13 ms·

Let's start using DuckDuckGo more often

241 points by rms_returns 10y ago

Granted that DuckDuckGo.com is quite a childish name, but then so was Google when we first heard about it in early 2000s, wasn't it? I just switched to DDG recently and feel that not only is the interface fast and minimal (like Google used to be in those early days), but even the results seem to be a lot better (at least specific to the programming topic that I search too often). I'm getting a feeling that some day in future, DDG is going to become as big as Google, if not supersede it. But a search engine's results are only as accurate as the number of users who search and contribute to it, so its my appeal to people to give a chance to DDG and start using it more and more instead of Google.

collyw 10y ago
I use DuckDuck go as my default search on my machines, but I think the fact that Google is not anonymous does give them a big advantage. An obvious example of this is when I search for "Django" (I am primarily a Django developer). DuckDuckGo will return results about the film as the top hits, whereas Google already knows that I mean Django Web Framework and will return those as the top hits. I appreciate the fact that my searches are anonymous with DDG, but I doubt that it will be able to be "as good" as Google for that reason.
- ascagnel_ 10y ago
  They don't always do a good job of that, though. Yesterday I was searching for documentation for a JS validation library (Joi), and a specific search string ("Joi deny substring") returned some... pornier search results as the top five. It was somewhat redeemed with the sixth result being the one I was looking for. And this was with safe search on.
  - hedora 10y ago
    I misread your comment. Google does indeed return porny stuff for this, and ddg does not. In both engines, your comment is the top of the search results. :-)
    - lostlogin 10y ago
      I cringe remembering when I Googled "developer dick image" instead of "disk image" with colleagues watching.
      - tlarkworthy 10y ago
        Out of curiosity I Googled that and, for me, Google now auto-corrects it to disk image.
        lostlogin 10y ago
        It would have been excellent if that had happened. It was about 2-3 years ago.
  - steanne 10y ago
    i searched for freezing eggs (for cooking) and then saw ads for fertility clinics for the next few weeks.
- ky738 10y ago
  And DuckDuckGo is not really comparable when you don't live in the US. Google is far more superior, even without your info.
  - rms_returns 10y ago
    We have the chicken and egg problem there. Google have that results because it has terabytes of information on everything and that's because millions use it. If more and more people start using DDG, their results will also improve.
    - thesmallestcat 10y ago
      > If more and more people start using DDG, their results will also improve. Let's say everybody stops using Google right now and starts using DDG with its anonymous, proxied queries to Bing. How does this in any way improve search results? You could maybe argue that heavy direct use of bing.com would give Microsoft some useful training data. But none of that changes the fact that Bing's crawlers aren't that good, and neither is its search engine.
    - st3v3r 10y ago
      See, I'm not willing to do that. I'm not willing to put up with inferior results on the promise that maybe, someday in the future, they might get better.
      - macintux 10y ago
        I remember how impossible searching was before Google. DDG at its worst is infinitely better than that.
        st3v3r 10y ago
        It very well might be. But there's also something better. And I'd prefer to use the better option.
  - sujay_m 10y ago
- rms_returns 10y ago
  I just tried that with DDJ out of curiosity (I develop mostly in Flask, but also Django occasionally). It did display a few imdb movie results (though the top one still referred to the framework). However, when I searched for "django python", the intent became quite clear and I got the relevant results. So basically, what you say about personalized search applies only to normal users who don't have much "googlefu" skills, for power users like us who know exactly what to search for, its not much relevant.
- peatmoss 10y ago
  I find myself often doing a two- or three-step search with DDG. First I search for a thing on DDG. Then if I get something back like Django the movie instead of Django the framework, I'll search the thing again on DDG with some sort of specializing term, e.g. "python." Lastly, I almost always end up searching with "!g thing + specializing term(s)." I love the idea of DDG, and I'm delighted on the rare occasion that I get better results than google. But most of the time I get results that are inferior to El Goog. Still, I keep trying.
  - StavrosK 10y ago
    Really? I've been using DDG exclusively for a few months, and whenever I get unsatisfactory results, I retry with !g. Invariably, I get equally unsatisfactory results with Google. Maybe in some rare cases where I'm searching for something esoteric, Google will return an extra page or two, but that's not very frequent.
    - peatmoss 10y ago
      Maybe I'm searching in a way that biases in favor of Google? I'm willing to stick with DDG-first on principle alone, so perhaps DDG getting better + me figuring out subtlety of search will improve things.
- subinsebastien 10y ago
  May be use DDG as the primary search enigne, and switch to Google when you don't get what you want in the first go on DDG. Atleast more traffic to DDG, and hence better results in future.
  - collyw 10y ago
    Pretty much what I do, as I say its set as my default search engine on most of my machines. Add "g!" if I am not happy with the results.
    - deleted 10y ago
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  - deleted 10y ago
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- whatshisface 10y ago
  >* the fact that Google is not anonymous does give them a big advantage.* What if DDG allowed us to manually tell them information about our demographic in a way that wasn't stored on their servers and could be changed at will? If you want convenience, maybe there could be an optional client-side preference detector script that only offered possible configurations.
  - joeclark77 10y ago
    Good idea. I definitely don't want them "filtering" my results without my permission, but with permission is fine.
  - IgorPartola 10y ago
    What a drag. So now I have to set up a profile of my ever changing interests on all of my devices just so I can get an approximation of what Google offers out of the box? Don't get me wrong, I like the idea of not using Google, but this seems like a very user hostile way to do it.
    - gtf21 10y ago
      I actually think this gives one slightly better control. I've experienced a weird phenomenon on Facebook where a contact of mine kept posting borderline conspiracy theories and I kept correcting him, but now all I get are his posts and it's really quite infuriating. I would prefer conscious filtering to this automated (and obscure) filtering that Google et al. utilise. I understand it's not for everyone, but it would suit me far better.
      - IgorPartola 10y ago
        Sure it is more control. Just like pushing electrons with a magnetized needle is even more control. It doesn't mean it's convenient. Now if you had an ML algorithm running in your browser that analyzed your preferences and transparently changed your DDG searches from "Django" to "Django web framework", you might get something closer to what you get with Google. Wonder if Firefox could make that happen.
- hedora 10y ago
  "As good" is subjective. I hate search bubbling. I'd rather click through semi-relevant results a few times then figure out why google hasn't heard of the movie Django, for example. Also, I switched to ddg years ago, and can't remember one time when I thought that personalizing the results would improve matters. Every few months, I'll search for something, not find it, and try google. Falling back to google has helped maybe two times out of dozens of searches. In one case google found an old email thread where someone asked my question and got no answer. In the other, I was looking for a specific document with a solution to a Linux issue. I had found it with ddg before. It turns out the solution no longer worked, and was superceded by documents ddg had already returned. It is unclear that running that test with google as the primary search engine and ddg as the secondary would have different results.
  - Twisell 10y ago
    And it not as if searching google from DuckDuckGo was hard. DuckDukGo bangs syntax is simply fantastic even if i mostly always use theses 4 : !w , !m, !g, !gi Privacy by default, google when you need, it's my default since 2 years.
- Sir_Cmpwn 10y ago
  It just requires a habit shift. You have to learn to be slightly more specific. "Django framework".
  - roryisok 10y ago
    Lets hope that's not the name of the sequel.
    - enzolovesbacon 10y ago
      Logged in just to upvote.
- DanBC 10y ago
  Have you tried the bang searches? https://duckduckgo.com/bang?c=Tech&q=django https://duckduckgo.com/bang?c=Tech&q=django
- VT_Drew 10y ago
  It has it's pro's and con's. I do love how I can just to !a to search amazon, or !w to search wikipedia, or !g if I really want to use Google. Kind of wish Google had a feature like that.
- eternalban 10y ago
  If that's what's holding you back: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=django+python
- PrivacyGirl 10y ago
  No doubt Google has great search results. (Many people just give up privacy because they're so much better.) Solution: Use StartPage for private Google search results. I also like that StartPage has a proxy option so I can visit webpages anonymously.
macintux 10y ago
It's my default engine everywhere. Very happy with it generally, and the fact that I can trivially redirect a search to Google makes it a no-brainer.
- kleiba 10y ago
  I used DDG for a while as my default engine, but realized that I was using the Google redirects more and more until I finally switched back again. Google's search result were just better for me.
  - macintux 10y ago
    I'd estimate I redirect no more than 10% of my searches, and given how much I distrust Google, it's worth it to keep searching elsewhere.
- teaneedz 10y ago
  You can redirect to StartPage and still get Google results with !sp.
eriknstr 10y ago
I've tried multiple times to switch completely. Currently I use DDG on my iPod touch (which is what I use for web things on the go) but when I'm on the laptop or desktop I stick with Google as default.
equivocates 10y ago
