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DuckDuckGo grew more than 70% this year

385 points by nichodges 11y ago

deleted 11y ago
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newscracker 11y ago
> “Our biggest challenge is that most people have not heard of us,” Weinberg says. “We very much want to break out into the mainstream.” It won't help at all if more people get to know of DDG and then leave it after a single trial because the results are not great. I value privacy a lot and want something like DDG to succeed and become really big, but I get frustrated very often with DDG. I know many people are very happy with the results from DDG. For most of my searches though (on technical and other matters), I end up doing a second search on Start Page or Google because DDG still does not have search by date and the search results are nowhere close to Google. I do have and use DDG as my default search engine in the hope that DDG keeps analyzing the volume of !s or !g queries as an indicator of how much DDG is lacking and takes action to improve it.
- sundarurfriend 11y ago
  FWIW, DDG search in my experience has gotten vastly better in the past year or so. It used to be that 90% of my searches ended up repeated with !g to go to google, but nowadys I'd guess that's like 30%, and even among those, half the time google's answer quality ends up the same. The only cases where Google is predictably and consistenly superior are 1. error/diagnostic messages: DDG still sucks at precision search, and quotes are not always the answer; 2. queries that require Natural Language Processing: Google understands stuff like "the bad moustache guy from XYZ series" where I myself have only a vague idea of what I'm looking for. And oftentimes the Instant Answers end up offsetting somewhat poorer quality of results, so kudos to DDG for coming up with those. (None of this is meant to disqualify your experience though, just expressing my own joy at their results having improved for my use case.)
  - stinos 11y ago
    DDG search in my experience has gotten vastly better in the past year or so. Had the exact same impression. There are numerous threads on HN involving DDG in the last couple of years and in more than one of them I complained about the results, but slowly yet steadily there are always less reasons to complain it seems. DDG does not yet find everything as quick as I'd want it to but when my go-to would be !g in the past I'm now starting to notice I use it much less (say only 1 out of 20 searches) and when I do chances are high google won't find what I want either, it usually just comes up with the same results but in 'better' order.
    - AdamSC1 11y ago
      Hey Stinos, Thanks for the feedback - part of the changes you've noticed are simply due to the fact that we do read threads like this, and we do encourage users to send/share their feedback and examples of where we haven't hit the mark for them; and then actively try and improve that experience. We've recently streamlined this process by adding a feedback tool on the bottom right of the results page. If you feel we don't quite show the results/experience you were expecting (or if we really really nail it) then we encourage you to share that feedback with us! You can opt-in to how much detail you provide, and as always we don't collect, store and share personally identifiable details. Thanks for your continued support!
      - stinos 11y ago
        by adding a feedback tool on the bottom right of the result Shame on me, didn't notice this. But thanks for pointing to it: I'll definitely put this to use.
  - pixard 11y ago
    I last tried DDG a few years ago and couldn't get anything done at all as the results were simply not what I needed (PHP / Laravel / WordPress development). Your comment made me try it again today and after several hours of using it I can definitely say it has vastly improved in results for my particular use case. While a few hours are obviously not a huge metric it's still satisfying enough so I have switched it to default for now and we'll see how it goes. Thanks for sharing your experience.
- necessity 11y ago
  Why use DDG at all if you're using Startpage/Ixquick?
- toomuchtodo 11y ago
  If you enjoy DDG (I love it!) consider helping create Instant Answers: https://www.gitbook.com/book/talsraviv/duckduckhackdocs/details https://www.gitbook.com/book/talsraviv/duckduckhackdocs/deta... (there's a Slack team for this as well)
  - tagawa 11y ago
    If any devs would like to join that Slack team please send a mail (empty body is fine) to quackslack@duckduckgo.com and we'll send you an invite.
- muddi900 11y ago
  I use DDG because of custom search 'bangs'. I have gotten rid of a whole bookmark sub folder of custom keyword searches. When I want google, which is less and less often, I just add a '!g' to my search. I doubt DDG will ever catchup to the Big G, but It works.
  - will_pseudonym 11y ago
    Is that similar to Chrome's "search engines"? They work really well, and I tend to use google's "site:" filter to search sites that have awful search capabilities.
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
    - AdamSC1 11y ago
      The "!Bang" feature allows you to redirect your searches. For example: "!w Sam Altman' would instantly return you to the wikipedia page on Sam Altman. And, "!Amazon shoes" would instantly return you to the Amazon search result page for shoes. We've got over 7500 !Bangs currently and users can request to add them for any site https://duckduckgo.com/bang https://duckduckgo.com/bang - just like our community efforts in 'Instant Answers' on our duckduckhack.com platform, this community driven experience allows you to get involved and shape a search experience you want to see.
    - yohui 11y ago
      Yes, and also similar to Firefox bookmark keywords. e.g. a Chrome search engine or Firefox bookmark with URL "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=%s" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=%s" and keyword "wp" will return the Wikipedia page for Hacker News if you search "wp Hacker News". Also works for stuff other than searches, e.g. "https://www.reddit.com/r/%s" https://www.reddit.com/r/%s" with keyword "rr" to quickly navigate to the Hacker News subreddit with "rr hackernews". Chrome automatically adds search engines, while Firefox requires a bit more manual work: https://support.mozilla.org/kb/how-search-from-address-bar https://support.mozilla.org/kb/how-search-from-address-bar
- agumonkey 11y ago
  The issue with DDG : 90% of my queries ends with '!g'. Most of DDG is awesome[1], except for the results, they set you back to the copernic era. Very often Google suggestions are already part of the answers I'm looking for. DDG first page is often off point. I feel tangible frustration every time I use it. Just using a browser not configured with DDG makes me feel calmer. [1] business reality check, so often I complain about Google UI, layout and stuff. DDG has all of this, lean ui, settings, shortcuts ... but it doesn't matter.
- PhantomGremlin 11y ago
  I get frustrated very often with DDG I get frustrated with Google (I don't use DDG much, so I'm not that familiar with the limitations). Google has repeatedly crippled search, made it worse than it was. E.g. you used to be able to say +yesIwantthis and your results definitely included that word. Now, not so much. It's now something to do with Google+. Now, you can't force Google to truly include particular words. You can try, but I don't think it always works. E.g. you can say "yes" "search" "all" "these" "words", and maybe it will and maybe it won't. Advanced search has definitely gotten worse. Frankly its at the point that I'd be willing to pay someone $10/mo to get a search engine that's a) good and b) truly gives me control. Meet the new Google, worse than the old Google.
  - 0xcde4c3db 11y ago
    They added a "Verbatim" mode to force all search terms to appear (in the "Search Tools" bar, click "All results" and change it to "Verbatim"). But it's all-or-nothing; it can't be applied to individual terms. It also can't be combined with the timespan searches; changing one resets the other. The old syntax with + was definitely more useful.
- JoshTriplett 11y ago
  I use DDG for 100% of searches, and never end up using !g anymore. (It took a while to disentangle how much I'd equated result quality with "formatted exactly like Google results".) But unfortunately, I still end up using !maps for all my map searches, because 1) DDG defaults to Bing, so no, and 2) DDG doesn't automatically parse anything like "$ADDRESS1 to $ADDRESS2" and provide directions. It'd be nice if DDG managed to get sensible first-party maps and routing, either via OSM data or direct map data licensing.
- douche 11y ago
  Am I nuts, or has DDG been around for a very long time? Wikipedia says it started in 2008, but for some reason it's lodged in my mind along with Excite, Alta-Vista, AskJeeves and the other pre-Google search engines.
  - dalke 11y ago
    https://duckduckgo.com/about https://duckduckgo.com/about says "DuckDuckGo began as an idea" on February 29, 2008, and on September 25, 2008 "DuckDuckGo was announced to the Hacker News and reddit communities". FWIW, here's the original HN announcement - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=315142 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=315142 .
  - antod 11y ago
    You weren't thinking of Dogpile were you? That was a pre Google meta search engine that sent your query to multiple search engines.
    - jaredsohn 11y ago
      metacrawler was another and was what I used prior to Google. Amusingly, it now forwards to a site powered by dogpile.
- rpgmaker 11y ago
  I was planning on moving to the DDG on my phone because Google Search it's unbearable (or Now or whatever the heck that app is now) and their mobile app sucks. It tries to be a web browser when I just wanted a search engine, I'm perfectly content with my mobile browser. It surprised me that MS Bing also suffers from this (yes, I was that desperately to stop using google search on my mobile). It's ridiculous.
- eridius 11y ago
  I sometimes use !g to fallback to google. But the vast majority of searches, I don't do that. And when I do, I'd estimate that probably 80% of the time, Google doesn't have any better results. Google usually only has better results when I'm searching for some highly-specific tech thing that is still esoteric enough for DDG to not find it, and I credit that largely to the fact that Google has the filter bubble (which I explicitly try to avoid by using DDG). Beyond that, Google typically has better results for topical searches than DDG does, but I don't do those very often.
- marklgr 11y ago
  > I end up doing a second search on Start Page or Google because DDG still does not have search by date !gday, !gmonth and !gyear are my main 'exit path' from DDG. I also have a good deal of "site:foo.com !g". Otherwise, I've been reasonably happy with it for the last eight months.
- tagawa 11y ago
