. So, I like the idea of DDG but still do not
| fully trust it.
| tjakab wrote:
| I switched over from Google to DDG back in 2013 and never looked
| back. I use it heavily on a day to day basis ranging from obscure
| java error messages for my job to just general searches and once
| in a great while I have to throw a !g in front of the search, but
| that's really it.
| ebg13 wrote:
| I'll believe this when the third result for "filled torus" isn't
| "Cum Filled Pussy Porn Videos" unless safe search is enabled.
| DDG's contextual awareness is abysmal.
| auiya wrote:
| Maybe you just under-estimate the prevalence of porn searches
| on the Internet? Once could easily argue that your esoteric
| geometry search is likely not nearly as common as the results
| they returned you on what they surmised was a porn search with
| a typo for instance.
| ebg13 wrote:
| If the query engine cannot recognize that nothing in "filled
| torus" indicates anything remotely close to a desire for porn
| results, then it's just not good.
|
| A DDG search for "full prison" with safe search off returns,
| in order: xvideos.com, pornhub.com, xnxx.com, xnxx.com,
| serco.com (holy shit something actually about prisons sort
| of), xxxparodyhd.net, pussyspace.com, fox.com/prison-break,
| youtube.com, youtube.com
|
| That's ridiculously bad. I'm not sure it could be worse if
| they tried.
|
| If there's one astoundingly obvious way that Google's results
| are superior, it's that apparently they first ask themselves
| "is the user looking for porn? [Yes/No]" and then proceed
| from there.
| kazinator wrote:
| Maybe they should simply re-label their settings, for
| starters.
|
| The safe search has three levels: "off", "moderate" and
| "strict".
|
| I would call this the "Adult content" setting, and the
| choices would be "prefer", "neutral", and "suppress". These
| would just map exactly to the semantics of the current three
| choices.
|
| Transitioning to the "prefer" option could require some
| dialog or check box tick-off to state that the search engine
| will emphasize adult material, and the user must confirm
| their adulthood to enable this mode.
|
| Thus under the "Adult content: prefer" setting, you would
| then be getting what you asked for. Your queries are
| interpreted as searching for porn, and "filled torus" behaves
| accordingly.
|
| Since the very presence of such an option might be seen as
| offensive, or as promoting pornography (i.e. that DDG is
| effectively a porn search engine since it has an option for
| preferentially finding adult material), that option could
| itself be hidden somehow. To access the option at all would
| require confirming through a dialog.
|
| Also, there should be a "kid friendly" version of duckduckgo
| at an alternative URL, with immutably safe settings and and
| possibly altered search behaviors for even greater safety.
| Parents could point at that, and block/redirect the main one.
|
| With that idea, what if simply one had to go to
| adult.duckduckgo.com to be able to search with safe-search
| "off", regardless of their settings? I.e. if you go to
| duckduckgo.com, then "off" is treated as "moderate". Only at
| adult.duckduckgo.com is it actually "off".
| clarry wrote:
| > I would call this the "Adult content" setting, and the
| choices would be "prefer", "neutral", and "suppress". These
| would just map exactly to the semantics of the current
| three choices.
|
| I honestly think a better idea would be tagging all
| results. A lot of the irritation with search engines seems
| to come from the fact that words can be so overloaded and
| ambiguous. It's unreasonable to expect that any search
| engine could return what you want in the first 20 results
| if there's no way to narrow down results by tags and
| categories. Porn shouldn't be the only category that gets
| special treatment.
|
| For example, sometimes I want to search about how to make
| foo, and I get pages and pages of results about... crafting
| foo in games. At that point I'd like to turn off all
| results that have to do with games or fiction. Or enable
| categories about.. actually making stuff?
|
| And speaking of games, it's fucking irritating that the
| results aren't tagged so when you try to look up
| information about a game in a series, you get tons of
| results about more recent sequels and it can be really hard
| to filter those out.
| kazinator wrote:
| Confirmed. Wow!
| chadlavi wrote:
| I do find that I get... a lot of porn images in any DDG image
| search past, say, the 20th image result. For literally any
| search term, it seems.
| nice_byte wrote:
| i'm not getting porn but this is nonetheless a perfect example
| of how bad ddg is. first result is the "torus" article on wiki,
| which is _not_ what the query asks for. by contrast, google's
| top result is the "solid torus" wiki article - much better.
| kazinator wrote:
| I reproduced OP's search result by turning the safe-search
| from "moderate" to "off", and searching for "filled torus"
| without quotes.
| ebg13 wrote:
| That's fascinating. If DDG's whole shtick is not profiling,
| what accounts for the difference?
| amelius wrote:
| According to which benchmark?
| alex_young wrote:
| I switched for a month and went back to Google.
|
| DDG is about 95% there for me, but that missing 5% is the crucial
| on point results for technical questions I rely on.
|
| In these cases DDG point me at useful stuff, but not as useful as
| Google, and that edge costs time spent traversing and sorting
| information.
|
| I'm happy there is a good competition here and I'll try again,
| but for now I'm happy with Google results even with the ads.
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| I'm on DDG on all my devices for more than a year. Tried to use
| Google recently on a friend's computer, was shocked by horrible
| UI and lack of links. Not OK,Google.
| microcolonel wrote:
| It used to be that Google would handle unstructured queries
| better for me, but lately things I'm looking for are, without
| explanation, invisible, or demoted to the fifth or sixth page.
|
| For me at least, the average search result quality from
| DuckDuckGo for me is better than Google.
|
| I think there three main difficult scenarios remaining with
| DuckDuckGo:
|
| 1) If your query is very abstract, and you don't know what to
| call the thing you're talking about, DuckDuckGo will less often
| be able to figure out what you're talking about.
|
| 2) If your query is not in English, Chinese, or Russian (and
| probably a handful of other languages which they/their vendors
| support well), it may have a hard time making your query general
| enough to return results.
|
| 3) If you really care about local results, you may not be
| satisfied unless you provide location information in the query,
| and maybe not even then.
| Dkastro92 wrote:
| At the moment it's pretty good if you want to fact check
| something, for almost everything else google is way better
| (especially for news).
| mnd999 wrote:
| Agree, news search is the thing I go back to google most for.
| patricklovesoj wrote:
| Switched to the duck 3 months ago. Don't really feel any pain
| really.
| tyteen4a03 wrote:
| The only reason I am not using DDG for everything is because
| location based search simply suck. I live in Europe but all the
| search results default to US. I wish I can tell DDG that they
| _can_ use my rough location for search queries.
| jccalhoun wrote:
| I wish DDG all the best but for me, "good enough" isn't enough. I
| don't care about tracking so that isn't a real incentive for me
| either. I use Bing for my main search because they bribe me with
| points I can use to buy Amazon gift cards. It regularly isn't
| good enough so I regularly end up at google.
|
| I want more competition in search so I'm glad people use DDG but
| it isn't for me yet
| SirLotsaLocks wrote:
| It really is, I've been using ddg for a few months now near
| exclusively. The bangs, though I still haven't gotten
| particularly fluent in them, really help sell it for people who
| aren't sure (like I was). Now like others in this thread have
| said, for more obscure things like when im bug fixing I use
| google but for most things ddg is sufficient.
| unixsheikh wrote:
| I think I switched to Duckduckgo about 3 years ago and I have not
| done any searching on Google since then (with a very few
| exceptions just to compare).
|
| I have been very happy with the results Duckduckgo provides.
|
| The only exception, which is something I find really annoying, is
| when you want to limit the search to something specific using
| quotes and it ignores the quotes and provides results that are
| completely useless.
|
| Startpage.com respects the quotes.
| wycy wrote:
| Agreed. I tried it a few times over the years and found the
| results to be pretty poor, but I tried again recently and found
| the results to be good enough to fully switch both my computer
| and phone to DDG.
|
| Although I'm fully switched over, there are 2 drawbacks:
|
| * Since DDG tracks you less, the results for local searches may
| be worse. If you're in Boston, TX you'll probably want to search
| for "boston, tx restaurants" whereas I'm guessing Google could
| handle "boston restaurants" if your location is in Boston, TX.
|
| * Finding brand new results seems a bit harder. I found this
| especially true when searching for election results. Searching
| for, e.g., "nevada election results" was showing me results from
| 2016 and 2018 on the day of those elections this year. Now the
| DDG results seem to correctly point to 2020 results.
| IggleSniggle wrote:
| Yeah I don't like that DDG interface limits you to timeframes
| of Last Day/Week/Month/Year. There are lots of good reasons to
| want to search a particular timeframe!
| saalweachter wrote:
| > Google could handle "boston restaurants" if your location is
| in Boston, TX.
|
| Location is the single biggest implicit factor for Google
| search results; "restaurants" would probably get you what you
| are looking for (well, ignoring that it's an overly broad
| query, and most places have too many restaurants for a simple
| ranking of them to really be that helpful).
| onychomys wrote:
| I live in Rochester, MN, and that's how I can say with some
| certainty that google doesn't do a good job of using your
| location in their search algorithm. If you just search for
| something simple like "Rochester library hours", it'll default
| to Rochester NY. Everybody in my town has learned that we have
| to use "Rochester MN library hours". I get that the one in NY
| has ten times more residents than we do, but it's not like
| we're some backwater here!
| samatman wrote:
| The main thing I still use g! for is "wolfram lite".
|
| I just tried "3 watts * 4 hours" on Google, it gave me the answer
| in joules (which, I think situationally watt-hours would be the
| better unit, but...) and DDG gave me a top hit of a site that
| could do the conversion for me.
| staticassertion wrote:
| I've been using DDG for years. It's perfectly fine. What I've
| found is I don't use general search engines much in general
| anyways - I use ddg macros like !rust to search rust docs, or
| other common places I search.
| jaggs wrote:
| General day to day searches? DDG is great for me Niche or deep
| dive searches? Still !g I'm afraid
|
| Big plus is that DDG is getting better every month. Google seems
| to be getting worse (ads, fluff etc).
| Thaxll wrote:
| I strongly disagree, especially when you have all the Wikipedia /
| contact / google map embedded into Google search, with one click
| it can call phone number from a restaurant.
