7 ms·

Make DuckDuckGo your default search engine now. Just do it. You won't miss Google.

by cup-of-tea 8y ago

quikoa 8y ago
What I miss with DDG is better date ranges. Filtering by date can help a lot in narrowing down what you want to get.
- oldcynic 8y ago
  I dislike the "last month", "last six months" way of doing ranges oh so much. Where are the 2 years or older, 4 years or older options at the other end of the scale or let me specify two actual dates. Sadly I often need to search for older content - DDG are least worst, but they're all poor to hopeless at it.
ddebernardy 8y ago
Has DDG become any better for programming-related searches? Asking, because last time I tried using it for more than a handful of queries, I ended up jumping back to using Google because searching for obscure programming error messages seldom led anywhere useful.
- bitL 8y ago
  It used to be better ~6 months ago. Now it's as bad as Google or even worse :(
Kiro 8y ago
No thanks. I might just as well use Bing then since that's where DDG get its search results.
- hjek 8y ago
  Do you have a source for that? DDG has their own cralwer[1], so it would appear it also gets its own search results, even if may get some search results from other search engines. [1]: https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckbot https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckbot
  - Kiro 8y ago
    https://duck.co/help/results/sources https://duck.co/help/results/sources > In fact, DuckDuckGo gets its results from over four hundred sources. These include hundreds of vertical sources delivering niche Instant Answers, DuckDuckBot (our crawler) and crowd-sourced sites (like Wikipedia, stored in our answer indexes). We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we source from Bing, Yahoo, and Yandex. So DuckDuckBot is not used for any normal indexing. All actual search results are from Bing, Yahoo and Yandex.
    - hjek 8y ago
      Thanks for taking the time to look that up. So their bot is only for instant answers, and DDG is really just a metasearch engine? I'm a bit disappointed by that. Might as well change to Searx then. It's also "just" a metasearch engine, but at least it's fully free/libre. I wonder if there are any well-established free search engines that do their own crawling?
      - Kiro 8y ago
        I understand it though. Quoted from the old Sources page on DuckDuckGo where they elaborated a bit on more: > Bing and Google each spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year crawling and indexing the deep Web. It costs so much that even big companies like Yahoo and Ask are giving up general crawling and indexing. Therefore, it seems silly to compete on crawling and, besides, we do not have the money to do so. Instead, we've focused on building a better search engine by concentrating on what we think are long-term value-adds -- having way more instant answers, way less spam, real privacy and a better overall search experience.
pcr0 8y ago
As much as I'd like that to be true, I end up having to use !g in half my searches. It does okay at keyword matching, but can't infer what I'm actually looking for, falls short at finding obscure/niche topics and its pageload speeds are frustrating compared to Google.
- 101km 8y ago
  This.
- anonytrary 8y ago
  > I end up having to use !g in half my searches. I googled this, but couldn't find the "!" operator as a google operator. What does "!g" do in search? Or are you trying to say "I end up leaving Google for half my searches" which is not only shorter, but more clear than what you said. Edit: Ah, that makes more sense, thanks guys. I completely misinterpreted that comment in two different ways.
  - cpmouter 8y ago
    !g is a bang or whatever they call it. If you put "potato !g" in DDG, it redirects you to google search
  - erk__ 8y ago
    On DuckDuckGo you can use bangs (!) to do special functions the !g redirects you to a google search. For a full list you can look here https://duckduckgo.com/bang https://duckduckgo.com/bang
  - dredmorbius 8y ago
    DDG !bang search. Non-javascript: https://duckduckgo.com/bang_lite.html https://duckduckgo.com/bang_lite.html
- cpmouter 8y ago
  DDG is super super bad. I don't know why people recommend it at all. Now that you mentioned !g I remembered all my DDG experiments... 1) change my default search engine to DDG, 2) use it for some time, 3) use !g in half of my searches, 4) use !g in all of my searches, 5) say "fuck it" and switch back to google
jnurmine 8y ago
There is also qwant.com which is in Europe. Somewhat strangely, when I use Qwant, I often get better results than Google. This is of course anecdotical evidence and I do not use Qwant all the time (creature of habit, and so on).