  DDG staff here. Thanks for sticking with us. The time/date filtering is being worked on - hopefully we can release it soon. That should make a lot of people happy. For quality of results, I'm biased but I've found they have improved thanks to a lot of feedback from users providing specific queries that could be investigated one-by-one. There's now a feedback button (desktop only) so if you're able to give more examples of bad results that will help improve further.
- mikkom 11y ago
  I don't think people realize that DuckDuckGo is a meta search engine, they don't have their own algorithm. Instead they are using whatever is cheapest at the moment. It's very hard to get better results if you can't modify the algorithms core logic. edit: okay maybe cheapest is a wrong word, the more correct term would be best price/result ratio. Some time ago they were using Yandex as their result provider, at the moment I don't know who their provider is but I think that could be found by browsing through the about us pages (or not as now they are so big they can negotiate deal where they don't have to disclose their source). (edit: this is what they disclose at https://duck.co/help/results/sources https://duck.co/help/results/sources) > DuckDuckGo gets its results from over four hundred sources. These include hundreds of vertical sources delivering niche Instant Answers, DuckDuckBot (our crawler) and crowd-sourced sites (like Wikipedia, stored in our answer indexes). We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we primarily source from Yahoo!, and in some regions and scenarios, Yandex and Bing.
- AdamSC1 11y ago
  As some folks have mentioned we're constantly improving our results but one of the best things is when we have a specific results case. So if you have a result that didn't work for you - share the specific case in our feedback tool or by shooting our team an email (mine is adam@duckduckgo.com). One thing that separates us is the fact that you can get involved in our community, build out instant answers, give us feedback on searches that actually gets integrated and shape a great search experience. Thanks for the feedback though!
  - newscracker 11y ago
    Thanks for the information about the feedback button. I had never noticed it at all! When people search, they look at the search box and then at what's below it, which tends to be always on the top and towards the left of the screen. Whatever's in the middle or bottom as well as on the right tends to get ignored. I'd suggest putting the Send Feedback button right below the search box when you display the results so that more people notice it. I've just sent a feedback about this through the Send Feedback button.
rlv-dan 11y ago
I've been using DDG for many years now, and I think the search results are excellent in most cases. Sometimes I'm not satisfied, and try the same seach on Google. Most of the time though, I get the same results there. My only gripe is that the last half year or so, w3schools has been getting at the top of the search results. (Previously w3schools did not show in the search results.)
- eridius 11y ago
  That's funny, one of my gripes with Google was their insistence for many many years on making w3schools the first result for html-related queries. I haven't ever noticed that with DDG, but to be fair I also don't do html-related queries very often anymore (because the Dash app has supplanted any sort of technical documentation search; if I want to know what an html tag does, I just ask Dash to show me (developer.mozilla.org) docs).
- qwertyuiop924 11y ago
  Use !mdn or !devdocs. Both are awsome sites.
scope 11y ago
DDG results have improved tremendously, top stack overflow / github matches are shown partially which is really neat I FULLY switched to DDG (& also away from Chrome) when I found out when I click save password on login forms my password is sent to Google Servers (I must have missed it on the TOC)
- antome 11y ago
  DuckDuckGo really is good enough to use on a daily basis now. One big gripe I still have however, is that there seems to be no way to filter by time. I still have to go to google if I want to find a news article or topic which is recent, or within a certain period.
  - tagawa 11y ago
    This is a popular request and one we're working on. Admittedly we've been saying that for a while but it's getting close.
    - dingaling 11y ago
      A really good filter ( for me anyhow ) would be 'prior to this [ week | month ]', since often I want to search for things from the period before they were news
      - tagawa 11y ago
        Interesting idea - I hadn't thought of that. Duly noted.
  - grimman 11y ago
    It's interesting to me, seeing how many people are so deeply dissatisfied with the results. I switched a couple of years ago, and only had a very small (two-three week) period where I'd check back on the mighty GOOG, only to confirm that they didn't have any better results either. Might it be due to the way I format my queries?
- 11y ago
tofupup 11y ago
I made the switch. My biggest problem with the lack of privacy is that I don't know in X years how my data will be used. In X years - laws may change - mores may change - the fortune of google may change. It just doesn't seem prudent for me and my progeny. For example searching for information about cigarettes or cigar clubs - 30 years ago may have been socially acceptable. Today if that information were available from the 80's it could provide signal for insurance companies determining rates.
akkartik 11y ago
I seem to have finally switched permanently a couple of days ago[1]. Pleasantly surprised. [1] The clincher? Copying a link on Google and finding for the umpteenth time that it was a #$%# redirect. (This is on my phone so greasemonkey plugins don't help.) There comes a time when you say enough.
msh 11y ago
I love ddg for english searches. For non english searches it is still behind google. For example "pizza name-of-my-town" lacks half the pizza places google lists.
- cJ0th 11y ago
  In case you are from Europe you may want to try https://www.qwant.com/web https://www.qwant.com/web It certainly doesn't match google when it comes to local searches but I find it a bit more pleasant than DDG.
ssaddi 11y ago
It's a great search engine, and gettig better with time ..
funkyy 11y ago
In all honesty, despite me knowing about DDG for reaaaaalllly long time, I still tend to forget their name. "something duck" is how non-tech people reference it. Cant you really name it something easy to remember and (ouch) Google like Duckgo? Or Ducker? Or anything else that can be pronounced by anyone within one breath?
- LeoPanthera 11y ago
  I always give the url as ddg.gg
- ugexe 11y ago
  I've never had a problem remembering their name after I first heard of them forevvvver ago, and recall thinking Google was a stupid name. Altavista, infoseek, dogpile, askjeeves... clearly the name is not important
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
- sgt 11y ago
  If you google 'duck' it should be in the top 5. For me it was the 3rd one, the 1st and 2nd being wiki-type articles.
  - r3bl 11y ago
    I just tried it, it was right under image results and Wikipedia article about ducks. So, it should be the second result (I've tried the same thing on StartPage and got the same result).
  - AdamSC1 11y ago
    If you Google 'search engine' it's number one.
    - sgt 11y ago
      Slightly ironic though - using Google to google 'search engine'.
lips 11y ago
My experience has been reminiscent of the old SE days, when different engines would often fare better/worse for varying queries, vs there being an all-out winner. I think of DDG as avoiding a fair amount of overtly "consumer" content. Google is great at getting to "interaction points," DDG is great for information. I quite like the DDG ability to play embedded videos from the search results page, and their accompanying privacy warning.
- sundarurfriend 11y ago
  > I think of DDG as avoiding a fair amount of overtly "consumer" content. True. Since all the 'content farms' out there are busy fighting the SEO war specifically targeted at Google, Google results for some topics are just stream after stream of useless generic garbage from non-experts. DDG, simply by using a different search backend, avoids most of this and often gives much better results in such cases.
lesdeuxmagots 11y ago
FYI: DuckDuckGo primarily leverages the Yahoo BOSS api in the US.
- adrtessier 11y ago
  I'm curious: who will they turn to if (when) Yahoo shuts the service down? Bing?
  - infbtag 11y ago
    Their only options are Google, Bing, Yandex, Exalead, Gigablast, and Mojeek, and most probably in that order as the last two need to grow considerably first. Unless there's any others that have their own index?
    - AznHisoka 11y ago
      How is Google an option? They offer no API whatsoever
      - infbtag 11y ago
        StartPage uses Google so there must be a way.
        AznHisoka 11y ago
        They probably scrape Google. Willing to bet there is no deal. Google would never agree to such a thing. Even paying $XXXXX a month isn't worth it to them.
        infbtag 11y ago
        That's what I always thought but according to this they have a contract: https://support.startpage.com/index.php?/Knowledgebase/Article/View/147/0/why-does-google-let-startpage-access-their-search-results https://support.startpage.com/index.php?/Knowledgebase/Artic...
myztic 11y ago
DuckDuckGo really looses the battle when it comes to search results. And since they make the case with privacy, I also want to make clear, they don't loose because Google tracks us all, even if you are logged out from your account, use vpn servers, delete all of your cookies and cache, Google is just so much better and DuckDuckGo awful and some search results are just weird. I tried once (it must have been this year) to use DuckDuckGo as my main search engine, basically whenever I did not find something quickly enough I just switched to Google and then found my object of desire often times instantly. One of my VPN-Servers is blocked by Google and because of that I am using Bing at the moment, which also seems so much better than DuckDuckGo was when I used it. I installed LinuxMint on a non-techy person's machine a while ago (few weeks) and DuckDuckGo was set up as default search engine with Firefox, even that person used Google, because he/she wasn't happy with the search results. Used Google even though he/she had to manually go to google.com every single time "We don't bubble you" is a unique selling point they have profited greatly from, and that's what made them well known to begin with, nothing else really.
CM30 11y ago
It's not surprising, but if they really want to become mainstream, they'll have to get people caring more about privacy than they already do. I mean okay, the Snowden leaks and stuff about PRISM got a lot of people using it, but those people were still most tech savvy types who value their privacy over the quality of the search results. DDG is getting better, but it'll have to beat Google and the likes on a quality level if it's going to get the interest of people who don't seem to give a damn about their privacy.
XJOKOLAT 11y ago
Good to see them progressing. I made the switch a year ago having found their results had improved greatly to the point of "good enough". Before that I agree there was a problem. For maybe 2-3% of the time I'll need to revert to google et al, but I see that as a fair price/compromise for even a small taste of privacy ... which is like tasting the purest of waters. DDG is my default.