|
| Edit: To add more, it's all those details that makes Google
| better than other, search engine are not just for searching
| things it's all about the display and relevance.
| burkaman wrote:
| DDG does that too. Most restaurants I search for have a box on
| the side with phone number and info pulled from Yelp, and a map
| in whatever provider you want to use.
| simias wrote:
| I don't like that stuff in Google, so I'm fine with DDG not
| over-doing it. Wikipedia overview is fine, but the many widgets
| just get in the way IMO. If I want a map I go on maps. If I
| want reviews I go on a review website.
|
| Like if I type "apple" on Google search the only web result I
| get is apple.com, everything else is taking with tangentially
| related widgets: https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=apple
|
| Special points for the IMO completely useless "people also
| search for" widget.
|
| DDG tones it down a lot more:
| https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=apple&ia=web
|
| Here without scrolling I can see potentially useful links to
| iCloud, Apple TV, Apple's support etc...
|
| Back when I first used Google its main selling point was that
| it was lean and clean and with decent results. DDG is like that
| for me these days.
| brann0 wrote:
| Mmmh, if you search for a place in the maps tab instead of the
| general one you usually have a telephone url you can tap to
| start a phone call.
|
| I still find that you're using a very specific use case of a
| search engine to completely dismiss not using a different
| search engine.
| [deleted]
| dredmorbius wrote:
| DDG crossed this threshold for me years ago, and I've been using
| it consistently since 2013. (With fairly frequent statements to
| that effect on HN.)
|
| For much of that time the principle justifications were 1) It Is
| Not Google, 2) results are roughly comparable, and 3) an improved
| privacy impact.
|
| Over the past year or two, the rationale's shifted: results _and
| most especially experience_ are markedly better.
|
| Google's polluting the SERP with advertising, bringing to mind
| the environment _into which Google first emerged in the late
| 1990s_ , with what many at the time considered a mature search-
| engine environment, is most especially notable.
|
| My use of console browsers and commandline queries ( _not_ a
| typical use case, though extraordinarily convenient) is another
| huge factor.
|
| _Google is now utterly unusable in console-mode browsers._
|
| By contrast, the default DDG site _works_ , and works well, and
| the "lite" site is ... amazeballs: https://duckduckgo.com/lite
|
| As a Bash/bourne shell function: ddg ()
| { /usr/bin/w3m
| "https://duckduckgo.com/lite?q=$*&kd=-1" }
|
| As of a few weeks ago, DDG added "region" and "time" selectors to
| the lite results page, matching the capabilities recently added
| to the default DDG site. The fact that "lite" not only works but
| is actively maintained speaks volumes.
|
| The search box is one tab away (it's 12 in Google).
|
| _Search results are directly clickable._ I don 't know what new
| idiocy has infected Google, but when I view a Google results page
| in, say, w3m, _I cannot click the links_ :
|
| http://www.google.com/search?ie=ISO-8859-1&hl=en&source=hp&b...
|
| (This is beyond the "the links are redirected for tracking", not
| the case on DDG with a URL parameter, but _Google has broken its
| own search links_.)
|
| I can only assume Google are telling advanced users that they are
| no longer of interest to the firm.
|
| In a graphical browser, results are crammed with ads and filler,
| annoying, hard to parse, and quite frequently _just not very
| good_.
|
| There are occasional exceptions:
|
| 1. For date-ranged search, Google (and specifically desktop) is
| the only option.
|
| 2. Some older content isn't accessible on DDG. Generally this is
| pre-2005 / pre-2000 content.
|
| 3. Some obscure content only appears on Google, though to a
| _vastly_ lesser extent than was true only a few years ago.
|
| Also, again, DDG's bang searches are hugely useful, with at least
| a couple dozen in frequent use by me.
|
| The broader picture, though, is that _Web search seems generally
| less useful than it was 5-10 years ago._
|
| That seems to be a mix of far more crap online, as well as black-
| hat SEO winning over Web search companies (death penalties really
| ought to be a thing), _and_ far more "traditional" content
| (books, scientific articles, other published sources) now being
| accessible online.
|
| I'll hit up Wikipedia, search for references, and follow those,
| or go to Worldcat and run a subject search, _then read books,
| magazines, or articles directly_ (through Library Genesis or Sci-
| Hub), rather than waste my time on Web glurge.
|
| Yes, there are still some good voices out there, but between crap
| content, crap Web UI/UX, and general web annoyances, it's become
| a net negative.
|
| AdTech and Surveillance Capitalism destroy everything.
| pricees wrote:
| I recently switched to DDG after giving it a shot 2 years ago and
| finding it wanting.
|
| Good, bad, or indifferent, I land on the same 5-10 platforms (or
| did Google only promote those platforms??) for 95% of my
| searches. This makes DuckDuckGo's !bang commands more efficient
| than a Google search.
|
| Google wins for completely agnostic default searches and rich map
| functionality. For everything else, I am very satisfied with DDG.
| mkchoi212 wrote:
| Feel like DuckDuckGo has been good enough for regular use for
| awhile. Search results are decent and what seems like an absence
| of ads is great.
|
| The only thing I miss from Google? The giant cards that show up
| with an answer if I ask something like "How old is [Insert
| Celebrity Name Here]"
| uk_programmer wrote:
| The only thing that Google is significantly better at than google
| in location based searches in the UK i.e. local businesses. DDG
| map search is wrong for me about 50% of the time.
|
| Everything else is pretty much the same as google or better in
| some cases (google seems to de-rank certain things). The code
| snippets when just quickly searching "How do I do <X> in
| <programming language L>" is quite nice.
| tus88 wrote:
| Was it not yesterday or the day before?
| mason55 wrote:
| I tried switching a bunch of times over the years but finally in
| the last six months or so I've found DDG to be good enough to use
| full time.
|
| I probably went three or four months without even using the "!g"
| command. I actually just yesterday ran into some issues and had
| to use "!g" - for some reason DDG struggled with the concept of
| "fish shell" and kept bringing me back results about seafood.
| davegauer wrote:
| Strange, my top three DDG results for 'fish shell' are for the
| friendly interactive shell. Maybe you just have really good
| seafood around your area?
| VikingCoder wrote:
| It's Lent, so I just searched for "Fish Tacos" and clicked on
| Map. It showed four places, none of which are anywhere near me. I
| click on Directions and it takes me to Bing.
|
| Do the same thing on Google, see a dozen places in my
| neighborhood, and I get Google Maps navigation.
|
| What do you get in your searches for Fish Tacos? Do you have a
| better experience with DDG?
| godshatter wrote:
| Don't make the assumption that a privacy-centered search engine
| is going to look at your location data. Add your location to
| the query itself.
| VikingCoder wrote:
| Yeah, but it did. It knew where I was, based off of IP I
| presume.
| godshatter wrote:
| I'm surprised by that. I guess _I_ shouldn 't make the
| assumption that a privacy-centered search engine _isn 't_
| going to look at your location data.
| calderarrow wrote:
| I'm a die-hard DDG fan, but for some things -- particularly
| mapping related issues -- google maps is so superior. I append
| a !gm to my searches for stores and it automatically opens in
| google maps.
| ce4 wrote:
| Google Maps has a number of features that contribute to that:
|
| * maps timeline (location recording)
|
| * maps "local guides" status with
|
| * Gamification for POI data enrichment
|
| * Google Survey app with payouts per survey finished
| TrumpMyGuns wrote:
| No, it's really not. I hate google as much as the next average HN
| poster, but this is just not true.
|
| It's just Bing, anyway.
| leed25d wrote:
| Of the google bangs, I find myself using !gm (google maps) the
| most.
| zszugyi wrote:
| I've switched to Qwant a few months ago at home. Aside a few
| usability issues (like hijacking the space button), the search
| results are fine both for random searches and for programming-
| related ones (aka. SO, JavaDoc, cppreference search). Their map
| search is not great, so had to switch back to google for that.
| speps wrote:
| It's only good enough when you're in the US, I live in the UK and
| DDG consistently returns non local results even though the
| country is set correctly, it's especially annoying given how many
| US cities are named after their UK counterpart.
| simias wrote:
| I use DDG, I'm not in the US and I never really felt that was
| an issue. If I'm looking specifically for something local I'd
| sooner use google maps directly anyway, not just a random web
| search.
| friseurtermin wrote:
| That's the reason I much prefer DDG over Google. When I want
| the news about politics in my country or restaurants in my
| town, I switch to local results in my language and region with
| the simple click of a button.
|
| Sometimes I want results from StackOverflow, in English. On
| Google getting this right was a PITA.
| jstanley wrote:
| All you need to do is type "uk" at the end of the query. I now
| do this automatically if I want UK-specific results, it's not a
| problem.
| AdamSC1 wrote:
| Do you have the UK toggle turned on? Improving local results
| internationally is a major priority for the team currently - if
| you find queries where this isn't working well, hitting the
| feedback button in the bottom right of the screen is a huge
| help!
| Doctor_Fegg wrote:
| Why not default to having the UK toggle on for UK users?
| motogpjimbo wrote:
| Also in the UK. It's noticeable that for many search terms,
| DDG's top autocomplete suggestion is the term you just typed,
| with "uk" tacked on the end of it. That suggests that many
| users in the UK are finding DDG's search results to be too US-
| centric.
| KuiN wrote:
| This is _by far_ my biggest issue with DDG. I've been trying
| to use it for most of my searching and I'm fine with having
| to append '!g' to ~25% of my searches, it's not ideal, but
| whatever, I can manage.
|
| Having to append 'uk' to 90% of searches after the first
| results page is full of useless American shit, for search
| terms that Google UK handles flawlessly, gets old, very
| quick.
| sefrost wrote:
| Do you have United Kingdom toggled on?
| KuiN wrote:
| The results did get better after I discovered that
| setting a while back. But it's still not close to good
| enough and I still have to manually stick 'uk' onto a
| search to find relevant results for most queries.
| lftl wrote:
| It's not just US-centric. DDG is just a little bad about
| local queries in general. With Google, if I'm looking for a
| local business, or something in the news locally, there's a
| decent chance I can just search for it and I'll find what I'm
| looking for. With DDG I need to explicitly tell it the locale
| I'm interested in.
|
| On top of that I live in a small city that shares a name with
| a larger city. Google understands this and gives me results
| for my local, smaller city, but DDG needs to be explicitly
| told city name, state name.
| EnderMB wrote:
| This is my only gripe with DDG.
|
| For daily use, it's fine, but it's awful for local results or
| anything that requires a map or directions.
| AdmiralGinge wrote:
| I agree, I use it as my main search engine as I'm trying to
| go Google-free at home but finding UK-centric things is
| annoying. I guess we must just be a much smaller market for
| them.
| alessioalex wrote:
| Unfortunately this is the same for Romania as well, no local
| results are returned even though the country was set correctly.
| 4ad wrote:
| That means I should try DDG. I _NEVER EVER_ want local results,
| and Google always gives me local results. If I 'd want local
| results I would put my country or my city in the search query.
| smichel17 wrote:
| DDG has a toggle to choose whether to prioritize local
| results or not. Try a search, and then it's prominent enough
| that I don't think I need to describe its location; you'll
| find it if you're looking.
