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I have been using DDG for about a year now, although I had tried using it years ago. It works fine for simple queries( e.g. search name of company rather than t

I have been using DDG for about a year now, although I had tried using it years ago. It works fine for simple queries( e.g. search name of company rather than typing out url). But I basically have !g programmed into my fingers for everything more complicated. Many times when I don't find the results I am looking for, I subconsciously assume that google would be able to find them. This is in comparison to when I cannot find something on google, I assume the website owner either sucks at SEO or it doesn't exist. I am rooting for DDG, but it is going to be really hard for them to make up the literal cognitive difference in my mindset. Side note, if they get bought out by a big player, I will feel like my use of them for the last year has been for naught.

mLuby 8y ago
I have the same muscle memory, but I don't think it's a bad thing. Basically I only use !g when normal DDG doesn't give me what I'm looking for, and half the time !g doesn't have it either. The only thing I can't abandon is !gmaps. And I'm just discovering a bunch of other ! commands that make DDG significantly more useful that Google (eg !esen).
- Splines 8y ago
  I don't think it's a bad thing either. It gives DDG a very clear signal so that they can improve: "you are not giving me the results I want for these queries". For most other search engines people just switch.
- news_to_me 8y ago
  I've found that "!w", which searches Wikipedia, is extremely useful.
  - eikenberry 8y ago
    And !a for amazon and !yt for youtube and !dpkg for packages and !imdb... Definitely my favorite feature of ddg.
  - carterage 8y ago
    One thing that consistently blows my mind is how readily an external search engine creates a better index, with more relevant recall, by scraping the published static pages of Wikipedia, such that it outperforms Wikipedia's own search, Wikipedia should be able to search itself better than any external entity, but cannot. Wikipedia, in effect, is blind to its own data, and can deliver less insight into it's own content than multiple external Search entities. If I use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search for anything, I get weaker results, than if I use search engines to locate wikipedia articles according to the same input string. There's something wrong with that.
    - barking 8y ago
      The same is true for every forum I know of, in fact a lot of them now have a google search box that gives site specific results
    - Larrikin 8y ago
      Search isn't easy and I would fully expect a company that specializes in search to provide better search results than an entity that simply has search as a feature to their main product. Since Wikipedia provides all of their pages for indexing, unlike Facebook for example, a good search experience would be an MVP for any competent search company.
      - carterage 8y ago
        That's a good point. Put another way, were I to run a local copy of a wikipedia mirror, right here in my own bedroom, I'd be putting myself eye-to-eye with any wikipedia employee or volunteer. I'd have the same tools in my hands, as they do. I'd be one person, a PHP script hosted by an apache process, and the wikipedia data set. But, contrast that to Facebook, and the concept becomes more interesting. Facebook's search utilities are similarly unsatisfying, despite the massive resources of the company. This is probably not a blind spot, but more about the level of quality provided, for free-tier, unprivileged user utilities. Advertisers probably gain better reach, but perhaps without knowing exactly who they reach. Facebook's search tool can't be used to discern the capabilities or qualities of one or more of the indices Facebook uses to negotiate the landscape of their data.
  - Semaphor 8y ago
    !mdn for developer.mozilla.org is one of my most used ones :)
    - theandrewbailey 8y ago
      Yes, that's a great way to skip all those w3schools results. I should probably bookmark the RegExp entry, because I !mdn regexp almost daily.
  - mrweasel 8y ago
    The only thing that annoys me about DDG is that I have to use !wen for Wikipedia searches. !w will return localized search on Wikipedia, and I almost never want the Danish wikipedia.
    - lloeki 8y ago
      I guess this is based on the Accept-Language header of your browser (which you can control), not guessed from your IP (which is a terrible thing to do): since my OS is in English even though I'm in France, I get to have the English wikipedia with !w and use !wfr for local stuff. In fact I did not know about the behaviour you describe because of that.
- fbreton 8y ago
  You can use !m instead of !gmaps.
- agrippanux 8y ago
  I use !npm which is pretty great if you'd doing node dev
- flas9sd 8y ago
  If anybody is curious for the distribution of used searches between ddg/!g, I came up with this rough estimate for firefox: sqlite3 ~/.mozilla/firefox/*default*/places.sqlite "select substr(p.url,9,14) as search_backend,count(1) from moz_places p where p.url like 'https://duckduckgo%' or p.url like 'https://%.google.%/search%' group by search_backend;" I fall back to google every 11th query, not counting maps searches.
  - shakna 8y ago
    duckduckgo.com|5521 www.google.com|6 So... I guess that means I don't really need google for search?
  - smichel17 8y ago
    I fall back every 21st query. That said, Google doesn't always find the answer in those cases, either.
  - executesorder66 8y ago
    I got: duckduckgo.com|14129 encrypted.goog|345 images.google.|1 ipv6.google.co|1 mail.google.co|2 play.google.co|10 translate.goog|2 www.google.co.|1106 www.google.com|2084 Rather interesting. I'll compare with my personal PC when I get home.
- lloeki 8y ago
  > The only thing I can't abandon is !gmaps I was in the same boat with !gi but DDG image search is increasingly relevant, and is not infested by Pinterest results. DDG increasingly feels like home the way Google Search did years ago.