Make DuckDuckGo your default search engine now. Just do it. You won't miss Google.

quikoa 8y ago

What I miss with DDG is better date ranges. Filtering by date can help a lot in narrowing down what you want to get.

oldcynic 8y ago
I dislike the "last month", "last six months" way of doing ranges oh so much. Where are the 2 years or older, 4 years or older options at the other end of the scale or let me specify two actual dates. Sadly I often need to search for older content - DDG are least worst, but they're all poor to hopeless at it.

ddebernardy 8y ago

Has DDG become any better for programming-related searches? Asking, because last time I tried using it for more than a handful of queries, I ended up jumping back to using Google because searching for obscure programming error messages seldom led anywhere useful.

bitL 8y ago
It used to be better ~6 months ago. Now it's as bad as Google or even worse :(

Kiro 8y ago

No thanks. I might just as well use Bing then since that's where DDG get its search results.

hjek 8y ago
Do you have a source for that? DDG has their own cralwer[1], so it would appear it also gets its own search results, even if may get some search results from other search engines. [1]: https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckbot https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckbot
- Kiro 8y ago
  https://duck.co/help/results/sources https://duck.co/help/results/sources > In fact, DuckDuckGo gets its results from over four hundred sources. These include hundreds of vertical sources delivering niche Instant Answers, DuckDuckBot (our crawler) and crowd-sourced sites (like Wikipedia, stored in our answer indexes). We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we source from Bing, Yahoo, and Yandex. So DuckDuckBot is not used for any normal indexing. All actual search results are from Bing, Yahoo and Yandex.
  - hjek 8y ago
    Thanks for taking the time to look that up. So their bot is only for instant answers, and DDG is really just a metasearch engine? I'm a bit disappointed by that. Might as well change to Searx then. It's also "just" a metasearch engine, but at least it's fully free/libre. I wonder if there are any well-established free search engines that do their own crawling?
    - Kiro 8y ago
      I understand it though. Quoted from the old Sources page on DuckDuckGo where they elaborated a bit on more: > Bing and Google each spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year crawling and indexing the deep Web. It costs so much that even big companies like Yahoo and Ask are giving up general crawling and indexing. Therefore, it seems silly to compete on crawling and, besides, we do not have the money to do so. Instead, we've focused on building a better search engine by concentrating on what we think are long-term value-adds -- having way more instant answers, way less spam, real privacy and a better overall search experience.

pcr0 8y ago

As much as I'd like that to be true, I end up having to use !g in half my searches. It does okay at keyword matching, but can't infer what I'm actually looking for, falls short at finding obscure/niche topics and its pageload speeds are frustrating compared to Google.

101km 8y ago
This.
anonytrary 8y ago
> I end up having to use !g in half my searches. I googled this, but couldn't find the "!" operator as a google operator. What does "!g" do in search? Or are you trying to say "I end up leaving Google for half my searches" which is not only shorter, but more clear than what you said. Edit: Ah, that makes more sense, thanks guys. I completely misinterpreted that comment in two different ways.
- cpmouter 8y ago
  !g is a bang or whatever they call it. If you put "potato !g" in DDG, it redirects you to google search
- erk__ 8y ago
  On DuckDuckGo you can use bangs (!) to do special functions the !g redirects you to a google search. For a full list you can look here https://duckduckgo.com/bang https://duckduckgo.com/bang
- dredmorbius 8y ago
  DDG !bang search. Non-javascript: https://duckduckgo.com/bang_lite.html https://duckduckgo.com/bang_lite.html
cpmouter 8y ago
DDG is super super bad. I don't know why people recommend it at all. Now that you mentioned !g I remembered all my DDG experiments... 1) change my default search engine to DDG, 2) use it for some time, 3) use !g in half of my searches, 4) use !g in all of my searches, 5) say "fuck it" and switch back to google

jnurmine 8y ago

There is also qwant.com which is in Europe. Somewhat strangely, when I use Qwant, I often get better results than Google. This is of course anecdotical evidence and I do not use Qwant all the time (creature of habit, and so on).