- AdamSC1 11y ago
  Thanks XJOKOLAT, We recently released a new feedback tool in the bottom right of the search results page. For that 2-3% of time you feel the need to revert, please consider taking the time to let us know why our results didn't work out for you so we can drill down on improving them! Thanks for your continued support!
Dolores12 11y ago
Using duckduckgo i found out that google blocks booksee.org domain. I spend some time trying to find ebook using google, implying its the best search engine in the world.
- yohui 11y ago
  https://www.google.com/transparencyreport/removals/copyright/domains/booksee.org/ https://www.google.com/transparencyreport/removals/copyright...
bad_user 11y ago
I'm trying to use DuckDuckGo, but for now the local search results are really, really poor. I can't blame them much though, because Yahoo and Bing suck as well. But then Bing's index is in fact the only competition Google has and DuckDuckGo cannot improve as long as they depend on Bing. One favorite example that I've been using for feedback is when I'm searching for "restaurante" (the Romanian word for "restaurants"), in Google Search I'm getting links to nearby restaurants. Which is normal since they've got my location and so on. But they also know that in my country (Romania) the people are speaking Romanian and so they are showing me results in the Romanian language of restaurants from my city. On the other hand in DuckDuckGo: 1. The instant answer is terribly wrong, mistakenly identifying a plain vocabulary word from at least 3 romance languages (!!!) as being the name of some insignificant 1-star GitHub project that nobody cares about. Ouch! 2. Even though the region selected is Romania, aproximately the first eleven results contain the translation of the word "restaurante" from Spanish, a link to some "el Restaurante" magazine I've never heard about and a link to some latin restaurant named Kuuk from Mexico, plus a "Top 10 Berlin Restaurants" (needless to say Berlin is not in Romania) 3. Out of 30 links I get, none of them is related to Romanian restaurants, Romanian cuisine, or anything related to Romania, even though the selected region is Romania and that word is a Romanian word. 4. OK, lets assume that some users searching for "restaurante" are interested in Spanish results. Well, one problem would be that Mexico is different from Spain, but lets ignore that as well. The biggest problem is that this set of results is completely useless for Spanish speakers as well.
- temp 11y ago
  I can only reiterate those same experiences for another locale. Google provides an almost seamless experience when I do searches in English and in my local language. I don't feel like I've downgraded when doing a search locally. None of the other search engines even bother. Which means that despite being incredibly privacy-conscious, and trying to avoid Google services like a plague, there's literally no alternative for me whatsoever to Google when searching online.
- realusername 11y ago
  If it can reassure you, it's about as terrible as this in French, in English it kind of works but for other languages, it's not even worth thinking about for now. I hope they are going to improve this part, otherwise they will never get those users.
gloves 11y ago
And rightfully so.
xedarius 11y ago
I love DDG but I think as the world turns away from document indexing and more toward intent based search, plus the ever increasing use of implicit data (gps location, speed of movement etc) - I can't see how DDG are going to grow. Ultimately search will end up with something a bit like Siri (but something that works). The hound demo (if real) is a very impressive glimpse of the future of search. For those who haven't seen it : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M1ONXea0mXg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M1ONXea0mXg
bsbechtel 11y ago
Most of the comments here are complaining that, while people like the idea of DDG, the search results are poor. Two comments regarding that: 1) the only way DDG is going to improve search results is by you using it regularly. Using it regularly drives not only revenue, allowing them to hire additional developers, but it also drives feedback to help DDG improve search results. 2) I suspect that the difference in search results may partly be conditioned responses. We are accustomed to what we find through Google, so when DDG presents something that looks different (e.g. showing a different answers site that has the exact same result), we feel uncomfortable and think it's not what we want. I think this is just something that takes time to adjust to, but also something DDG needs to think about how try to figure out how to overcome.
- netcan 11y ago
  I think an unavoidable conclusion is that while people may like privacy or some other benefit/function, they are rarely willing to take a hit on the main benefit/function (search results) to get it. It think this is an important thing to learn here as it applies in many cases. Maybe everyone complains about bad behaviour of their insurance company, but that does not mean they'll take a higher premium. Some people care about autonomy at work, but most will not take a lower salary to get it. People care about the ethics of manufacturing phones, but they won't take a phone that represents a compromise. There's something here about "consumer" psychology and choices that is hard to capture in the concrete terms economists like to formalize using. I think there are usually some very basic main points that people make decisions based on and some secondary points that people don't make decisions based on. The secondary ones may be the ones they talk about more or care about more, but not in a way that affects their choices.
  - Rainymood 11y ago
    >Maybe everyone complains about bad behaviour of their insurance company, but that does not mean they'll take a higher premium Exactly. >There's something here about "consumer" psychology and choices that is hard to capture in the concrete terms economists like to formalize using. That some/most economists like to use. There is a huge field in economics (and econophysics and stuff) that focused on actual irrational behaviour (like trend-following, trying to time the market, predicting the 'mood' of the market). I find this a very interesting field of study. My god the rational agent model is so bloody stupid but it makes calculations feasible, that's literally the only reason we use it nowadays ... There is one thing you can't buy. You can't buy love* * with exceptions of course
eva1984 11y ago
Tried a few queries with it. Seems like its accuracy has improved greatly over last year, but still throws me a Japanese article for no reason. Search is really a very hard business, in terms of both technology and market. I don't think they have Google level quality right now, so I won't consider use it seriously.
- tagawa 11y ago
  If you could remember which queries gave you a Japanese result I'd love to look into it to help fix it.
truncate 11y ago
I recently started using DDG as my default search engine. I'm usually fine with searches, however what troubles me most times is the extracted content on result page. For example, when I search "How to make coffee"[1] the result links are good for both, however the extracted text shown in Google results are generally more relevant to my query. In this example, Google shows me instructions to make coffee in each result, while DDG shows the first text it could find which is totally irrelevant to what I want. So in short, I feel a lag when deciding when and what to click with DDG. [1] http://imgur.com/a/7jCEH http://imgur.com/a/7jCEH
takee 11y ago
Has anyone considered that the slightly longer and forgettable name DuckDuckGo might have something to do with the low mainstream presence? I think they should rebrand and market with duckgo or maybe just duck.com if at all practically possible.
- torvald 11y ago
  It is probably not a big crucial factor for success, but I totally agree.
- AdamSC1 11y ago
  We recently commented about this on a Reddit thread too (https://www.reddit.com/comments/3vtxib/duckduckgo_search_like_nobodys_watching/cxu4fy4 https://www.reddit.com/comments/3vtxib/duckduckgo_search_lik...) We do have a short domain "http://ddg.gg" http://ddg.gg" although it is worth noting that duck.com is owned by Google and points to their main search engine. So it's not really an option for us.
  - burkaman 11y ago
    duck.com is explained here for anyone wondering: https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/epd59/google_points_duckcom_at_google_search_after_duck/c19v4cz https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/epd59/google_po... It's not necessarily nefarious, the domain came from some unrelated acquisition, but they didn't have to make duck.com point to Google.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
Illniyar 11y ago
If I remember correctly, DDG doesn't crawl the web on their own, so considering the many comments here saying they stopped using DDG because of bad result, is there any way for them to improve on this? Are all improvements made to the actual search results caused by improved from Yahoo or Bing ?
- AdamSC1 11y ago
  Results are powered from hundreds of sources https://duck.co/help/results/sources https://duck.co/help/results/sources and aided and refined by our community. We recently added a feedback tool on our results page, so if you find a bad result feel free to share the feedback!
jgalt212 11y ago
I use DDG almost exclusively on my phone, and Google almost exclusively on my laptop.
edpichler 11y ago
It's really good to see that even in a such powerful monopoly that it is, the "search" who Google has, it still have space for competition. DDG focus on a niche on this, and they are growing.
Kenji 11y ago
The privacy of DuckDuckGo is worthless when I click on the first link and it includes ajax and fonts from the google domain (and facebook and twitter buttons and whatnot) - might as well just type my search term in google.
- qwertyuiop924 11y ago
  Then use Ghostery. Or Privacy Badger. Also, I don't think the fonts can track YOU, unless google's got your IP. Which they won't, unless you log into your account. Which you won't, if you care about security. And if you don't, than why are you complaining?
  - Kenji 11y ago
    Most sites rely on ajax and are completely unusable without it so I have to make exceptions for google anyway. Also, I'm not complaining at all, I am just stating that the privacy is almost completely useless. I do have a google account, google mail, and so on. I don't have a problem with it.
    - qwertyuiop924 11y ago
      Well, privacy is somewhat useful if Google can't link your IP to you. Also I was referring to Ghostery and Privacy Badger more for your concerns about like buttons, analytics, and the like.
pilooch 11y ago
DDG is basically a meta-search engine. It is then better to host it yourself with https://github.com/asciimoo/searx https://github.com/asciimoo/searx Set it up remotely and you basicially have your own DDG.
- qwertyuiop924 11y ago