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| I will give DDG in a similar try, but I am more like the HN crowd
| than the average user....lots of searches for statistical and
| programming functions/ideas that most people have never heard or
| think about :e.g. "model selection among non-nested fractional
| polynomial mixed level models"
| astatine wrote:
| I have DDG set up as the default search engine and it works quite
| well. I would think that I don't need to use g! about 75% of the
| time. When the result is from wikipedia or stack overflow or some
| similar popular site, DDG works alright but seems to miss
| specialized blogs. So if I don't find the answer on the
| mainstream sites I find myself doing g! more often.
|
| 75% is not bad at all and if you approach with that perspective
| then DDG works just great but if you think you should never have
| to use Google, then please wait - not sure how long.
| LegitShady wrote:
| I switched to ddg because google is acting politically and I no
| longer trust them to act as responsible stewards of information
| and search.
|
| But ddg isn't as good as google and just barely qualifies as good
| enough.
| jefurii wrote:
| > DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use
|
| This is news to people?
| objektif wrote:
| In the last couple of months my experience With DDG has been very
| good. I consistently got better results than Google.
| artursapek wrote:
| How sad is it that this is the best way to make a substantial
| announcement on Twitter. A pixelated image of text. Twitter
| should work on some less-frequently-used tweet mode that allows
| for more characters for stuff like this.
|
| https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/1220768243318571008
| vzidex wrote:
| Agreed, I've switched my work computer to use it by default and
| the only place I've noticed it falter is when searching domain-
| specific niche technical information. Otherwise it works fine,
| though I still need to switch all my personal computers to it.
| yingw787 wrote:
| I switched from Chrome/Google to Firefox/DDG three months ago, as
| part of a larger switch from macOS to laptop Ubuntu. There are
| things I don't like about DDG. DDG continually offers to play
| YouTube videos in its own window due to privacy concerns, and
| it's not clear to me when it redirects and when it offers its own
| window. Some searches don't work well; for example, "weather
| 22203" returns weather for Arlington, TX instead of Arlington, VA
| in the DDG modal, and for things like precipitation I still need
| to g! the query.
|
| These minor concerns are all peanuts compared to the benefits
| though. I've found I'm very much a "live free or die" kind of
| guy, and I like how both Firefox and DDG care about the user. I
| also like how they work well without too much configuration out
| of the box :P
| fiatjaf wrote:
| You can't get direct links to images when using Google Image
| Search, but you can when using DuckDuckGo Image Search. That
| should be enough for you to switch.
| ufo wrote:
| Does anyone know if there is a way to emulate DDG's bangs using
| Firefox search engine keywords?
|
| I tried forcing myself to use keywords but apparently they only
| work on the address bar (and not on the search bar) and also only
| if you type them at the start of the query. DDG bangs also work
| on any part of the query, including at the end.
| cpascal wrote:
| DDG is my daily driver and I do not miss Google Search in the
| slightest. I rarely need to !g and its often futile because
| Google returns nearly the same results.
|
| However, my favorite feature of DDG is it's native dark theme.
| jamespullar wrote:
| I just decided to try DDG out because of this post and am so
| happy there's a native dark theme. Now if only Github would
| release one!
| sandes wrote:
| Engine search global market share:
|
| Google 92.54%
|
| so, who cares?
| Pmop wrote:
| It'd be awesome if they had an mirror that starts with "go", so
| we can reuse muscle memory and browser's url autocomplete.
| Jaxkr wrote:
| No it isn't. I try to switch every few months, usually sticking
| with it as my only search engine on mobile and desktop. The
| results suck, and it is completely lacking in information about
| real-time topics.
|
| Just compare the results for a live sports game across DuckDuckGo
| and Google. Or the query "democratic primary".
|
| In both of these google presents relevant accessible information
| while DDG does not.
|
| DuckDuckGo wastes your time but protects your privacy. At the
| moment Google's results are so much better that I am willing to
| give up privacy in exchange for convenience.
|
| I will continue trying DuckDuckGo every few months. Hopefully
| someday I will not feel drawn back to Google.
| anderspitman wrote:
| I switched over to DDG a few weeks ago. I slowly regressed to
| more and more !g usage, and finally switched back to GOOG a
| couple days ago. Then just an hour ago I searched for "google
| fiber stadia", because I was curious how well they work together.
| The main reddit result opened in an amp page (and of course
| reddit pressured me to install the mobile app). I went back to
| the results and started scrolling down. I honestly couldn't tell
| at a glance what was ads, amp, or normal links. I personally feel
| like I'm in a bit of a no-man's land right now when it comes to
| search, but I think DDG really has a window of opportunity.
| hiccuphippo wrote:
| You can use !s in ddg to get google results without google.
| jaggs wrote:
| Does that bring up Startpage results?
| smichel17 wrote:
| Yes
| ashton314 wrote:
| Use !sp for that
| ignoramous wrote:
| I'm redirected to startpage for both _!s_ and _!sp_ from
| duckduckgo. Is there a setting I need to flip?
| andrepd wrote:
| Try using a google mirror instead, like Startpage. The google
| results without the spying.
| Fnoord wrote:
| Startpage is in bed with an advertising company.
| commoner wrote:
| Google is an advertising company, so Startpage isn't any
| worse.
| Fnoord wrote:
| There are other choices, such as SearX, DuckDuckGo, and
| Ecosia.
|
| Recommended read: "Detailed tests of search engines:
| Google, Startpage, Bing, DuckDuckGo, metaGer, Ecosia,
| Swisscows, Searx, Qwant, Yandex, and Mojeek" [1]
|
| [1] https://libretechtips.gitlab.io/detailed-tests-of-
| search-eng...
| 188201 wrote:
| I found that searching was more difficult nowadays. Result from
| Google is becoming worse, filling with content farm and ads. In
| some sense, that gave opportunity to become a better search
| engine without any technical improvement, but better marketing.
| ntsplnkv2 wrote:
| I don't know if DDG is better or good enough - maybe I'll
| start using it.
|
| But I do know that google has gone far downhill. and I think
| that is partially its fault, and also the fault of the
| internet as a whole. It's just become such an infested ad
| machine.
| gadders wrote:
| Similar. DDG just wasn't quite as good, and Google is getting
| too sleazy.
| dimator wrote:
| Same boat here. Even for technical searches, which ddg is
| supposed to be good at, I would routinely find the Google
| results of much more accuracy and quality. Finally switched
| back.
|
| Luckily, for the things I search, ads are not usually a
| problem.
| creddit wrote:
| Mobile Google search is atrocious for my preferences. I pretty
| much avoid it entirely at this point.
| babypistol wrote:
| I have used DuckDuckGo a couple of years back, but, after some
| more consideration switched back to Google. Apart from privacy I
| never really liked the direction DuckDuckGo was going in (more
| below). Just recently I decided to search for an alternative
| search engine once again.
|
| Things I want to consider are:
|
| 1. _Reasonable privacy_ - I don 't want the search engine to take
| super invasive steps to track me (but still keep in mind that I
| need to send my queries to someone, so there's really no
| expectation of full privacy)
|
| 2. _No personalization_ - I want to be sure that only obvious
| parameters affect the ranking of search results (e.g. manual
| language or location selection, manual time selection, ...). Want
| to avoid personalization and a search bubble at all cost.
|
| 3. _No results processing_ - I want links to original sources,
| not processed or aggregated information with little or no
| references to sources.
|
| 4. _Independence_ - I 'd like to support a search engine that can
| operate as independently as possible. A search engine with it's
| own crawler seem far more resilient to external influence than a
| meta or proxying search engine.
|
| Google falls short on 1, 2 and 3. But holds up very well on 4.
|
| With Bing or Yandex I don't have much experience, but expect
| something similar.
|
| DuckDuckGo heavily advertises 1. I guess 2 follows from it but
| didn't find it mentioned as an explicit goal. On 3 and 4 it falls
| short. If I remember correctly DuckDuckGo was one of the first to
| offer processed results (Instant answers). I'm not sure about the
| situation now, but I believe it started of as a meta search
| engine and proxied most searches to Yahoo, Bing or Yandex.
| https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/so...
| still lists Bing prominently.
|
| Startpage.com seems to get me 1 and 3. But 2 is questionable
| since the results are still tailored by Google (not to me
| personally, but it's still not clear what factors into ranking).
| And 4 obviously doesn't apply.
|
| To find a better alternative I started looking for search engines
| with independent web crawlers. So far I found mojeek.com,
| beta.cliqz.com and qwant.com. mojeek.com looks good on 1,2,3,4
| but results aren't quite good enough. With Cliqz I'm not sure
| about personalization, but otherwise looks good.
|
| I finally settled on Qwant.com for now. It promises privacy and
| no personalization explicitly. Has an independent crawler.
| Sometimes it tries to provide a processed answer card, but so far
| I managed to ignore that. Results are surprisingly good.
| kylebenzle wrote:
| Same, DDG works better for me.
| greenimpala wrote:
| Switched 6 months ago on all devices, I actually prefer the
| experience, I have discovered a bunch of really interesting small
| independent websites and blogs through it too (wasn't that the
| original idea of the internet!?).
|
| Once or twice a week I need !g to search for a programming
| specific query. There's still some improvement needed when
| searching for all the weird characters we use in software.