I have duckduckgo set on my phone. Recently, I started discovering that when I clicked a google search result link on my phone, google would mask that link and wouldn't actually take me to the webpage. Annoying. DDGo doesn't do this.
madman2890 10y ago
...
aq3cn 10y ago
I use searx.me more often than any other search engine because along with giving the result it also display the search engine which it uses to fetch the result. I mean it is very important to know the areas where each of the search engine excel. Privacy is a concern for sure, but DuckDuckGo cannot win me over on the basis of privacy only. DuckDuckGo can be an answer to privacy concerned people, but it cannot beat Google Scholar, YouTube, PubMed, Amazon etc. We must know which search engine is perfect for which kind of keyword.
- hedora 10y ago
  It would be great if they made ! more discoverable. For instance, it could tell you the ! code needed to limit searches to the engine that produced each "niche" blue link and gray box at the top of the screen (the one that inlines amazon product thumbnails/prices, wikipedia article synopses, stack overflow answers.", etc)
  - aq3cn 10y ago
    But the question is, why are we looking for a Swiss Army Knife? I make all kinds of search queries but I only use privacy centric search engines when required for my particular concerns. In my opinion, the best way to stay anonymous is by disguising yourself as normal. Today's browser are capable of switching search engines with the use of a single letter before the search query to make use of a particular search engine. And one can easily visit Firefox search engine database to include it in their list. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/search/?atype=4 https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/search/?atype=4 I haven't use DuckDuckGo's bang features, so I really don't understand what are they trying to achieve other than proxying the search result which I already satisfactorily achieve by having multiple Firefox profile with different proxies. I think this is never ending quest of integrating new search engines in DuckDuckGo. But it will never match the native use. For example, take Wolfram Alpha or TinEye(Reverse Image Search). Bottom line is that there are million ways to stay anonymous while using native search engines instead of routing it through third party services.
wesleytodd 10y ago
Already have been!!! Started using Beaker Browser as my main browser, DDG as my search, and am working on moving the rest of my life off google (read: gmail). Also have been messing with doing more work on a raspi tablet rigged with a bluetooth keyboard/trackpad combo.
rb808 10y ago
Also use bing more. I know my privacy has gone already - I just want to encourage competition for Google. The results are great 98% of the time.
gpm 10y ago
I've used duckduckgo for a few years now, highly recommend it. For 'easy' searches it's equivalent to Google. For 'hard' searches it's nearly stricter better than Google, because if DuckDuckGo doesn't find something I also look at the Google results (append !g to the search), and they often come up with very different subsets of the internet. To me it no longer has anything to do with privacy or not liking Google, it's just that DuckDuckGo has the better product for putting into your search bar.
zitterbewegung 10y ago
I use DuckDuckGo exclusively on my phone. Half of the time I seem to fallback to Google but since you can use !g to get google results I still use it.
keeganjw 10y ago
DDG has been my default search for the last few years and I only very rarely use it for it's native search results. The bang (!) search syntax is by far the biggest reason I use it. It allows me to search sooooo many websites directly from the address bar. If you want normal Google search results, use !g. If you want Google Images, use !gi. Amazon? !a. Wikipedia? !w. The list goes on and on and on. Edit: grammar.
- Avshalom 10y ago
  yeah the various bangs are hugely useful to me on my phone particularly, it's a very light weight interface to the internet.
- Forlien 10y ago
  You can add these shortcuts into your browser. On firefox, you can right click on a search box and specify some character(s). I'm sure there's a similar process on chrome too.
- dethos 10y ago
  Completely agree. I also have been using DDG for a few years and got used to the bangs. The results for a general search usually are good enough, so don't I even bother to use Google directly.
Twirrim 10y ago
I took the opportunity of starting at a new job to make the switch of default. I've found it to be generally giving me better tech search results than Google. For the most part, however, I haven't really noticed I'm using it, which I'd consider a good thing. It means it does its job without fuss or bother and gets out of the way.
Joeboy 10y ago
DDG is really great for easily doing specific types of search, eg. adding "!w" to your query will search for something on Wikipedia. For that feature, it's extremely useful and I don't like to be without it. But its own search results (which I think are actually anonymized Bing search results?) are nowhere as near what google manages by personalizing your search. So I'll often add "!g" to my query to get google results rather than ddg ones.
- xj9 10y ago
  this is why DDG is my default search engine. I use !g a lot because the native search is only okay at best, but there are so many handy !bang shortcuts that I can't walk away. !emoji !dict !w !gi
- Forlien 10y ago
  You can add these shortcuts into your browser. On firefox, you can right click on a search box and specify some character(s). I'm sure there's a similar process on chrome too.
  - xj9 10y ago
    too much work. changing my default search engine to ddg is faster and easier. i don't even know all of the bang commands! if i followed your advice i would have a significantly inferior experience.
neximo64 10y ago
I find duckduckgos results quite bad though, i've given it many shots over the past year but often have to keep switching back to Google.
- StavrosK 10y ago
  I find that the results feel quite bad, but, whenever I actually compared results to Google's, the latter wasn't better at all.
  - neximo64 10y ago
    I meant I used to find bad results and used google and found the results were more relevant, I tried to feel duckduckgo's results were better.
    - StavrosK 10y ago
      Hmm, odd, that doesn't match my experience at all. I realized how bad Google was when I started using DDG and realized that all the bad results in DDG were bad in Google too. Maybe it improved since you used it?
  - hedora 10y ago
    Don't worry. This is completely normal. :-) You can put intentionally crappy results under a google logo, and google results under any other logo, and most people will say the crappy "google" results are better. You need the crappy results to be reasonable -- for example, strip out half of Google's top ten.
Yhippa 10y ago
> But a search engine's results are only as accurate as the number of users who search and contribute to it Are there not privacy concerns about this for DDG?
551199 10y ago
At DuckDuckGo, no cookies are used by default. >Yet they do store a cookie by default - this cookie is called "user_segment" and is valid for 1 month after it is first set.[1] They have removed it but this kind of behaviour doesn't exactly raise trust. Also they are based in US so 'privacy' is just PR. I would recommend to use startpage. [1]https://archive.is/qntuk https://archive.is/qntuk [2]https://8ch.net/tech/ddg.html https://8ch.net/tech/ddg.html
arthurz 10y ago
But DDG still goes to Google (as well as the other providers). And I see it returns less relevant results compared to Google itself. Where it might be shining is in avoiding the search per unit of time throttling done by Google, and less content tailored by user IP which I see an intrusion into ones privacy.
joeclark77 10y ago
The "bangs" make all the difference. Just this morning I used !ups <tracking number> to track a package. I use !w (wikipedia), !gm (google maps), !gi (google images), !yt (youtube) and !a (amazon) all the time. Less often I use !so (stack overflow), !gsc (google scholar), and others. Sometimes I even use !g (google) or !b (bing) if the search results are inadequate. But that's very rare for me.
nine_k 10y ago
DDG is great; what it currently lacks (for me) is not search quality but reach; it has trouble indexing less visited corners of the internet. Google did not become huge because of the search engine alone. AFAICT two things, based on related technologies, made Google oodles of money: AdWords and SERP ads. (AdWords used to be so unobtrusive I never tried to block them.) I don't know how DDG currently pays its bills. They do feature unobtrusive and clearly marked ads on their SERP, too. I'm not sure if ads can be reasonable without precise targeting, that is, tracking, tacit privacy invasion of various sorts, etc. Poorly targeted ads are disliked both by users ("dumb!") and advertisers ("poor conversion, money wasted"). The only other option I can see for a private company is to sell a subscription. Pay n USD / mo for no-tracking, no-strings-attached search. The question is, of course, the value of n. It may turn out to be uncomfortably high for many users, just because advertisers value their eyeball rather highly. You can already opt out of ads on some Google services, e.g. YouTube: try closing a few ads, or visit google.com/contributor when it (re-)opens. You can opt out of personalized ads, too. While many of us still won't trust all these measures, for many these would feel adequate. I wish DDG all the luck. But being and staying an alternative, privacy-respecting search engine, even a low-profile one, isn't going to be easy.
- StavrosK 10y ago
  How poorly targeted can an ad be when you've told them exactly what you're looking for? It doesn't get much more targeted than "car dealerships Florida".
  - st3v3r 10y ago
    Well, if you're looking to buy a Honda, and the ad that gets shown is for the Mercedes Benz dealership, that's pretty crappy targeting.
    - fredsir 10y ago
      And all the times I'm shown ads for girls clothing or stoves because of some site I visited, and I am never interested in girls clothing or stoves, is good advertising? I beg to differ. What it is, is advertising that makes me install an adblocker.
isaac_is_goat 10y ago
I switched to DuckDuckGo as my primary SE and will be using Bing as a fallback. I'm slowly moving as far away from Google as I can. On that note, any good alternatives to G-Suite that aren't necessarily Microsoft O365 (though I'm not against migrating to that either). A straightforward email migration is a big plus, documents not such a big deal.