stockkid 8y ago
> Many times when I don't find the results I am looking for, I subconsciously assume that google would be able to find them. I've also been using DDG as a main search engine for a while and feel the similarly. Even more, for some queries I subconsciously assume that DDG won't find the result I want and resort to Google before I even search. Examples of such queries are complex programming questions etc.
shdh 8y ago
I also use !yt !gi !w and many many more including one I submitted: !hdb
- cknoxrun 8y ago
  There are great research-related ones as well. !pubmed !dailymed !drugbank etc.
speek 8y ago
There's also http://duckduckgoog.com http://duckduckgoog.com which let's you use the !bang codes but defaults to Google search otherwise
- latexr 8y ago
  I’m wary of using DuckDuckGoog, and have stopped doing so. Its maintainer stopped using it, and when it recently broke he started recommending a random fork from a user with no open-source presence that hasn’t made any update since. As for the live version, it’s now working thanks to some other random twitter user. The whole transition was a rush job. I’m not saying those people aren’t trustworthy. What I am saying is that we don’t know, because the maintainer of DuckDuckGoog did not care enough to make sure the project would be left in good hands. See https://github.com/mikecrittenden/duckduckgoog/issues/11 https://github.com/mikecrittenden/duckduckgoog/issues/11.
  - speek 8y ago
    FWIW I'm the random twitter user (https://twitter.com/m_held https://twitter.com/m_held + https://github.com/mheld https://github.com/mheld) and use duckduckgoog myself, so when it went down all of a sudden I thought I'd just continue running it for folks. Will probably ask to transfer the repo at some point
smsm42 8y ago
Have been using DDG for several years. Initially, I did !google a lot, not I maybe do it once a month, and even then the result is not always better. For most of my daily queries DDG is completely on par.
agumonkey 8y ago
same here, ddg is a web proxy front page with a !g fallback
gpm 8y ago
I've been using DDG for a few years now. I have the same reflex with !g, but when I'm on a browser that's google by default I quickly find that I also need a way to go the other way and do the equivalent of !ddg... In other words the queries that google has good results for isn't a superset of the queries that ddg has good results for. It's just a different set.
- digi_owl 8y ago
  I suspect that the eternal problem will be that of context. Back when Google started out, they bet the farm on the idea that more links pointing to a document meant that said document was informative. These days though, i wonder if what we are looking for is more hair. That what we are looking for depends on a context that can't be properly included in the search terms used. On top of this "naive" metrics like link counts are no longer a viable measure for what to elevate to the top of the search results.
  - pwaai 8y ago
    but the frequency of reputable backlinks are perfectly suitable variable to rank a website's importance and relevance, and Google obvious knows how to discern garbage backlinks vs legitimate ones. For instance, a certain startup I worked for in the past used a military blog seemingly belonging to a web of Eastern European entities to link to our company website and the CEO advertised it on linkedin....it was pretty fucking embarassing tbh but it was oviously for gaining SEO juice. It worked for a while but now when I search for the same keyword I don't see it in the SERPs.
  - halflings 8y ago
    Google has been personalizing search results, and going way beyond just "link counts", for a while now. e.g: When I type "pandas" or "kafka", I get the Python library and the streaming framework. I don't get cute black and white animals and a depressed novelist (what the average person would expect).
    - adrianN 8y ago
mdaniel 8y ago
> I basically have !g programmed into my fingers for everything more complicated This might be more energy than you're willing to expend, but just in case you were not already aware: there is a feedback icon in the bottom-left(!!!) corner of the page through which you can let them know about your bad experience. My interest in doing that is that in my life it is unreasonable to expect change without letting the other party know of your discontent. I gravely wish it was just a one button sad-face, but at least it exists. I also would have previously guessed they could have used the presence of `!g` as a proxy for the sad-face, but that's certainly not true if users are preemptively `!g` based on an assumption about the results instead of trying the search first.
- Kenji 8y ago
  > My interest in doing that is that in my life it is unreasonable to expect change without letting the other party know of your discontent. It is unreasonable to expect bad service without personal involvement to make it better. They could check "does a user search for [something], then they search for !g [something]? If yes, we are doing something wrong." It's not rocket science.
interdocken 8y ago
I've exclusively used DDG for all mobile and desktop searches for years now. I haven't looked back at Google nor have I ever used !g.
wjoe 8y ago
I started out doing that, but I've found myself using !g less and less recently. There are two main things I find myself needing it for: Location based queries, Google will always prioritize UK based results, and often London based results for me. The other is technical searches, I'm not sure how much this is due to Google having better search algorithms for this, or just that it has the data to know that I'm a programmer, but it it's more likely to know that I'm talking about coding with a term like Python or Ruby which could mean something else. I hope DDG can keep improving, and I do feel like it's a worthy alternative now. I do wonder how they can keep making money with no advertising or paid services, but if they were to be bought out by a big player, I think they would quickly lose much of their user base.