| urtrs wrote:
| I exclusively use DuckDuckGo mostly because google results got
| worse. What worries me though is that I get different results
| when I browse with tor.
| qwerty456127 wrote:
| Indeed.
| newscracker wrote:
| If we are comparing anecdotes, like in this article, DDG is still
| not good enough for me for certain kinds of queries. My default
| search engine is DDG, but even today I had to switch to startpage
| (!s) for some searches. IIRC, these were just some searches
| related to some themes and features of Ghost (the publishing
| platform), Hugo (static site generator), etc. In my daily use, I
| still rely on startpage, and the next level, which is Google
| (!g), to get to what I need.
|
| Forget about instant answers and similar things. DDG's index of
| the web is not as vast as Google's...or maybe it is but it's
| unable to figure out relevance as well as Google does.
|
| I still recommend DDG to people and tell them about a few bang
| commands. But as of today, DDG is not something I can totally
| rely on within the scope of its search results.
|
| The new Edge browser from Microsoft uses Bing as the default
| search engine. It works better than DDG for several cases (for
| me), but whenever it doesn't, I miss the bang commands that make
| the act of performing the same search on another engine so quick
| and easy.
| drivingmenuts wrote:
| So, DDG is good enough - but, is it better than Google?
| typpo wrote:
| To add a little data on this thread, here's a list of queries
| that I subsequently !g'ed over a 30 day period. Maybe Duck/Bing
| developers will find it useful:
| https://gist.github.com/typpo/605a7cd9da88c3be061c6958a31fa2...
|
| Aside from a limited set of head queries where they've added
| their own custom stuff, DDG is a wrapper around Bing. The results
| are identical and any webmaster can tell you that Duckduckbot is
| not crawling the web like Google/Bing.
|
| In the same way that "Google is an advertising company", I see
| DDG as a marketing company. They've done a good job marketing
| Bing results with a privacy wrapper. I recognize the value, but
| it's different from competing directly on search.
| bonsai80 wrote:
| I agree. I have switched and used to feel like the switch was
| failing when I had to use Google for some things, but realized
| that's just fine. I also occasionally use Wolfram Alpha for
| things too. Both there if needed, but otherwise getting great
| results from a company that respects me.
| svnpenn wrote:
| I would like to take any chance I can to avoid Google products,
| but I dont agree with this.
|
| DuckDuckGo is using the infamous "More Results", essentially
| infinite scroll. Until that changes Im not using DuckDuckGo.
| burkaman wrote:
| You can turn that off in the settings:
| https://duckduckgo.com/settings
| svnpenn wrote:
| No you cant. You can turn off auto loading, but you cant set
| it so that results are paginated.
| CmdrKrool wrote:
| This is true. Unfortunately DDG is flatly not interested in
| offering paginated results, if this 2 year old post by the
| staff member 'moollaza' on Reddit still applies.
|
| https://old.reddit.com/r/duckduckgo/comments/757gde/how_to_
| m...
|
| My post there as 'the_minion_in_red' details how turning
| off "Auto-Load" works inconsistently depending on how you
| scroll, anyway - a behaviour which I see is still present
| and incorrect today.
|
| And the 'lite' and 'html' views I suggest for the benefit
| of another poster, I don't much like because they're doing
| something to make the address bar URL not change so I can't
| easily bookmark a search.
| nkingsy wrote:
| DuckDuckGo is a for profit company. There are no guarantees it
| will not seek more profits at a later date. See: Google.
|
| That being said, competition that hurts Google's bottom line
| would likely result in better behavior.
|
| Ddg has a long way to go to be an impactful competitor in the
| market, though.
| irrational wrote:
| I've been using DDG exclusively for years. People talk about how
| hard it is to switch, but I've never had any trouble getting
| exactly the results I'm searching for. I sometimes wonder what
| makes google search results so amazing, but not enough to risk
| it.
| magicalhippo wrote:
| Guess it depends on domain. I've changed the default in Firefox
| a few weeks ago and find that for "regular" searching DDG is
| enough that I don't go to Google.
|
| But for specialized searches I frequently reach for the Google
| override, and sure enough Google has significantly better
| results. Like searching specific, weird errors messages and
| such.
| irrational wrote:
| That's the thing. The vast majority of my searches are
| development/coding related. I always find what I'm looking
| for in the first few returns. I sometimes wonder if I'd get
| even better results on google?
| magicalhippo wrote:
| In my experience yes. But as I said, often the DDG is good
| enough.
| IggleSniggle wrote:
| The quality of my Google results plummeted when I blocked and
| opted out of as much tracking as I could. I'm not really happy
| with Google or DDG results at this point.
|
| It doesn't help that search engines have been progressively
| hiding more and more functionality. Just last night I was
| trying to search for results within a window of "published
| after 18 months ago" but couldn't figure out how to do it. It
| was probably just another search away from finding the answer,
| but why are search UIs removing/hiding their best Advanced
| Search features?
| bluntfang wrote:
| i just recently switched to DDG as my primary search. It's not as
| good as google, especially when it comes to software engineering
| documentation and maps, but everything else is fine.
| lostgame wrote:
| Very strange timing on what is unfortunately a horribly
| inaccurate title based on my personal experience.
|
| I tried swapping to DuckDuckGo yesterday on my iPhone as the
| primary search tool and reverted unfortunately back to Google
| after only two hours.
|
| It's hard to define all of the reasons the 'mobile' experience is
| so unbearable, but I'll try:
|
| 1) No video or image results at the top of the page when that is
| most relevant.
|
| 2) No IMDB/overviews for movies, music, books, etc.
|
| 3) I am used to one of the first results in my search
| consistently being Wikipedia. This was the case about 1/3rd of
| the time vs. Google.
|
| 4) Results often appeared extremely out of order in terms of
| relevancy vs. Google, with the actual relevant like often being
| on the second(!) page.
|
| 5) Personal taste, but super relevant - In terms of UI/UX, the
| interface feels dated, actually harkening back to the days of
| AltaVista - I'm unfortunately honest when I say I feel like I'm
| using something designed 10-15 years ago.
|
| 6) Autocomplete seemed to have significant issues, and, for some
| reason, sometimes even taking several seconds to appear.
|
| I couldn't express my disappointment enough. I _really_ wanted to
| give up the ghost, and just move on from Google - but I am so
| used to so many of the apparently fantastic nuances of Google, I
| believe it will unfortunately take 4-5 years before I can even
| get past enough of these significant issues to make it worth
| using.
|
| On Desktop - the experience seems to be significantly better. I
| can't even point out enough reasons why it's so poor on mobile,
| it could unfortunately fill several blog posts and I don't have
| time to point out the myriad of issues and inconsistencies here
| at this time.
|
| If there's jobs available at DDG - I'd love to help, in all
| seriousness.
| psweber wrote:
| It's not going to be convenient to get off any Google product.
| If privacy and escaping algorithm bubbles is important enough
| to you, DDG can probably be "good enough".
| woofie11 wrote:
| I've been using DDG forever. I do !g once in a long time, but not
| often. I think the most common use case is Google's excellent
| calculator. DDG is buggy, and when it works, just isn't as good.
| einpoklum wrote:
| The author does not remove ads. That skews the comparison
| relative to my experience.
|
| Anyway - in my experience, DDG is good enough for most of my
| searches, but not all.
| bobbylarrybobby wrote:
| To people who use DuckDuckGo: how do you deal with its inability
| to answer simple queries with factual answers? Things like
| "distance from Los Angeles to New York", "Joe Biden age", "knives
| out cast", "capital of South Africa", etc. The time it takes to
| click a result on DuckDuckGo and navigate to the answer is so
| much longer than just getting the answer at the top of the
| results page, as google (and even bing) provide. This is the main
| reason I can't use DuckDuckGo, as much as I'd like to
| Normal_gaussian wrote:
| Either it appears as part of the first result or one of the top
| results have it. This is the case for all of your queries, and
| the result to select is obvious - normally wikipedia or imdb.
|
| This is arguably harder (+1 click and page load).
|
| However for capital of south africa this is arguably more
| correct. My google test shows no distinction between the
| capitals, whereas the wiki page does.
|
| Of course the wiki page is accessible on google as well.
|
| I'm wary of cases when these facts are incorrect. Google
| declares them while trying to hide the source. This was very
| important recently when a friend googled for caucus winners and
| recieved an incorrect fact at the top of Google, something that
| would have rang alarm bells when seen on its candidate
| affiliated source page
| kube-system wrote:
| You don't need the extra click and page load. Try these:
|
| "joe biden !w"
|
| "Los Angeles to New York !wa"
|
| "knives out !w"
|
| "south africa !w"
|
| "ddg bangs !hn"
| davegauer wrote:
| For facts like these, I use WolframAlpha. For everything else,
| it's DDG.
| TallGuyShort wrote:
| That seems like more of what WolframAlpha caters to.
| Personally, I don't like assuming an engine has interpreted
| what I'm looking for correctly - I'd prefer to maintain some of
| the load of personally understanding the source of information
| and it's context. So here is what I do:
|
| >> distance from Los Angeles to New York
|
| !m los angeles to new york
|
| >> Joe Biden age
|
| !w joe biden
|
| >> knives out cast
|
| !imdb knives out
|
| >> capital of South Africa
|
| !w South Africa
|
| And that last one is a really good example of why I don't want
| to trust an engine to interpret what I'm looking for, because
| Wolfram Alpha just tells you Pretoria, and if I hadn't spent a
| large part of my life there I wouldn't know that's probably not
| what people are looking for. Economically? They probably want
| to know that Johannesburg is the largest city. Just like how
| people are sometimes surprised when they learn that New York
| City and Los Angeles are not state capitals, even though
| they're really important cities. Politically? Well the roles of
| the government is split between 3 cities and that's not a
| simple thing for an engine to comprehend. And I didn't even
| know Bloemfontein held that kind of status until I just read it
| on Wikipedia. Neither I, a former citizen of the country, nor
| WolframAlpha, was aware of that.
| ghastmaster wrote:
| I use my search engine to direct me to a source. I do not
| expect it to be the source. That is just how my brain sees the
| purpose of the engine.