- jquast 10y ago
  suggest fastmail.com
  - jumpCastle 10y ago
    I have a question about fastmail: I tried migrating from gmail but the original date of the emails didn't transfer. Anyone knows how to solve it? I had to go back to gmail since it's a deal breaker and I couldn't find a solution, but I really want to leave gmail (so I can have a direct relationship with the service provider without advertisers involve)
    - ocdtrekkie 10y ago
      How were you trying to migrate? I've been doing a Gmail->FastMail migration and I definitely had no issues with original email dates.
      - jumpCastle 10y ago
        It was a few months ago, so I don't remember exactly, but I believe I followed the instructions that fastmail provided. If you say you didn't have this problem then I will try again. Thanks for the answer
        ocdtrekkie 10y ago
        In my case, FWIW, I used an IMAP-compatible mail client (Outlook), and dragged my crud from one mailbox to the other. I did have some issues where mail conversations where different messages were under different labels ended up in not copying fully over, but that's partly because I migrated section by section. Also, of course, note that if you have a mail message under two Gmail labels, and use IMAP to copy your folders, you'll probably end up with two copies of that message. Migrating out of Gmail, FWIW, is still a pain because they are so nonstandard now. But I never had an issue with the dates on the emails.
id122015 10y ago
I am already using it. and when you want a custom Google search that goes through DDG you do: !g 1 byte to MB or any other search you want
thesmallestcat 10y ago
> I'm getting a feeling that some day in future, DDG is going to become as big as Google, if not supersede it. Well, no, they don't even have their own search engine. > a search engine's results are only as accurate as the number of users who search and contribute to it That makes no sense. Anyway, we don't use DDG because its results are shitty.
- cptskippy 10y ago
  > Well, no, they don't even have their own search engine. Really? I've never heard this, do you have anymore information about it?
  - jmathai 10y ago
    It's sort of a meta search engine that utilizes other search indexes. Here's a post from the founder. https://duck.co/forum/comment/27893 https://duck.co/forum/comment/27893 Edit, that's about 5 years old. The current page on Wikipedia provides a more recent explanation. "DuckDuckGo's results are a compilation of "about 50" sources,[42] including Yahoo! Search BOSS; Wikipedia; Wolfram Alpha; Bing; its own Web crawler, the DuckDuckBot; and others." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DuckDuckGo#Overview https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DuckDuckGo#Overview
    - Bedon292 10y ago
      They actually say hundreds of sources now on https://duck.co/help/results/sources https://duck.co/help/results/sources and specifically call out Bing, Yahoo, and Yandex for search results.
    - low_battery 10y ago
      It is a meta search engine. Note that they never mention the share breakdown of these "sources". What percentage of queries DDG itself answer? Probably very few.
  - nickpsecurity 10y ago
    Meta-search is a type of search engine that goes way back. They avoid the cost of maintaining a full, search service by sending the query to all kinds of other search engines, running some analysis on their results, and presenting a condensed form to the user optionally with value adds. DuckDuckGo's value add is privacy. Here's some others to give you an idea for what they do: http://www.searchenginepeople.com/blog/10-meta-search-engines-reviewed-and-compared.html http://www.searchenginepeople.com/blog/10-meta-search-engine...
anthony_romeo 10y ago
This is the sort of low-effort post I expect on reddit. And I come here to avoid that.
simias 10y ago
I've been using duckduckgo as my main search engine for about 2 years but I never recommend it to anybody. It just feels like a homeopathic remedy to me. What's the business model? I don't allow them to show me ads and they don't allow me to pay for the service. I just can't imagine how that can scale. Search engines are such an important tool that I would be more than willing to pay $10 a month for a good quality one with strong commitment to privacy and maybe additional premium features.
zouhair 10y ago
Every time I try to use DDG I ended using !g which kills its purpose, I just use Startpage[0] [0]: https://www.startpage.com/ https://www.startpage.com/
- clydethefrog 10y ago
  Then use !s :-) It's what I do, don't want to use a search engine without the bangs any more.
  - Forlien 10y ago
    At this point, I've set up search keywords in firefox to do this. Now, for example, I type "gi rabbit" for pictures of rabbits. It's nice because they also can be used as shortened parts of links. Eg. "@ john" to go to twitter.com/john
- sureshn 10y ago
  This site appears to be a front of google and in the end its relying on google to search and get the result, some how I don't see this to be too different from directly using google in a incognito window
  - Ladnaks 10y ago
    A incognito window doesn't hide your identity from Google. They still get your IP address and your browsers's fingerprint, which is more than enough to identify you.
roryrjb 10y ago
I switched to DDG a few months ago and have found it just as good as Google at least for my usage, at the very least I haven't felt the need to use Google as the results I have been getting have been just fine, and that's without the bangs functionality.
anexprogrammer 10y ago
I'd suggest to "Start contributing data to DDG in 2017". Most of their best results are crowdsourced. I've been using it as default for perhaps 2 years now. There's some consistent annoyances, but overall I actually prefer the experience to Google. It's much nicer about disambiguation than google, and can be incredibly helpful. e.g. Search for Zen - you get a wide selection of possibles in probable order. Sadly there's far too many missing. Crowdsourcing needed. It's horrible at localisation. eg set Filter by region to UK and search any global multinational. Chances are the UK site is WAY down the list and the .com and US options hard at top. on google UK the local branch is always first. There's too many instant answers that presume a US only view of the world. The instant answers when they have adequate data and ! searches are brilliant. Lyric and video searches are orders of magnitude better than Google. Maybe 5% of searches go to Google as I'm not quickly finding what I need.
- AdamSC1 10y ago
  We always welcome more contributions. We crossed 1000 Instant Answers this year and they make for some wonderful experiences!
clydethefrog 10y ago
For anyone using !g when they don't get the results they need - use !s. It will use Startpage, which fetches results from the Google search engine but without giving any personal information to Google's servers.
yarou 10y ago
I actually tend to use Bing. hides
- MichaelBurge 10y ago
  Bing image search is a lot better than Google's.
- jaclaz 10y ago
  >I actually tend to use Bing. hides I would find more appropriate in the context ducks ...
  - yarou 10y ago
    Haha absolutely!
  - bbcbasic 10y ago
    Boom boom
mibbiting 10y ago
Adverts on hackernews now eh?
- feelslikefelt 10y ago
  Precisely. This is not what I expect to see on Hacker News. This isn't a discussion of DDG's abilities. It's simply an advertisement. If this was a link to DDG's contribution page or some kind of information document or review, it would be different. However this just screams "USE THIS SERVICE FOR X REASON!"
- bbcbasic 10y ago
  The jobs link contains ads too
gbersac 10y ago
If you want a search engine which respect your privacy but with a fancy gui (unkike duck duck go), you should try qwant : https://www.qwant.com/ https://www.qwant.com/ French technology which work really well !
bobajeff 10y ago
>I'm getting a feeling that some day in future, DDG is going to become as big as Google, if not supersede it If they become bigger than Google what's to stop them from becoming another Google? Why punish myself by using an inferior service just to give it the seat at the big 5?
markpapadakis 10y ago
I don't really get DDG. I guess it's nice that they pattern-match some queries and give you a a query specific UI on top of the results or maybe some results UI that makes a lot of sense for the query -- though Google and Bing do that too, and I don't believe they are hardcoding those rules/patterns like DDG seems to be doing. I 've given it a few honest tries this year but the results are really not that great, certainly far inferior to Google's or even Bing's, and it 'feels' slow -- but then again, a few dozen ms slower than Google is 'slow' to me (and I am sure the difference is higher than that ). I suppose the major selling point is that it doesn't track your queries and that's nice and all, but it definitely is not important enough for me to trade that for better results and responsiveness. I wish them the best though.
johndubchak 10y ago
@rms_returns, my only question is why are you asking us to use DDG rather than Google? You seem to be drawing some sort of direct comparison to Google, but you're not stating why we shouldn't use Google or what DDG does better.
AdamSC1 10y ago
Disclaimer: I work at DuckDuckGo so I'm a bit bias. I won't turn this into a sales pitch, but here are a few common misconceptions people have about privacy and search. 1) Many people don't realize that tracking isn't just about having something to hide. But, it can cost you money. From Airline tickets to staplers you pay based on a profile: http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887323777204578189391813881534 http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB100014241278873237772045781893... http://www.wsj.com/articles/why-you-cant-trust-youre-getting-the-best-deal-online-1414036862 http://www.wsj.com/articles/why-you-cant-trust-youre-getting... 2) People don't realize what's being tracked. I usually send them to http://history.google.com/history http://history.google.com/history to have a look. Or http://webkay.robinlinus.com/ http://webkay.robinlinus.com/ to see what their browser can access. That makes a lot of people realize just what is out there. 3) People feel they can't search without personalized searches. The example is often a matter of disambiguation. For example, if I type "Python" I want code, not snakes. But, really, when is the last time you only typed 'Python' and wanted something generic about Python? You probably wanted a package lookup or the latest news on a release. So if you become more specific there is no issue. Plus when you get a bit more specific on Python you can trigger things like package lookup: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=python+numpy&ia=about https://duckduckgo.com/?q=python+numpy&ia=about Or NumPy Cheatsheet: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=numpy+cheat+sheet&ia=cheatsheet https://duckduckgo.com/?q=numpy+cheat+sheet&ia=cheatsheet At the end of the day some people may truly be ok with all the tracking that takes place, and that's ok that's up to them. But, at DuckDuckGo our goal is to educate people on online privacy, and provide a trusted way to access information as best we can. (Not to mention Instant Answers and Bangs which are super addicting)