- mLuby 8y ago
  I find DDG does a better job with low-to-mid difficulty tech queries because it displays the top stack overflow answer at the top of the results which is often what I want. But you're right, really obscure tech questions usually involve a !g.
- Semaphor 8y ago
  > There are two main things I find myself needing it for: Location based queries, Google will always prioritize UK based results, and often London based results for me. As I'm German, that's actually where DDG has the advantage over Google. Most of my searches are in English, but sometimes I want to search for something here, with DDG that's just a single press of a button and I get German results. With Google I'd have to do multiple clicks.
  - ascar 8y ago
    You can also force Googles language using the query parameter "hl". E.g. www.google.de/?hl=en returns English queries. That parameter is preserved through multiple querries, so you can use this in a bookmark and have multiple google language versions just a click away. Not as handy as the DDG location switch, but still a sometimes useful hack.
    - 8y ago
duncan-donuts 8y ago
I’ve been using ddg for a few years and it really has come a long way. When I first started I would !g all the time. These days I almost exclusively use ddg searches. I find their results to be just as relevant as google.
gregable 8y ago
You are primarily going to get responses from people on threads like this who like and use DDG regularly. Selection bias. If you didn't find DDG useful, you wouldn't be using it, and probably don't have much commentary to add. I don't see them truly competing with big budget search engines, but it's probably easy enough to make decent money from keyword ads and if you can sell the brand, you can get enough users to cover a smaller machine footprint and R&D budget that's orders of magnitude smaller. The results are probably not awful (I don't use it). Result quality gets exponentially more difficult as you try to push that boundary, so you can probably get 80% of the quality there with 1% of the investment. The results may be good enough for plenty of folks, but I highly doubt they will ever be better than the big budget search engines.
- lugg 8y ago
  This post reads perfectly if you replace DDG with "Google" and believe it's 1999. Sure Google had a vastly superior algorithm but I don't think too many people really grasped that at the time.
  - jjeaff 8y ago
    Contrary to the seemingly popular belief, that their success was due to their algorithm, I used them because of their uncluttered and simple design. That's why I used Altavista before that. Google kept things very simple while other sites loaded on the bloat and garbage. I don't remember ever feeling like what I found with Google couldn't be found with Altavista or lycos. But a lot of the other companies tried to prematurely monetize to an excessive degree.
    - ian0 8y ago
      I was quite young at the time but made the same transition for the same reasons. I think the vast majority of users don't consciously evaluate search engines for accuracy. And most non-technical users just assume that if they cant find it through X, its probably not there.
    - philipps 8y ago
craftyguy 8y ago
I use a metasearch engine (searx) for precisely this reason. It aggregates results from any number of search engines, sending request to them in a very generic, non-identifying form, then displays them all on one page with a tag next to it to indicate where the source of the result came from. You can host Searx yourself or use a public instance, but using the public instance means you trust the operator to not log/filter results/inject ads(I don't know if folks do, but it would be possible) or do other nefarious things. It's pretty easy to host it yourself..
- BeetleB 8y ago
  I'm curious: If I install Searx on my PC and not on an online server, and use it while I'm on the PC - do I lose most of the privacy benefits?
aldoushuxley001 8y ago
Google search results are getting increasingly more terrible. If this trend keeps up, Google will be a barely viable search engine in a couple years. Google's interests are too conflicted now, rigging their search results to benefit their own alphabet companies. The result is search results biased to Google's own walled garden... And it's Very noticeable
Terretta 8y ago
> I basically have !g programmed into my fingers for everything more complicated Or !s for Googling with less Google?
abentspoon 8y ago
I've been using DDG for around six months now, largely because I love their keyboard shortcuts. Weirdly there doesn't seem to be a shortcut to help insert bang commands. I've been using this greasemonkey script[1] as a workaround, but I'd love to have an official solution. [1] https://gist.github.com/m5/247631d8258ff6f52383b417acd8516f https://gist.github.com/m5/247631d8258ff6f52383b417acd8516f
mempko 8y ago
I'm actually surprised how often I search in ddg and think , wow maybe google has better results? then I do !g and find that Google's results are worse! Then I hit the back button and browse ddg results.
- inciampati 8y ago
  I had the same experience. I'm using Google once a day at most. I can't remember the last time it helped me find something that ddg didn't. It can be harder to scroll into the later results with Google, which makes a big difference in my experience with it.
TheAceOfHearts 8y ago
It really depends on what you're searching for, but I don't think it's a problem. I think DDG is way better than Google for lots of things, but it's fine if it's not better at everything since a Google search is just a g! away. You might want to try Bing as well. Sometimes it can surprise you, although I haven't used it as extensively as the others.
mscasts 8y ago
I have been using DDG for about 2 years. While I also have !g programmed into my fingers, I notice that most of the time Google don't give me the result I want / expect so I have actually stopped doing that lately. In fact, many, many times DDG gives me better results than Google.