|
| I can, however, understand why anyone would like it to provide
| you with instant factual and reliable information! That would
| be a godsend.
|
| I do not trust the instant answers most of the time. I like
| seeing forum answers and comments, finding age in wikipedia and
| stumbling upon more information, and generally getting lost in
| the web.
| osehgol wrote:
| I switched after Google's redesign too, this time it's good
| enough for good.
| bramjans wrote:
| Indeed, been using DDG for a couple of years now, and since
| Google's redesign I've been using a lot less "!g".
| calderarrow wrote:
| Question for google search users on HN: Do y'all use adblockers?
| I noticed less of a difference in my one-off searches after I had
| been using an ad blocker for a while, so I wonder if using an
| adblocker would be a way for people to transition away from
| Google.
| stiglitz wrote:
| Anyone got a specific search term that gave poor results on ddg
| compared to google or vice versa?
|
| I see zero specific examples in the comments right now. For all I
| know, you people are searching for "howbakecarrotsovengsgshd". In
| my experience there's no difference in quality worth talking
| about between any of the popular search engines.
| nice_byte wrote:
| this is most likely not true. i keep trying ddg every now and
| then - last attempt was ~ 6 months ago - and every time i have to
| return to google search with renewed appreciation. i have no idea
| why it's so bad - i think my queries should be very easy because
| most of the time i google referential material (e.g. information
| on a widely used api) and not something obscure.
| kuon wrote:
| I have been using DDG for years and did not know the !g I copy
| paste search often when DDG results are lacking, I feel so
| stupid.
| bprasanna wrote:
| Switched to DDG 3 years back! Only to check if Google lists
| anything different, checked it rarely. DDG is very GOOD imho.
| Since, you see organic results mostly based on the ranking rather
| than preference to mobile sites, AMP & advertisers, it feels
| refreshing and good.
| [deleted]
| Wheaties466 wrote:
| I've been using DDG on my one browser for the past 3 years and
| the amount of things I have to search twice, once through DDG and
| then again in google is absurd.
| chuckgreenman wrote:
| I think I've figured out what is happening when people tell me
| that DuckDuckGo's results "aren't good enough".
|
| What's really happening is that they've been trained to search a
| certain way to using Google and because DDG doesn't have all the
| historical data of your searches on their platform they can't
| fill in the gaps as well.
|
| After a couple days using DDG I found the right vocabulary to get
| good local results and which bangs to use to get results from the
| sites that I want. It's a more effective tool if you learn how to
| use it.
| questionfor wrote:
| Can you share what is the right vocabulary for example?
|
| I have DDG as main engine for the phone and unless it's
| Wikipedia level question, I have to use g!
| Semaphor wrote:
| Don't use natural language, use keywords and quotes.
| Essentially the way people searched 5-10 years ago. I rarely
| need !g
| Proziam wrote:
| This is the trick. Google got good at letting people search
| using 'natural' language. DDG is just a bit different. In
| some ways, I think it's better because my results are more
| specific in a lot of cases. I look up a lot of academic
| stuff where Google has the tendency to feed me a lot of
| garbage that DDG doesn't.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| > Don't use natural language
|
| So... its worse. People want to use natural language.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| If I wanted to search using natural language, I'd use Ask
| Jeeves. DDG is just fine in my experience.
| no_wizard wrote:
| I have to ask, in 2020, or any year, really, was Ask
| Jeeves ever good at this? Empirically? I can anecdotally
| it was _terrible_
|
| I somehow doubt that changed.
|
| Edit: Well I be darned, turns out it was their bread and
| butter:
|
| https://econsultancy.com/the-state-of-natural-language-
| conve...
| _jal wrote:
| ...For certain values of "people", sometimes. I sure
| don't, it is imprecise, more failure prone and generally
| gives worse results.
|
| This reminds me of telcos trying to get in to content.
| "Humans appear to value short audiovisual bursts of
| stimulation. We shall conquer all by providing all the
| memes!" And then they knife Tumblr.
|
| It isn't that "people" "want" one search method over
| another. The search grammar is not why they're there.
| ravenstine wrote:
| It depends on how you look at it. I want to be specific
| in my searches, which is why I often use quotes, things
| like `site:somedomain.com`, etc.
|
| That said, that means that DDG is not for everyone. If
| people want to use Google because they prefer NLP, that's
| fine, but Google users who trash DDG because it's not
| smart like Google are totally dismissive of DDG's utility
| or why people choose it. DDG users on HN, on the other
| hand, at least seem to understand why people choose to
| use Google, and I don't think any appreciable number of
| them expect a large portion of the market to shift
| towards DDG. In fact, I don't think they believe that DDG
| is necessarily better. A lot of users, such as myself,
| use DDG because the UI is a little simpler and because
| they don't want Google to dominate their life, the
| compromise being a more stupid but still useful search
| engine.
|
| Not everyone wants NLP. I dislike NLP and think that it's
| turning out to be a joke in a lot of ways. When I use
| natural language with Google, it often doesn't understand
| my intent, and it even ignores obvious keywords. This is
| true for pretty much every service or device I've used
| that has NLP. I don't want it. If others find it useful,
| that's great, and they should use Google in that case. I
| don't want it, and that doesn't mean that my chosen tools
| are "worse".
| FalconSensei wrote:
| > which is why I often use quotes, things like
| `site:somedomain.com`, etc.
|
| this might be true for technical people that don't need
| accessibility. Nowadays people prefer to use natural
| language to search, with many people using voice search,
| either because of preference, or because they need to
| bad_user wrote:
| I use DDG on a daily basis, being my default search engine for
| the past two years.
|
| However I don't agree -- many of my searches have awful results
| on DDG compared with Google and I often find no words to make
| it better.
|
| Local searches are an obvious candidate, DDG is awful for my
| native language, giving me results in Spanish (I'm Romanian).
|
| But lately I'm noticing programming-related results being worse
| on DDG as well. I'm not sure why because they used to be
| similar, but now some of the results DDG is giving me (for very
| specific search terms) are really, really bad, many times DDG
| ignoring my keywords and giving me something else entirely.
|
| It's fine for now, I prefer the privacy, but they'd better
| improve and fast.
| codethief wrote:
| My experience with DDG has been exactly the same, not just
| with programming- and, in my case, math-related search terms
| but also when I look for personal websites of people in
| academia. On Google, it's usually the first search result but
| it often isn't even among the first 10 in DDG.
| no_wizard wrote:
| I think you inadvertently hit the nail on the head here, in
| that DuckDuckGo requires you to know its incantations, and
| Google has gotten really good at not having you to know any
| incantations at all. I can even obliterate the spelling of
| words and it often knows what i'm looking for.
|
| Now, with that said, if your target is power searchers (like
| myself) I think you have a better argument, because Google
| often lacks in some of these areas (like being able to filter
| by a specific grouping of sorts, like if I want a "dev focused"
| search, not just filtering by a specific site, DDG has some
| methodology here that I haven't been able to easily surface
| with Google)
|
| But there are cases where I've noticed DDG falling behind, like
| indexing newer content, or being able to filter by time
| accurately.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > Google has gotten really good at not having you to know any
| incantations at all.
|
| I disagree -- the decline of the quality of Google's search
| appears to have begun when it started trying to second-guess
| what I'm searching for, and has continued to decline ever
| since.
| whalesalad wrote:
| A lot of DDG fans on HN blame the user or social conditioning
| and use that as a crutch. It's BS.
|
| You need to provide clear examples of the differences in order
| to really make this argument to someone who might switch.
|
| What specifically are the differences? The last time this topic
| came up someone told me I was a total noob because I didn't
| know how to use search and that was basically the extent of it.
| LeftHandPath wrote:
| I agree. I've been in the DDG camp for a little while, but I
| finally had to switch back to google as my primary search
| engine on my laptop - fixing searches was taking too much
| time. That's after two or three months of using DDG and Bing
| exclusively
| _jal wrote:
| > You need to provide clear examples
|
| Nope, I don't. I don't care what search engine you like. I do
| want to see Google knocked down several pegs, but fan rants
| aren't going to do that.
|
| I just keep using DDG as it gets better while Google gets
| worse and sometimes think a little about the variety of the
| human experience.
| hedora wrote:
| Google gives me bad results. It ignores some of the words in
| my queries, and the context boxes are generally spammy and
| irrelevant. Even if the correct information is somewhere in
| the results page, I bounce before I can find it.
|
| From what I can tell from the article, this might be because
| I type too much stuff into the search bar, and because
| Google's manually curated semantic web stuff is not relevant
| to me.
|
| However, I'm really not sure why I can't use Google anymore.
| It was better when I switched away, so I definitely used to
| be able to use it (I didn't log in back then either).
|
| Ddg is fine, and more respectful to its users. I don't have a
| practical reason to figure out what the problem is.
| hedora wrote:
| I think, on reflection, the issue is that typing "harry
| potter sport" and clicking on the wikipedia article at the
| very top of the page (above the first ad) is a much lower
| cognitive burden than the Google way, where I guess people
| are trained to type "harry potter" and then skim an entire
| page of ads, search results and noise to find the word
| "Quidditch" (which doesn't appear, I just checked).
|
| If I google harry potter sport, it presents the Wikipedia
| article in a context box, then the same article in a
| differently formatted context box, an ad, and then a third
| link to the same article at the top of the organic results.
|
| Duck duck go displays the same link twice (once in a big
| context box). This seems better, though arguably not great.
| dagenix wrote:
| A Google search for me produces the word "Quidditch" in a
| box along with a link to the Wikipedia page for Quidditch
| and the first paragraph of that article. The box appears
| at the very top of the results. I'm not sure how a search
| result for that query could be much more useful.
| gjm11 wrote:
| I can confirm that I also see this, both in my regular
| Firefox instance where I do everything and in an
| incognito Chrome window. Specifically, I get, in order
| from top to bottom, with only trivial differences between
| those two cases:
|
| A box with "Quidditch" in big letters, a picture and a
| brief description.
|
| Some "People also ask:" with questions that do seem to be
| reasonably relevant.
|
| The Wikipedia page about Quidditch.
|
| Some video links, all relevant.
|
| Some images, all relevant.
