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Why should I use DuckDuckGo instead of Google?
- breitling 8y agoI've seriously given it a shot, but it's just not the same. I really want DDG to succeed, but don't think it's fully-there, yet. I get significantly more relevant results with google.
- giancarlostoro 8y agoJust !g when you search on duckduckgo. The best part of duckduckgo is being able to append commands as to where you want to search. !yt takes your search to youtube, !gi to google images and theres a longer list somewhere for even more sites.
- oytis 8y agoWhat's the advantage of !g over searching directly from google?
- giancarlostoro 8y agoI wind up using DDG as a search terminal basically. I just type to get to any type of search site not just google specific ones.
- Kiro 8y ago> I really want DDG to succeed, but don't think it's fully-there, yet. You should root for Microsoft then and for Bing to succeed. Also in some regards Yahoo and Yandex (the two other search engines that DDG aggregates results from).
- vezycash 8y ago>You should root for Microsoft Bing to succeed. Those paying attention would notice a difference in Google's attitude to the AOSP since WP died. IOS's a slight threat. For search, Bing's the only "real" competition. If it dies, Google will at best, force DGG, startpage... to include tracking and Adsense. Or simply, track through Chrome. A few billions in the right pocket will shut EU up. So don't count on their intervention. Let's Bing at least twice in a year.
- clubm8 8y ago> I've seriously given it a shot, but it's just not the same. I really want DDG to succeed, but don't think it's fully-there, yet. I get significantly more relevant results with google. Why not stick with DDG and only fall back to google with the !g bang command when it fails?
- move-on-by 8y agoEven better, only fall back to StartPage (google proxy) with the !s bang command when it fails. Same google results, less the tracking
- Flow 8y agoI've used DDG for close to a year now and every time I go to google.com and search it feels like a bloaty Yahoo style web. I've also noticed that when I don't get the results I want on DDG and try Google instead, it too gives me bad results. Probably a sign I should use some other words in my query.
- TangoTrotFox 8y agoCan you give some examples of searches that you felt provided significantly more relevant results with google? I see people say this on occasion, and it was absolutely true some years back. But now a days that does not seem to be the case, at least not for the things that I search for. Perhaps my searches are biased in some way, or perhaps yours are. Mostly, I'm just quite curious and would like to see it with my own eyes.
- Semaphor 8y agoI'm pretty happy with DDG as well, but someone provided an example further up: Mastodon API. On Google it gives the API docs, on DDG it doesn't.
- growt 8y agoNo offense to Gabriel or DDG, but this kind of question on quora always looks a bit set-up. If you take DDG out it reads like "Why should I use <specific product>?", to which the creator/CEO/Owner of <specific product> can now answer with the complete marketing blurb he/she has ready, without guilt. I also have seen that about some obscure AI-Algorithm and a question like "Why is <obscure algorithm> so superior?". To which the inventor of said algorithm had a few pages as a reply.
- bad_user 8y agoI don't understand what the problem is. It's irrelevant if the question is being set-up or not for people wanting to know the difference between a search engine marketing itself for privacy, like DuckDuckGo, versus Google.
- Woberto 8y agoI think OP is making a distinction between a question like "what are the differences between DDG and Google" and the more subjective question that was actually posted. With a subjective question, the marketing team can come tout all the positive attributes as reasons why one should switch without giving equal time to discuss what might be lacking.
- justinpombrio 8y agoIn other words, the bottom line was already written. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/34XxbRFe54FycoCDw/the-bottom-line https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/34XxbRFe54FycoCDw/the-bottom...
- augbog 8y agoYeah agreed I've actually seen this a lot on Quora as well. I personally don't think there's anything "wrong" with it because the pros listed will most definitely be valid however as an outside user, I am interested in both the products and they are less likely to tout their own shortcomings.
- NeedMoreTea 8y ago
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- sdegutis 8y ago> "When you search, you expect unbiased results, but that’s not what you get on Google. On Google, you get results tailored to what they think you’re likely to click on, based on the data profile they’ve built on you over time from all that tracking I described above." That explains why I get much more helpful results for technical questions on Google than when I tried DDG. Granted, that was 3-4 years ago, maybe I should give DDG another try.