- MarHoff 8y ago
  My personal rule of thumb is that if I look for a reference manual or an official website vanilla DDG is the way to go. If I'm looking for really fresh contents like news or latest QA !g gives better results. Guess it's logical because even if the search algorithm of DDG is pretty neat, they can't compete yet with Google army of crawlers that probably use every idle computing power of their massive cloud.
- midgetjones 8y ago
  The key for me is making the query _slightly_ more descriptive. It's a good thing that it's not tracking me, so it's fair enough that I should type a bit more so that it knows I mean Ruby the language and not the gemstone.
arketyp 8y ago
I find that Google is actually losing ground as the all-seeing-eye-reference-objective-truth due to the increasingly tailored searches. I can no longer refer to a search query and expect a peer to see the same results as I do. This social bubble phenomenon, while no doubt convenient, is sometimes a burden, and with their stricter privacy policy DDG actually has some ground to gain here. Using DDG is more like tuning in to good old ether radio instead of browsing through podcasts. I find that comforting, that break from a claustrophobic solipsist trend.
- atupis 8y ago
  Yeah I have noticed same problem. Try search something like Trump Twitter page, if you are very liberal bubble Twitter page comes like 4th or 5th result.
- wodenokoto 8y ago
  > I can no longer refer to a search query and expect a peer to see the same results as I do. It's been decades since you could do that for yourself. It must be something like 20 years ago on Alta Vista that I got burned using search queries as bookmarks and (surprise, surprise) suddenly not being able to find "that page" any more.
  - ckastner 8y ago
    Those are two separate issues. Altavista's index certainly got updated over time, so changes in the search results aren't that surprising. I believe the issue OP is addressing is that even given an identical index, two different users might see to entirely different search results, as their individual search history is factored into the query.
- amelius 8y ago
  > I can no longer refer to a search query and expect a peer to see the same results as I do. You could try opening an incognito window, although it could still give different results based on geo location.
  - deleted 8y ago
kuschkufan 8y ago
Same here, sometimes I already assume DDG won't give good results and append !g right away. BTW, those bangs are great anyway! Can't live without !hn, !sr, !a, !w, !@
amelius 8y ago
> But I basically have !g programmed into my fingers for everything more complicated. On mobile, typing "!g" takes 7 actions (including the focus, space and enter). DDG should make a button for it, below the search results, so you can easily revert to Google if you didn't find what you were looking for. Honestly, without this button, I doubt if I will ever start using DDG much.
- yladiz 8y ago
  Why would DDG include a button to a competing search engine, considering they already have !g? It’s implicitly saying that, “our search results aren’t that great, here’s a direct button to search Google for the same thing.”
  - amelius 8y ago
    I think you misunderstand. What DDG would be saying is: "Here are our results; in case you didn't find what you were looking for, here's a button that will give you Google's results". Having this button will make me use DDG more, not less.
- computerfriend 8y ago
  Focus, long press "n", "g", enter.
- la_oveja 8y ago
  > Honestly, without this button, I doubt if I will ever start using DDG much. "!g" is a fallback, not a default action. Seems to me pretty reasonable. Using it you're actually skipping ddg, not using it.
  - amelius 8y ago
    That's why the "!g" button should be below the search results.
simias 8y ago
Interesting, I actually find that I use !g less and less and when I do I often don't get what I'm looking for either (probably because I'm not searching for the right thing in the first place). On top of that I vastly prefer ddg's very simple and terse output compared to Google's many widgets displaying all kinds of content inline and wasting monitor real estate. >Side note, if they get bought out by a big player, I will feel like my use of them for the last year has been for naught. I completely agree and at this point it's my main issue with DDG. I don't think their business model is sustainable, if they ever make it big the pressure to make more money will eventually corrupt their noble goals. After all Do No Evil used to be a thing at Google too and we see how that turned out. I'd gladly pay a subscription to a good search engine to remove the need for ads and align the business model to the privacy goals, however I'm probably in a small minority here.
- drcongo 8y ago
  What _is_ their business model?
  - tscosj 8y ago
    https://duck.co/help/company/advertising-and-affiliates https://duck.co/help/company/advertising-and-affiliates
- edraferi 8y ago
  I'm not too worried about acquisition. Per the article: > ...there was little need for the company to raise more money. DuckDuckGo, which had a last known raise of $3 million in 2011, has been profitable since 2014.
  - amarkov 8y ago
    Fingers crossed for sure, but there's such a thing as growing too fast for your own good. Github famously stopped being profitable the year after it got a $250M round.
- epicide 8y ago
ams6110 8y ago
I've used DDG as my main search site for a few years now. Every once in a while when I don't find what I want, I try !g and lately I find that Google didn't find anything usefully better. So now using !g is more like a last resort before giving up rather than an expectation that it will really help.
marssaxman 8y ago
When I first started using DDG, I had the same response, but I have found that my use of "!g" has steadily diminished over time, without making any conscious effort.

