29 ms·

DuckDuckGo vs Google

• majewsky 9y ago
  Might be an interesting article, but that position:fixed footer with ongoing animations is just too atrocious.
  • wickawic 9y ago
    On mobile it asks for an email in a persistent footer that takes up 1/3 of the screen. When you type a fake email (there is no way to remove it) it brings up another footer asking if you would like to have such a footer on your own website ( also unremovable). Thank God for reader mode.
    • lqdc13 9y ago
      I burst out laughing, thinking they were trolling. But it's a real product.
    • deusum 9y ago
      Didn't get any of that in Firefox Focus
  • robin_reala 9y ago
    Right-click / Inspect element / Delete
    • cbcoutinho 9y ago
      genius - thanks for this
      • Flow 9y ago
        A better solution is to enter the Reading mode of your browser. Some sites popup dialogs and even if you delete all the elements they have set some of the elements in the original page to not allow scroll. With reading mode you just bypass all that crap.
        • robin_reala 9y ago
          This is true, although if you do want to fix that particular issue then unticking overflow:none against body usually does the trick :) But yes, reader mode is simpler.
        • dredmorbius 9y ago
          Reader mode tends to be a more uniform (a/k/a better) experience. Though it's possible to do a hell of a lot of site fixing in Stylish via CSS edits.
  • alayek 9y ago
    In case you already haven't, might wanna add the "Kill Sticky" bookmarklet: https://alisdair.mcdiarmid.org/kill-sticky-headers/ https://alisdair.mcdiarmid.org/kill-sticky-headers/
    • robocat 9y ago
      Bookmarklet works in Chrome on iOS. Edit bookmark and paste in javascript link.
      • briandear 9y ago
        Kind of ironic to me we are talking about DDG and using Chrome all in the same breath.
  • donalhunt 9y ago
    That's what Developer Tools are for! ;) In Chrome, you can right click and select "Inspect" and then remove the relevant content from the display. :) Other browsers have "reading mode" which tends to work well for this type of thing.
  • dnel 9y ago
    Firefox reader view is your friend
    • pricechild 9y ago
      I'm continually impressed at how well this feature works. Several times I've come across an oddly formatted page and worried it'd lose styling required for the correct interpretation but not yet!
      • dredmorbius 9y ago
        Try blogger with dynamic pages. They fail always.
  • bru 9y ago
    Also suggesting you to accept their notifications upon landing on their page.
  • DarkCrusader2 9y ago
    Add this to your bookmark bar. Click on any such sites. It redirects to the outline.com page for the current article in the tab. javascript:%20window.location%20=%20"http://outline.com/"%20+%20window.location http://outline.com/"%20+%20window.location
    • abainbridge 9y ago
      That's pretty good, apart from the stupid font they use. Is there some way to teach Chrome to replace the stupid font with a normal one?
      • DarkCrusader2 9y ago
        With my limited knowledge of javascript, I don't think it can be done as any code to change font will be lost when new page is loaded. You might want to look into greasemonkey or their official chrome extension(I haven't tested it out).
    • kwhitefoot 9y ago
      Thank you!
  • shubhamjain 9y ago
    I felt the same way but the content seems worth it.
  • Sir_Cmpwn 9y ago
    Don't worry, you're not missing out. The article is a bunch of questionable assumptions made from highly dodgy metrics written by the kind of person who calls people a "Solopreneur". DuckDuckGo, on the other hand, is very very much worth your time, if you aren't familiar with it: https://duckduckgo.com https://duckduckgo.com
    • majewsky 9y ago
      I am! It's my default search engine.
  • jccalhoun 9y ago
    I didn't even see it. Score one more for noscript.
• Lifesnoozer 9y ago
  Recently switched over to DuckDuckGo on all my devices. Tried to do the same thing several years ago and found it didn't really work out, but this time around it is so much better, both when it comes to speed and results. If anyone has doubts because they tried it years ago, I'd say go for it again.
  • jstanley 9y ago
    Same story here. And since I regularly browse via a Digital Ocean VM, the lack of CAPTCHAs on DuckDuckGo is refreshing as well.
    • sethrin 9y ago
      > And since I regularly browse via a Digital Ocean VM If you don't mind my asking, why? And by which method do you usually accomplish this? Edit: Thanks for explaining the CAPTCHA issue.
      • SCHiM 9y ago
        Why? Maybe he/she wants to bypass data collection in his/her country. Or desires more privacy, or something else. How? ssh -D 8080 digital-ocean-vm-here.tld Now port 8080 on your local machine is a socks proxy for your vm. Google is really tor/proxy/anonymous user unfriendly. Requiring users to solve as many as four or five CAPTCHAs (seriously fuck you google).
        • dx034 9y ago
          > Google is really tor/proxy/anonymous user unfriendly. Requiring users to solve as many as four or five CAPTCHAs (seriously fuck you google). They're like this for a reason. They didn't implement complex detection of proxies to annoy users. Just to keep everyone out who's not supposed to use their search.
          • deleted 9y ago
            [deleted]
• bugmen0t 9y ago
  I know the American Dream story of somone small being big corporations is appealing, but s/Solopreneur/Team/.
  • orthecreedence 9y ago
    "Solopreneur" ...what a stupid, stupid word to make up.
• amelius 9y ago
  I tried to find some info on the architecture of DDG, and found this article from 2013: [1]. It seems they used Solr at the time. Is there anything more recent? [1] http://highscalability.com/blog/2013/1/28/duckduckgo-architecture-1-million-deep-searches-a-day-and-gr.html http://highscalability.com/blog/2013/1/28/duckduckgo-archite...
  • djsumdog 9y ago
    If you reverse some of their servers, you'll also find they're hosted mostly on AWS. So that privacy thing....
• jankotek 9y ago
  Bing, Seznam, Yandex, Baidu.. there are many other search engines with surprisingly good results. Give it try. I started using alternatives, for privacy, but also because they are often better. Google Maps can not even find near pharmacy in EU country.
  • prokaktus 9y ago
    Also, Yandex is partner of DDG for russian language searches. Try to search something and you will see notification about it in right bottom corner. edit: right corner
  • endisukaj 9y ago
    You think Bing, Yandex, and especially Baidu are better for your privacy than Google?
    • daxorid 9y ago
      With regard to Yandex and Baidu: there's the notion of threat proximity. Google is a US company, beholden to US laws. If you reside in the United States, you also reside in the jurisdiction of state actors with the capability to get at you. If Putin himself showed up to Yandex HQ and demanded a full data dump of every search you made, he is still incapable of touching you, whereas J. Random Agent at the FBI can throw you in a 6x8 steel box.
      • endisukaj 9y ago
        Has anyone ever been sent to jail in the U.S. because of their (innocuous) searches?
  • isolli 9y ago
    Apart from Bing, are they good with English results as well?
