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I started using DDG a few months back and I've been very happy so far. Sometimes results aren't as great, so I just use !g to load Google. But even better, you
by TheAceOfHearts 9y ago
I started using DDG a few months back and I've been very happy so far. Sometimes results aren't as great, so I just use !g to load Google. But even better, you can search across different websites! For example, !mdn for Mozilla Developer Network, or !yt for YouTube
Another thing you can do is use alternative browsers. On mobile I use Firefox Mobile, which has the benefit of allowing extensions, so you can install uBlock Origin! That makes a gigantic different in mobile web performance. On my laptop I've been using Safari as my main browser because it consumes far less memory, and it seems to handle mountains of tabs a lot better than Chrome.
- nerdponx 9y agoI actually find DDG results to be better and more relevant a lot of the time nowadays. The only thing Google really has an edge on (for my use) is searching for academic articles, because of Google Scholar.
- quantum_magpie 9y agoSame experience. I switched 4 years ago, and the search results that I'm interested in were as good or better than google. Except scientific articles. I've yet to find a service that comes anywhere close to Google Scholar, which I think is the most successful of their products for my use case.
- Semaphor 9y agoCan't agree. Almost always when DDG has only spam or useless results, !g gives me exactly what I looked for. I like DDG, especially the bangs, but Google still gives me way better results when I need them.
- nerdponx 9y agoOut of curiosity, what are some examples? You can also submit feedback directly in the results, which the DDG team uses to improve their algorithms.
- Semaphor 9y agoIIRC most commonly it's coding related stuff.
- Semaphor 9y agoJust had an extremely horrendous example. Searching for "webpack 3" the first link doesn't mention "webpack" at all, only packweb and generally it's an absolutely useless result page. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22webpack+3%22&atb=v49-4&ia=web https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22webpack+3%22&atb=v49-4&ia=web
- takeda 9y agoSame experience here. Sometimes though, I do have problems finding what I'm looking for (when it is obscure) so I pre-pend !g in front, but generally it's not much better ...
- driverdan 9y agoDDG used to be worse but now it's about even. Every time I get bad results on DDG and use !g I find equally bad results.
- amelius 9y agoI'm using Android with Chrome, and there is no option to change the search engine to DDG :/ The only options are: Google, Bing, AOL, Yahoo, Ask.
- GrinningFool 9y agoIf you go to ddg in chrome they provide a link that will add ddg as a search provider.
- amelius 9y agoIt works, thanks!
- reactor 9y agoI have been looking to do the same, but so far no luck.
- amelius 9y agoSee comment above for a fix.
- takeda 9y agoThe sad thing is that AOL & Yahoo is really Bing, and Ask is I believe Google. So essentially it comes down to Google and Bing. To get DDG you'll need to use a different browser like FF. I actually blocked Chrome on my phone and started using FF once I noticed that Chrome was updating itself even though I was requiring manual updates. Play Store and Google Play Services do the same thing, but don't have a good alternative for them,
- hoschicz 9y agoDDG actually was using Yahoo as a serach provider and now uses Yandex. The ads on DDG are from the Yahoo network. > AOL & Yahoo is really Bing What? I don't get that -- I don't know about AOL, but I thought that Yahoo does its own crawling (their Slurp bot)