|
| Another Wikipedia page about Quidditch.
|
| A page about the "Department of Magical Games and Sports"
| from some Harry-Potter-specific wiki.
|
| Same wiki's "games and sports" category.
|
| "Beyond Quidditch: games and pastimes in the wizarding
| world" from www.wizardingworld.com.
|
| NPR article about real-world quidditch games.
|
| Quora question about other sports in Harry Potter.
|
| Related searches: a bunch of Harry Potter things which
| seem pretty relevant.
|
| Related search: "Quidditch teams".
|
| A bunch of "Searches related to harry potter sport" which
| mostly also seem relevant.
|
| So ... the organization of the page is a little weird in
| places, but this seems like an excellent set of search
| results for that query. The DDG results are also
| perfectly fine, though they feel slightly worse than the
| Google ones to me.
| tracker1 wrote:
| I switched for about a month... for most general searches
| ddg was as good or better... when searching for development
| terms as a programmer, I found that the ddg results were
| often worthless to me. The context that google has
| associated to you specifically adds value to the results.
|
| Since most of my searches were for technical libraries,
| components, etc, I found myself searching again with !g
| more than half the time... after the month was up, I
| switched back. There are a _LOT_ of things I like about ddg
| though.
|
| It would be nice if DDG offered search roles, that could
| prioritize certain associated terms together for someone
| that is say a programmer, engineer, social media person,
| etc. This could be opt-in to maybe a dozen categories to
| skew results on one way or another, but not tied to a
| person per-se.
|
| Also, a shorter domain name would help.
| mdaniel wrote:
| > Also, a shorter domain name would help.
|
| I'm surprised your browser doesn't just search from the
| "awesome bar", making navigating to the domain a non-
| event
|
| However, the answer to your question is ddg.gg _(unknown
| if that 's short enough, but it's only 3 keys to press)_
| godshatter wrote:
| I have this same problem. I use the same "subject sub-
| subject (...) specific query" tactic I've been using since
| forever and Google search has been becoming less effective
| for me over the years. I switched to DDG a couple of years
| ago I think, and it's better for handling that sort of
| thing.
|
| Is there a search engine out there that respects quotes,
| and, or, case-insensitive when asked for, etc? In some ways
| I miss the days of altavista and similar search engines
| which had "advanced" tabs you could use to craft your query
| as closely as needed to find that one web page you know has
| what you need to find that you stumbled upon years ago.
|
| The only time I use what the author refers to as "low
| intent searches" is when I've just heard a term or phrase I
| don't understand and don't know enough about it to ask
| specifically for something.
| wolco wrote:
| Go into google search options and select verbatam to
| include all search terms.
| user234683 wrote:
| > Google gives me bad results. It ignores some of the words
| in my queries
|
| This is the problem I've been having with DDG, where it
| will aggressively rewrite my search into something
| completely unrelated
| gameswithgo wrote:
| One could ask that you provide clear examples of searches
| that don't work right for you, then maybe we can provide
| advice.
| ravenstine wrote:
| > A lot of DDG fans on HN blame the user or social
| conditioning and use that as a crutch. It's BS.
|
| That's no more or less BS than people saying that "DDG
| results are shit". I don't see anything wrong with trying to
| guess why DDG doesn't work well for some people, even if the
| conclusion happens to offend someone's personal choices.
| fossuser wrote:
| Funnily enough I just got an example of this from a friend
| who is trying DDG this week.
|
| Her example query that did better on Google than DDG:
|
| > why did robinhood go down feb 29 2020
|
| What I would search for the same question that does better on
| DDG:
|
| > robinhood down
|
| She's 24 and I'm 29 so it's possible that difference is real,
| people who are younger may be tailoring searches in a way
| that benefits Google (in which case they may not benefit as
| much from DDG or really would have to change behavior).
| jstanley wrote:
| An example of a difference: I live in Bristol. If I search
| for things like "car mechanic bristol", DDG comes up with
| lots of results from Bristol, Tennessee. It's not that DDG is
| _worse_ than Google, it 's just that DDG isn't tailoring the
| results to what it knows about me. The solution is to be more
| specific: "car mechanic bristol uk", for example, does the
| job.
| [deleted]
| aembleton wrote:
| Have you tried switching `United Kingdom` to on?
|
| https://imgur.com/6ydSWAF
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > If I search for things like "car mechanic bristol", DDG
| comes up with lots of results from Bristol, Tennessee. It's
| not that DDG is worse than Google, it's just that DDG isn't
| tailoring the results to what it knows about me.
|
| If I wanted a car mechanic in San Francisco, I would
| usually search for "car mechanic 94105" rather than "car
| mechanic san francisco". Regardless of search engine.
|
| Do postal codes not work to refer to particular areas of
| the UK?
| notahacker wrote:
| The Bristol postcode is the letters 'BS' followed by a
| one or two digit number, so it's not particularly good
| for finding a service provider in a large area.
|
| UK postcodes are somewhat more useful when you want to
| narrow a search to a small area, especially for small
| towns and London districts where the number is a useful
| identifier and the area itself might have multiple or
| non-unique names
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > it's not particularly good for finding a service
| provider in a large area.
|
| Unless I'm misunderstanding something, this doesn't make
| much sense.
|
| For example, running a search for "car mechanic 94105"
| doesn't restrict your results to car mechanics that are
| located inside the 94105 zip code. It restricts your
| results to car mechanics that are near the 94105 zip
| code, where "near" is a fuzzy term. I just ran this
| search myself, from outside San Francisco, and there's
| just a single result in the 94105 area. But there are
| plenty shown in 94107, 94103, 94102, 94111... (primarily
| 94107).
|
| The zip code is a cheap, easy, and unambiguous way to
| tell the search engine what you want. It's on the search
| engine to decide how to respond.
| berkut wrote:
| I have exactly the same issue with it in Wellington, NZ.
|
| Even with "New Zealand" turned on at the top, it gives me
| quite a few results for things in Wellington, Florida.
|
| If I don't specify "Wellington" or "NZ" in the search
| terms, results are even worse, even with "New Zealand"
| turned on: I get results from Australia, Dubai, even the UK
| for various search terms. (and some of the TLDs are things
| like "com.au" or ".co.uk" so it should be trivial to filter
| those out.)
|
| Google's not perfect in this regard, but it's an order of
| magnitude better in my experience for localised queries,
| even with both in Incognito/Private mode.
| fossuser wrote:
| Have you tried it recently?
|
| I generally agree that people made excuses for DDG when it
| was clearly worse and unusable, but today it's good enough to
| use instead (I think it's better).
|
| I'd try it again if you haven't for a while. Maybe your needs
| are different than mine, but since we're both on HN there's
| probably pretty good overlap.
|
| Small thing, but I really like how DDG results are primarily
| links to websites and I can see a bunch of links on the first
| page without scrolling. I think with google the last search I
| did had 3?
|
| I suspect the article is right about google being better
| about low intent searches (and just generally bad search
| queries from regular people which probably make up the vast
| majority of users), but I don't care about that. I think DDG
| is probably better for more technical users.
| Grimm1 wrote:
| I have tried it recently and my co-founder and I are
| literally building a new search experience because we are
| deeply unsatisfied with the current ones.
| [deleted]
| ampdepolymerase wrote:
| Any links to your new project?
| Grimm1 wrote:
| Yup there is (alpha.whize.co) the question mark at the
| top links to a blog post with our broader goals though
| we've refined them a bit since that post.
|
| I'll warn you though, the alpha has a really limited
| index (github results) but was meant to showcase how we
| think we'll initially prioritize results and gauge
| people's interest versus this is the final version
| because as you can imagine crawling the larger internet
| is a bigger task and if no one was interested we weren't
| going to do it.
|
| That said we did have a healthy amount of people try it
| out (over 2000) and are still seeing people use it now
| over a month out so we've been full steam ahead on our
| generic crawler, plus a few social media specific
| crawlers and we expect to have our beta available mid
| May.
| xigency wrote:
| No offense, but I literally cannot find anything on
| GitHub with this search engine.
| Grimm1 wrote:
| It's tuned towards discovery, so if you search a topic
| you'll get results for smaller, new repos that do
| something around that topic. We deliberately hard
| downranked common repos but it's also 2 months out of
| date now since that was to test the waters and we didnt
| set up recrawling at the time. That said we shared your
| concerns and have changed things up with how we are
| approaching it for the beta
| FalconSensei wrote:
| > We deliberately hard downranked common repos
|
| Wasn't google criticized here on HN for downranking
| specific results? If I'm looking for something, probably
| I'm looking for the most common, I think
| Grimm1 wrote:
| So we didn't pick specific repos, but we crafted a
| function based on some metrics we we're using from Github
| that had a sharp drop off after a certain point and
| basically -any- super common or well known repo would be
| down ranked based on those metrics.
|
| I can appreciate your thought on that but we're not
| necessarily geared towards the most common per se (though
| this might be me misunderstanding what you mean) as we
| have experienced multiple times the most common result
| being wrong or outdated and the way things are now it
| takes a long time for those to slide out of the rankings.
|
| We've been asking around for a while now to flesh out
| what our actual thought is and the description for the
| problem we're solving right now is "information
| staleness", you search for something and it leads you to
| a reddit post but that's outdated by 5 years and then you
| wind up actually having to do a deep dive and it turns
| out there was actually a more accurate post from a year
| ago but it just hasn't crept up to the top yet because
| everything references the 5 year old post.
|
| With our alpha we actually think we went too much in the
| other direction we focused on it all being super super
| new but the reality is there is nuance between different
| topics for what timeframe information decays in, if that
| makes sense, and now we're for the beta trying to strike
| a better balance.
| FalconSensei wrote:
| Right, it makes sense. What I end up doing a lot of
| times, is manually filtering by "last year". It's good to
| give preference to more recent results. Thanks for the
| explanation
| azinman2 wrote:
| I've always had the opposite experience with DDG. Technical
| queries gave just garbage results, where as I got
| meaningful hits on google each time. </anecdote>
| ckosidows wrote:
| Agreed. Each time I see something about DDG on HN I try
| to switch and it never lasts. I don't like the results on
| DDG and as much as I'd like to move away from Google
| they've got search on lock.