  ... but without a company and a community of hackers constantly working to add more backends, more instant answers, more !bangs, and give you better results. So why would I use it?
  - pilooch 11y ago
    You don't need a company for building a meta-search engine. And most importantly, if you value privacy, you want the whole meta-thing to be open source, always.
    - qwertyuiop924 11y ago
      My point isn't about privacy. If you really are that privacy-obsessed, than building your own meta-search might be the best option for you. For me, I like the fact the DDG's meta-search is incredibly well featured, with instant answers, and many backends for that, its search, and !bangs. So if I'm not that obsessive about privacy, why would I go to the trouble for a weaker search with less features?
hyperdunc 11y ago
I've been using DDG almost exclusively for the past two years. It's improved a lot in that time and now I hardly ever have to !g.
pholz 11y ago
On desktop I only use DDG, mostly because I think their visual design & typography is much more pleasing than Google's, and the search results are usually just as good.
- qwertyuiop924 11y ago
  Agreed. The new google logo looks like it was drawn with a Crayola.
rodionos 11y ago
Interactive DDG Search Traffic Stats: http://apps.axibase.com/chartlab/e8635882/10/ http://apps.axibase.com/chartlab/e8635882/10/
4lejandrito 11y ago
Maybe slightly off topic but wouldn't it be nice to have something like WSQL (Web Search Query Language) such as: "Select text from *.co.uk where page contains = XXXX and page.popularity > YY". We then could have different implementations as we do with SQL (mariadb, postgres...) name them Google, Duckduckgo, Bing... I did a quick search on my default search engine (DDG) and couldn't find anything related...
- razakel 11y ago
  You're basically describing the Semantic Web.
dpcan 11y ago
I feel like the search results are getting better. EDIT: Complaint #1 removed. I can change the THEME in DDG to get blue links. Awesome. #2 Complaint is that I dislike the font-weight changes on search sites. I don't need my search words bolded. I know what I searched for, I trust that those words are in the search results, you don't need to show them to me. It's actually the SUPPORTING words around my keywords that are going to make me click them after I've already searched. So if anything should be bold, it should be those words because they set each listing apart from the others. The Positive (for me): As I do SEO for some companies sometimes, I often times use DDG as a baseline because it doesn't track me. If I see one of my companies ranked high in DDG AND Google, I believe what I'm seeing in Google in terms of SEO A little more. I know it's not really accurate, and I tell my clients this, but it's nice to say that DDG is not tracked so it's not influenced by my previous searches, and seeing a site ranked high there too is a really good thing in my opinion.
- AdamSC1 11y ago
  Hi dpcan, Thanks for the feedback! Did you know you can change themes from the settings menu? You can then save them as a non-personalized cookie, anonymously to the cloud via a unique passphrase, or via a URL. The bookmarklet tool in the settings menu will build out a URL with any settings group so you can save, share and use your settings without anything local. For example here are the settings I use: https://duckduckgo.com/?kae=d&k5=-1&kaj=m&kd=1 https://duckduckgo.com/?kae=d&k5=-1&kaj=m&kd=1 Dark theme, metric system measurements, prompt for video play, prevent redirect. If you are a blue links fan you can try: https://duckduckgo.com/?kae=c https://duckduckgo.com/?kae=c That's our 'contrast' theme which pops out a bit more.
JayNeely 11y ago
I started using DDG this year. I've found the main thing that drives me back to Google (and frequently) is searching for anything where freshness of results matters; that's where I'm seeing the biggest difference in quality of results.
- AdamSC1 11y ago
  Hey Jay, This is something actively being worked on that we hope to have an update for in 2016. We also recently released a new "News Instant Answer" that pulls in fresh relevant content on popular news topics. Have you come across that in your searches? And, are there any specific topics where you are looking for more freshness and currently aren't getting it?
yclatewin2015 11y ago
In all honesty, I don't care if they (google) track me. I just want to find the right information as fast as possible.
bane 11y ago
I switched to DDG maybe about a year ago, not because of privacy concerns exactly, but because I was getting concerned that Google's results were getting less and less accurate (literal) for what I was searching for. I think this is something that technical people tend to care about more than non-technical. I find now that I'm using DDG for very specific searches and Google for "fuzzier" things (via !g). Google also tends to order results better than DDG, where DDG might have the result I'm looking for in its result set, the relevance ranking of the results isn't quite as good as Google. About the only other things I search Google for are images (!gi) and if I need to constrain the date range down on the results (afaik DDG doesn't have any way to say "between these two dates" or "in the last month").
makecheck 11y ago
I generally like it but I definitely don't like some of its apparent integrations. For instance, I search for recipes a lot. And Yummly "wrappers" seem to come up a lot on DuckDuckGo, often barely acknowledged as being Yummly. I don't know what Yummly is but it just seems scummy...it seems to wrap pages that I know are clearly recipes on other web sites, yet they're made to appear like Yummly pages. Why? There's no reason for this kind of middle-man stuff.
pcr0 11y ago
I really like how their instant answers are open source, and they're really nice. (e.g. npm, GitHub, regex/vim cheatsheet) I do have 2 complaints, and together, they made me switch back to Google. 1) Results aren't as relevant, especially when I'm searching for very new or specific things. 2) Speed. I'm not sure why, but DDG seems to stumble on some searches, which end up taking 2-3x the time they're supposed to.
- JTon 11y ago
  I haven't noticed speed issues. But I have noticed the relevancy issues. If the first 5 search results in DDG don't seem relevant. I just bang out a google search ("!g").
wila 11y ago
DDG has been my search engine of choice for the past few years and in my experience it is pretty rare that I have to use google for better results. In general I'm quite happy with it. One thing I would love to see as a feature is the ability to add under settings a list of sites I'd prefer not to see any results from. For example experts-exchange where they want you to sign up to see the answer. There's also a bunch of scraping websites that don't have actual answers which just pollute the results. Being able to suppress that kind of site would be wonderful. I'm aware you can use an option on the search itself, problem is that the list of sites I like to remove from the search is too long to type each time.
- mrspeaker 11y ago
  I'd love there to be a "I'm a developer" mode: I know it goes against the point of not tracking people but there are so many tech words that are common nouns etc, and providing a bit of context would prevent a lot of g! searches from me (see example: https://twitter.com/mrspeaker/status/672115832772784128/photo/1 https://twitter.com/mrspeaker/status/672115832772784128/phot...)
  - ScottGillis 11y ago
    Sounds like you need to hack together a search engine for hackers.
  - wila 11y ago
    You could use the bangs for that: https://duckduckgo.com/bang?c=Tech https://duckduckgo.com/bang?c=Tech
- _dark_matter_ 11y ago
  They could also use this as another signal of the quality of a link for other users.
  - wila 11y ago
    That is not my main motivation for asking this, but yes you are correct. If DDG wants to use such a list as a signal then they would have to check it a bit for potential abuse. For example to only count the excluded sites that are in active accounts used for searching, but it could indeed have other potential search improvements.
qwertyuiop924 11y ago
I don't actually use DDG for privacy primarily. I use if for the instant answer and !bang goodness. If you're a developer, both of these are indispensable. If if the results don't work, you can always !g.
- SteveNuts 11y ago
  I appreciate what DDG is trying to do, but I found myself using !g way too often.
  - qwertyuiop924 11y ago
    It really depends on your use-case. But for me, it works really well, and I'm glad it exists.
joryhatton 11y ago
Much deserved progress.
dexterchief 11y ago
Wikipedia has lots of disambiguation pages but somehow this idea has never made it into the search world. Perhaps the idea of a single text box that you can type "Michelangelo" into is not a good one. Tracking the user so you can get some context (is it Ninja Turtles or art history usually with this person?) seems a logical extension of the lunacy of that situation. I use DDG a fair bit but I feel like without revisiting that assumption that a single context-free text box is even desirable, ditching the tracking (which I am totally in favour of) feels like they are dooming themselves. I've played a little with running Yacy locally and directing it to crawl only sites I care about. So far that habit has not stuck. The bangs are a step in the right direction. Suggesting additional search terms isn't quite right, and neither is doing a site specific search since I don't know what site will have the information. Maybe a "metabang" where you search all the bangs in a category? "python !!tech" Anyway, its good to see DDG growing.
korzun 11y ago
Going to chime in on the whole 'results are getting better'. They might be. On paper; because there is more data. Unfortunately, nobody is accounting for the 'stale' factor. Searching old news is well.. old news.
andrea_sdl 11y ago
Wow, so many people talking about how DDG is lacking good search results. Here's my personal experience. I've tried using DDG 2 years ago, and it sucked. In my language (italian) results were poor, and also for general searches. 6 Months ago I gave it a try again, and I've been pleased enough to use it both at work, at home and on my smartphone. The results are not always perfect, but I find myself using !g bang mainly when I feel there's something missing (which doesn't happen that much) or when I need to find a very selective piece of information. I also loved the integration with stack overflow. Works nicely, it doesn't always "answer" your question, but just yesterday it did and the moment was like "wow, it's getting interesting". So, while I admit that DDG may not be ready for prime time yet, I guess there's a chance that many of us (developers, etc) might start liking it and using it constantly. While it would be naive to say "I wouldn't go back to google", I'm now an happy user of DDG, and I wasn't expecting it to begin with (In fact I was very skeptical).
sn 11y ago
RE: https://duck.co/help/company/advertising-and-affiliates https://duck.co/help/company/advertising-and-affiliates I think it would be cool if it was possible to do ads direct with DDG.