- Spooky23 8y agoThe quote that you citied is bizarre. When I search for my keys at home, I don't want a fair search pattern of the house -- I want the answer... the location of my keys. Bias isn't always bad. Think about how annoying it would be as a non-tech person to google or acronyms, for example. Google is amazing at what it does in this space.
- TangoTrotFox 8y agoThe problem there is when the personalization interferes with what you're searching for. It's easy to create a more precise search term to clarify things when you get a large set of data, but at times it's not so easy to escape the confines of a bubble that a site locks you into based on an opaque profiling of you. YouTube is a good example of this. I find the experience of visiting YouTube when not in incognito mode to be just obnoxious. A huge chunk of all recommendations are basically other things I've watched, when more often I just want things related to what I'm currently watching.
- bla2 8y agoDDG is an ok skin on bing search results, but their pushy and misleading marketing is a huge turn-off to me. And I'm very very sympathetic to the "we don't track you" cause in general.
- josefresco 8y agoI got downvoted the last time I posted this (love you HNers) but DDG states they're more than just a skinned Bing: https://duck.co/help/results/sources https://duck.co/help/results/sources
- bla2 8y agoThat links "more than 400 sources" to https://duck.co/ia https://duck.co/ia which in turn links to https://docs.duckduckhack.com/#improve-a-live-instant-answer https://docs.duckduckhack.com/#improve-a-live-instant-answer saying "DuckDuckHack is in Maintenance Mode". But https://docs.duckduckhack.com/welcome/how-ias-work.html https://docs.duckduckhack.com/welcome/how-ias-work.html suggests that these sources are for things displayed at the top, which I see super rarely. So this is in fact a nice example of misleading DDG PR.
- josefresco 8y agoMaybe. I just thought it makes sense to share what the "official" DDG position is when calling them out for being a simple "skin".
- Kiro 8y agoThe 400 sources are just for instant answers. The "normal" search results are all from Bing, Yahoo and Yandex.
- lhball 8y agoThe irony of this linking to Quora is painful. Spen 0.5 on the page; get a request for notifications permissions.
- _Donny 8y agoEven though it is a 'minor' feature, I find the !bangs feature incredibly useful and time-saving. They even make searching on Google faster!
- move-on-by 8y agoIn the rare case that I'm unable to find something in DDG and want to compare with google, I always use the !s bang to use StartPage - which is a proxy of google. Its much slower then DDG or google, but its nice to have that firewall between google and my searches
- rudolph9 8y agoI’ve switched to DuckDuckGo on my mobile device and it’s great but I found it difficult to commit to on my work machine and switched back to Google. When conducting searched pertinent to software development the results on DuckDuckGo tended to be too generic, often missing the stackoverflow posts discussing exactly what I’m looking for.
- frereubu 8y agoInteresting to read this, because my subjective experience has been exactly the opposite - DDG tends to turn up a bunch of relevant SO posts at the top, while being a bit shaky for more general queries.
- clubm8 8y agoI've been using DuckDuckGo for years now. It's not perfect but if you think carefully about your query it will work fine. For me the killer feature is DDG's bang commands (https://duckduckgo.com/bang https://duckduckgo.com/bang) prepend "!w" for wikipedia, "!imdb" for movie trivia stuff, etc. And if you don't find what you're looking for "!s" will search with Startpage (a site that proxies Google searches for you)
- frereubu 8y agoI initially thought that there would be a high mental cost of switching from Google to DDG - but now that bangs have become muscle memory, using privacy-conscious DDG by default and then using !g if the results aren't helpful feels seamless.
- kxyvr 8y agoQuick question: What's the advantage of bangs over adding a custom search engine to something like Firefox? In Firefox, we can right click any search bar and add a keyword for the search, so we could just type something like "w topic" to search Wikipedia for some topic. Anyway, maybe there's something I'm missing, but I am curious.