| fossuser wrote:
| The same thing was true for me until it wasn't, I stayed
| on DDG after trying it again probably three months ago.
| azinman2 wrote:
| I don't fully buy the whole "need to move away from
| google" part. Yes privacy, yes ads, yes SEO gaming, yes
| monotechopocolpyse. But the reality is they don't sell my
| data, they've been a good steward of my search queries
| over the years (and have tools to clear my history or log
| me out and not save them), and their product is still the
| best over two-ish decades.
|
| If you're going to convince me to move away from them,
| you gotta 10x it, not give me a poor clone with ! tools
| to force me to compensate for a not great search engine.
| Give me a fundamentally different experience that
| actually innovates in this space. I'd love to see the
| competition, but somehow it hasn't materialized in all
| these years.
| visarga wrote:
| > If you're going to convince me to move away from them,
| you gotta 10x it,
|
| The fact that you don't start all your searches in Google
| is sufficient reason. You could always jump to Google if
| DDG has bad results, but for many searches you don't need
| to leave Google traces.
| azinman2 wrote:
| Why is that sufficient reason? I'm not particularly
| concerned about Google having my search history. As I've
| said before, they've been good stewards with it over 20
| years.
| troyvit wrote:
| Actually the article in this post provides exactly that.
| https://www.bitlog.com/2020/03/06/duckduckgo-is-good-
| enough-... Look for the bit about Harry Potter.
| dhimes wrote:
| It might be more effective if you try it yourself. Google
| something you normally google, then repeat the search with
| &pws=0 at the end of the query string.
| akavel wrote:
| Interesting, what is the pws arg?
| shrikant wrote:
| It turns off personalised (based on your browsing/search
| history) search results.
| dhimes wrote:
| I think it's something like 'personalized web search' so
| you turn it off. That used to be the way to do it anyway.
| pingyong wrote:
| Considering the base idea isn't that DDG's search is better,
| but that their privacy is better, it's kinda the opposite.
| The people not using DDG would have to provide clear
| examples. (Or just say that they don't care enough about
| Google's privacy issues to switch.)
| jt2190 wrote:
| > A lot of DDG fans on HN blame the user or social
| conditioning and use that as a crutch.
|
| The tools _are_ different, though, so searching the same way
| on DDG and Google will lead to different outcomes. This is no
| different than adapting you speech when speaking to an infant
| or speaking to an adult. [1]
|
| For example, I use DDG as my primary search tool, and I have
| a habit of using "keywords", rather than natural language,
| when I search DDG. (This may be an outdated habit from my
| long exposure to search tools.) With modern Google though, I
| find that if I follow my habit and use keywords, my search
| results are poor. I have better results using natural
| language. As others have noted, I have better results when
| searching Google when I don't know what the thing I'm looking
| for is called, or when I'm looking for esoteric content (like
| code samples.)
|
| [1] I'm not saying that switching is easy or even ideal, I'm
| just underscoring that different tools are... different. ;-)
| And "knowing" how to use search well is kinda hard these
| days, as everything keeps evolving, and we're all busy doing
| other things.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| I have a hard time believing there's actually much google-
| specific adaption going on for anyone except the biggest HN
| nerd.
|
| My girlfriend types whole sentences into it. People in this
| thread have search examples like "harry potter sport". I
| look at my google search history and it's just generic
| search strings that DDG has no excuse to struggle.
|
| Having to "tweak your language" just sounds like a cop-out
| to me.
| chuckgreenman wrote:
| Let's say there's a new can opener in the drawer [1], it's
| the same size and shape as a can opener but because it's not
| what you're used to you try to use it in the normal
| orientation and it doesn't work.
|
| Even though the tool can open cans, rounds off the sharp
| edges and requires less grip force you reply with: a lot of
| OXO folks blame the user or social conditioning. It's BS.
|
| Is that a reasonable response?
|
| I'd argue that it isn't.
|
| But to answer your question I use more precise language for
| what I'm looking for, specifying the city and state I want
| results from, specifying the type of thing that I want.
|
| A lot of my searches are !bangs,
|
| !godoc - for searching Go packages !gems - for searching ruby
| gems !sx - for getting only stack overflow results !w - for
| jumping to a Wikipedia article !gh - for searching github
|
| - [1] https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000079XW2?tag=duckduckgo-
| ffab-20&...
| overcast wrote:
| Trained in what way? I type a couple words(misspelled) on
| Google and it magically returns me exactly what I need. Typing
| special keywords back in the day sucked.
| kriro wrote:
| I'm using DDG but I have to "!g" a lot. The English language
| results are quite good but the German results are often not
| what I'm looking for. I'm assuming this will improve with time
| so I'm not too worried but DDG search results can still be
| improved a lot (imo). That being said, I'm not switching back
| anytime soon. Pretty happy so far.
|
| FWIW I use uBlock Origin and Privacy Badger.
| hinkley wrote:
| I've made a promise to myself to start paying attention to this
| when I do searches, but so far that promise has gone
| unfulfilled.
|
| If I had to hazard a guess, I'd say that I think I see quite a
| few SEO hackers pop up on the first page, to the point that
| it's sometimes difficult to find anything meaty.
|
| I'll try to keep an eye on it this week so the next time DDG
| comes up I can contribute something substantial (and
| substantiated).
| Waterluvian wrote:
| I've been a DDG booster for a while. Their search results are
| usually good enough. Except after longer use I've found two
| major issues that eventually forced me back to Google:
|
| 1. I can Image Search the most basic of terms and literally get
| "No Results Found" once or twice a day. Sometimes I'll get
| like... 8 photos.
|
| 2. I will weirdly get the Wikipedia link for a relevant query,
| but the British or Spanish or some other version often isn't
| even in English. And I do have "Canada" toggled on.
| bloaf wrote:
| 3. You can't search for "older than" results. For example, if
| you want news reports about Ukrainian corruption, but only
| from before 2015, you're out of luck on ddg, have fun reading
| about Trump.
| frenchyatwork wrote:
| > ... the British or .. some other version often isn't even
| in English.
|
| There's only one regular English version of the Wikipedia,
| unless you're refering to the Galic one, which would be a
| little odd
| (https://ga.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pr%C3%ADomhleathanach).
| Waterluvian wrote:
| I'm surely messing up the details. I just remember getting
| other versions of Wikipedia as my main result.
| jbay808 wrote:
| I got the scots one once when I searched for the Hoover
| dam.
|
| https://sco.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoover_Dam
|
| At first I thought either I was going crazy or the article
| had been vandalized. But then I figured out that DDG hadn't
| taken me to the English result.
| bigbob2 wrote:
| I find DDG works for most purposes but I sometimes have to use
| !s to get meaningful results; even with very specific search
| terms such as a part number. These days I rarely find a need to
| use !g but it does happen a few times a week.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| Please teach me how to use DDG, as I'm clearly missing
| something. I'm happy to switch to a service that provides
| better results in exchange for a bit more effort in
| constructing search queries, but the results I get for that
| effort really do need to be better.
|
| The only specific advise I've ever seen is "use !g if you don't
| get good results the first time", which really isn't
| encouraging.
| jp_sc wrote:
| It's not about better results. It's about good enough results
| without all the spying.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| richthegeek wrote:
| Today I was trying to find info about Corpus Christi - a Polish
| film that won some awards lately. DDG gives me information
| about a place in Texas, including stuff from the local
| newspaper and attractions. I'm searching from a Poland IP btw.
| Anyway, the actual film was at the very end of the first page
| of results for me.
|
| It certainly feels like it priotises things weirdly.
|
| Google Maps has a similar issue though: plenty of US placenames
| are just stolen from European places and oftentimes I'll be
| trying to get directions to a nearby town and instead it'll
| navigate to someplace in Alabama instead. Strangely enough, not
| where I want to go...
| ufo wrote:
| Corpus Christi is the name of a major Christian festival and
| is a holiday in many countries with a large catholic
| population, including Poland. The city in Texas and the movie
| are named after it.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feast_of_Corpus_Christi
| wolco wrote:
| Wait a second. You can't use a privacy themed search engine
| and expect them to lookup your ip, figure out what city you
| are in. The entire point of using ddg is to avoid this.
| mrcu5 wrote:
| Did you include the word "film" in your search? Otherwise
| there's no reasonable expectation for it to show up. It's
| like searching for "Philadelphia" and expecting the movie to
| show up and not the city.
| glenneroo wrote:
| I understand what you're suggesting but for fun I did that
| search on DDG and the film was the 8th result (on the first
| page of results ;)
| scollet wrote:
| The experiment was a success
| weystrom wrote:
| So does Google, "Corpus Christi" is too ambiguous.
|
| "Corpus Christi polish film" is good enough. https://duckduck
| go.com/?q=Corpus+Christi+polish+film&t=ffab&...
|
| "Corpus Christi film" also works, results look relevant, but
| knowledge graph shows the old 2014 Venezuelan movie. This is
| where Google is way superior, it showed me average score on
| imdb and even local showtimes.
| astine wrote:
| I imagine that if you were searching from a Polish IP,
| Google would infer that you meant the movie, not the city.
| For anyone in the United States, however, I'd expect the
| city to be the more common search.
| VikingCoder wrote:
| When I search for Fish Tacos on DDG's maps and Google, it's
| night and day.
|
| DDG gave me 4 results, none anywhere near me.
|
| Do you have a suggestion for how I could have been more
| effective?
| andrewprock wrote:
| I do not use DDG for map queries. Google Maps is still light
| years ahead of anyone else for maps. For non-map queries, DDG
| is now well ahead of Google except for long tail stuff, for
| example: technical error messages.
| smichel17 wrote:
| I currently also use Google Maps for map queries.. But I
| use it through DuckDuckGo, with !gm. I actually find this a
| _better_ experience than navigating to Google Maps before
| entering my query.
| kube-system wrote:
| I find DDG more useful when I treat it like it's trying to
| help me use the internet, rather than like it's trying to
| replace the internet.
|
| try "fish tacos !yelp"
| FalconSensei wrote:
| then, why not just use yelp?
| kube-system wrote:
| The same reason that any ddg bang is useful: fewer
| keystrokes, one less page load.