mLuby 8y ago

I have the same muscle memory, but I don't think it's a bad thing. Basically I only use !g when normal DDG doesn't give me what I'm looking for, and half the time !g doesn't have it either. The only thing I can't abandon is !gmaps. And I'm just discovering a bunch of other ! commands that make DDG significantly more useful that Google (eg !esen).

Splines 8y ago
I don't think it's a bad thing either. It gives DDG a very clear signal so that they can improve: "you are not giving me the results I want for these queries". For most other search engines people just switch.
news_to_me 8y ago
I've found that "!w", which searches Wikipedia, is extremely useful.
- eikenberry 8y ago
  And !a for amazon and !yt for youtube and !dpkg for packages and !imdb... Definitely my favorite feature of ddg.
- carterage 8y ago
  One thing that consistently blows my mind is how readily an external search engine creates a better index, with more relevant recall, by scraping the published static pages of Wikipedia, such that it outperforms Wikipedia's own search, Wikipedia should be able to search itself better than any external entity, but cannot. Wikipedia, in effect, is blind to its own data, and can deliver less insight into it's own content than multiple external Search entities. If I use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search for anything, I get weaker results, than if I use search engines to locate wikipedia articles according to the same input string. There's something wrong with that.
  - barking 8y ago
    The same is true for every forum I know of, in fact a lot of them now have a google search box that gives site specific results
  - Larrikin 8y ago
    Search isn't easy and I would fully expect a company that specializes in search to provide better search results than an entity that simply has search as a feature to their main product. Since Wikipedia provides all of their pages for indexing, unlike Facebook for example, a good search experience would be an MVP for any competent search company.
    - carterage 8y ago
      That's a good point. Put another way, were I to run a local copy of a wikipedia mirror, right here in my own bedroom, I'd be putting myself eye-to-eye with any wikipedia employee or volunteer. I'd have the same tools in my hands, as they do. I'd be one person, a PHP script hosted by an apache process, and the wikipedia data set. But, contrast that to Facebook, and the concept becomes more interesting. Facebook's search utilities are similarly unsatisfying, despite the massive resources of the company. This is probably not a blind spot, but more about the level of quality provided, for free-tier, unprivileged user utilities. Advertisers probably gain better reach, but perhaps without knowing exactly who they reach. Facebook's search tool can't be used to discern the capabilities or qualities of one or more of the indices Facebook uses to negotiate the landscape of their data.
- Semaphor 8y ago
  !mdn for developer.mozilla.org is one of my most used ones :)
  - theandrewbailey 8y ago
    Yes, that's a great way to skip all those w3schools results. I should probably bookmark the RegExp entry, because I !mdn regexp almost daily.
- mrweasel 8y ago
  The only thing that annoys me about DDG is that I have to use !wen for Wikipedia searches. !w will return localized search on Wikipedia, and I almost never want the Danish wikipedia.
  - lloeki 8y ago
    I guess this is based on the Accept-Language header of your browser (which you can control), not guessed from your IP (which is a terrible thing to do): since my OS is in English even though I'm in France, I get to have the English wikipedia with !w and use !wfr for local stuff. In fact I did not know about the behaviour you describe because of that.
fbreton 8y ago
You can use !m instead of !gmaps.
agrippanux 8y ago
I use !npm which is pretty great if you'd doing node dev
flas9sd 8y ago
If anybody is curious for the distribution of used searches between ddg/!g, I came up with this rough estimate for firefox: sqlite3 ~/.mozilla/firefox/*default*/places.sqlite "select substr(p.url,9,14) as search_backend,count(1) from moz_places p where p.url like 'https://duckduckgo%' or p.url like 'https://%.google.%/search%' group by search_backend;" I fall back to google every 11th query, not counting maps searches.
- shakna 8y ago
  duckduckgo.com|5521 www.google.com|6 So... I guess that means I don't really need google for search?
- smichel17 8y ago
  I fall back every 21st query. That said, Google doesn't always find the answer in those cases, either.
- executesorder66 8y ago
  I got: duckduckgo.com|14129 encrypted.goog|345 images.google.|1 ipv6.google.co|1 mail.google.co|2 play.google.co|10 translate.goog|2 www.google.co.|1106 www.google.com|2084 Rather interesting. I'll compare with my personal PC when I get home.
lloeki 8y ago
> The only thing I can't abandon is !gmaps I was in the same boat with !gi but DDG image search is increasingly relevant, and is not infested by Pinterest results. DDG increasingly feels like home the way Google Search did years ago.