- cpayne624 10y ago
  I'm a ddg fan. You guys should have a big, conspicuous WHY? button on the homepage that links to all this. The 'Learn More' link takes me to what you guys don't do, which is good, but it's light on the why.
  - AdamSC1 10y ago
    Thanks for the great suggestion. We're currently exploring ways to get the 'why' message out there more. I'll certainly bring it up with the team :)
Entangled 10y ago
Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, they all have something in common: EaaS. Ecosystem as a Service. DDG should start offering email first, then news, stocks, maps, social, and finally ads. You don't survive with search alone, you need to monetize it on one hand and keep your users coming back on the other. Oh, I wish it was called something simpler like "Ducker" or "Duckit", but whatever, bikeshedding territory.
- justinclift 10y ago
  That strategy doesn't seem to have worked out for Yahoo. Not sure DDG users really need/want another er... EaaS.
maaaats 10y ago
I can never remember the (short) url, so I end up Googling it so I don't have to spell it out..
- AdamSC1 10y ago
  ddg.gg or duckduckgo.com You can also set it as default in any major browser either manually or using one of the extensions.
jonathansizz 10y ago
Questions for you to ponder: 1) Why do you think their results would get better if more people use their engine? 2) If their results really are better than Google, as you claim, why is their user base so small after all these years? 3) Why should we trust them any more than Google? How do you know they're not actually collecting your data or passing it on to the third party engines they use?
- hedora 10y ago
  1) More revenue -> more developers -> more deep web onebox results. 2) Result quality is trumped by inertia and ecosystem stickyness (I commented above) 3) They have a smaller team and are focused on one product, which means they can survive without doing this. Also, the risk of detection is high, since it relies on hiding revenue, third parties that keep secrets, and the US never issuing a subpoena for their logs. In contrast, Google would go out of business tomorrow if they stopped collecting and monetizing data.
baq 10y ago
Sure, just make me a chrome add-on that splits the tab in two vertical ones with DDG in the left and Google on the right whenever I search from the location bar which is nearly always so I don't have to search twice when DDG misunderstands what I want.
eeeeeeeeeeeee 10y ago
I tried to use DuckDuckGo and it was terrible. Couldn't even last a week. The results were dramatically worse. And putting aside the quality of results, the actual design of the site is not very good. This is probably a preference, but I find it much easier to quickly scan a Google results page (or even Bing), but DuckDuckGo, with the font face and spacing they use, is not as clear.
- Ladnaks 10y ago
  Try startpage.com. They fetch the search results from Google without revealing your identity to Google. My primary search engine since more than a year.
Tempest1981 10y ago
They do a nice job of extracting and presenting the top StackOverflow answer: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=stl+string+remove+characters&t=h_&ia=qa https://duckduckgo.com/?q=stl+string+remove+characters&t=h_&...
sureshn 10y ago
I use DDG full time and it has been awesome , I am a devops guy use DDG to trouble shoot my way out of problems I get stuck in and I have personally found this to be way better than google. The Bang search is very cool too , for example I use it to search github for docker orchestration related content directly ! , I also use DDG command line quite a bit and its really awesome , these are things which I feel are much superior compared to google and I hope DDG will become the geeks most preferred search tool in 2017
9erdelta 10y ago
I try to use DDG and set it as my default search. But more often than not I end up doing !g. And if I don't, I feel like I'm missing the answer that will really help me work through my coding issues. After awhile, it just gets to be more annoying than anything, and I go back to Google.
awalton 10y ago
Well, as Google continues dumbing down their search engine, there's certainly room in the market for a search engine with the same kind of power that Google used to have... ...but that being said, DuckDuckGo ain't it. It's in fact, quite far from it. It's roughly as good as old Yahoo Search (pre-Bing), which also nobody used because Google's is vastly superior. Give me a search engine like Google circa 2010-11 (back before the menagerie of Bird algorithms began trading "fuzzier" results for raw search power) and I'm good.
coldshower 10y ago
DDG is my default search engine because I'm addicted to the !bangs. For example, I use !pf to quickly convert an article into a PDF. I maintain a blog where I "showcase" the best bangs for the Duck: http://duckgobang.com/ http://duckgobang.com/
- bbcbasic 10y ago
  Nice. I like the passion you clearly have for this topic
gist 10y ago
> Let's start using DuckDuckGo more often I am at a loss to understand really why 'us' should start doing this 'more often'. Is there something inherently good about using ddg vs. google? Why should anyone use it more vs. what they have already decided works best for them? This smacks of 'make the world a better place by using ddg' unfortunately as many others have noted it's simply not a better mouse trap. And what does the name have to do with it at all?
- PrivacyGirl 10y ago
  I agree. We should all use private search more often. If you need Google search results, just use StartPage.
greenyouse 10y ago
Anyone use DDG's grouping search syntax much?[0] I've always wondered if this is something just for bots or if humans actually write out complex searches like that. If you use it how are the results? [0]https://duck.co/help/results/syntax https://duck.co/help/results/syntax
- gonhidi 10y ago
  I often submit equivalent queries when searching using Google. I tend to use OR a lot to specify alternatives to specific keywords (e.g. osx OR "os x" OR macos), though it's a years-old habit often not that important with today's search engines; I sometimes also use it to search sets of domains (e.g. site:w3.org OR site:whatwg.org). In general I feel that when the first few pages of results using a simple query don't get me to what I am looking for, using a more complex expression can unearth hits which I would have otherwise skipped or not reached. Regarding Duck Duck Go's advanced search syntax, I've use it in a similar fashion, though not as much. Keep in mind that the provided link doesn't seem to reflect the current implementation. For instance, the syntax for grouping using parentheses doesn't seem to be as strict (which is a relief), excluded words are seemingly not limited to being at the end of the search string, and AND has a higher precedence than OR (which is currently a pet peeve of mine because I am used to Google doing it otherwise and I like not having to use parentheses in my usual queries).
DoodleBuggy 10y ago
>>> Granted that DuckDuckGo.com is quite a childish name Call me crazy, but I suspect that's part of the reason DuckDuckGo has had a hard time catching on. A name matters. If I was DuckDuckGo I would rebrand to something simpler that could be used as a verb. But what do I know?
- deleted 10y ago
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- pOVTVOItY 10y ago
  Agreed, it can't be verbified easily. DDG admins: this is a real problem, you need to get creative on how to fix this.
disposablezero 10y ago
Switched to DDG for most things 3 years ago.
slyzmud 10y ago
I think twice a year I get my antigoogle moment and try to use it, it rarelly last more than two weeks when I don't find something or get frustrated because Google always loads faster. It's a shame. As much as I want to love DDG I find pretty hard to use it for a long time.
cpcat 10y ago
i got bored from using Google. i like trying new products so i'll go with DDG until i get bored from it.
Arzh 10y ago
I really like that google isn't anonymous and that it pulls everything that I've done in the past to give me better results. I usually have to jump through a lot of hoops to get the same level of results from DDG.
DrScump 10y ago
One of many things that disgust me about the latest big revision to Opera (version 41) is that Opera Mobile doesn't include DDG as one of the (7) default search options (though it does include Amazon, eBay, and IMDB). Ugh.
- frik 10y ago
  Opera got bought by an Asian ads company. Vivaldi browser seems to be the spiritual successor of Opera by its previous developers.
jplayer01 10y ago
I've always had problems with their search results and I end up switching back to Google every time.
gaspoweredcat 10y ago
i think they do need to ditch that name though, whilst as you say google wasnt really any less odd in the early days however it did sort of roll off the tongue, where as duckduckgo is somewhat clumsy and unpleasant no matter how many times you say it. i know it shouldnt be important and its not really, its just annoying
coke 10y ago
Well ... No.
tscs37 10y ago
I personally found searx to be better than DDG, plus it's self-hosted. (It's a metasearch engine, you don't need an index)
banterfoil 10y ago
I use DDG but only because of the bang system. In other words I can supply a !g anywhere in the query and it will use the encrypted google search. This is also useful when you also use other ones like !yt !fl !gh !r and so forth. But to be honest, I hardly ever actually use the ddg search engine.
l0b0 10y ago
By far my biggest gripe with Google and DDG is that they have started quite simply ignoring search terms. I search for 'foo bar' (without the quotes), they return results which clearly do not include "bar", neither in the blurb nor on the page itself. At least Google will mostly obey if I quote the search terms, but DDG doesn't even do that.