| FalconSensei wrote:
| IDK, for all sites I use I have them as custom searches.
| So Yelp would be: "y" -> tab -> search -> see Yelp
| results page
| fiatjaf wrote:
| DDG is not good for local stuff. That's in the linked
| article.
| AdamSC1 wrote:
| 'Fish Tacos [X]' where X is the name of the city - or turning
| on your region toggle is usually enough to solve that
| problem.
| [deleted]
| taywrobel wrote:
| For me part of the problem is that DDG feels slow to index new
| results. Trying to search for anything that's happened in the
| last week almost always is a swing and a miss for me.
|
| It's a stark contrast to google, where the results seem more or
| less live, including updated auto complete for things that have
| happened recently.
|
| And that doesn't seem like an issue at all related to privacy,
| it's just a problem space that DDG doesn't seem to handle well.
| CriticalCathed wrote:
| Ironically Google changing how it responds to my search
| queries, and me finally figuring out that's why my google
| experience has degraded, is what actually made me switch to DDG
| as my primary search engine.
| moksly wrote:
| DDG doesn't work well for my language, but it works perfectly
| well for my English searches.
| stuaxo wrote:
| I use it regularly, but for some programming queries the
| results could be better and I have to use the Goog.
| latexr wrote:
| I never log in to Google's services in the browser[1]; clear my
| cookies on browser close; use several other blocking methods
| for privacy; and have been using DDG as my main search engine
| for years.
|
| Yet, I've used `!g` more in the last months than ever before.
| In my usage, DDG's results are getting noticeably worse. It's
| unlikely I've forgotten "how to use it".
|
| [1]: I only log in to a Google account for Gmail, and always on
| an app.
| rykuno wrote:
| DDG is fantastic and now my preference. I tried it a couple years
| ago and was constantly second guessing their results.
|
| To have come this far as to it now becoming my daily preference,
| the team has come a long way and has instilled great confidence
| that they will continue to improve the platform
| JackMcMack wrote:
| I love duckduckgo, but for some reason my home ip address (new-
| to-me but fixed) seems to be banned on at least one server, and I
| have to flush my dns cache often to be able to reach
| duckduckgo.com . I've tried reaching out to info@duckduckgo.com
| but only got a generic "thanks for the feedback response", and I
| don't have twitter. Is anyone from duckduckgo reading this?
| jug wrote:
| I noticed the same. It wasn't fit for my use a few years ago but
| I think the user uptake has helped somehow, or inspired their
| devs. Now I feel like it's more about not being quite used to the
| results. It's just a matter of unlearning the old though, with
| Google's overly strong echo chamber results.
| ryanmcbride wrote:
| I switched to DDG pretty much as soon as they were on the scene
| and it's been awesome watching them grow. Several of my team
| members have switched to DDG after watching me use it for so long
| too. I can't recall the last time I had to !g.
| Bombthecat wrote:
| Sooo, when do you guys think Google will pull the plug from ddg?
| Kiro wrote:
| You mean Bing?
| stuaxo wrote:
| I am a regular user.
|
| Is there a way to report bad search results ?
| weystrom wrote:
| I find myself using !g more than I'd like to, even before I even
| look at DDG results. I just don't seem to trust it with complex
| queries and go straight to google. But it has gotten better,
| that's true.
|
| Side effect - I started using built-in Firefox wikipedia and
| Stackoverflow search way more, skipping DDG and Google
| altogether.
| bgrohman wrote:
| I've been using DuckDuckGo for years now. It's great. I probably
| use the !g fallback to Google a few times a year.
| realradicalwash wrote:
| i've been using DDG for a few years now. i generally like it a
| lot. however, i have decided to stop using them for image search.
| their filters are just not good enough.
|
| two examples: I've searched for some kind of speedo (jammers?)
| and got to see a really problematic image I thought of reporting
| to the police. and just recently, i image searched 'martin from
| the simpsons', because I came across his name and forgot which
| character that was. near the top of the results were some really
| wtf images (now removed). I don't want to see that stuff - so if
| anyone at DDG sees this: please up your image filters.
| phaedryx wrote:
| I think what finally sold me was the bangs. For example I can
| search "Array !mdn" and get right to the MDN docs and not worry
| about w3schools stuff.
| onychomys wrote:
| Like the author, I switched over when the google ad thing
| happened, and for the same reason. But instead of DDG, I decided
| to try out ecosia ( https://www.ecosia.org ) which is a wrapper
| over Bing. But they'll take all the ad revenue and use it to
| plant trees. So I get decent search results (bing isn't quite as
| good as google, but it's pretty decent for what I need) and also
| get to save the earth a little bit.
| giantrobot wrote:
| I switched to DDG soon after they launched. I've been using
| search engines since the days of WebCrawler and out of habit
| still search today like I did back then. I don't do natural
| language queries, I search for keywords and want to use logical
| operators to narrow down my search. I also usually know some
| sites to search for things so I regularly limit searched with
| "site:...".
|
| For most of the past decade Google's support for the way _I_
| think about searching has sucked. They got obsessed with
| tailoring results to users and linking everything to their
| profiles. They also went nuts with natural language search,
| filling results pages with bullshit, and letting paid placement
| overtake meaningful search results.
|
| For me this was all made worse because I don't stay logged into
| accounts and I don't use GMail as my primary e-mail. When I need
| to log into account I do so in a private browser window. I also
| use ad blockers and have for decades now.
|
| This all adds together to make Google useless for me. I'm sure
| plenty of people like their features but they don't do me any
| good.
|
| It's aggravating to me because for a while in the 00s, before the
| DoubleClick reverse buyout, Google's search was vastly superior
| to the competition. Where all others were inundated with keyword
| spam and other early SEO bullshit Google returned germane results
| for just about everything. Their search page ads were even
| relevant because they were looking at _what I had searched for_
| instead of some historical profile.
|
| DDG is closest to what old Google search used to be. I don't want
| to ask questions in an NLP search box most of the time. When I do
| I'll go to WolframAlpha. I'm really interested in just a full
| text search of the web with good result sorting. This is what old
| Google did fantastically and current DDG does well enough for my
| needs.
| paul7986 wrote:
| Would any other DDG users like to see
|
| - a DDG Mail service - a DDG News.. i still use Google News
| begrudingly - a DDG Video site.. Youtube replacement (not easy to
| do with Youtube having so much content)
|
| Personally, I'd drop all Google services if such were available.
| Maybe others would too?
| wickerman wrote:
| I use DDG as my main search engine - for most things it works
| just fine, when I can't find what I'm looking for I go to google.
| I find it hilarious that the image search function works a lot
| like Google used to in the past - I'm constantly looking for
| reference when drawing and more often than not if you type
| something innocuous like "man with hand in front of face" you'll
| end up with a first page full of porn in DDG whereas it's all SFW
| in Google, even with all restrictions off. Luckily DDG offers a
| nudity filter which works pretty well - even if it still fails to
| catch the odd gore picture.
| marssaxman wrote:
| DuckDuckGo has certainly been good enough for my regular use for
| several years now. Switching the search engine to DDG is part of
| my standard new-browser setup, along with resetting the "new tab"
| content to blank and installing uBlock Origin.
|
| I may have had an easier switch because I never used a google
| account, and thus never had to deal with personalized search
| results. I also never liked the natural-language style of search
| query - too fuzzy - and have continued using the same kind of
| keyword-based searches that worked when the web was young.
| Grimm1 wrote:
| To my knowledge duck duck go uses Bing's search API to get their
| results. To me Bing and Google have not been sufficient for my
| searching needs and the needs of a large group around me for a
| long time now.
|
| On a separate but related issue because DDG is using Bing the
| overall experience is lackluster, as other user's have noted
| things like very slow to re-index new results, new information
| climbs up to the top very slowly and often times I have to switch
| off their search with a ! command to get my results because they
| just aren't working. But if I have to do that I'd rather be on
| that other search site entirely.
|
| To be fair google also for the last few years has also started
| providing a very lack luster search experience and using dark
| patterns around their results to get you to click ads.
|
| They all kind of suck.
|
| My opinion is biased though because I'm currently working on a
| new search engine to solve these things.
| diffeomorphism wrote:
| > To my knowledge duck duck go uses Bing's search API to get
| their results.
|
| And their own crawler and wikipedia and stackexchange and about
| 400 other sources: https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-
| pages/results/so...
|
| That said, yeah it is mainly a better Bing.
| bla3 wrote:
| That page basically confirms this. It says
|
| > To do that, we've developed an open source Instant Answer
| platform called DuckDuckHack,
|
| which links to https://duckduckhack.com/ which says
| "DuckDuckHack is now in Maintenance Mode".
|
| And the "four hundred sources" link links to 400 special case
| replies. They are probably useful, but fire rarely. It's
| basically Bing, and that page is a bunch of spin.
| josefresco wrote:
| It's actually Bing+ other sources, there's a page on their site
| that explains it.
|
| And I had the same opinion as you, until I started using it
| every day. My habit was as follows: When I didn't get good
| results, I would switch back to Google and run the same query.
| Over time I found more "purple" links in Google indicating DDG
| was giving me almost the same (sometimes better) results.
| Grimm1 wrote:
| That's an interesting process, I'll have to give it a try ;)
|
| I mentioned it above but Google has also been giving me worse
| results in recent years so I genuinely believe there's a
| better way to do these things and do them in a way that is
| also more respectful of the users.
| xyst wrote:
| If that's the case, then I'm sticking with Ecosia since it uses
| Bing as well. Not sure if Ecosia has it's own crawler, but at
| least they appropriate some profits to plant trees.
|
| They also have an alias to redirect the search to google if the
| initial search doesn't yield anything useful.
| cbHXBY1D wrote:
| Compare searches between Ecosia and DDG. Same results.
| Ardia wrote:
| They should shorten the name - DuckDuckGo.com is too long to type
| out.
| NoGravitas wrote:
| Try "duck.com", or "ddg.gg".
| [deleted]
| rudolph9 wrote:
| It's gotten better! I still use google for very obscure things
| but the vast majority of my searches these days are duckduckgo
| [deleted]
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(page generated 2020-03-06 23:00 UTC)