385 points by nichodges 11y ago

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

> “Our biggest challenge is that most people have not heard of us,” Weinberg says. “We very much want to break out into the mainstream.” It won't help at all if more people get to know of DDG and then leave it after a single trial because the results are not great. I value privacy a lot and want something like DDG to succeed and become really big, but I get frustrated very often with DDG. I know many people are very happy with the results from DDG. For most of my searches though (on technical and other matters), I end up doing a second search on Start Page or Google because DDG still does not have search by date and the search results are nowhere close to Google. I do have and use DDG as my default search engine in the hope that DDG keeps analyzing the volume of !s or !g queries as an indicator of how much DDG is lacking and takes action to improve it.

sundarurfriend 11y ago
FWIW, DDG search in my experience has gotten vastly better in the past year or so. It used to be that 90% of my searches ended up repeated with !g to go to google, but nowadys I'd guess that's like 30%, and even among those, half the time google's answer quality ends up the same. The only cases where Google is predictably and consistenly superior are 1. error/diagnostic messages: DDG still sucks at precision search, and quotes are not always the answer; 2. queries that require Natural Language Processing: Google understands stuff like "the bad moustache guy from XYZ series" where I myself have only a vague idea of what I'm looking for. And oftentimes the Instant Answers end up offsetting somewhat poorer quality of results, so kudos to DDG for coming up with those. (None of this is meant to disqualify your experience though, just expressing my own joy at their results having improved for my use case.)
- stinos 11y ago
  DDG search in my experience has gotten vastly better in the past year or so. Had the exact same impression. There are numerous threads on HN involving DDG in the last couple of years and in more than one of them I complained about the results, but slowly yet steadily there are always less reasons to complain it seems. DDG does not yet find everything as quick as I'd want it to but when my go-to would be !g in the past I'm now starting to notice I use it much less (say only 1 out of 20 searches) and when I do chances are high google won't find what I want either, it usually just comes up with the same results but in 'better' order.
  - AdamSC1 11y ago
    Hey Stinos, Thanks for the feedback - part of the changes you've noticed are simply due to the fact that we do read threads like this, and we do encourage users to send/share their feedback and examples of where we haven't hit the mark for them; and then actively try and improve that experience. We've recently streamlined this process by adding a feedback tool on the bottom right of the results page. If you feel we don't quite show the results/experience you were expecting (or if we really really nail it) then we encourage you to share that feedback with us! You can opt-in to how much detail you provide, and as always we don't collect, store and share personally identifiable details. Thanks for your continued support!
    - stinos 11y ago
      by adding a feedback tool on the bottom right of the result Shame on me, didn't notice this. But thanks for pointing to it: I'll definitely put this to use.
- pixard 11y ago
  I last tried DDG a few years ago and couldn't get anything done at all as the results were simply not what I needed (PHP / Laravel / WordPress development). Your comment made me try it again today and after several hours of using it I can definitely say it has vastly improved in results for my particular use case. While a few hours are obviously not a huge metric it's still satisfying enough so I have switched it to default for now and we'll see how it goes. Thanks for sharing your experience.
necessity 11y ago
Why use DDG at all if you're using Startpage/Ixquick?
toomuchtodo 11y ago
If you enjoy DDG (I love it!) consider helping create Instant Answers: https://www.gitbook.com/book/talsraviv/duckduckhackdocs/details https://www.gitbook.com/book/talsraviv/duckduckhackdocs/deta... (there's a Slack team for this as well)
- tagawa 11y ago
  If any devs would like to join that Slack team please send a mail (empty body is fine) to quackslack@duckduckgo.com and we'll send you an invite.
muddi900 11y ago
I use DDG because of custom search 'bangs'. I have gotten rid of a whole bookmark sub folder of custom keyword searches. When I want google, which is less and less often, I just add a '!g' to my search. I doubt DDG will ever catchup to the Big G, but It works.
- will_pseudonym 11y ago
  Is that similar to Chrome's "search engines"? They work really well, and I tend to use google's "site:" filter to search sites that have awful search capabilities.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - AdamSC1 11y ago
    The "!Bang" feature allows you to redirect your searches. For example: "!w Sam Altman' would instantly return you to the wikipedia page on Sam Altman. And, "!Amazon shoes" would instantly return you to the Amazon search result page for shoes. We've got over 7500 !Bangs currently and users can request to add them for any site https://duckduckgo.com/bang https://duckduckgo.com/bang - just like our community efforts in 'Instant Answers' on our duckduckhack.com platform, this community driven experience allows you to get involved and shape a search experience you want to see.
  - yohui 11y ago
    Yes, and also similar to Firefox bookmark keywords. e.g. a Chrome search engine or Firefox bookmark with URL "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=%s" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=%s" and keyword "wp" will return the Wikipedia page for Hacker News if you search "wp Hacker News". Also works for stuff other than searches, e.g. "https://www.reddit.com/r/%s" https://www.reddit.com/r/%s" with keyword "rr" to quickly navigate to the Hacker News subreddit with "rr hackernews". Chrome automatically adds search engines, while Firefox requires a bit more manual work: https://support.mozilla.org/kb/how-search-from-address-bar https://support.mozilla.org/kb/how-search-from-address-bar
agumonkey 11y ago
The issue with DDG : 90% of my queries ends with '!g'. Most of DDG is awesome[1], except for the results, they set you back to the copernic era. Very often Google suggestions are already part of the answers I'm looking for. DDG first page is often off point. I feel tangible frustration every time I use it. Just using a browser not configured with DDG makes me feel calmer. [1] business reality check, so often I complain about Google UI, layout and stuff. DDG has all of this, lean ui, settings, shortcuts ... but it doesn't matter.
PhantomGremlin 11y ago
I get frustrated very often with DDG I get frustrated with Google (I don't use DDG much, so I'm not that familiar with the limitations). Google has repeatedly crippled search, made it worse than it was. E.g. you used to be able to say +yesIwantthis and your results definitely included that word. Now, not so much. It's now something to do with Google+. Now, you can't force Google to truly include particular words. You can try, but I don't think it always works. E.g. you can say "yes" "search" "all" "these" "words", and maybe it will and maybe it won't. Advanced search has definitely gotten worse. Frankly its at the point that I'd be willing to pay someone $10/mo to get a search engine that's a) good and b) truly gives me control. Meet the new Google, worse than the old Google.
- 0xcde4c3db 11y ago
  They added a "Verbatim" mode to force all search terms to appear (in the "Search Tools" bar, click "All results" and change it to "Verbatim"). But it's all-or-nothing; it can't be applied to individual terms. It also can't be combined with the timespan searches; changing one resets the other. The old syntax with + was definitely more useful.
JoshTriplett 11y ago
I use DDG for 100% of searches, and never end up using !g anymore. (It took a while to disentangle how much I'd equated result quality with "formatted exactly like Google results".) But unfortunately, I still end up using !maps for all my map searches, because 1) DDG defaults to Bing, so no, and 2) DDG doesn't automatically parse anything like "$ADDRESS1 to $ADDRESS2" and provide directions. It'd be nice if DDG managed to get sensible first-party maps and routing, either via OSM data or direct map data licensing.
douche 11y ago
Am I nuts, or has DDG been around for a very long time? Wikipedia says it started in 2008, but for some reason it's lodged in my mind along with Excite, Alta-Vista, AskJeeves and the other pre-Google search engines.
- dalke 11y ago
  https://duckduckgo.com/about https://duckduckgo.com/about says "DuckDuckGo began as an idea" on February 29, 2008, and on September 25, 2008 "DuckDuckGo was announced to the Hacker News and reddit communities". FWIW, here's the original HN announcement - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=315142 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=315142 .
- antod 11y ago
  You weren't thinking of Dogpile were you? That was a pre Google meta search engine that sent your query to multiple search engines.
  - jaredsohn 11y ago
    metacrawler was another and was what I used prior to Google. Amusingly, it now forwards to a site powered by dogpile.
rpgmaker 11y ago
I was planning on moving to the DDG on my phone because Google Search it's unbearable (or Now or whatever the heck that app is now) and their mobile app sucks. It tries to be a web browser when I just wanted a search engine, I'm perfectly content with my mobile browser. It surprised me that MS Bing also suffers from this (yes, I was that desperately to stop using google search on my mobile). It's ridiculous.
eridius 11y ago
I sometimes use !g to fallback to google. But the vast majority of searches, I don't do that. And when I do, I'd estimate that probably 80% of the time, Google doesn't have any better results. Google usually only has better results when I'm searching for some highly-specific tech thing that is still esoteric enough for DDG to not find it, and I credit that largely to the fact that Google has the filter bubble (which I explicitly try to avoid by using DDG). Beyond that, Google typically has better results for topical searches than DDG does, but I don't do those very often.
marklgr 11y ago
> I end up doing a second search on Start Page or Google because DDG still does not have search by date !gday, !gmonth and !gyear are my main 'exit path' from DDG. I also have a good deal of "site:foo.com !g". Otherwise, I've been reasonably happy with it for the last eight months.
tagawa 11y ago
DDG staff here. Thanks for sticking with us. The time/date filtering is being worked on - hopefully we can release it soon. That should make a lot of people happy. For quality of results, I'm biased but I've found they have improved thanks to a lot of feedback from users providing specific queries that could be investigated one-by-one. There's now a feedback button (desktop only) so if you're able to give more examples of bad results that will help improve further.
mikkom 11y ago
I don't think people realize that DuckDuckGo is a meta search engine, they don't have their own algorithm. Instead they are using whatever is cheapest at the moment. It's very hard to get better results if you can't modify the algorithms core logic. edit: okay maybe cheapest is a wrong word, the more correct term would be best price/result ratio. Some time ago they were using Yandex as their result provider, at the moment I don't know who their provider is but I think that could be found by browsing through the about us pages (or not as now they are so big they can negotiate deal where they don't have to disclose their source). (edit: this is what they disclose at https://duck.co/help/results/sources https://duck.co/help/results/sources) > DuckDuckGo gets its results from over four hundred sources. These include hundreds of vertical sources delivering niche Instant Answers, DuckDuckBot (our crawler) and crowd-sourced sites (like Wikipedia, stored in our answer indexes). We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we primarily source from Yahoo!, and in some regions and scenarios, Yandex and Bing.
AdamSC1 11y ago
As some folks have mentioned we're constantly improving our results but one of the best things is when we have a specific results case. So if you have a result that didn't work for you - share the specific case in our feedback tool or by shooting our team an email (mine is adam@duckduckgo.com). One thing that separates us is the fact that you can get involved in our community, build out instant answers, give us feedback on searches that actually gets integrated and shape a great search experience. Thanks for the feedback though!
- newscracker 11y ago
  Thanks for the information about the feedback button. I had never noticed it at all! When people search, they look at the search box and then at what's below it, which tends to be always on the top and towards the left of the screen. Whatever's in the middle or bottom as well as on the right tends to get ignored. I'd suggest putting the Send Feedback button right below the search box when you display the results so that more people notice it. I've just sent a feedback about this through the Send Feedback button.