241 points by rms_returns 10y ago

collyw 10y ago

I use DuckDuck go as my default search on my machines, but I think the fact that Google is not anonymous does give them a big advantage. An obvious example of this is when I search for "Django" (I am primarily a Django developer). DuckDuckGo will return results about the film as the top hits, whereas Google already knows that I mean Django Web Framework and will return those as the top hits. I appreciate the fact that my searches are anonymous with DDG, but I doubt that it will be able to be "as good" as Google for that reason.

ascagnel_ 10y ago
They don't always do a good job of that, though. Yesterday I was searching for documentation for a JS validation library (Joi), and a specific search string ("Joi deny substring") returned some... pornier search results as the top five. It was somewhat redeemed with the sixth result being the one I was looking for. And this was with safe search on.
- hedora 10y ago
  I misread your comment. Google does indeed return porny stuff for this, and ddg does not. In both engines, your comment is the top of the search results. :-)
  - lostlogin 10y ago
    I cringe remembering when I Googled "developer dick image" instead of "disk image" with colleagues watching.
    - tlarkworthy 10y ago
      Out of curiosity I Googled that and, for me, Google now auto-corrects it to disk image.
      - lostlogin 10y ago
        It would have been excellent if that had happened. It was about 2-3 years ago.
- steanne 10y ago
  i searched for freezing eggs (for cooking) and then saw ads for fertility clinics for the next few weeks.
ky738 10y ago
And DuckDuckGo is not really comparable when you don't live in the US. Google is far more superior, even without your info.
- rms_returns 10y ago
  We have the chicken and egg problem there. Google have that results because it has terabytes of information on everything and that's because millions use it. If more and more people start using DDG, their results will also improve.
  - thesmallestcat 10y ago
    > If more and more people start using DDG, their results will also improve. Let's say everybody stops using Google right now and starts using DDG with its anonymous, proxied queries to Bing. How does this in any way improve search results? You could maybe argue that heavy direct use of bing.com would give Microsoft some useful training data. But none of that changes the fact that Bing's crawlers aren't that good, and neither is its search engine.
  - st3v3r 10y ago
    See, I'm not willing to do that. I'm not willing to put up with inferior results on the promise that maybe, someday in the future, they might get better.
    - macintux 10y ago
      I remember how impossible searching was before Google. DDG at its worst is infinitely better than that.
      - st3v3r 10y ago
        It very well might be. But there's also something better. And I'd prefer to use the better option.
- sujay_m 10y ago
rms_returns 10y ago
I just tried that with DDJ out of curiosity (I develop mostly in Flask, but also Django occasionally). It did display a few imdb movie results (though the top one still referred to the framework). However, when I searched for "django python", the intent became quite clear and I got the relevant results. So basically, what you say about personalized search applies only to normal users who don't have much "googlefu" skills, for power users like us who know exactly what to search for, its not much relevant.
peatmoss 10y ago
I find myself often doing a two- or three-step search with DDG. First I search for a thing on DDG. Then if I get something back like Django the movie instead of Django the framework, I'll search the thing again on DDG with some sort of specializing term, e.g. "python." Lastly, I almost always end up searching with "!g thing + specializing term(s)." I love the idea of DDG, and I'm delighted on the rare occasion that I get better results than google. But most of the time I get results that are inferior to El Goog. Still, I keep trying.
- StavrosK 10y ago
  Really? I've been using DDG exclusively for a few months, and whenever I get unsatisfactory results, I retry with !g. Invariably, I get equally unsatisfactory results with Google. Maybe in some rare cases where I'm searching for something esoteric, Google will return an extra page or two, but that's not very frequent.
  - peatmoss 10y ago
    Maybe I'm searching in a way that biases in favor of Google? I'm willing to stick with DDG-first on principle alone, so perhaps DDG getting better + me figuring out subtlety of search will improve things.
subinsebastien 10y ago
May be use DDG as the primary search enigne, and switch to Google when you don't get what you want in the first go on DDG. Atleast more traffic to DDG, and hence better results in future.
- collyw 10y ago
  Pretty much what I do, as I say its set as my default search engine on most of my machines. Add "g!" if I am not happy with the results.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
whatshisface 10y ago
>* the fact that Google is not anonymous does give them a big advantage.* What if DDG allowed us to manually tell them information about our demographic in a way that wasn't stored on their servers and could be changed at will? If you want convenience, maybe there could be an optional client-side preference detector script that only offered possible configurations.
- joeclark77 10y ago
  Good idea. I definitely don't want them "filtering" my results without my permission, but with permission is fine.
- IgorPartola 10y ago
  What a drag. So now I have to set up a profile of my ever changing interests on all of my devices just so I can get an approximation of what Google offers out of the box? Don't get me wrong, I like the idea of not using Google, but this seems like a very user hostile way to do it.
  - gtf21 10y ago
    I actually think this gives one slightly better control. I've experienced a weird phenomenon on Facebook where a contact of mine kept posting borderline conspiracy theories and I kept correcting him, but now all I get are his posts and it's really quite infuriating. I would prefer conscious filtering to this automated (and obscure) filtering that Google et al. utilise. I understand it's not for everyone, but it would suit me far better.
    - IgorPartola 10y ago
      Sure it is more control. Just like pushing electrons with a magnetized needle is even more control. It doesn't mean it's convenient. Now if you had an ML algorithm running in your browser that analyzed your preferences and transparently changed your DDG searches from "Django" to "Django web framework", you might get something closer to what you get with Google. Wonder if Firefox could make that happen.
hedora 10y ago
"As good" is subjective. I hate search bubbling. I'd rather click through semi-relevant results a few times then figure out why google hasn't heard of the movie Django, for example. Also, I switched to ddg years ago, and can't remember one time when I thought that personalizing the results would improve matters. Every few months, I'll search for something, not find it, and try google. Falling back to google has helped maybe two times out of dozens of searches. In one case google found an old email thread where someone asked my question and got no answer. In the other, I was looking for a specific document with a solution to a Linux issue. I had found it with ddg before. It turns out the solution no longer worked, and was superceded by documents ddg had already returned. It is unclear that running that test with google as the primary search engine and ddg as the secondary would have different results.
- Twisell 10y ago
  And it not as if searching google from DuckDuckGo was hard. DuckDukGo bangs syntax is simply fantastic even if i mostly always use theses 4 : !w , !m, !g, !gi Privacy by default, google when you need, it's my default since 2 years.
Sir_Cmpwn 10y ago
It just requires a habit shift. You have to learn to be slightly more specific. "Django framework".
- roryisok 10y ago
  Lets hope that's not the name of the sequel.
  - enzolovesbacon 10y ago
    Logged in just to upvote.
DanBC 10y ago
Have you tried the bang searches? https://duckduckgo.com/bang?c=Tech&q=django https://duckduckgo.com/bang?c=Tech&q=django
VT_Drew 10y ago
It has it's pro's and con's. I do love how I can just to !a to search amazon, or !w to search wikipedia, or !g if I really want to use Google. Kind of wish Google had a feature like that.
eternalban 10y ago
If that's what's holding you back: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=django+python
PrivacyGirl 10y ago
No doubt Google has great search results. (Many people just give up privacy because they're so much better.) Solution: Use StartPage for private Google search results. I also like that StartPage has a proxy option so I can visit webpages anonymously.

macintux 10y ago

It's my default engine everywhere. Very happy with it generally, and the fact that I can trivially redirect a search to Google makes it a no-brainer.

kleiba 10y ago
I used DDG for a while as my default engine, but realized that I was using the Google redirects more and more until I finally switched back again. Google's search result were just better for me.
- macintux 10y ago
  I'd estimate I redirect no more than 10% of my searches, and given how much I distrust Google, it's worth it to keep searching elsewhere.
teaneedz 10y ago
You can redirect to StartPage and still get Google results with !sp.

eriknstr 10y ago

I've tried multiple times to switch completely. Currently I use DDG on my iPod touch (which is what I use for web things on the go) but when I'm on the laptop or desktop I stick with Google as default.

equivocates 10y ago

I have duckduckgo set on my phone. Recently, I started discovering that when I clicked a google search result link on my phone, google would mask that link and wouldn't actually take me to the webpage. Annoying. DDGo doesn't do this.

madman2890 10y ago

...