- majewsky 8y agoThere are some bangs that do not directly correspond to search boxes. For example, "!rfc 2616" expands into https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2616 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2616
- vntok 8y ago> You may realize they also track you on YouTube, Gmail, Chrome, Android, Gmaps, and all the other services they run. Yes, you can live Google-free. I’ve been doing it for many years. You can, however all these alternatives are measurably worse in terms of features and ease-of-use, so much so that switching to them is both painful at first and frustrating on a daily basis. Consider the sheer number of people who in every DDG thread keep on saying "well yes DDG results are worse than Google's, but you can use Google from DDG so it's okay". Well it's not okay for most people. Also, bangs seem like a great idea at first, until you realise that Google simply does not need them to return relevant results! Then they suddenly seem way less differenciating and more like an acknowledgement of the inferiority of DDG compared to Google. And as a user, I'd much rather type "duckduckgo" and get the official site at first then the wikipedia entry (with a complimentary knowledge box on the side) than have to decide first where I want to look and then type "!w duckduckgo". Even in this very thread, we can read stuff like > "I've been using DuckDuckGo for years now. It's not perfect but if you think carefully about your query it will work fine. > For me the killer feature is DDG's bang commands (https://duckduckgo.com/bang https://duckduckgo.com/bang) prepend "!w" for wikipedia, "!imdb" for movie trivia stuff, etc." Well, Google will achieve the same or better results without this need to mentally switch context. This is a feature, and a key differentiator.
- bluGill 8y agoWhen is the last time you used DDG? I switch about a year ago. I've used the !g trick 3 times when I didn't find what I wanted, and in all cases google didn't find what I was looking for either. I can't speak for you, but I find DDG is good enough to replace google for search. Is google better - maybe, but not enough to overcome their downsides.
- StavrosK 8y agoI've been using DDG for years now, and the results are exactly as good as Google. I've never had a case where going to Google returned better results for me. Maybe it's because I tend to search for programming/hardware questions, but that's my experience. Also, I don't use bangs, I use the browser's built-in searches. So, for example, "i <movie name>" will take me to IMDB (actually Rotten Tomatoes nowadays) by searching for "site:imdb.com ! <movie name>" on DDG.
- void_starer 8y agoBesides the privacy issues, the single most frustrating thing is it's dropping of keywords that are critical to the query so it can pretend that it always has search results ready for you (here are zillion results found in 0.0000001 seconds!)
- ectospheno 8y agohttps://www.google.com/advanced_search https://www.google.com/advanced_search
- SlowRobotAhead 8y agoMy Search: SPC58C72 Nexus Datasheet Results: Datasheet
- ferongr 8y agoIronically, you are the sole result for "spc58c72" Nexus Datasheet
- SlowRobotAhead 8y agoI don't even remember if the C72 is a chip. Might have been a C74? To further complicate, iirc the C-series is customer specific version with limited data released on it. ALTHOUGH Nexus is a trace interface, basically Ethernet 10G trimmed down to communicate to a micro directly. And there is pretty much no information on it outside the ultra expensive tools you need to buy. EDIT: LOL downvotes for Nexus and an obscure STM chip :D Oh Hackernews... be less Reddit.
- utopcell 8y agoWhat were you searching for, if you don't mind sharing ?
- sfohohoho 8y agoWill they make me use AMP? I don't want to use AMP.
- move-on-by 8y agoI've been using DDG pretty exclusively for about a year now. I've never seen an AMP domain/link in any of my search results
- netman21 8y agoI have switched to DDG as my default. It answers the many daily questions I have. Have to switch to maps.google for directions though. For research I actually use Yippy. Great filters and easier to set dates.
- bitL 8y agoDid anyone notice that DDG recently stopped treating prefix - as a way to remove search results that contain the prefixed term, i.e. -news would remove all pages with "news"? It is now instead highlighting "news" as the term you searched for... I hope this is just a bug they are going to fix, otherwise I'd have no choice but to migrate elsewhere, as without it search results are mostly useless.
- drhodes 8y agodash works for me. Maybe the issue is specific to "news"? bulger bulger -whitey return different results as expected.
- yorwba 8y agoMaybe your keyboard is not actually inserting an ASCII "-"? Compare https://duckduckgo.com/html?q=hacker%20ycombinator%20%CB%97news https://duckduckgo.com/html?q=hacker%20ycombinator%20%CB%97n... and https://duckduckgo.com/html?q=hacker%20ycombinator%20%2Dnews https://duckduckgo.com/html?q=hacker%20ycombinator%20%2Dnews
- bitL 8y agoHmm, that's scary. On Linux Mint it inserts the first one, on macOS the second one...