  • mousa 9y ago
    Noone in the world thinks Baidu gives good results.
• unicornporn 9y ago
  I'm sure DDG works great if you're an American. As someone who has tried a region specific version of DDG though, I can say the results are downright terrible. Some say the DDG bangs are a solution. What do I win by doing that? It only made me resort to !g all the time, because the results were so bad. Now I use https://www.startpage.com/ https://www.startpage.com/ with region set to Swedish. It's practically a proxy for Google search, so it gives me the right results but sans the filter bubble experience (yes, I want the regional bubble). If you're a non US user, I can recommend it.
  • Svip 9y ago
    I must say I'm having the reverse experience. I very seldom use its Danish regional setting, but even for Danish searches DDG is fine. It's only 4-5 times a month I need the !g bang. But knowing about Startpage, I now use the !sp bang instead of !g. Indeed, due to the bangs, I know use DDG as my proxy to a lot of other search engines, like Wikipedia (!w/!wda/!w..) and Wiktionary (!wikt), and even obscure ones like Memory Alpha (!memoryalpha). Very handy indeed.
    • FabHK 9y ago
      The wikipedia-in-certain-language bangs are very useful, indeed.
    • notzorbo3 9y ago
      I've never found the bang functionality very useful. Perhaps because Chrome offers that out of the box in the URL bar.
  • daurnimator 9y ago
    As an Australian, I don't get bad results with DDG.
  • rlv-dan 9y ago
    Using DDG with Swedish settings, I think results are ok. Of course, I'm usually seeking english results except when searching for swedish words.
  • 9y ago
• viach 9y ago
  Why not using Yandex directly? I mean, really?
• laser 9y ago
  "Google would be an elephant while DuckDuckGo is a mosquito (this is not to emphasize; I’m actually making things better for DuckDuckGo)." Why would this guy go out of his way to say this metaphor is actually literally informative and generous towards DuckDuckGo while apparently having exerted no mental effort and being incorrect by orders of magnitude on his own data? If you're most generous to the writer, you get 12 million hits /day vs 13 billion hits /day according to his data from Wolfram, for a ratio of ~1/1100, which applied to a pygmy elephant of 5500 lbs yields a corresponding weight of ~5 lbs for the mosquito, or over 2,000,000 mg, versus the average mosquito weight of about 5 mg. Even if he meant a small 2000 kilogram pygmy elephant and a 20mg elephant mosquito, he's still 5 orders of magnitude too generous towards Google in mass comparison in his metaphor in which he is "actually making things better for DuckDuckGo". I think most people think of animals like African Elephants when they hear "elephant", though, in which case you're looking at a 13,000 pound animal versus a ~12 pound one if you use hits as your metric, or a ~95 lb one if you go by visits as your metric. So an actually fair metaphor is if Google's an elephant, DuckDuckGo is somewhere between a goose and a hyena. Better watch out, Google.
  • jerrre 9y ago
    Nice exercise, but in length I would say the magnitude is correct: around 6m for an elephant vs 3-6mm for a mosquito
    • amelius 9y ago
      But animals are three-dimensional, so it's better to include three dimensions in the comparison. We also compare CPUs by die-area, not by their length or height.
      • daurnimator 9y ago
        It's pretty common to compare animals by height. e.g. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1f/Largestdinosaursbysuborder_scale.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1f/Largestd...
• jondubois 9y ago
  DuckDuckGo is OK but they seem to be penalising single-page apps so my project websites rank low on DuckDuckGo but high on Google. So I can't support DuckDuckGo.
  • quickthrower2 9y ago
    Maybe you need to do some SEO then.
    • jondubois 9y ago
      As I said, my websites are doing well on Google that's all the SEO I care about and I'm not willing to sacrifice user experience. It shouldn't be difficult to index web apps these days... There are so many open source headless browsing tools/libraries available.
  • guitarbill 9y ago
    Some might see this as a win for DuckDuckGo
    • Sargos 9y ago
      People who like inaccurate search results?
      • wruza 9y ago
        That seems to be pretty one-sided view on decisions one makes out of trade-offs. Having iPhone 4 few weeks ago with js obviously off and now having SE with js:on, I'm not sure whether my web experience got any better or not at all (overall phone experience got better, no doubt).
  • r3bl 9y ago
    How are you doing on Bing and Yahoo? Maybe your SEO is too Google-specific? I wouldn't blame you, mine is too (since the majority of readers use Google), but I rank exceptionally higher in alternatives than I do on Google.
• rejschaap 9y ago
  Using Google to analyze its own competitor seems a bit questionable. Though with the difference in usage being what it is, I doubt Google would bother with any funny business.
• losvedir 9y ago
  Isn't DDG basically Bing + bangs? Doesn't seem fair to credit it at beating Google without highlighting the billions of dollars that MSFT has invested.
  • mda 9y ago
    Ahh. the uncomfortable truth that DDG is just a meta search engine with a few shortcuts.
    • senatorobama 9y ago
      Wow. It is a hustler company.
    • FabHK 9y ago
      "just"? It's an alternative to datenkrake Google that does not track you and adds some neat features (bangs, keyboard navigation, etc.)
      • mda 9y ago
        But it is not an actual search engine. We do not know the details of their agreements with the actual search engines they depend on.
  • r3bl 9y ago
    I mean, a probably more relevant summary of what DDG offers would be: Bing/Yahoo/Yandex mashup stripped out of personalized results + bangs + [until recently] community maintained instant answers. Edit: Worth pointing out: as far as I am aware, they're using all the other search engines with an agreement with those companies, which makes it completely okay in my book to credit them as the one. I credit my operating system to Canonical, even though the heavy lifting and behaving nicely on hardware is done by people contributing to Linux. Linux out of the box doesn't mean a thing to me. Bing out of the box doesn't mean a thing to me. DDG and Ubuntu do mean a lot to me.
    • hnlmorg 9y ago
• tiffanyh 9y ago
  Isn’t DDG just using Yahoo on the backend to perform the search (which in turn is using Bing)? What prevents Yahoo from (a) offering a competitive search to DDG or (b) Yahoo from shutting of DDG from using its search engine?
  • Catalyst4NaN 9y ago
    DDG is using over 400 sources apparently, of which one is Yahoo https://duck.co/help/results/sources https://duck.co/help/results/sources
    • deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    • afsina 9y ago
      Most of those sources are search engines of some web pages, answer pages, cheat sheets and help documents. They even list tiny unit conversation services there. Give me a break.
      • djsumdog 9y ago
        They license both Yahoo and Yandex (Yandex being a massive index based in Russia).
    • josinalvo 9y ago
      > https://duck.co/help/results/sources https://duck.co/help/results/sources "We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we source from Bing, Yahoo, and Yandex." I thought they where re-implementing search.. Are they "just" aggregating?