stockkid 8y ago

> Many times when I don't find the results I am looking for, I subconsciously assume that google would be able to find them. I've also been using DDG as a main search engine for a while and feel the similarly. Even more, for some queries I subconsciously assume that DDG won't find the result I want and resort to Google before I even search. Examples of such queries are complex programming questions etc.

shdh 8y ago

I also use !yt !gi !w and many many more including one I submitted: !hdb

cknoxrun 8y ago
There are great research-related ones as well. !pubmed !dailymed !drugbank etc.

speek 8y ago

There's also http://duckduckgoog.com http://duckduckgoog.com which let's you use the !bang codes but defaults to Google search otherwise

latexr 8y ago
I’m wary of using DuckDuckGoog, and have stopped doing so. Its maintainer stopped using it, and when it recently broke he started recommending a random fork from a user with no open-source presence that hasn’t made any update since. As for the live version, it’s now working thanks to some other random twitter user. The whole transition was a rush job. I’m not saying those people aren’t trustworthy. What I am saying is that we don’t know, because the maintainer of DuckDuckGoog did not care enough to make sure the project would be left in good hands. See https://github.com/mikecrittenden/duckduckgoog/issues/11 https://github.com/mikecrittenden/duckduckgoog/issues/11.
- speek 8y ago
  FWIW I'm the random twitter user (https://twitter.com/m_held https://twitter.com/m_held + https://github.com/mheld https://github.com/mheld) and use duckduckgoog myself, so when it went down all of a sudden I thought I'd just continue running it for folks. Will probably ask to transfer the repo at some point

smsm42 8y ago

Have been using DDG for several years. Initially, I did !google a lot, not I maybe do it once a month, and even then the result is not always better. For most of my daily queries DDG is completely on par.

agumonkey 8y ago

same here, ddg is a web proxy front page with a !g fallback

gpm 8y ago

I've been using DDG for a few years now. I have the same reflex with !g, but when I'm on a browser that's google by default I quickly find that I also need a way to go the other way and do the equivalent of !ddg... In other words the queries that google has good results for isn't a superset of the queries that ddg has good results for. It's just a different set.

digi_owl 8y ago
I suspect that the eternal problem will be that of context. Back when Google started out, they bet the farm on the idea that more links pointing to a document meant that said document was informative. These days though, i wonder if what we are looking for is more hair. That what we are looking for depends on a context that can't be properly included in the search terms used. On top of this "naive" metrics like link counts are no longer a viable measure for what to elevate to the top of the search results.
- pwaai 8y ago
  but the frequency of reputable backlinks are perfectly suitable variable to rank a website's importance and relevance, and Google obvious knows how to discern garbage backlinks vs legitimate ones. For instance, a certain startup I worked for in the past used a military blog seemingly belonging to a web of Eastern European entities to link to our company website and the CEO advertised it on linkedin....it was pretty fucking embarassing tbh but it was oviously for gaining SEO juice. It worked for a while but now when I search for the same keyword I don't see it in the SERPs.
- halflings 8y ago
  Google has been personalizing search results, and going way beyond just "link counts", for a while now. e.g: When I type "pandas" or "kafka", I get the Python library and the streaming framework. I don't get cute black and white animals and a depressed novelist (what the average person would expect).
  - adrianN 8y ago

mdaniel 8y ago

> I basically have !g programmed into my fingers for everything more complicated This might be more energy than you're willing to expend, but just in case you were not already aware: there is a feedback icon in the bottom-left(!!!) corner of the page through which you can let them know about your bad experience. My interest in doing that is that in my life it is unreasonable to expect change without letting the other party know of your discontent. I gravely wish it was just a one button sad-face, but at least it exists. I also would have previously guessed they could have used the presence of `!g` as a proxy for the sad-face, but that's certainly not true if users are preemptively `!g` based on an assumption about the results instead of trying the search first.

Kenji 8y ago
> My interest in doing that is that in my life it is unreasonable to expect change without letting the other party know of your discontent. It is unreasonable to expect bad service without personal involvement to make it better. They could check "does a user search for [something], then they search for !g [something]? If yes, we are doing something wrong." It's not rocket science.

interdocken 8y ago

I've exclusively used DDG for all mobile and desktop searches for years now. I haven't looked back at Google nor have I ever used !g.

wjoe 8y ago

I started out doing that, but I've found myself using !g less and less recently. There are two main things I find myself needing it for: Location based queries, Google will always prioritize UK based results, and often London based results for me. The other is technical searches, I'm not sure how much this is due to Google having better search algorithms for this, or just that it has the data to know that I'm a programmer, but it it's more likely to know that I'm talking about coding with a term like Python or Ruby which could mean something else. I hope DDG can keep improving, and I do feel like it's a worthy alternative now. I do wonder how they can keep making money with no advertising or paid services, but if they were to be bought out by a big player, I think they would quickly lose much of their user base.