- yorwba 8y agoThere are a whole bunch of similar-looking Unicode characters: - ˗ ֊ ‒ – — ― − Something between your keyboard and the input box is probably trying to be helpful by not inserting a hyphen at the beginning of a word. You might be able to trick it by typing "x-news" then inserting a space or deleting the "x". Alternatively, file a bug report against your input method or tell DuckDuckGo about it so they can undo the transformation.
- arayh 8y agoI have noticed this... For instance, searching "dribbble -shots", the first result contains the word "shots" in bold. I'm not entirely sure what makes this happen and is sometimes frustrating when making "advanced searches". https://duckduckgo.com/?q=dribbble+-shots https://duckduckgo.com/?q=dribbble+-shots
- izietto 8y agoWhen I visit duckduckgo.com, uBlock reports blocking a tracking image from the domain improving.duckduckgo.com whose url includes my browser user agent. That doesn't seem fair to me.
- vntok 8y agoOne can only wonder what a backlash Google would get if they had their analytics script at https://improving.google.com/ https://improving.google.com/ instead of https://www.google-analytics.com/analytics.js https://www.google-analytics.com/analytics.js
- fiiv 8y agoI think a company or a maker does have the right to measure how many people are using their product. As long as they constrain their collection to that, I think it's reasonable. The payload (sent via query param) seems to include locale, OS and browser (among with a couple other pieces of info that may or may not be related to the user vs. the page).
- izietto 8y agoMy concern is about the params. If you use Chrome on Windows at San Francisco user agent is dispersive, but if you connect from a little country using an exotic browser and an exotic OS the user agent data could be enough to identify you.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- the_clarence 8y agoI use it for streaming movies, Google has managed to clean its results from a lot of these websites.
- xjia 8y agoSlightly related: in the linked article from the answer, iOS is proposed as the privacy preserving alternative to Android. But I am having a hard time to agree to that. Are there anything else?
- gesman 8y agoLarge employers fake GOOG certificates and spy on employee's search queries. They usually won't do that for DDG and smaller portals.
- mattlondon 8y agoNews to me! Interesting - do you have a source for that? Surely browsers will be flagging up HTTPS warnings for this?
- xfitm3 8y agoCommercial products like BlueCoat proxies do this. You won't see a warning because the CA of the proxy will be trusted on your system by your administrator. Certificate pinning with HSTS/HPKP isn't effective as the proxy can strip those headers in the response. https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/33976/man-in-the-middle-blue-coat-proxy-ssl-or-what https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/33976/man-in-th...
- move-on-by 8y agoThere is a fantastic paper on how these proxies often lower security: "The Security Impact of HTTPS Interception" [1]. The paper also provides some interesting ways of detecting this type of proxy on the server (and client too - although a client should know if they have custom trusted certs). mitm.watch has implemented the details of the paper. [1] https://jhalderm.com/pub/papers/interception-ndss17.pdf https://jhalderm.com/pub/papers/interception-ndss17.pdf [2] https://mitm.watch/ https://mitm.watch/
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- aikah 8y agoOr you know use, your phone on data plan instead of corporate network for anything private.