      • bamboozled 9y ago
        I recently spoke with Gabriel and his view was that they're going to continue to outsource / proxy / aggregate unless they need to implement their own search. Right now it's not worth the investment apparently.
• zizek23 9y ago
  The thing with Duckduckgo is the choice has to be ideological or you will do a search again on Google again just to ensure you are not missing out. This is Google marketing and brand perception at work because Google results of late, 3 years, have been unimpressive and you have to sift through pages of useless links and content to find any relevant information beyond the usual suspects one already knows, so their intensive spyware operations doesn't seem to help search quality. It's surprising there are not more experimental search projects. One would have expected a steady stream of regular attempts but not a single credible effort exists. There was once an alternative search project called Cuil that just seemed to fizzle off.
  • i_cant_speel 9y ago
    I have to say, I go to the second page of Google search results maybe once every couple months. I'm not sure what you are searching for but that has not been my experience at all. It seems to always be getting better.
  • captainmuon 9y ago
    Sometimes I think there should be a search engine that has a button "these results are not satisfactory". When you click it, you can describe in detail what you were looking for... and hordes of cheap minimum wage or outsourced workers work 24/7 on these reports. Culling spammy search results, boosting good links, etc.. Solve what Google was always claiming to do purely algorithmically, with additional brute force labour. (Actually, I suspect that a major ingredient of Google and Facebooks "algorithms" are really human reviewers... they want to keep this fact secret since human reviewers are responsible for judgement, whereas algorithms still count as impartial. This is not true of course, but it is the perception.)
  • 482794793792894 9y ago
    A few off the top of my head: Proxied (therefore non-personalized) Google results: https://www.startpage.com/ https://www.startpage.com/ Heavily privacy-focused, even proxying content: https://www.ixquick.eu/ https://www.ixquick.eu/ Meta search engine with very feature-rich search, self-hostable: https://searx.me/ https://searx.me/ Search engine with very feature-rich search result pages: https://www.qwant.com/ https://www.qwant.com/ Not yet released, peer-to-peer search: http://pearsearch.org/ http://pearsearch.org/
• shp0ngle 9y ago
  I still don't understand - does DDG have its own crawler and index, or is it outsourcing all that to third parties? If the second, as I suspect, it's not really long-term viable anyway, is it.
  • afsina 9y ago
    AFAIK it is the second.
  • mda 9y ago
    Second, they might crawl a few things, what percentage of the queries are answered by their index, that information they will probably not say.
• Derbasti 9y ago
  Write a whole article about DuckDuckGo, and don't mention bang searches. !py searches the Python documentation, !w searches Wikipedia, !g searches Google, !a searches Amazon, and better yet, !gde, !wde, and !ade search the German Google, Wikipedia, and Amazon. For natural language queries, I use !g, because Google is better at this sort of thing. For local queries I use !gde, because Google has better map integration. For most everything else, I prefer DDG, because it doesn't "did you mean DickDickGo?", and it doesn't "I don't know what you're looking for, but here are five ads instead".
  • r3bl 9y ago
    > Write a whole article about DuckDuckGo, and don't mention bang searches. Ummm... yes it does. It's literally the very first point the author discusses once he starts comparing the search results. Here's a link to the relevant subsection: https://fourweekmba.com/duckduckgo-vs-google/#Search_DuckDuckGo_vs_Google https://fourweekmba.com/duckduckgo-vs-google/#Search_DuckDuc...
• EvanKnowles 9y ago
  They're beating Google at monopolizing the internet's advertising?
• staticelf 9y ago
  DuckDuckGo has really, really improved on their results for me who do not live in USA. Before, it was pretty much unusable. But today I use DDG as my main search engine on all my devices. You should too.
  • AdamSC1 9y ago
    Our engineers have been working really hard on international results - I'm sure they will be happy to hear it's making a difference for our users! Disclaimer: DDG staff.
    • anonymous38383 9y ago
      I just came back and have been using it for the last few days now. It is getting very good. Thanks for your hard work.
    • staticelf 9y ago
      Glad to hear that! Big difference and I am glad you're not completely US-focused which is unfortunately common. :)
• romo5 9y ago
  People are conditioned to think Search has to work online. This was true when Google was created. No one had the processing or memory available on their desktop to search an entire index of the "useful" web. Not anymore. How large is a "useful" index of the web today? And can it fit on your laptop? The answer is yes. Can the entire thing be queried fast? The answer is yes. As an example take the entire stackexchange and wikipedia dumps in their entirety(including images). Compressed it comes to 50-60 GB range. Think about that number. That's an rough approximation of all known human knowledge. It's not growing too fast. It has stabilized. To query the content you need an index. So how large is an index to a 100 GB file? Generally around 1 GB. Let's say you use covering indexes with lot of meta data and up that to 5GB to support sophisticated queries. With today's average hardware you can search the entire thing in milliseconds. So why aren't we building better local search? Because everyone is conditioned to believe, thanks to Google's success, we need to do it online. Which means baking in the problem of handling millions of queries a second into the Search problem. Guess what? This is not a problem that local search has. Every time a chimp or a duck needs to build a protein in it's cell it doesn't query the DNA index stored in the cloud. Instead every cell has the index. Every cell has the processing power to query that index in the nanosecond time scale. The cloud based search story is temporary. If you want to index every reference to Taylor Swifts ass that every teenager in Norway, Ecuador and Cambodia are making, then yes you need a Google size index. But for useful human knowledge we are getting to the point where we don't need Google scale. If you don't believe me look at what is possible TODAY in Dash/Zeal docset search for offline developer documentation search or Kiwix or with Mathematica.
  • davedx 9y ago
    Refreshing viewpoint. Is there a way to easily sync search repositories, like Stackoverflow, Wikipedia etc., to your local computer with an automatically built search index?
  • wastedhours 9y ago
    Stabilised != final though, so you'll still need a layer in order to find all of the new knowledge and compare it against what everyone has locally (not going to download 50GB every time someone posts a new useful SO answer), and update the local store. Why not keep that index centrally for everyone instead of replicating it for 2bn people?
• djsumdog 9y ago
  Does anyone remember how back in the day, we had Lycos, Hotbot, Yahoo, Dogpile .. a whole host of search engines. You'd go to two or three to get an idea of what was out there. People had different indexes and there were a lot of players. Today, it's just Google. I've been using DDG for a few years, but about 1/3 of the time I add an !g because I don't find the results I need on DDG. The cost of entry to the search market is exceedingly high right now. This is a pretty good article of detailing how one person was able to come up with an idea and challenge the behemoth in very niche areas (privacy/the nsa leaks were probably the reason I started looking at/using it around 2013). Yet I still miss the days of using multiple search engines; seeing a variety of results. I hate the de factor standard of Google. When a company controls that much of search, they get to define the narrative. They literally shape the way many people perceive the world. I wonder if tech will get to the point where indexing will be easier and we'll see more solutions that are cheaper and that can crawl larger datasets with lower processing requirements. Maybe the next step will be distributed search with shared indexes? In any case, Google can't remain on top forever (at least I hope not). It'd be nice to see more tech in this space, but it's an incredibly difficult problem. There is reason Google climbed to the top like it did.