rlv-dan 11y ago

I've been using DDG for many years now, and I think the search results are excellent in most cases. Sometimes I'm not satisfied, and try the same seach on Google. Most of the time though, I get the same results there. My only gripe is that the last half year or so, w3schools has been getting at the top of the search results. (Previously w3schools did not show in the search results.)

eridius 11y ago
That's funny, one of my gripes with Google was their insistence for many many years on making w3schools the first result for html-related queries. I haven't ever noticed that with DDG, but to be fair I also don't do html-related queries very often anymore (because the Dash app has supplanted any sort of technical documentation search; if I want to know what an html tag does, I just ask Dash to show me (developer.mozilla.org) docs).
qwertyuiop924 11y ago
Use !mdn or !devdocs. Both are awsome sites.

scope 11y ago

DDG results have improved tremendously, top stack overflow / github matches are shown partially which is really neat I FULLY switched to DDG (& also away from Chrome) when I found out when I click save password on login forms my password is sent to Google Servers (I must have missed it on the TOC)

antome 11y ago
DuckDuckGo really is good enough to use on a daily basis now. One big gripe I still have however, is that there seems to be no way to filter by time. I still have to go to google if I want to find a news article or topic which is recent, or within a certain period.
- tagawa 11y ago
  This is a popular request and one we're working on. Admittedly we've been saying that for a while but it's getting close.
  - dingaling 11y ago
    A really good filter ( for me anyhow ) would be 'prior to this [ week | month ]', since often I want to search for things from the period before they were news
    - tagawa 11y ago
      Interesting idea - I hadn't thought of that. Duly noted.
- grimman 11y ago
  It's interesting to me, seeing how many people are so deeply dissatisfied with the results. I switched a couple of years ago, and only had a very small (two-three week) period where I'd check back on the mighty GOOG, only to confirm that they didn't have any better results either. Might it be due to the way I format my queries?
11y ago

tofupup 11y ago

I made the switch. My biggest problem with the lack of privacy is that I don't know in X years how my data will be used. In X years - laws may change - mores may change - the fortune of google may change. It just doesn't seem prudent for me and my progeny. For example searching for information about cigarettes or cigar clubs - 30 years ago may have been socially acceptable. Today if that information were available from the 80's it could provide signal for insurance companies determining rates.

akkartik 11y ago

I seem to have finally switched permanently a couple of days ago[1]. Pleasantly surprised. [1] The clincher? Copying a link on Google and finding for the umpteenth time that it was a #$%# redirect. (This is on my phone so greasemonkey plugins don't help.) There comes a time when you say enough.

msh 11y ago

I love ddg for english searches. For non english searches it is still behind google. For example "pizza name-of-my-town" lacks half the pizza places google lists.

cJ0th 11y ago
In case you are from Europe you may want to try https://www.qwant.com/web https://www.qwant.com/web It certainly doesn't match google when it comes to local searches but I find it a bit more pleasant than DDG.

ssaddi 11y ago

It's a great search engine, and gettig better with time ..

funkyy 11y ago

In all honesty, despite me knowing about DDG for reaaaaalllly long time, I still tend to forget their name. "something duck" is how non-tech people reference it. Cant you really name it something easy to remember and (ouch) Google like Duckgo? Or Ducker? Or anything else that can be pronounced by anyone within one breath?

LeoPanthera 11y ago
I always give the url as ddg.gg
ugexe 11y ago
I've never had a problem remembering their name after I first heard of them forevvvver ago, and recall thinking Google was a stupid name. Altavista, infoseek, dogpile, askjeeves... clearly the name is not important
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
sgt 11y ago
If you google 'duck' it should be in the top 5. For me it was the 3rd one, the 1st and 2nd being wiki-type articles.
- r3bl 11y ago
  I just tried it, it was right under image results and Wikipedia article about ducks. So, it should be the second result (I've tried the same thing on StartPage and got the same result).
- AdamSC1 11y ago
  If you Google 'search engine' it's number one.
  - sgt 11y ago
    Slightly ironic though - using Google to google 'search engine'.

lips 11y ago

My experience has been reminiscent of the old SE days, when different engines would often fare better/worse for varying queries, vs there being an all-out winner. I think of DDG as avoiding a fair amount of overtly "consumer" content. Google is great at getting to "interaction points," DDG is great for information. I quite like the DDG ability to play embedded videos from the search results page, and their accompanying privacy warning.

sundarurfriend 11y ago
> I think of DDG as avoiding a fair amount of overtly "consumer" content. True. Since all the 'content farms' out there are busy fighting the SEO war specifically targeted at Google, Google results for some topics are just stream after stream of useless generic garbage from non-experts. DDG, simply by using a different search backend, avoids most of this and often gives much better results in such cases.

lesdeuxmagots 11y ago

FYI: DuckDuckGo primarily leverages the Yahoo BOSS api in the US.

adrtessier 11y ago
I'm curious: who will they turn to if (when) Yahoo shuts the service down? Bing?
- infbtag 11y ago
  Their only options are Google, Bing, Yandex, Exalead, Gigablast, and Mojeek, and most probably in that order as the last two need to grow considerably first. Unless there's any others that have their own index?
  - AznHisoka 11y ago
    How is Google an option? They offer no API whatsoever
    - infbtag 11y ago
      StartPage uses Google so there must be a way.
      - AznHisoka 11y ago
        They probably scrape Google. Willing to bet there is no deal. Google would never agree to such a thing. Even paying $XXXXX a month isn't worth it to them.
        infbtag 11y ago
        That's what I always thought but according to this they have a contract: https://support.startpage.com/index.php?/Knowledgebase/Article/View/147/0/why-does-google-let-startpage-access-their-search-results https://support.startpage.com/index.php?/Knowledgebase/Artic...

myztic 11y ago

DuckDuckGo really looses the battle when it comes to search results. And since they make the case with privacy, I also want to make clear, they don't loose because Google tracks us all, even if you are logged out from your account, use vpn servers, delete all of your cookies and cache, Google is just so much better and DuckDuckGo awful and some search results are just weird. I tried once (it must have been this year) to use DuckDuckGo as my main search engine, basically whenever I did not find something quickly enough I just switched to Google and then found my object of desire often times instantly. One of my VPN-Servers is blocked by Google and because of that I am using Bing at the moment, which also seems so much better than DuckDuckGo was when I used it. I installed LinuxMint on a non-techy person's machine a while ago (few weeks) and DuckDuckGo was set up as default search engine with Firefox, even that person used Google, because he/she wasn't happy with the search results. Used Google even though he/she had to manually go to google.com every single time "We don't bubble you" is a unique selling point they have profited greatly from, and that's what made them well known to begin with, nothing else really.

CM30 11y ago

It's not surprising, but if they really want to become mainstream, they'll have to get people caring more about privacy than they already do. I mean okay, the Snowden leaks and stuff about PRISM got a lot of people using it, but those people were still most tech savvy types who value their privacy over the quality of the search results. DDG is getting better, but it'll have to beat Google and the likes on a quality level if it's going to get the interest of people who don't seem to give a damn about their privacy.