- paradite 8y ago
- bad_user 8y agoI've been a long time Google Search user that used to complain about DuckDuckGo's results. That changed and I'm now a full time DuckDuckGo user, on desktop and mobile. For one I became aware of privacy implications, so went to my Google account and deleted all apps history I had. To their credit they let you delete your data (although under GDPR companies now no longer have a choice). I did this because looking back I was amazed at how many things they could infer from my searches over the last decade at least (my Google account is from 2004). Without that history Google's results became visibly worse than before, worse than DuckDuckGo! Also once you become privacy aware you end up being concerned with the actual searches. For example I'm now following a ketogenic diet for weight loss and I also have hypothyroidism issues, so lately I ended up doing a lot of searches on weight loss, diabetes, ketosis, hyperinsulinemia, heart disease, interpretation of cholesterol results, high uric acid and gout, etc... some of these issues have been for my own education, but I cannot in good conscience let Google know of my potential health issues. I was careless enough to join a local T2 diabetes group on Facebook and now I'm getting ads for diabetics. Whenever I searched for a subject on DuckDuckGo, I never noticed subsequent "relevant" ads following me around the web ... although you can get them via Google/Facebook enabled tracking planted on the landing pages themselves, but I'm armored with an ad-blocker, Privacy Badger, plus Firefox's FB Multi-account Containers. I cannot investigate DuckDuckGo's implementation of course. This is not open source. So there's always the risk of betrayal. But the difference is I already know what Google is doing and I want none of it. And as far as quality is concerned, I got used to it, plus I now have better peace of mind, coupled with the blocking of trackers and with a good VPN of course. Once the privacy mindset infects you, it's really hard to go back unfortunately :-) BTW, I don't know if DuckDuckGo is the best choice. For European users, it's still hosted in the US which might be a concern. Here are 2 other alternatives: 1. https://about.qwant.com/ https://about.qwant.com/ 2. https://www.startpage.com/ https://www.startpage.com/
- maxxxxx 8y agoI don't understand why DDG is not open source. I don't think it would hurt them business wise and it would be much easier to trust them.
- 8y ago
- MarkusAllen 8y agoI am blown away that DuckDuckDuck.com continues to claim no tracking after being exposed for tracking here: https://archive.is/qntuk https://archive.is/qntuk
- sergiosgc 8y agoTracking they removed when called up on it. I'm willing to give it a pass for incompetence, instead of flagging the tracking as malevolence (an application of Hanlon's razor).
- Semaphor 8y agoI don't know what archive.is is, but earlier today I followed a link to them and got a cloudfare DNS error. Now I get SSL_ERROR_NO_CYPHER_OVERLAP. Can't say they are impressing me so far.
- gvac 8y agoThanks for sharing this. I’m very disappointed but not surprised.
- jordhy 8y agoDDG is a better search engine for developers for a number of reasons: - Infinite scroll allows you to find information faster, even from not so notable sources - Privacy means you can search freely and do research on issues that will probably not be found out on a civil case (patents, papers, dev articles etc). - Bangs allow for a streamlined, faster search experience if you use certain services massively. - Search results are very simple. No knowledge graph boxes, etc. So you can just get the content you want. - Less (irrelevant) advertisements when you leave the search engine. You will be tagged by the content you consume and not the one you search due to privacy settings. - Your personal data will be safe in case of a Google hack. * Disclosure: Some years ago I was a DDG ambassador.
- kstenerud 8y agoThe only thing it doesn't do is exact matching when you use quotes, which really sucks when you're looking for something an app you're using spit out and it returns a bunch of irrelevant results that closely match what you typed :/
- shpx 8y agohttps://www.google.com/preferences https://www.google.com/preferences -> Results per page -> drag it to 100 now you don't need infinite scroll.
- tuxlifan 8y ago> - Infinite scroll allows you to find information faster, even from not so notable sources That is the opposite of my experience. I used to be able to skip, say, 5 or 8 pages of results to ignore the automated botsites and mainstream nonsense on some searches and get less popular but in some contexts more helpful results. Now I'm stuck with torturing my mouse wheel or use some specialist search engine like https://millionshort.com/ https://millionshort.com/. Especially since "-" and "+" don't seem to work reliably anymore. > - Bangs allow for a streamlined, faster search experience if you use certain services massively. Yes! I love !wa for time zone conversions that understand most appointments copied from somewhere
- philamonster 8y agoBeen missing Scroogle just about as long as I've been a DDG user.... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privacy_concerns_regarding_Google#Scroogle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privacy_concerns_regarding_Goo...
- BeetleB 8y agoSince DuckDuckGo always seems to get the most publicity, I feel compelled to point out two other search engines: http://www.startpage.com http://www.startpage.com Searx (https://asciimoo.github.io/searx/ https://asciimoo.github.io/searx/) You can install searx on your own host/PC, or use one of the public instances like http://searx.me http://searx.me (although no one can guarantee that the public instance isn't tracking you). Searx has apparently been around for quite a few years. I installed it recently on my machine and the results are decent enough that I continue to use it.