  • ianai 9y ago
    I really like the localized index idea someone posted earlier. If I could get 60% of my searches answered locally for the cost of 100 gigs of space I would use it. Even more so if I could host it on a local server somehow.
    • roryisok 9y ago
      Why though? Is your connection that bad? I wouldn't want to use 100GB of precious SSD storage for something I can get instantly in the browser
  • i_cant_speel 9y ago
    While it would be nice if the barrier to entry was lower to enter the search space, I feel like if it's easier to get in Google will just be able to do more with what they have.
• thanatropism 9y ago
  I see DuckDuckGo as an improved search bar more than as a search engine, though it's admirably fast at the latter. DDG's bangs are effectively a CLI interface to web searches. !g does google, !yt does YouTube, !w does Wikipedia, !wa does Wolfram Alpha, !scholar does Google Scholar... Huge timesaver.
  • Crespyl 9y ago
    It's interesting, since browsers have had custom keyword searches for ages, and I've known that and just never taken the time to set them up. Having DDG with its bangs I use them all the time, and if there's some specific new site that I want to search there's (so far) always been a fairly guessable bang already set up for it. I find it exceedingly convenient.
• kdamken 9y ago
  I really, really want to like DuckDuckGo. But every single time I’ve switched from Google, I’ve found them to be much worse at returning the best results for what I’m looking for. For example, let’s say I want to look up “ear infection”. Google will spit out a bunch of info right on their results page, often saving me the trouble of even going to another site. DDG however will just give me 10 webmd links. If they want to compete, the privacy angle isn’t enough. They need comparable functionality as well.
  • notzorbo3 9y ago
    Try startpage.com. I moved away from google a year ago and never looked back. I've never once needed to fall back to google. That's probably because startpage.com is basically anonymized google. I know we're supposed to root for the entrepreneurs here on HN, but DDG honestly seems like more hype / marketing than a decent product. You never hear anything about startpage.com (maybe because it has a boring name?) but it just works.
    • kdamken 9y ago
      Thanks for the suggestion. I just gave them a try with my "ear infection" search, and found that while they provide similar links, they don't give the additional info (like the summary of what it is and the "People also ask" dropdown box) right on the results page that google search does. This is especially important to me on mobile, especially when I have a weak cell signal.
    • captainmuon 9y ago
      Do you know how they monetize? I know it's a bit of a cliche asking that (you're the product etc.) but I'm really curious - using the Google API for search isn't cheap at scale. If they are using a video of Snowden, they may have some philanthropic money - or it may be something nefarious. I'd love to give them the benefit of doubt though.
• smt88 9y ago
  Insofar as DDG is a mashup of many search engines, doesn't it technically have a massive team? If you add up the teams building the products that feed DDG, then you probably end up with a much larger team than the one building Google Search. I might describe that as gaining on Google, but still losing quite badly. I'm still impressed by DDG of course and welcome some alternative to Google, which is a dangerous monopoly with a search that I've come to despise in recent years due to its ignoring what I've actually typed.
• projectant 9y ago
  But how good can a search engine be if it does not track its humans, and therefore cannot use browsing / search history as contextual clues for query ranking / semantics ? It might be very good. But can such a system compete with one that does use search history as context?
  • lightswitch05 9y ago
    Personally, I value my privacy more than the small amount of time tweaking my search query to get the results I actually wanted vs. the out-of-context results I got. I think anyone using DuckDuckGo is of the same opinion. When you think about it: total loss of internet privacy for some slightly better search results? Pretty massive trade off of with some serious consequences. However, I do get your point. Without that extra context, the search results can only ever only be so good.
  • freeflight 9y ago
    That solely depends on your definition of "good". These comments have plenty of examples where DDG is "better" in terms of usability compared to Google, which is also an important factor besides search accuracy. Imho using the search history as context can also lead to undesirable results, so can funneling people to overly popular results which still can be wrong, had both happen more than enough with Google. It's a trade-off between spending time arguing with Google if I really meant to search for that word, regardless of " usage, and having to look at more results in DDG until I find the one that I was looking for.
  • user68858788 9y ago
    There used to be a concept of google-fu, where writing search queries was a skill in itself. I got quite good at finding what's needed. Then, over time, search results became less and less useful. I noticed that search results seemed to be weighed more on my history than the query written. I'd get results with words synonymous to web page titles I'd recently visited, but otherwise no connection to my search. To get decent results now I have to use incognito or change the search settings to be "verbatim." I hoped things would get better, but years later things are the same. DDG gives more predictable results. It reminds me of why I started using Google over other search engines decades ago.
• cgarvey 9y ago
  I've been using DDG as my primary search for about 2 years now, it rarely ever falls short for me. When it does, it's usually related to some type of image search I'm doing, I think google still has nicer tools for that. Overall, super happy with DDG.
  • chiefalchemist 9y ago
    Agreed. It's not perfect but I'd prefer to give it the first chance(s), and if necessary fallback to Google, etc.
• solidr53 9y ago
  Love how everybody concerned about their privacy are most likely querying DNS via 8.8.8.8. But I understand, I try to think of the internet as a non-privacy place.
  • mattnewport 9y ago
    That's a strange assumption. I use my VPN provider's DNS servers and I imagine many of the relatively tech savvy users who hang out on HN and care about privacy enough to use alternative search engines know how DNS works.
  • callinyouin 9y ago
    What a strange straw man. People who are very concerned about their online privacy are likely not using that as their DNS.
• simion314 9y ago
  I switched to duck duck go recently and for me it is good enough, when I feel I get bad results or not what I need I search with !g and for my surprise google returns same results most of the time. It would be good to have more duck duck go like sites/projects in case ddg fails or goes evil.
• dsschnau 9y ago
  Hell yeah duckduckgo owns
• throwaway970992 9y ago
  I've been using it for ~ 4+ years and it's great most of the time. I sometimes jump to Google if I can't find what I'm looking for, but these excursions generally aren't very successful.
• jbergstroem 9y ago
  Does anyone know of a way to help DDG improving by passing them statistics about how I use !g as well as passing information about the results I prefer from google? I can only assume it would be riddled with privacy issues but would be happy to occasionally provide it.
  • AdamSC1 9y ago
    Whenever you do a search you'll notice there is a "Feedback" button in the top right-hand corner of the screen. This allows you to lets you share your feedback about the site or specific results with us. Your personal information is not recorded. If a query isn't returning as expected you can share it there! Disclaimer: DDG staff.