XJOKOLAT 11y ago

Good to see them progressing. I made the switch a year ago having found their results had improved greatly to the point of "good enough". Before that I agree there was a problem. For maybe 2-3% of the time I'll need to revert to google et al, but I see that as a fair price/compromise for even a small taste of privacy ... which is like tasting the purest of waters. DDG is my default.

AdamSC1 11y ago
Thanks XJOKOLAT, We recently released a new feedback tool in the bottom right of the search results page. For that 2-3% of time you feel the need to revert, please consider taking the time to let us know why our results didn't work out for you so we can drill down on improving them! Thanks for your continued support!

Dolores12 11y ago

Using duckduckgo i found out that google blocks booksee.org domain. I spend some time trying to find ebook using google, implying its the best search engine in the world.

yohui 11y ago
https://www.google.com/transparencyreport/removals/copyright/domains/booksee.org/ https://www.google.com/transparencyreport/removals/copyright...

bad_user 11y ago

I'm trying to use DuckDuckGo, but for now the local search results are really, really poor. I can't blame them much though, because Yahoo and Bing suck as well. But then Bing's index is in fact the only competition Google has and DuckDuckGo cannot improve as long as they depend on Bing. One favorite example that I've been using for feedback is when I'm searching for "restaurante" (the Romanian word for "restaurants"), in Google Search I'm getting links to nearby restaurants. Which is normal since they've got my location and so on. But they also know that in my country (Romania) the people are speaking Romanian and so they are showing me results in the Romanian language of restaurants from my city. On the other hand in DuckDuckGo: 1. The instant answer is terribly wrong, mistakenly identifying a plain vocabulary word from at least 3 romance languages (!!!) as being the name of some insignificant 1-star GitHub project that nobody cares about. Ouch! 2. Even though the region selected is Romania, aproximately the first eleven results contain the translation of the word "restaurante" from Spanish, a link to some "el Restaurante" magazine I've never heard about and a link to some latin restaurant named Kuuk from Mexico, plus a "Top 10 Berlin Restaurants" (needless to say Berlin is not in Romania) 3. Out of 30 links I get, none of them is related to Romanian restaurants, Romanian cuisine, or anything related to Romania, even though the selected region is Romania and that word is a Romanian word. 4. OK, lets assume that some users searching for "restaurante" are interested in Spanish results. Well, one problem would be that Mexico is different from Spain, but lets ignore that as well. The biggest problem is that this set of results is completely useless for Spanish speakers as well.

temp 11y ago
I can only reiterate those same experiences for another locale. Google provides an almost seamless experience when I do searches in English and in my local language. I don't feel like I've downgraded when doing a search locally. None of the other search engines even bother. Which means that despite being incredibly privacy-conscious, and trying to avoid Google services like a plague, there's literally no alternative for me whatsoever to Google when searching online.
realusername 11y ago
If it can reassure you, it's about as terrible as this in French, in English it kind of works but for other languages, it's not even worth thinking about for now. I hope they are going to improve this part, otherwise they will never get those users.

gloves 11y ago

And rightfully so.

xedarius 11y ago

I love DDG but I think as the world turns away from document indexing and more toward intent based search, plus the ever increasing use of implicit data (gps location, speed of movement etc) - I can't see how DDG are going to grow. Ultimately search will end up with something a bit like Siri (but something that works). The hound demo (if real) is a very impressive glimpse of the future of search. For those who haven't seen it : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M1ONXea0mXg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M1ONXea0mXg

bsbechtel 11y ago

Most of the comments here are complaining that, while people like the idea of DDG, the search results are poor. Two comments regarding that: 1) the only way DDG is going to improve search results is by you using it regularly. Using it regularly drives not only revenue, allowing them to hire additional developers, but it also drives feedback to help DDG improve search results. 2) I suspect that the difference in search results may partly be conditioned responses. We are accustomed to what we find through Google, so when DDG presents something that looks different (e.g. showing a different answers site that has the exact same result), we feel uncomfortable and think it's not what we want. I think this is just something that takes time to adjust to, but also something DDG needs to think about how try to figure out how to overcome.

netcan 11y ago
I think an unavoidable conclusion is that while people may like privacy or some other benefit/function, they are rarely willing to take a hit on the main benefit/function (search results) to get it. It think this is an important thing to learn here as it applies in many cases. Maybe everyone complains about bad behaviour of their insurance company, but that does not mean they'll take a higher premium. Some people care about autonomy at work, but most will not take a lower salary to get it. People care about the ethics of manufacturing phones, but they won't take a phone that represents a compromise. There's something here about "consumer" psychology and choices that is hard to capture in the concrete terms economists like to formalize using. I think there are usually some very basic main points that people make decisions based on and some secondary points that people don't make decisions based on. The secondary ones may be the ones they talk about more or care about more, but not in a way that affects their choices.
- Rainymood 11y ago
  >Maybe everyone complains about bad behaviour of their insurance company, but that does not mean they'll take a higher premium Exactly. >There's something here about "consumer" psychology and choices that is hard to capture in the concrete terms economists like to formalize using. That some/most economists like to use. There is a huge field in economics (and econophysics and stuff) that focused on actual irrational behaviour (like trend-following, trying to time the market, predicting the 'mood' of the market). I find this a very interesting field of study. My god the rational agent model is so bloody stupid but it makes calculations feasible, that's literally the only reason we use it nowadays ... There is one thing you can't buy. You can't buy love* * with exceptions of course

eva1984 11y ago

Tried a few queries with it. Seems like its accuracy has improved greatly over last year, but still throws me a Japanese article for no reason. Search is really a very hard business, in terms of both technology and market. I don't think they have Google level quality right now, so I won't consider use it seriously.

tagawa 11y ago
If you could remember which queries gave you a Japanese result I'd love to look into it to help fix it.

truncate 11y ago

I recently started using DDG as my default search engine. I'm usually fine with searches, however what troubles me most times is the extracted content on result page. For example, when I search "How to make coffee"[1] the result links are good for both, however the extracted text shown in Google results are generally more relevant to my query. In this example, Google shows me instructions to make coffee in each result, while DDG shows the first text it could find which is totally irrelevant to what I want. So in short, I feel a lag when deciding when and what to click with DDG. [1] http://imgur.com/a/7jCEH http://imgur.com/a/7jCEH

takee 11y ago

Has anyone considered that the slightly longer and forgettable name DuckDuckGo might have something to do with the low mainstream presence? I think they should rebrand and market with duckgo or maybe just duck.com if at all practically possible.

torvald 11y ago
It is probably not a big crucial factor for success, but I totally agree.
AdamSC1 11y ago
We recently commented about this on a Reddit thread too (https://www.reddit.com/comments/3vtxib/duckduckgo_search_like_nobodys_watching/cxu4fy4 https://www.reddit.com/comments/3vtxib/duckduckgo_search_lik...) We do have a short domain "http://ddg.gg" http://ddg.gg" although it is worth noting that duck.com is owned by Google and points to their main search engine. So it's not really an option for us.
- burkaman 11y ago
  duck.com is explained here for anyone wondering: https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/epd59/google_points_duckcom_at_google_search_after_duck/c19v4cz https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/epd59/google_po... It's not necessarily nefarious, the domain came from some unrelated acquisition, but they didn't have to make duck.com point to Google.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

Illniyar 11y ago

If I remember correctly, DDG doesn't crawl the web on their own, so considering the many comments here saying they stopped using DDG because of bad result, is there any way for them to improve on this? Are all improvements made to the actual search results caused by improved from Yahoo or Bing ?

AdamSC1 11y ago
Results are powered from hundreds of sources https://duck.co/help/results/sources https://duck.co/help/results/sources and aided and refined by our community. We recently added a feedback tool on our results page, so if you find a bad result feel free to share the feedback!

jgalt212 11y ago

I use DDG almost exclusively on my phone, and Google almost exclusively on my laptop.

edpichler 11y ago

It's really good to see that even in a such powerful monopoly that it is, the "search" who Google has, it still have space for competition. DDG focus on a niche on this, and they are growing.