- qwerty456127 8y agoI actually use startpage.com now. Searx seems curious, thanks - the idea of a self-hosted meta search engine seems curious, I hope it is going to get more steam, perhaps it also could leverage strong personalization and access to my browsing history and bookmarks (which I certainly don't want 3-rd parties like Google or any to have).
- acheron 8y agoI've been using DDG for many years now. I rarely resort to !g anymore, and when I do it doesn't help. (That is, if I don't find anything good in the DDG results, I don't find anything any better in the !g results.) (That said, my Google account is purposefully pretty clean of "personalization", so if you've let Google track you for many years then maybe it will still return better results for you.)
- y-c-o-m-b 8y ago> Even less well known is they also enable advertisers like airlines to charge you different prices based upon your personal information. I hate this with a passion and it highlights why privacy is valuable to every individual whether or not they think they have "nothing to hide"
- tempswdf 8y agoDDG is known to be backed by Yandex search engine. This means that your request's metadata is already reported to Russian government services. https://www.quora.com/How-does-the-partnership-between-Yandex-and-DuckDuckGo-work https://www.quora.com/How-does-the-partnership-between-Yande... https://duck.co/forum/thread/2725/yandex-partnership https://duck.co/forum/thread/2725/yandex-partnership
- fiiv 8y agoThere seems to be no direct link between DDG and Yandex besides these two links that lack any evidence. Yandex merely appears to be one of DDG's content sources.
- batat 8y agoI'm pretty sure there may be some. Please check my comment in previous post about DDG https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17868117 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17868117
- fiiv 8y agoRead your original post. As far as I understand you are saying these two things: 1. Yandex search results very closely match DDG's in Ukrainian (or did) as opposed to Google/Bing 2. When Yandex could no longer operate in Ukraine, DDG's region for Ukraine disappeared I am reminded of Hanlon's Razor in this situation, that perhaps in Ukraine they simply did not fix their search after their top index provider was blocked.
- tivert 8y ago> DDG is known to be backed by Yandex search engine. IIRC, DDG is a privacy-preserving metasearch engine. That means it farms your query out to other search engines and then combines the results. I think it started by proxying Google searches to hide your metadata from Google. > This means that your request's metadata is already reported to Russian government services. This sound like FUD. Why would a metasearch engine send anything out to the search engines it proxies besides the query? It might not even have to make that query for your request if someone else made it recently.
- edoo 8y agoI use DuckDuckGo regularly now and Google only when the results aren't up to par (often with technical stuff). I do this in protest of Google becoming the opposite of their motto. It is faster than google for some things. For example it is nice to be able to type xxxx !octo and auto search at octopart.
- ljf 8y agoI want to love DDG - but for local search in the UK - it is terrible. I can be in a small town, searching for that small town, and it will give me a whole bunch of American results. It is still my default search on my phone (plus I use Brave as the browser) - but I find myself popping back to google when I want a 'proper' search (and by that I mean the way that I've conditioned myself to thinking search should work with the last X years of googling - sure DDG will feel more natural one day)
- fabricexpert 8y agoI've been using DDG for a while now. It's taken some time, but I am now finding that DDG is giving me more relevant results than Google. The only time it doesn't is for breaking news, which is something I rarely search for. Occasionally if I can't find something I'll put !g before it and get Google's results, it's getting very rare now that Google has a better result. Earlier today I started to reflex type ! into Google and then realised there was nowhere to search and google doesn't even have bangs for other sites. Honestly if I was banned from Google Search I wouldn't miss it now. Couldn't say that 6 months ago.
- the_arun 8y agoIt is not just about Google Search vs DDG. If you use DDG via Google Chrome, google can still track you.
- known 8y agoDDG should display Google results side-by-side
- utopcell 8y agoit is probably illegal for them to do so.
- xte 8y agoIMVHO you shoudn't. They are both companies that run proprietary service outside user control. If you want a different approach you should use something like YaCy witch is a FOSS, distributed, search engine, based on solr. So something you can know (have the code) and that does not run on a single company server.