    • jbergstroem 9y ago
      Thanks! I'll keep this in mind.
• lyk 9y ago
  I used to use ddg, then startpage, but I've been using a self-hosted searx for a while now. It's a meta-search engine that scrapes other sites. Results are always great, and it's nice being able to enable specific engines for different sites. Check it out: https://searx.me https://searx.me
  • ianai 9y ago
    That never loaded for me.
  • heroprotagonist 9y ago
    That one seems down at the moment, at least for me. List of instances: http://stats.searx.oe5tpo.com/ http://stats.searx.oe5tpo.com/
• ishtu 9y ago
  Use search engine[1] that respects[2] your privacy [1] https://www.ixquick.eu/ https://www.ixquick.eu/ [2] https://www.ixquick.eu/eng/privacy-policy.html#hmb https://www.ixquick.eu/eng/privacy-policy.html#hmb
  • r0fl 9y ago
    The results are terrible. I tried a simple search for a large Porsche dealership which is down the street from my house and it did not even come up in the top 5 results. Would be a great search engine if it was the year 2001.
    • ishtu 9y ago
      Well, for such use cases Google is a better tool indeed. I personally know my neighborhood and never google what is down the street. And if I need dealership I will try to find it on car maker website which is easy to look up even using search engines from 2001.
• thinkMOAR 9y ago
  "If I do the same with Google, you get over 11 billion results!" Yes i have this often, and then when i click for example from page 5 to page 6 it suddenly says NO RESULTS and im always left flabbergasted with the thought "But google.. you just told me i got 11 million results to search through myself..."
  • saimiam 9y ago
    I've had the same experience even with the 2nd or 3rd pages. Makes you wonder if google isn't suffering from grade inflation.
• 1024core 9y ago
  But doesn't DDG just repackage results from Yahoo (now Bing)? At least, it was doing that a few years ago when I last checked.
  • aembleton 9y ago
    They also have their own crawler: https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckbot https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckbot
    • 1024core 9y ago
      But that doesn't mean they don't just repackage Bing's results (with some of their own thrown in).
• darrmit 9y ago
  I tried DDG several times over the years before finally sticking with it about 2 years ago. Now it feels weird to go back to Google because I've gotten used to using some of the bangs. I love DDG and what they stand for, and I'll gladly trade the creepy personalized results for the more organic results I get there.
• deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
• wdn 9y ago
  I will stick with Google for now. Google usually returns the result I wanted. Google's page is also cleaner. But when DDG improve the search result, I will make a switch there.
• khana 9y ago
  Boy that didn't take long.
• nickpsecurity 9y ago
  The comments on this article mostly talk about the privacy benefits DDG brings. Yet, we've known since the Orange Book (TCSEC) that system integrity is a prerequisite for confidentiality/privacy. As in, the DDG servers and network need some strong security to ensure they're doing what the staff and users think they're doing esp with all the press it gets. Example attacks: 1. Root the search servers. Gradually leak out what people were doing in a way that looks like fake search results to attackers running "searches" that are actually commands to trigger leaks. The leaked data would be stored in memory temporarily. 2. Subvert the engine to send malicious JavaScript to users that leaks their search results to a specific location. Might reduce risk of detection by first determining browser configuration for common ways of spotting leaks. Then, don't send anything to those users. I'd guess the boxes and setups were originally optimized for speed and cost rather than isolation. So, what's security like at DDG? A quick glance shows they run... "DuckDuckGo is coded in Perl and JavaScript with the help of the YUI Library, served via nginx, FastCGI and memcached, running on FreeBSD and Ubuntu via daemontools. We both run our own servers and have servers on Amazon EC2 across the world." Probably not that private once hackers are involved with Perl and Ubuntu. On nation-state level with EC2. The servers and cache at least get security updates regularly. So, safe assumption is private against passive collection and low-to-medium-strength attackers.
  • mattnewport 9y ago
    I imagine most people using DDG over Google for privacy reasons are concerned first with what Google does with the data it collects on them and only secondarily with the potential for other actors to get access to that data.
    • nickpsecurity 9y ago
      Entirely true. I bring it up since the article mentioned the Snowden leaks and data ending up in government's hands. The leaks, esp Core Secrets, also said they had a way to get the FBI to "compel" the backdooring. Others said TAO's hackers often made up for what passive collection couldn't do. If they're in the threat model, the DDG isn't likely the solution in and of itself unless their security has the same threat model. Good for other threat models that majority of users are actually worried about, though. I did say that in original comment.
• deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
• SubiculumCode 9y ago
  I'd love me some DDG Scholar functionality (not the Google Scholar bang)
• ballenf 9y ago
  I've had more than one family member uninstall DDG thinking it was malware. DuckDuckGo, imo, implies some degree of arbitrariness in whether they'll take your search query seriously. The article mentions he came up with the name before he had a product. It's just too bad he didn't think of a kids game just before this search engine. It's my default search engine and without fail when a non-tech colleague is over my shoulder for an internet search they bust out laughing at the name and are insistent that it's a prank website. I persist and calmly explain. They relent and give that look you give a crazy person you don't want to argue with.
  • adolph 9y ago
    I remember when Google looked that way too. The lack of other links, gif animations and backgrounds, the prototype-style primary colors . . .
    • ballenf 9y ago
      But the name Google implies a mind-boggling large number of results or websites that it's processing or searching for you. Maybe the name has a degree of playfulness, but it's not named after a children's game that revolves around the arbitrary choice of an unlucky child. They also had the luxury of entering the market before there was a dominant player. Not to mention the brilliance of the pagerank algorithm.
    • captainmuon 9y ago
      I first encountered Google as an embeddable widget on Warez sites. For the longest time, I was convinced it was a "Scene" thing (like the astalavista search engine) and avoided it :-D.
• davesque 9y ago
  I feel like one of the appeals to using DuckDuckGo is that it simply isn't Google and, therefore, doesn't come along with all the ethical baggage. That's true now, but who's to say that will continue to be true in the future? At the end of the day, the same forces still drive large businesses to cut corners, costs, and creeds if they want to compete effectively with one another.
  • ballenf 9y ago
    There are no guarantees, but if they're not currently amassing data trails then they won't be an attractive acquisition target for a data aggregator. If they ever change their privacy policy, you just stop using it.
• jjawssd 9y ago
  Is there any practical decentralized alternative search engine? YaCy seems dead.
• malchow 9y ago
  DuckDuckGo is great. Also, the HBS case study prose style is annoying enough in itself. To have the style emulated by a non-native writer is fun. And weird.
• lochlainn 9y ago
  I've been using DuckDuckGo for about a year now. I would say it has complete parity with every search engine other than Google, and only seems to miss things when I do very specific searches. A common example is looking up an error in dmesg: I can usually get a specific bug thread on Google, but only more general results on DDG.