Kenji 11y ago

The privacy of DuckDuckGo is worthless when I click on the first link and it includes ajax and fonts from the google domain (and facebook and twitter buttons and whatnot) - might as well just type my search term in google.

qwertyuiop924 11y ago
Then use Ghostery. Or Privacy Badger. Also, I don't think the fonts can track YOU, unless google's got your IP. Which they won't, unless you log into your account. Which you won't, if you care about security. And if you don't, than why are you complaining?
- Kenji 11y ago
  Most sites rely on ajax and are completely unusable without it so I have to make exceptions for google anyway. Also, I'm not complaining at all, I am just stating that the privacy is almost completely useless. I do have a google account, google mail, and so on. I don't have a problem with it.
  - qwertyuiop924 11y ago
    Well, privacy is somewhat useful if Google can't link your IP to you. Also I was referring to Ghostery and Privacy Badger more for your concerns about like buttons, analytics, and the like.

pilooch 11y ago

DDG is basically a meta-search engine. It is then better to host it yourself with https://github.com/asciimoo/searx https://github.com/asciimoo/searx Set it up remotely and you basicially have your own DDG.

qwertyuiop924 11y ago
... but without a company and a community of hackers constantly working to add more backends, more instant answers, more !bangs, and give you better results. So why would I use it?
- pilooch 11y ago
  You don't need a company for building a meta-search engine. And most importantly, if you value privacy, you want the whole meta-thing to be open source, always.
  - qwertyuiop924 11y ago
    My point isn't about privacy. If you really are that privacy-obsessed, than building your own meta-search might be the best option for you. For me, I like the fact the DDG's meta-search is incredibly well featured, with instant answers, and many backends for that, its search, and !bangs. So if I'm not that obsessive about privacy, why would I go to the trouble for a weaker search with less features?

hyperdunc 11y ago

I've been using DDG almost exclusively for the past two years. It's improved a lot in that time and now I hardly ever have to !g.

pholz 11y ago

On desktop I only use DDG, mostly because I think their visual design & typography is much more pleasing than Google's, and the search results are usually just as good.

qwertyuiop924 11y ago
Agreed. The new google logo looks like it was drawn with a Crayola.

rodionos 11y ago

Interactive DDG Search Traffic Stats: http://apps.axibase.com/chartlab/e8635882/10/ http://apps.axibase.com/chartlab/e8635882/10/

4lejandrito 11y ago

Maybe slightly off topic but wouldn't it be nice to have something like WSQL (Web Search Query Language) such as: "Select text from *.co.uk where page contains = XXXX and page.popularity > YY". We then could have different implementations as we do with SQL (mariadb, postgres...) name them Google, Duckduckgo, Bing... I did a quick search on my default search engine (DDG) and couldn't find anything related...

razakel 11y ago
You're basically describing the Semantic Web.

dpcan 11y ago

I feel like the search results are getting better. EDIT: Complaint #1 removed. I can change the THEME in DDG to get blue links. Awesome. #2 Complaint is that I dislike the font-weight changes on search sites. I don't need my search words bolded. I know what I searched for, I trust that those words are in the search results, you don't need to show them to me. It's actually the SUPPORTING words around my keywords that are going to make me click them after I've already searched. So if anything should be bold, it should be those words because they set each listing apart from the others. The Positive (for me): As I do SEO for some companies sometimes, I often times use DDG as a baseline because it doesn't track me. If I see one of my companies ranked high in DDG AND Google, I believe what I'm seeing in Google in terms of SEO A little more. I know it's not really accurate, and I tell my clients this, but it's nice to say that DDG is not tracked so it's not influenced by my previous searches, and seeing a site ranked high there too is a really good thing in my opinion.

AdamSC1 11y ago
Hi dpcan, Thanks for the feedback! Did you know you can change themes from the settings menu? You can then save them as a non-personalized cookie, anonymously to the cloud via a unique passphrase, or via a URL. The bookmarklet tool in the settings menu will build out a URL with any settings group so you can save, share and use your settings without anything local. For example here are the settings I use: https://duckduckgo.com/?kae=d&k5=-1&kaj=m&kd=1 https://duckduckgo.com/?kae=d&k5=-1&kaj=m&kd=1 Dark theme, metric system measurements, prompt for video play, prevent redirect. If you are a blue links fan you can try: https://duckduckgo.com/?kae=c https://duckduckgo.com/?kae=c That's our 'contrast' theme which pops out a bit more.

JayNeely 11y ago

I started using DDG this year. I've found the main thing that drives me back to Google (and frequently) is searching for anything where freshness of results matters; that's where I'm seeing the biggest difference in quality of results.

AdamSC1 11y ago
Hey Jay, This is something actively being worked on that we hope to have an update for in 2016. We also recently released a new "News Instant Answer" that pulls in fresh relevant content on popular news topics. Have you come across that in your searches? And, are there any specific topics where you are looking for more freshness and currently aren't getting it?

yclatewin2015 11y ago

In all honesty, I don't care if they (google) track me. I just want to find the right information as fast as possible.

bane 11y ago

I switched to DDG maybe about a year ago, not because of privacy concerns exactly, but because I was getting concerned that Google's results were getting less and less accurate (literal) for what I was searching for. I think this is something that technical people tend to care about more than non-technical. I find now that I'm using DDG for very specific searches and Google for "fuzzier" things (via !g). Google also tends to order results better than DDG, where DDG might have the result I'm looking for in its result set, the relevance ranking of the results isn't quite as good as Google. About the only other things I search Google for are images (!gi) and if I need to constrain the date range down on the results (afaik DDG doesn't have any way to say "between these two dates" or "in the last month").

makecheck 11y ago

I generally like it but I definitely don't like some of its apparent integrations. For instance, I search for recipes a lot. And Yummly "wrappers" seem to come up a lot on DuckDuckGo, often barely acknowledged as being Yummly. I don't know what Yummly is but it just seems scummy...it seems to wrap pages that I know are clearly recipes on other web sites, yet they're made to appear like Yummly pages. Why? There's no reason for this kind of middle-man stuff.

pcr0 11y ago

I really like how their instant answers are open source, and they're really nice. (e.g. npm, GitHub, regex/vim cheatsheet) I do have 2 complaints, and together, they made me switch back to Google. 1) Results aren't as relevant, especially when I'm searching for very new or specific things. 2) Speed. I'm not sure why, but DDG seems to stumble on some searches, which end up taking 2-3x the time they're supposed to.

JTon 11y ago
I haven't noticed speed issues. But I have noticed the relevancy issues. If the first 5 search results in DDG don't seem relevant. I just bang out a google search ("!g").

wila 11y ago

DDG has been my search engine of choice for the past few years and in my experience it is pretty rare that I have to use google for better results. In general I'm quite happy with it. One thing I would love to see as a feature is the ability to add under settings a list of sites I'd prefer not to see any results from. For example experts-exchange where they want you to sign up to see the answer. There's also a bunch of scraping websites that don't have actual answers which just pollute the results. Being able to suppress that kind of site would be wonderful. I'm aware you can use an option on the search itself, problem is that the list of sites I like to remove from the search is too long to type each time.

mrspeaker 11y ago
I'd love there to be a "I'm a developer" mode: I know it goes against the point of not tracking people but there are so many tech words that are common nouns etc, and providing a bit of context would prevent a lot of g! searches from me (see example: https://twitter.com/mrspeaker/status/672115832772784128/photo/1 https://twitter.com/mrspeaker/status/672115832772784128/phot...)
- ScottGillis 11y ago
  Sounds like you need to hack together a search engine for hackers.
- wila 11y ago
  You could use the bangs for that: https://duckduckgo.com/bang?c=Tech https://duckduckgo.com/bang?c=Tech
_dark_matter_ 11y ago
They could also use this as another signal of the quality of a link for other users.
- wila 11y ago
  That is not my main motivation for asking this, but yes you are correct. If DDG wants to use such a list as a signal then they would have to check it a bit for potential abuse. For example to only count the excluded sites that are in active accounts used for searching, but it could indeed have other potential search improvements.

qwertyuiop924 11y ago

I don't actually use DDG for privacy primarily. I use if for the instant answer and !bang goodness. If you're a developer, both of these are indispensable. If if the results don't work, you can always !g.

SteveNuts 11y ago
I appreciate what DDG is trying to do, but I found myself using !g way too often.
- qwertyuiop924 11y ago
  It really depends on your use-case. But for me, it works really well, and I'm glad it exists.

joryhatton 11y ago

Much deserved progress.

dexterchief 11y ago

Wikipedia has lots of disambiguation pages but somehow this idea has never made it into the search world. Perhaps the idea of a single text box that you can type "Michelangelo" into is not a good one. Tracking the user so you can get some context (is it Ninja Turtles or art history usually with this person?) seems a logical extension of the lunacy of that situation. I use DDG a fair bit but I feel like without revisiting that assumption that a single context-free text box is even desirable, ditching the tracking (which I am totally in favour of) feels like they are dooming themselves. I've played a little with running Yacy locally and directing it to crawl only sites I care about. So far that habit has not stuck. The bangs are a step in the right direction. Suggesting additional search terms isn't quite right, and neither is doing a site specific search since I don't know what site will have the information. Maybe a "metabang" where you search all the bangs in a category? "python !!tech" Anyway, its good to see DDG growing.

korzun 11y ago

Going to chime in on the whole 'results are getting better'. They might be. On paper; because there is more data. Unfortunately, nobody is accounting for the 'stale' factor. Searching old news is well.. old news.

andrea_sdl 11y ago

Wow, so many people talking about how DDG is lacking good search results. Here's my personal experience. I've tried using DDG 2 years ago, and it sucked. In my language (italian) results were poor, and also for general searches. 6 Months ago I gave it a try again, and I've been pleased enough to use it both at work, at home and on my smartphone. The results are not always perfect, but I find myself using !g bang mainly when I feel there's something missing (which doesn't happen that much) or when I need to find a very selective piece of information. I also loved the integration with stack overflow. Works nicely, it doesn't always "answer" your question, but just yesterday it did and the moment was like "wow, it's getting interesting". So, while I admit that DDG may not be ready for prime time yet, I guess there's a chance that many of us (developers, etc) might start liking it and using it constantly. While it would be naive to say "I wouldn't go back to google", I'm now an happy user of DDG, and I wasn't expecting it to begin with (In fact I was very skeptical).

sn 11y ago

RE: https://duck.co/help/company/advertising-and-affiliates https://duck.co/help/company/advertising-and-affiliates I think it would be cool if it was possible to do ads direct with DDG.