mLuby 8y ago
I find DDG does a better job with low-to-mid difficulty tech queries because it displays the top stack overflow answer at the top of the results which is often what I want. But you're right, really obscure tech questions usually involve a !g.
Semaphor 8y ago
> There are two main things I find myself needing it for: Location based queries, Google will always prioritize UK based results, and often London based results for me. As I'm German, that's actually where DDG has the advantage over Google. Most of my searches are in English, but sometimes I want to search for something here, with DDG that's just a single press of a button and I get German results. With Google I'd have to do multiple clicks.
- ascar 8y ago
  You can also force Googles language using the query parameter "hl". E.g. www.google.de/?hl=en returns English queries. That parameter is preserved through multiple querries, so you can use this in a bookmark and have multiple google language versions just a click away. Not as handy as the DDG location switch, but still a sometimes useful hack.
  - 8y ago

duncan-donuts 8y ago

I’ve been using ddg for a few years and it really has come a long way. When I first started I would !g all the time. These days I almost exclusively use ddg searches. I find their results to be just as relevant as google.

gregable 8y ago

You are primarily going to get responses from people on threads like this who like and use DDG regularly. Selection bias. If you didn't find DDG useful, you wouldn't be using it, and probably don't have much commentary to add. I don't see them truly competing with big budget search engines, but it's probably easy enough to make decent money from keyword ads and if you can sell the brand, you can get enough users to cover a smaller machine footprint and R&D budget that's orders of magnitude smaller. The results are probably not awful (I don't use it). Result quality gets exponentially more difficult as you try to push that boundary, so you can probably get 80% of the quality there with 1% of the investment. The results may be good enough for plenty of folks, but I highly doubt they will ever be better than the big budget search engines.

lugg 8y ago
This post reads perfectly if you replace DDG with "Google" and believe it's 1999. Sure Google had a vastly superior algorithm but I don't think too many people really grasped that at the time.
- jjeaff 8y ago
  Contrary to the seemingly popular belief, that their success was due to their algorithm, I used them because of their uncluttered and simple design. That's why I used Altavista before that. Google kept things very simple while other sites loaded on the bloat and garbage. I don't remember ever feeling like what I found with Google couldn't be found with Altavista or lycos. But a lot of the other companies tried to prematurely monetize to an excessive degree.
  - ian0 8y ago
    I was quite young at the time but made the same transition for the same reasons. I think the vast majority of users don't consciously evaluate search engines for accuracy. And most non-technical users just assume that if they cant find it through X, its probably not there.
  - philipps 8y ago

craftyguy 8y ago

I use a metasearch engine (searx) for precisely this reason. It aggregates results from any number of search engines, sending request to them in a very generic, non-identifying form, then displays them all on one page with a tag next to it to indicate where the source of the result came from. You can host Searx yourself or use a public instance, but using the public instance means you trust the operator to not log/filter results/inject ads(I don't know if folks do, but it would be possible) or do other nefarious things. It's pretty easy to host it yourself..

BeetleB 8y ago
I'm curious: If I install Searx on my PC and not on an online server, and use it while I'm on the PC - do I lose most of the privacy benefits?

aldoushuxley001 8y ago

Google search results are getting increasingly more terrible. If this trend keeps up, Google will be a barely viable search engine in a couple years. Google's interests are too conflicted now, rigging their search results to benefit their own alphabet companies. The result is search results biased to Google's own walled garden... And it's Very noticeable

Terretta 8y ago

> I basically have !g programmed into my fingers for everything more complicated Or !s for Googling with less Google?

abentspoon 8y ago

I've been using DDG for around six months now, largely because I love their keyboard shortcuts. Weirdly there doesn't seem to be a shortcut to help insert bang commands. I've been using this greasemonkey script[1] as a workaround, but I'd love to have an official solution. [1] https://gist.github.com/m5/247631d8258ff6f52383b417acd8516f https://gist.github.com/m5/247631d8258ff6f52383b417acd8516f

mempko 8y ago

I'm actually surprised how often I search in ddg and think , wow maybe google has better results? then I do !g and find that Google's results are worse! Then I hit the back button and browse ddg results.

inciampati 8y ago
I had the same experience. I'm using Google once a day at most. I can't remember the last time it helped me find something that ddg didn't. It can be harder to scroll into the later results with Google, which makes a big difference in my experience with it.

TheAceOfHearts 8y ago

It really depends on what you're searching for, but I don't think it's a problem. I think DDG is way better than Google for lots of things, but it's fine if it's not better at everything since a Google search is just a g! away. You might want to try Bing as well. Sometimes it can surprise you, although I haven't used it as extensively as the others.

mscasts 8y ago

I have been using DDG for about 2 years. While I also have !g programmed into my fingers, I notice that most of the time Google don't give me the result I want / expect so I have actually stopped doing that lately. In fact, many, many times DDG gives me better results than Google.