• vadansky 9y ago
  According to uMatrix, DuckDuckGo serves 43 cookies from Google? Does it only "No Follow You" if you're proactive enough block them using uMatrix?
  • sbov 9y ago
    Privacy badger detects zero trackers. When I open my developer toolbar, all hits when I search are to duckduckgo.com. When I installed uMatrix, the only thing I see are references to duckduckgo. And zero cookies. This is using Firefox on Linux. It appears as if Google has infected your internet.
• andyhnj 9y ago
  I use DDG everywhere except at work, where (for some reason) it's blocked. The one silly thing I miss about not having DDG at work: in DDG, I can type "new guid" and it gives me a new random guid. If there's a way to do that in Google, I haven't figured it out. (And yes I know there are a million other ways to get random guids. It's just convenient for me to get them this way.)
  • uyoakaoma 9y ago
    You just made me wanna try it. And it worked
  • sanbor 9y ago
    Also if you search "library genesis" it will include library genesis in the results.
  • 482794793792894 9y ago
    Recently needed random whole numbers from varying ranges. First looked up "random number generator" and got onto some sophisticated webpage where you could define your own set of items to be choosing at random from and have it list out ten thousand random results and so on. Really, everything you could wish for, but it was clunky as hell for varying ranges. Then I decided to just look up "random 1 5", so that maybe a webpage which could deal well with intervals would show up. And there it was, DuckDuckGo understood immediately what I wanted and just generated one as an Instant Answer. Changing the interval was a matter of changing those two numbers in the query and getting the next random number worked with F5. Could not have wished for a better tool for the job.
  • jf 9y ago
    Have you tried using something like "uuidgen | pbcopy" from your command line?
  • AdamSC1 9y ago
    Hey Andy, Do you know what firewall system your work uses? We were blocked in a few of them but found that reaching out to those companies got it fixed. Would be happy to help investigate! Disclaimer: DDG staff.
• yellowapple 9y ago
  Off-topic: Can we please stop with this trend of random websites asking to spam me with notifications? Is there some framework everyone's using that's trying to grab notification permissions at every possible opportunity? At the very least, sites should at least tell me what they're going to have pop up as a notification and give me the option to subscribe to those notifications through some link in the actual site (like what Gmail does when desktop notifications aren't enabled yet). I understand notifications are useful for "webapps", but for a blog post they seem entirely useless, so every time I see the prompt to allow notifications I reject it immediately on the basis of it almost certainly being spam.
• baxtr 9y ago
  DDG is really great! I use it on all my devices since January. I've tried it before to by changing the default to DDG on my iOS devices. However, I've always switched back to google after a couple of weeks. Not this time. Every now and then when I'm not happy with the search results, I use the "g!" Shortcut to get the google results, but the occasions I'm doing this is definitely decreasing.
• rallycarre 9y ago
  I've switched to duckduckgo for security reasons and noticed not much difference. Even when I switched back to google for something I couldn't find with duckduckgo the search results are very close.
• snakeanus 9y ago
  I would actually switch to ddg if they actually bothered to free more parts of their site and backend. Right now their JS is nonfree for example.
• monochromatic 9y ago
  I've switched over on my phone, mostly because I'm sick of not having any other way to opt out of AMP.
• Kluny 9y ago
  What's with this person's writing style? I've never seen so many literary tics in one place. "In short", 14 usages. Almost every sentence starts with a prepositional phrase like "In fact...", "Yet...", "However..." Confusing sentence structure like "How would have the net looked like?" It's so irritating to read.
  • Koshkin 9y ago
    I think such style has legitimate uses; yet, it can also be used to give text an appearance of coherence where there is little or none. (Otherwise, it's just noise, like in the preceding sentence.)
  • appleiigs 9y ago
    E-book writer... should explain his style. Here's a TLDR summary: - Google huge, DDG tiny. - Gabriel Weinberg serial startups all failed until he sold one for $10MM, which allowed him to do and focus on DDG. - Privacy a big deal these days and DDG markets towards that. - DDG makes money from keyword advertising and affiliate revenue. - You too can profit from something!
    • roryisok 9y ago
      How much is $10MM? Like, a million million? Or is a millimeter thickness of dollars?
      • dx034 9y ago
        No, it's a thousand thousand (roman numeral). In finance, using MM and MMM is quite common (although bn is often preferred over MMM).
        • appleiigs 9y ago
          yeah, I am in finance. At the bank I used to work at we'd use $1M for $1,000 and not allowed to use $1K.
• spektom 9y ago
  I'd like to act as devil's advocate for a bit. Showing ads according to a search term is totally possible, but having no attribution attached to a "click" or to an "impression" give very little advantage for the marketer who is paying for the ads. There are cost models allowing to pay for the actual action (like installing an advertised application) not just for clicks or views. Re-targeting people who had expressed their interest in a product is a useful tool for marketers as well. Having some kind of link back to the advertising campaign, which your users came from along with their LTV allow you to measure campaign productivity, which helps optimize future campaigns. And much more. I really like the idea of not being tracked on the Internet, but it's seems like currently it's not feasible to remove a tool many marketers get used to.
  • spektom 9y ago
    People, who downvoted my comment - care to explain? Does downvote button on HN compare to "I don't like what you're saying"?
• flashdance 9y ago
  I'd just like to say that this is a great article--stuff like this is why I keep coming back to HN.
• grimgrin 9y ago
  Those who use DDG, do you miss dates in results? Having a date present definitely helps me think about the results: https://www.google.com/search?q=dcss+branch+order https://www.google.com/search?q=dcss+branch+order https://duckduckgo.com/?q=dcss+branch+order https://duckduckgo.com/?q=dcss+branch+order This isn't a case where I _know_ I only want 2017 results, and so I do the syntax to filter it down automatically. I want all results, but I want to be aware of the timeline of whatever I'm going to click. But to take the thought further: I can understand when a date isn't important. Say some documentation for a specific programming related thing. You'll probably learn to use !clojuredocs or something. What about outside that? Those searches I can't quite describe without thinking, but my example above sort of works nicely because that game in particular has changed a bunch (and will continue to) over time and you do care about the date of a forum post or whatever. For all I know, the answer is "that's when you use !g".
  • SubiculumCode 9y ago
    If that isn't available in DuckDuckGo they should definitely reconsider. I use the date pretty often...though sometimes it seems spoofed.
  • inputcoffee 9y ago
    A date is crucial, even for a programming related task. There are probably people who, at this very moment, are looking up Django 1.0 documentation right now and can't get the example to work because their system installs the second to last version.