aq3cn 10y ago

I use searx.me more often than any other search engine because along with giving the result it also display the search engine which it uses to fetch the result. I mean it is very important to know the areas where each of the search engine excel. Privacy is a concern for sure, but DuckDuckGo cannot win me over on the basis of privacy only. DuckDuckGo can be an answer to privacy concerned people, but it cannot beat Google Scholar, YouTube, PubMed, Amazon etc. We must know which search engine is perfect for which kind of keyword.

hedora 10y ago
It would be great if they made ! more discoverable. For instance, it could tell you the ! code needed to limit searches to the engine that produced each "niche" blue link and gray box at the top of the screen (the one that inlines amazon product thumbnails/prices, wikipedia article synopses, stack overflow answers.", etc)
- aq3cn 10y ago
  But the question is, why are we looking for a Swiss Army Knife? I make all kinds of search queries but I only use privacy centric search engines when required for my particular concerns. In my opinion, the best way to stay anonymous is by disguising yourself as normal. Today's browser are capable of switching search engines with the use of a single letter before the search query to make use of a particular search engine. And one can easily visit Firefox search engine database to include it in their list. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/search/?atype=4 https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/search/?atype=4 I haven't use DuckDuckGo's bang features, so I really don't understand what are they trying to achieve other than proxying the search result which I already satisfactorily achieve by having multiple Firefox profile with different proxies. I think this is never ending quest of integrating new search engines in DuckDuckGo. But it will never match the native use. For example, take Wolfram Alpha or TinEye(Reverse Image Search). Bottom line is that there are million ways to stay anonymous while using native search engines instead of routing it through third party services.

wesleytodd 10y ago

Already have been!!! Started using Beaker Browser as my main browser, DDG as my search, and am working on moving the rest of my life off google (read: gmail). Also have been messing with doing more work on a raspi tablet rigged with a bluetooth keyboard/trackpad combo.

rb808 10y ago

Also use bing more. I know my privacy has gone already - I just want to encourage competition for Google. The results are great 98% of the time.

gpm 10y ago

I've used duckduckgo for a few years now, highly recommend it. For 'easy' searches it's equivalent to Google. For 'hard' searches it's nearly stricter better than Google, because if DuckDuckGo doesn't find something I also look at the Google results (append !g to the search), and they often come up with very different subsets of the internet. To me it no longer has anything to do with privacy or not liking Google, it's just that DuckDuckGo has the better product for putting into your search bar.

zitterbewegung 10y ago

I use DuckDuckGo exclusively on my phone. Half of the time I seem to fallback to Google but since you can use !g to get google results I still use it.

keeganjw 10y ago

DDG has been my default search for the last few years and I only very rarely use it for it's native search results. The bang (!) search syntax is by far the biggest reason I use it. It allows me to search sooooo many websites directly from the address bar. If you want normal Google search results, use !g. If you want Google Images, use !gi. Amazon? !a. Wikipedia? !w. The list goes on and on and on. Edit: grammar.

Avshalom 10y ago
yeah the various bangs are hugely useful to me on my phone particularly, it's a very light weight interface to the internet.
Forlien 10y ago
You can add these shortcuts into your browser. On firefox, you can right click on a search box and specify some character(s). I'm sure there's a similar process on chrome too.
dethos 10y ago
Completely agree. I also have been using DDG for a few years and got used to the bangs. The results for a general search usually are good enough, so don't I even bother to use Google directly.

Twirrim 10y ago

I took the opportunity of starting at a new job to make the switch of default. I've found it to be generally giving me better tech search results than Google. For the most part, however, I haven't really noticed I'm using it, which I'd consider a good thing. It means it does its job without fuss or bother and gets out of the way.

Joeboy 10y ago

DDG is really great for easily doing specific types of search, eg. adding "!w" to your query will search for something on Wikipedia. For that feature, it's extremely useful and I don't like to be without it. But its own search results (which I think are actually anonymized Bing search results?) are nowhere as near what google manages by personalizing your search. So I'll often add "!g" to my query to get google results rather than ddg ones.

xj9 10y ago
this is why DDG is my default search engine. I use !g a lot because the native search is only okay at best, but there are so many handy !bang shortcuts that I can't walk away. !emoji !dict !w !gi
Forlien 10y ago
You can add these shortcuts into your browser. On firefox, you can right click on a search box and specify some character(s). I'm sure there's a similar process on chrome too.
- xj9 10y ago
  too much work. changing my default search engine to ddg is faster and easier. i don't even know all of the bang commands! if i followed your advice i would have a significantly inferior experience.

neximo64 10y ago

I find duckduckgos results quite bad though, i've given it many shots over the past year but often have to keep switching back to Google.

StavrosK 10y ago
I find that the results feel quite bad, but, whenever I actually compared results to Google's, the latter wasn't better at all.
- neximo64 10y ago
  I meant I used to find bad results and used google and found the results were more relevant, I tried to feel duckduckgo's results were better.
  - StavrosK 10y ago
    Hmm, odd, that doesn't match my experience at all. I realized how bad Google was when I started using DDG and realized that all the bad results in DDG were bad in Google too. Maybe it improved since you used it?
- hedora 10y ago
  Don't worry. This is completely normal. :-) You can put intentionally crappy results under a google logo, and google results under any other logo, and most people will say the crappy "google" results are better. You need the crappy results to be reasonable -- for example, strip out half of Google's top ten.

Yhippa 10y ago

> But a search engine's results are only as accurate as the number of users who search and contribute to it Are there not privacy concerns about this for DDG?

551199 10y ago

At DuckDuckGo, no cookies are used by default. >Yet they do store a cookie by default - this cookie is called "user_segment" and is valid for 1 month after it is first set.[1] They have removed it but this kind of behaviour doesn't exactly raise trust. Also they are based in US so 'privacy' is just PR. I would recommend to use startpage. [1]https://archive.is/qntuk https://archive.is/qntuk [2]https://8ch.net/tech/ddg.html https://8ch.net/tech/ddg.html

arthurz 10y ago

But DDG still goes to Google (as well as the other providers). And I see it returns less relevant results compared to Google itself. Where it might be shining is in avoiding the search per unit of time throttling done by Google, and less content tailored by user IP which I see an intrusion into ones privacy.

joeclark77 10y ago

The "bangs" make all the difference. Just this morning I used !ups <tracking number> to track a package. I use !w (wikipedia), !gm (google maps), !gi (google images), !yt (youtube) and !a (amazon) all the time. Less often I use !so (stack overflow), !gsc (google scholar), and others. Sometimes I even use !g (google) or !b (bing) if the search results are inadequate. But that's very rare for me.

nine_k 10y ago

DDG is great; what it currently lacks (for me) is not search quality but reach; it has trouble indexing less visited corners of the internet. Google did not become huge because of the search engine alone. AFAICT two things, based on related technologies, made Google oodles of money: AdWords and SERP ads. (AdWords used to be so unobtrusive I never tried to block them.) I don't know how DDG currently pays its bills. They do feature unobtrusive and clearly marked ads on their SERP, too. I'm not sure if ads can be reasonable without precise targeting, that is, tracking, tacit privacy invasion of various sorts, etc. Poorly targeted ads are disliked both by users ("dumb!") and advertisers ("poor conversion, money wasted"). The only other option I can see for a private company is to sell a subscription. Pay n USD / mo for no-tracking, no-strings-attached search. The question is, of course, the value of n. It may turn out to be uncomfortably high for many users, just because advertisers value their eyeball rather highly. You can already opt out of ads on some Google services, e.g. YouTube: try closing a few ads, or visit google.com/contributor when it (re-)opens. You can opt out of personalized ads, too. While many of us still won't trust all these measures, for many these would feel adequate. I wish DDG all the luck. But being and staying an alternative, privacy-respecting search engine, even a low-profile one, isn't going to be easy.