MarHoff 8y ago
My personal rule of thumb is that if I look for a reference manual or an official website vanilla DDG is the way to go. If I'm looking for really fresh contents like news or latest QA !g gives better results. Guess it's logical because even if the search algorithm of DDG is pretty neat, they can't compete yet with Google army of crawlers that probably use every idle computing power of their massive cloud.
midgetjones 8y ago
The key for me is making the query _slightly_ more descriptive. It's a good thing that it's not tracking me, so it's fair enough that I should type a bit more so that it knows I mean Ruby the language and not the gemstone.

arketyp 8y ago

I find that Google is actually losing ground as the all-seeing-eye-reference-objective-truth due to the increasingly tailored searches. I can no longer refer to a search query and expect a peer to see the same results as I do. This social bubble phenomenon, while no doubt convenient, is sometimes a burden, and with their stricter privacy policy DDG actually has some ground to gain here. Using DDG is more like tuning in to good old ether radio instead of browsing through podcasts. I find that comforting, that break from a claustrophobic solipsist trend.

atupis 8y ago
Yeah I have noticed same problem. Try search something like Trump Twitter page, if you are very liberal bubble Twitter page comes like 4th or 5th result.
wodenokoto 8y ago
> I can no longer refer to a search query and expect a peer to see the same results as I do. It's been decades since you could do that for yourself. It must be something like 20 years ago on Alta Vista that I got burned using search queries as bookmarks and (surprise, surprise) suddenly not being able to find "that page" any more.
- ckastner 8y ago
  Those are two separate issues. Altavista's index certainly got updated over time, so changes in the search results aren't that surprising. I believe the issue OP is addressing is that even given an identical index, two different users might see to entirely different search results, as their individual search history is factored into the query.
amelius 8y ago
> I can no longer refer to a search query and expect a peer to see the same results as I do. You could try opening an incognito window, although it could still give different results based on geo location.
- deleted 8y ago

kuschkufan 8y ago

Same here, sometimes I already assume DDG won't give good results and append !g right away. BTW, those bangs are great anyway! Can't live without !hn, !sr, !a, !w, !@

amelius 8y ago

> But I basically have !g programmed into my fingers for everything more complicated. On mobile, typing "!g" takes 7 actions (including the focus, space and enter). DDG should make a button for it, below the search results, so you can easily revert to Google if you didn't find what you were looking for. Honestly, without this button, I doubt if I will ever start using DDG much.

yladiz 8y ago
Why would DDG include a button to a competing search engine, considering they already have !g? It’s implicitly saying that, “our search results aren’t that great, here’s a direct button to search Google for the same thing.”
- amelius 8y ago
  I think you misunderstand. What DDG would be saying is: "Here are our results; in case you didn't find what you were looking for, here's a button that will give you Google's results". Having this button will make me use DDG more, not less.
computerfriend 8y ago
Focus, long press "n", "g", enter.
la_oveja 8y ago
> Honestly, without this button, I doubt if I will ever start using DDG much. "!g" is a fallback, not a default action. Seems to me pretty reasonable. Using it you're actually skipping ddg, not using it.
- amelius 8y ago
  That's why the "!g" button should be below the search results.

simias 8y ago

Interesting, I actually find that I use !g less and less and when I do I often don't get what I'm looking for either (probably because I'm not searching for the right thing in the first place). On top of that I vastly prefer ddg's very simple and terse output compared to Google's many widgets displaying all kinds of content inline and wasting monitor real estate. >Side note, if they get bought out by a big player, I will feel like my use of them for the last year has been for naught. I completely agree and at this point it's my main issue with DDG. I don't think their business model is sustainable, if they ever make it big the pressure to make more money will eventually corrupt their noble goals. After all Do No Evil used to be a thing at Google too and we see how that turned out. I'd gladly pay a subscription to a good search engine to remove the need for ads and align the business model to the privacy goals, however I'm probably in a small minority here.

drcongo 8y ago
What _is_ their business model?
- tscosj 8y ago
  https://duck.co/help/company/advertising-and-affiliates https://duck.co/help/company/advertising-and-affiliates
edraferi 8y ago
I'm not too worried about acquisition. Per the article: > ...there was little need for the company to raise more money. DuckDuckGo, which had a last known raise of $3 million in 2011, has been profitable since 2014.
- amarkov 8y ago
  Fingers crossed for sure, but there's such a thing as growing too fast for your own good. Github famously stopped being profitable the year after it got a $250M round.
epicide 8y ago

ams6110 8y ago

I've used DDG as my main search site for a few years now. Every once in a while when I don't find what I want, I try !g and lately I find that Google didn't find anything usefully better. So now using !g is more like a last resort before giving up rather than an expectation that it will really help.

marssaxman 8y ago

When I first started using DDG, I had the same response, but I have found that my use of "!g" has steadily diminished over time, without making any conscious effort.