  • jasonkostempski 9y ago
    The only thing I miss is the "Past Year" option. I find it really important for filtering out programming stuff that's too old. "Past Month" is too short. I can't understand why it's not there. I've sent the suggestion several times.
    • 482794793792894 9y ago
      It's because they get results from so many different sources. Many of those sources just don't keep time records or don't offer it through the API that DuckDuckGo interacts with.
• sabujp 9y ago
  i use ddg for finding things that haven't been taken down by dmca notices.
• MrJagil 9y ago
  Why do search engines have to exist on a website? Couldn't they be a built-in part of the browser?
  • turc1656 9y ago
    Not really. A search engine crawls the web (billions and billions of sites) and indexes them for quick and easy access. If you use Outlook for email, it's kind of analogous to how the search option works there. When an email arrives on your company's system, the mail server processes the mail and indexes it for searchability. The key here is that either your computer or your mail server have to have a copy to make it searchable. So, for the case of web searching, you would have to know/read the content on the entire web. This is the "crawling" process that search engines perform. They read it and store/index what they need for searchability. It is entirely infeasible, obviously, for anyone (let alone every person) to do so on their individual devices.
    • MrJagil 9y ago
      Thanks for the answer! Couldn't Apple crawl the web and store the index for safari to search through? This way, an iPhone user would search Apple's index instead of Bing's, no website needed.
      • turc1656 9y ago
        If I understand your question, the answer is that what you describe is basically the same thing currently on Android phones with the Google search widget thing (I think it's called Google Now). It can perform a search without going to Google's main search page. It may or may not open the results in a browser window, though (I don't know because I don't use it). But regardless, it goes through Google's main search system, much like the proposal you made for Apple. Whether or not it is accessed through the site directly is kind of irrelevant. It's still accessing the same remote system in the same way. Whatever interface you choose to use is just a user preference, really. You're still submitting a query to the site/service over an internet connection and you are getting the response back with the results. Does that answer your question? I'm not sure if you were asking if this hypothetical from Apple could avoid using Google or if you were asking something else. Because if you are trying to avoid giving your data to Google, then you should also be concerned with Apple.
• hvmonk 9y ago
  Interestingly, contrary to most comments, i recently had to switch to Google after using DDG for about two years. It was just getting slower and slower - across all devices. Yes, programming and technical questions are answered better than Google, but rest of the queries were returning lesser optimal results - most likely it has to do with privacy and data collection.
• ams6110 9y ago
  How do you make money if you don’t track users? All you need is a keyword. For instance, let’s say I’m looking for a new computer, I insert the keyword in the search box “new PC” and all you have to show me are ads related to that. I don’t necessarily have to see all the things I’ve been looking for in the past. Seems eminently sensible to me. And much more likely to produce ads that are relevant to what I'm looking for right now.
  • 482794793792894 9y ago
    Yeah, I often wonder how what Google is doing can really be so much better that it justifies leaking billions of users' information all over the place and the massive infrastructure costs that they must have.
• dredmorbius 9y ago
  I've been using DDG for 3-4 years now. Good results generally, love the bangs. Still thin results an a few sites, Ello and Reddit comments particularly IME (I use and search both frequently). For console, there's https://duckduckgo.com/lite https://duckduckgo.com/lite (no JS). Hit counts and date-bounded search stills sends me to Brand G.
• SubiculumCode 9y ago
  DuckDuckGo, powered by Yandex? In all seriousness, does that mean Putin and Russia would have my searches? Not trolling,just interested to know what I would be choosing by going with DDG.
  • SubiculumCode 9y ago
    You can negatively vote the question, but the question was in earnest, and I'd appreciate an earnest answer of why their partnership and reliance on Yandex is not a privacy concern.
    • SubiculumCode 9y ago
      e.g., https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/05/30/yandexs_ukraine_offices_raided_for_treason/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/05/30/yandexs_ukraine_off...
• earth_walker 9y ago
  I've used DDG on and off since the initial HN submission, and I have to agree with the 'like quitting smoking' comment. In the past I would switch to it when I'm feeling some google-morning-after-shame (e.g. after seeing some targeted ads), I would stick with it for a day or two, but eventually go back to the 'what I wanted is on the first page' magic of google. I've used DDG more consistently since changing the firefox search default, but there are still some things that I end up googling - sometimes DDG shows too many irrelevant results on the first page. I think paying more attention to the bangs and moving away from 'keyword' searches will probably help - after all a tool is more useful if you learn how to use it properly - but for some topics (e.g. Haskell examples) if the first answer it finds isn't what I was looking for, the next couple of pages of results are usually useless too.
• cpeterso 9y ago
  I'm curious how DDG's affiliate revenue compares to search-based ads. The article glosses over affiliate programs, but they are an interesting revenue alternative to ads.
• fooker 9y ago
  How do they plan to scale with the number of users?
• greggarious 9y ago
  Persoanlly I love DDG. It handles a vast majority of my search traffic quite fine. Quick tip: Rather than falling back to Google, try the "!sp" bang command for StartPage, which crawls Google to supplement it's results.
• Animats 9y ago
  The useful insight about DuckDuckGo, which the author misses, is that even with 0.1% market share, a search engine can be profitable. Search ads are valuable, because they appear when someone is actually looking for something and likely to buy. Almost all other ads are merely annoying interruptions. DuckDuckGo isn't even a full search engine. They don't crawl the whole Web. The heavy lifting is done by Bing and Yandex. That allows DuckDuckGo to have coverage without much infrastructure. That's what makes the business possible without too much expenditure.
  • captainmuon 9y ago
    The article also sort of answers my question how a third party gets access to Bing and Yandex's indexes. I know they offer access, but how is it paid for? By using the founder's money from an exit, and then some VC money until profitable.
• ceefan 9y ago
  duck.com is owned by Google.
• ftw45 9y ago
  DuckDuckGo is really an amazingly stupid name for a browser brand, and the logo completes it.. How small would Google be with such a name?
• atc 9y ago
  I switched to DDG years ago and it didn't work out. I tried again recently when Google's treatment of the "women in tech" memo made me realised they're too powerful and I should support competition. I've since moved to over to DDG on all my devices and I do not miss Google search one bit. It's frightening how little I need it. I now only use it for dictating reminders and rarely when DDG doesn't find the answers to my programming questions. The use of !ho or !stackage (and the many other bangs) are very addictive. DDG has come a long way - well done!
• Arubis 9y ago
  Having swapped over to DDG a couple years back, I recall my frustration and Google-fallback habit lasting for ~6mo. At this point I'll end up using the big G maybe every week or two--mostly I forget that they're there. Honestly, my second most-used "search" style interface these days is Wolfram Alpha. Google comes in _third._ Say what you will about their respective search result quality, I found that a lot of the delta between DDG and G! could be made up by just spending time with DDG. I believe I've subconsciously adjusted both my keyword structure (I'm conscious of using "explicitly" "quoted" "keywords" to ensure they're included in my results) and my expectations.