StavrosK 10y ago
How poorly targeted can an ad be when you've told them exactly what you're looking for? It doesn't get much more targeted than "car dealerships Florida".
- st3v3r 10y ago
  Well, if you're looking to buy a Honda, and the ad that gets shown is for the Mercedes Benz dealership, that's pretty crappy targeting.
  - fredsir 10y ago
    And all the times I'm shown ads for girls clothing or stoves because of some site I visited, and I am never interested in girls clothing or stoves, is good advertising? I beg to differ. What it is, is advertising that makes me install an adblocker.

isaac_is_goat 10y ago

I switched to DuckDuckGo as my primary SE and will be using Bing as a fallback. I'm slowly moving as far away from Google as I can. On that note, any good alternatives to G-Suite that aren't necessarily Microsoft O365 (though I'm not against migrating to that either). A straightforward email migration is a big plus, documents not such a big deal.

jquast 10y ago
suggest fastmail.com
- jumpCastle 10y ago
  I have a question about fastmail: I tried migrating from gmail but the original date of the emails didn't transfer. Anyone knows how to solve it? I had to go back to gmail since it's a deal breaker and I couldn't find a solution, but I really want to leave gmail (so I can have a direct relationship with the service provider without advertisers involve)
  - ocdtrekkie 10y ago
    How were you trying to migrate? I've been doing a Gmail->FastMail migration and I definitely had no issues with original email dates.
    - jumpCastle 10y ago
      It was a few months ago, so I don't remember exactly, but I believe I followed the instructions that fastmail provided. If you say you didn't have this problem then I will try again. Thanks for the answer
      - ocdtrekkie 10y ago
        In my case, FWIW, I used an IMAP-compatible mail client (Outlook), and dragged my crud from one mailbox to the other. I did have some issues where mail conversations where different messages were under different labels ended up in not copying fully over, but that's partly because I migrated section by section. Also, of course, note that if you have a mail message under two Gmail labels, and use IMAP to copy your folders, you'll probably end up with two copies of that message. Migrating out of Gmail, FWIW, is still a pain because they are so nonstandard now. But I never had an issue with the dates on the emails.

id122015 10y ago

I am already using it. and when you want a custom Google search that goes through DDG you do: !g 1 byte to MB or any other search you want

thesmallestcat 10y ago

> I'm getting a feeling that some day in future, DDG is going to become as big as Google, if not supersede it. Well, no, they don't even have their own search engine. > a search engine's results are only as accurate as the number of users who search and contribute to it That makes no sense. Anyway, we don't use DDG because its results are shitty.

cptskippy 10y ago
> Well, no, they don't even have their own search engine. Really? I've never heard this, do you have anymore information about it?
- jmathai 10y ago
  It's sort of a meta search engine that utilizes other search indexes. Here's a post from the founder. https://duck.co/forum/comment/27893 https://duck.co/forum/comment/27893 Edit, that's about 5 years old. The current page on Wikipedia provides a more recent explanation. "DuckDuckGo's results are a compilation of "about 50" sources,[42] including Yahoo! Search BOSS; Wikipedia; Wolfram Alpha; Bing; its own Web crawler, the DuckDuckBot; and others." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DuckDuckGo#Overview https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DuckDuckGo#Overview
  - Bedon292 10y ago
    They actually say hundreds of sources now on https://duck.co/help/results/sources https://duck.co/help/results/sources and specifically call out Bing, Yahoo, and Yandex for search results.
  - low_battery 10y ago
    It is a meta search engine. Note that they never mention the share breakdown of these "sources". What percentage of queries DDG itself answer? Probably very few.
- nickpsecurity 10y ago
  Meta-search is a type of search engine that goes way back. They avoid the cost of maintaining a full, search service by sending the query to all kinds of other search engines, running some analysis on their results, and presenting a condensed form to the user optionally with value adds. DuckDuckGo's value add is privacy. Here's some others to give you an idea for what they do: http://www.searchenginepeople.com/blog/10-meta-search-engines-reviewed-and-compared.html http://www.searchenginepeople.com/blog/10-meta-search-engine...

anthony_romeo 10y ago

This is the sort of low-effort post I expect on reddit. And I come here to avoid that.

simias 10y ago

I've been using duckduckgo as my main search engine for about 2 years but I never recommend it to anybody. It just feels like a homeopathic remedy to me. What's the business model? I don't allow them to show me ads and they don't allow me to pay for the service. I just can't imagine how that can scale. Search engines are such an important tool that I would be more than willing to pay $10 a month for a good quality one with strong commitment to privacy and maybe additional premium features.

zouhair 10y ago

Every time I try to use DDG I ended using !g which kills its purpose, I just use Startpage[0] [0]: https://www.startpage.com/ https://www.startpage.com/

clydethefrog 10y ago
Then use !s :-) It's what I do, don't want to use a search engine without the bangs any more.
- Forlien 10y ago
  At this point, I've set up search keywords in firefox to do this. Now, for example, I type "gi rabbit" for pictures of rabbits. It's nice because they also can be used as shortened parts of links. Eg. "@ john" to go to twitter.com/john
sureshn 10y ago
This site appears to be a front of google and in the end its relying on google to search and get the result, some how I don't see this to be too different from directly using google in a incognito window
- Ladnaks 10y ago
  A incognito window doesn't hide your identity from Google. They still get your IP address and your browsers's fingerprint, which is more than enough to identify you.

roryrjb 10y ago

I switched to DDG a few months ago and have found it just as good as Google at least for my usage, at the very least I haven't felt the need to use Google as the results I have been getting have been just fine, and that's without the bangs functionality.

anexprogrammer 10y ago

I'd suggest to "Start contributing data to DDG in 2017". Most of their best results are crowdsourced. I've been using it as default for perhaps 2 years now. There's some consistent annoyances, but overall I actually prefer the experience to Google. It's much nicer about disambiguation than google, and can be incredibly helpful. e.g. Search for Zen - you get a wide selection of possibles in probable order. Sadly there's far too many missing. Crowdsourcing needed. It's horrible at localisation. eg set Filter by region to UK and search any global multinational. Chances are the UK site is WAY down the list and the .com and US options hard at top. on google UK the local branch is always first. There's too many instant answers that presume a US only view of the world. The instant answers when they have adequate data and ! searches are brilliant. Lyric and video searches are orders of magnitude better than Google. Maybe 5% of searches go to Google as I'm not quickly finding what I need.

AdamSC1 10y ago
We always welcome more contributions. We crossed 1000 Instant Answers this year and they make for some wonderful experiences!

clydethefrog 10y ago

For anyone using !g when they don't get the results they need - use !s. It will use Startpage, which fetches results from the Google search engine but without giving any personal information to Google's servers.

yarou 10y ago

I actually tend to use Bing. hides

MichaelBurge 10y ago
Bing image search is a lot better than Google's.
jaclaz 10y ago
>I actually tend to use Bing. hides I would find more appropriate in the context ducks ...
- yarou 10y ago
  Haha absolutely!
- bbcbasic 10y ago
  Boom boom

mibbiting 10y ago

Adverts on hackernews now eh?

feelslikefelt 10y ago
Precisely. This is not what I expect to see on Hacker News. This isn't a discussion of DDG's abilities. It's simply an advertisement. If this was a link to DDG's contribution page or some kind of information document or review, it would be different. However this just screams "USE THIS SERVICE FOR X REASON!"
bbcbasic 10y ago
The jobs link contains ads too

gbersac 10y ago

If you want a search engine which respect your privacy but with a fancy gui (unkike duck duck go), you should try qwant : https://www.qwant.com/ https://www.qwant.com/ French technology which work really well !

bobajeff 10y ago

>I'm getting a feeling that some day in future, DDG is going to become as big as Google, if not supersede it If they become bigger than Google what's to stop them from becoming another Google? Why punish myself by using an inferior service just to give it the seat at the big 5?

markpapadakis 10y ago

I don't really get DDG. I guess it's nice that they pattern-match some queries and give you a a query specific UI on top of the results or maybe some results UI that makes a lot of sense for the query -- though Google and Bing do that too, and I don't believe they are hardcoding those rules/patterns like DDG seems to be doing. I 've given it a few honest tries this year but the results are really not that great, certainly far inferior to Google's or even Bing's, and it 'feels' slow -- but then again, a few dozen ms slower than Google is 'slow' to me (and I am sure the difference is higher than that ). I suppose the major selling point is that it doesn't track your queries and that's nice and all, but it definitely is not important enough for me to trade that for better results and responsiveness. I wish them the best though.

johndubchak 10y ago

@rms_returns, my only question is why are you asking us to use DDG rather than Google? You seem to be drawing some sort of direct comparison to Google, but you're not stating why we shouldn't use Google or what DDG does better.