• pmoriarty 9y ago
  When I search for: "strace" "hex" "ascii" site:stackoverflow.com on DDG lite: https://duckduckgo.com/lite/?q="strace" "hex" "ascii" site:stackoverflow.com&kd=-1 the returned results only show "hex" and "ascii" but do not include "strace". I expect results with all three search terms (and if that fails, to return nothing).
• twsted 9y ago
  Two years and a half just with DDG. It’s really ok for me. Just a number of !g sometimes. Google searches are surely better but I feel comfortable with DDG.
• Osmium 9y ago
  Is there going to be a replacement for DuckDuckHack[0]? Had a cool instant answer integration I wanted to contribute, that I hope would be useful to a lot of people (primarily students/scientists). Seems a real shame for there to be no route to community contributions in the future. [0] https://duckduckhack.com https://duckduckhack.com
• feelin_googley 9y ago
  Why does DDG not present "direct" URLs in its search results? Why does DDG, like Google, by default instead prefix all results with a URL pointing to DDG servers enabling DDG to track what results that the user clicks on? Google started doing this some years ago, e.g., all the URLs in search results are prefixed with something like https://www.google.com/url?q= https://www.google.com/url?q= Needless to say, this serves no useful purpose for users and it showed the direction the company was moving in. Easy for any nerd to remove client-side, but it is on by default and this will catch many non-technical users who do not know about them or how to remove them. In DDG the prefix is something like https://duckduckgo.com/l/?uddg= https://duckduckgo.com/l/?uddg= Even assuming no logs are kept with client IPs, and no correlation can be made by any party in possession of DDG's logs bewteen client IP and clicked URLs, this practice is still collecting data. The data collected is not merely what searches a user submits i.e. search data, but also data about the user's browsing, i.e., which URLs she chooses to follow. And of course it collecting this data without asking for the user's permission. If the company can argue having this data is useful to the company and therefore somehow useful to users because company will make better website/software (a common argument made by many web companies caught collecting user data by default), then it seems the respectful thing to do is ask users if they want to contribute such data. Let users make the choice. As I recall this default prefixing of results is not something that search engines before Google used to do. Nor did the original Google do this either. It is something that Google started doing some years ago. Note: Some browsers allow the user, e.g., to preset a default HTTP referrer, to set it to the target URL, to send an empty one, or to not send this header at all. Same options as offered by "meta referrer" except it is controlled by the user in their browser, not via a third party website. I have no idea if the popular browsers have such settings. Finally, a problem with having bad design choices (such as prefixing URLs) and then offering users the option of changing the "settings" via a website is that this usually requires Javascript or cookies, because as everyone knows HTTP was designed to be stateless. Cookies and Javascript are two things privacy conscious users may want to avoid. By default DDG does not set cookies or require Javascript. (Good.) But if in order to change a bad default, the user has to enable cookies or Javascript, then we have sacraficed the goal of no cookies or Javascript required. (Bad.)
  • b52_ 9y ago
• codelord 9y ago
  I don't understand what's the difference between Google and DuckDuckGo when all of my traffic is going through Comcast and AT&T anyway. There's no privacy.
  • orthecreedence 9y ago
    Unless AT&T/Comcast are somehow MITMing your SSL connections (unlikely), then your search terms are all encrypted and all the ISPs know is that you are using DuckDuckGo.
    • deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
• syphilis2 9y ago
  I created a website a year ago and I simply cannot find it using Google. Searching for the site title: Google - not in top 100, DDG - result 8. I am in Google, since I can search for the exact URL (which is the same as the site name), but otherwise I don't show up. It's incredibly frustrating considering the amount of no-content and repeated articles Google does return. Related, my biggest gripe with the WWW today is how difficult it is to find personal websites among (what I'd call) all the ad-revenue garbage.
  • Eupolemos 9y ago
    Just to be thorough; did you try this: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6259634?hl=en https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6259634?hl=en It is an extra step to make google aware of you.
    • syphilis2 9y ago
      I did, so the site is in Google and is crawled by Google (Analytics I believe has the option to do that). I also went through various SEO suggestions, set up Google Analytics, added meta tags, improved load speed (it's a pretty minimal static page anyway), among other things.
• sweetp 9y ago
  I always use DDG first, and then as a last resort ill look on Google. I think I only really checked on Google maybe 2 or 3 times this past month. For me Google is mostly irrelevant, and I could quite happily not use it.
• wentoodeep 9y ago
  DDG is just icing on cakes, a convenient UI to search the web/search engines. Now trend is shifting towards chatbot, is DDG still relevant?
• yuhong 9y ago
  I am thinking about the current debt based economy which is based on growth and stock prices, and Google and the tracking ad bubble is a good example of the problems. Brendan Eich talked about it: https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/870483249587519489 https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/870483249587519489 Google was VC funded so had to exit using IPO (in this case).
• TheGrassyKnoll 9y ago
  DDG user. I use this to cook pasta: 7 min !timer (goes off to google & starts a timer)
• mikehain 9y ago
  I'm a fan of DuckDuckGo and I've found myself using it more and more these days. I actually had to change my launcher on Android because the default Google Go launcher that comes packed with the Moto X Pure has no option to remove the Google search from every home page. I switched over to Nova launcher just so I could put a DDG search bar in its place.
• jatins 9y ago
  One reason why Google seems to do better is because it knows more about me. For example when I search for "reverse a LL" shows me reversing linked list on Google (which is what I intended) but something completely else on DDG. Maybe because Google just knows that I tend to search for programming stuff.
• apatters 9y ago
  Much ink is being spilled currently over the evils being perpetrated by the tech giants. What's so exciting about DuckDuckGo is 1. DDG competes directly with Google in Google's core market 2. Not being evil is DDG's differentiator for real, they're not just paying lip service 3. DDG is small and profitable... in other words, they're a successful startup. It can be done. It is being done.
• SeanDav 9y ago
  OT: > "Google would be an elephant while DuckDuckGo is a mosquito (this is not to emphasize; I’m actually making things better for DuckDuckGo)." Actually the Author is not making it better, in fact worse. From the numbers in the OP it appears Google is about 1000 times bigger (roughly) than DDG. A better, and perhaps more apt comparison would to compare Google's Elephant to DDG's Badger (small badger).
• donmatito 9y ago
  Couldn't access the website - too many pop-up! Hopefully the HN comments made me want to try DDG again
• jahlucine 9y ago
  duckduck doubles traffic last year https://www.trafiklite.com/duckduckgo.com https://www.trafiklite.com/duckduckgo.com
• jahlucine 9y ago
  duckduck doubled traffic last year https://www.trafiklite.com/duckduckgo.com https://www.trafiklite.com/duckduckgo.com