AdamSC1 10y ago

Disclaimer: I work at DuckDuckGo so I'm a bit bias. I won't turn this into a sales pitch, but here are a few common misconceptions people have about privacy and search. 1) Many people don't realize that tracking isn't just about having something to hide. But, it can cost you money. From Airline tickets to staplers you pay based on a profile: http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887323777204578189391813881534 http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB100014241278873237772045781893... http://www.wsj.com/articles/why-you-cant-trust-youre-getting-the-best-deal-online-1414036862 http://www.wsj.com/articles/why-you-cant-trust-youre-getting... 2) People don't realize what's being tracked. I usually send them to http://history.google.com/history http://history.google.com/history to have a look. Or http://webkay.robinlinus.com/ http://webkay.robinlinus.com/ to see what their browser can access. That makes a lot of people realize just what is out there. 3) People feel they can't search without personalized searches. The example is often a matter of disambiguation. For example, if I type "Python" I want code, not snakes. But, really, when is the last time you only typed 'Python' and wanted something generic about Python? You probably wanted a package lookup or the latest news on a release. So if you become more specific there is no issue. Plus when you get a bit more specific on Python you can trigger things like package lookup: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=python+numpy&ia=about https://duckduckgo.com/?q=python+numpy&ia=about Or NumPy Cheatsheet: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=numpy+cheat+sheet&ia=cheatsheet https://duckduckgo.com/?q=numpy+cheat+sheet&ia=cheatsheet At the end of the day some people may truly be ok with all the tracking that takes place, and that's ok that's up to them. But, at DuckDuckGo our goal is to educate people on online privacy, and provide a trusted way to access information as best we can. (Not to mention Instant Answers and Bangs which are super addicting)

cpayne624 10y ago
I'm a ddg fan. You guys should have a big, conspicuous WHY? button on the homepage that links to all this. The 'Learn More' link takes me to what you guys don't do, which is good, but it's light on the why.
- AdamSC1 10y ago
  Thanks for the great suggestion. We're currently exploring ways to get the 'why' message out there more. I'll certainly bring it up with the team :)

Entangled 10y ago

Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, they all have something in common: EaaS. Ecosystem as a Service. DDG should start offering email first, then news, stocks, maps, social, and finally ads. You don't survive with search alone, you need to monetize it on one hand and keep your users coming back on the other. Oh, I wish it was called something simpler like "Ducker" or "Duckit", but whatever, bikeshedding territory.

justinclift 10y ago
That strategy doesn't seem to have worked out for Yahoo. Not sure DDG users really need/want another er... EaaS.

maaaats 10y ago

I can never remember the (short) url, so I end up Googling it so I don't have to spell it out..

AdamSC1 10y ago
ddg.gg or duckduckgo.com You can also set it as default in any major browser either manually or using one of the extensions.

jonathansizz 10y ago

Questions for you to ponder: 1) Why do you think their results would get better if more people use their engine? 2) If their results really are better than Google, as you claim, why is their user base so small after all these years? 3) Why should we trust them any more than Google? How do you know they're not actually collecting your data or passing it on to the third party engines they use?

hedora 10y ago
1) More revenue -> more developers -> more deep web onebox results. 2) Result quality is trumped by inertia and ecosystem stickyness (I commented above) 3) They have a smaller team and are focused on one product, which means they can survive without doing this. Also, the risk of detection is high, since it relies on hiding revenue, third parties that keep secrets, and the US never issuing a subpoena for their logs. In contrast, Google would go out of business tomorrow if they stopped collecting and monetizing data.

baq 10y ago

Sure, just make me a chrome add-on that splits the tab in two vertical ones with DDG in the left and Google on the right whenever I search from the location bar which is nearly always so I don't have to search twice when DDG misunderstands what I want.

eeeeeeeeeeeee 10y ago

I tried to use DuckDuckGo and it was terrible. Couldn't even last a week. The results were dramatically worse. And putting aside the quality of results, the actual design of the site is not very good. This is probably a preference, but I find it much easier to quickly scan a Google results page (or even Bing), but DuckDuckGo, with the font face and spacing they use, is not as clear.

Ladnaks 10y ago
Try startpage.com. They fetch the search results from Google without revealing your identity to Google. My primary search engine since more than a year.

Tempest1981 10y ago

They do a nice job of extracting and presenting the top StackOverflow answer: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=stl+string+remove+characters&t=h_&ia=qa https://duckduckgo.com/?q=stl+string+remove+characters&t=h_&...

sureshn 10y ago

I use DDG full time and it has been awesome , I am a devops guy use DDG to trouble shoot my way out of problems I get stuck in and I have personally found this to be way better than google. The Bang search is very cool too , for example I use it to search github for docker orchestration related content directly ! , I also use DDG command line quite a bit and its really awesome , these are things which I feel are much superior compared to google and I hope DDG will become the geeks most preferred search tool in 2017

9erdelta 10y ago

I try to use DDG and set it as my default search. But more often than not I end up doing !g. And if I don't, I feel like I'm missing the answer that will really help me work through my coding issues. After awhile, it just gets to be more annoying than anything, and I go back to Google.

awalton 10y ago

Well, as Google continues dumbing down their search engine, there's certainly room in the market for a search engine with the same kind of power that Google used to have... ...but that being said, DuckDuckGo ain't it. It's in fact, quite far from it. It's roughly as good as old Yahoo Search (pre-Bing), which also nobody used because Google's is vastly superior. Give me a search engine like Google circa 2010-11 (back before the menagerie of Bird algorithms began trading "fuzzier" results for raw search power) and I'm good.

coldshower 10y ago

DDG is my default search engine because I'm addicted to the !bangs. For example, I use !pf to quickly convert an article into a PDF. I maintain a blog where I "showcase" the best bangs for the Duck: http://duckgobang.com/ http://duckgobang.com/

bbcbasic 10y ago
Nice. I like the passion you clearly have for this topic

gist 10y ago

> Let's start using DuckDuckGo more often I am at a loss to understand really why 'us' should start doing this 'more often'. Is there something inherently good about using ddg vs. google? Why should anyone use it more vs. what they have already decided works best for them? This smacks of 'make the world a better place by using ddg' unfortunately as many others have noted it's simply not a better mouse trap. And what does the name have to do with it at all?

PrivacyGirl 10y ago
I agree. We should all use private search more often. If you need Google search results, just use StartPage.

greenyouse 10y ago

Anyone use DDG's grouping search syntax much?[0] I've always wondered if this is something just for bots or if humans actually write out complex searches like that. If you use it how are the results? [0]https://duck.co/help/results/syntax https://duck.co/help/results/syntax

gonhidi 10y ago
I often submit equivalent queries when searching using Google. I tend to use OR a lot to specify alternatives to specific keywords (e.g. osx OR "os x" OR macos), though it's a years-old habit often not that important with today's search engines; I sometimes also use it to search sets of domains (e.g. site:w3.org OR site:whatwg.org). In general I feel that when the first few pages of results using a simple query don't get me to what I am looking for, using a more complex expression can unearth hits which I would have otherwise skipped or not reached. Regarding Duck Duck Go's advanced search syntax, I've use it in a similar fashion, though not as much. Keep in mind that the provided link doesn't seem to reflect the current implementation. For instance, the syntax for grouping using parentheses doesn't seem to be as strict (which is a relief), excluded words are seemingly not limited to being at the end of the search string, and AND has a higher precedence than OR (which is currently a pet peeve of mine because I am used to Google doing it otherwise and I like not having to use parentheses in my usual queries).

DoodleBuggy 10y ago

>>> Granted that DuckDuckGo.com is quite a childish name Call me crazy, but I suspect that's part of the reason DuckDuckGo has had a hard time catching on. A name matters. If I was DuckDuckGo I would rebrand to something simpler that could be used as a verb. But what do I know?

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
pOVTVOItY 10y ago
Agreed, it can't be verbified easily. DDG admins: this is a real problem, you need to get creative on how to fix this.

disposablezero 10y ago

Switched to DDG for most things 3 years ago.

slyzmud 10y ago

I think twice a year I get my antigoogle moment and try to use it, it rarelly last more than two weeks when I don't find something or get frustrated because Google always loads faster. It's a shame. As much as I want to love DDG I find pretty hard to use it for a long time.

cpcat 10y ago

i got bored from using Google. i like trying new products so i'll go with DDG until i get bored from it.

Arzh 10y ago

I really like that google isn't anonymous and that it pulls everything that I've done in the past to give me better results. I usually have to jump through a lot of hoops to get the same level of results from DDG.

DrScump 10y ago

One of many things that disgust me about the latest big revision to Opera (version 41) is that Opera Mobile doesn't include DDG as one of the (7) default search options (though it does include Amazon, eBay, and IMDB). Ugh.

frik 10y ago
Opera got bought by an Asian ads company. Vivaldi browser seems to be the spiritual successor of Opera by its previous developers.

jplayer01 10y ago

I've always had problems with their search results and I end up switching back to Google every time.

gaspoweredcat 10y ago

i think they do need to ditch that name though, whilst as you say google wasnt really any less odd in the early days however it did sort of roll off the tongue, where as duckduckgo is somewhat clumsy and unpleasant no matter how many times you say it. i know it shouldnt be important and its not really, its just annoying

coke 10y ago

Well ... No.

tscs37 10y ago

I personally found searx to be better than DDG, plus it's self-hosted. (It's a metasearch engine, you don't need an index)

banterfoil 10y ago

I use DDG but only because of the bang system. In other words I can supply a !g anywhere in the query and it will use the encrypted google search. This is also useful when you also use other ones like !yt !fl !gh !r and so forth. But to be honest, I hardly ever actually use the ddg search engine.

l0b0 10y ago

By far my biggest gripe with Google and DDG is that they have started quite simply ignoring search terms. I search for 'foo bar' (without the quotes), they return results which clearly do not include "bar", neither in the blurb nor on the page itself. At least Google will mostly obey if I quote the search terms, but DDG doesn't even do that.