- brentadamson 8y agoI agree and don't like the proprietary nature of DDG and others. YaCy has no !bangs, no instant answers and you have to install it. I've made an open source version of DDG with !bangs, instant answers, etc. We are hosted on Digital Ocean but feel free to run it on your own server or even locally. https://jivesearch.com https://jivesearch.com
- olivermarks 8y agoI think it's important to use multiple search engines in order to see different results and disparities. DDG, Google & Bing are the 3 I mainly use and there is quite a disparity on every given search.
- stcredzero 8y agoI have DDG set up on my home machine. However, I keep on switching back to Google for the difficult searches.
- olivermarks 8y agoI have an old imac set up with no accounts on it, fascinating to see 'raw' google and how it learns from my searches...
- looperhacks 8y agoAs much as I like using DDG, the search results rarely feel on par with Google - But I'm mostly searching for German results or specific technical stuff.
- posedge 8y agoI second this. Tried to switch for a while but, especially with the technical stuff, it always feels like you might be missing out on something. Maybe I will try again in a few years or find some sort of mixed solution with both search engines depending on what I'm searching for...
- nobody271 8y agoThey still filter and curate search results though. For example if you ddg "crimes committed by the fbi" you get a whitewashed and filtered response. So what other responses are modified? Another good litmus test is to ddg something politically incorrect. Most of the time the response does not match the query.
- mmt 8y agoPresumably, this is because their results are really just from someone else's index (e.g. Bing). If that's the case, then it's not really DDG doing the curating or filtering. The real test will come if they ever switch over to their own crawl and search.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- utopcell 8y agoInstead of advertising that their quality is better in some way, they employ FUD to say that Google is bad because they tailor their results to the user. Notice how it's always Google that is under attack and never Bing, which has 20% of the US desktop market share and, incidentally, provides their web results. What a pathetic way to market a product.
- Lio 8y agoIt's not FUD to say that Google track you across the internet and that if you don't want Google to do that you can use DuckDuckGo. I have no problem with DDG using Bing or Google for search results so long as tracking information about me isn't sent to them as part of the process.
- utopcell 8y agoMy point is: Bing also personalizes results and has 20% of the US desktop traffic. Did you ever see DDG advertizing that Bing is tracking you ?
- jccalhoun 8y ago> #1 — Google tracks you. We don’t. I'm not convinced this is a problem. I have commented before that even after 9 years on facebook they still suggest totally irrelevant groups for me to join (for example, facebook recently suggested I join a group for progressive asian-american christians. I am not asian or a christian) >#3 — Get unbiased results, outside the Filter Bubble. I read Eli Pariser's book and it was terrible. Full of "might" and "could" and little hard data. I am highly skeptical of the effect of a filter bubble. >#8 — Our search results aren’t loaded up with ads. >For many Google searches, most of the entire first page is ads. On mobile it can be even worse. Really? I have not encountered that many ads on google searches. >#9 — Search without fear. Being afraid isn't really a good reason to switch in my mind. More power to DuckDuckGo but the main thing that will make me use it is if it has good search results.
- sdfjkl 8y agoBecause DDG doesn't bloody geolocate you and then shove some dreadful localized content in your face, in a language you do not understand. If you travel, you'll know what I'm talking about.
- yotoyo 8y agoI feel like I'm having DDG shoved down my throat atm with all the cheesy twitter advertising and spontaneous HN posts. Clearly what happens when you take VC money. To me - not tracking searches (or, "not doing anything") is not protecting my privacy - It's just not doing anything. Privacy is just a commercial narrative to reinforce a weak service IMO when it comes to DDG. It's pretty hard to believe there is a big team behind this website. It doesn't feel like it has changed in many years - what are all the employees doing. Clearly lacks leadership on all levels. Probably need better people I genuinely fear the biggest contribution DDG makes to privacy is their yearly contributions to companies / products that actually product privacy of everyday people
- brentadamson 8y agoShameless plug: I've tried DDG in the past and didn't like that they weren't completely open source. I've been developing https://jivesearch.com https://jivesearch.com and it is similar to DDG with all the !bangs and tons of instant answers. It offers better privacy IMO because it is 100% open source and you can run it on your own server or even locally. Plus, we aren't hosted on AWS.
- fiveFeet 8y agoThank you!
- rufio1 8y agoUse Brave instead of Chrome (:
- ta3435353535 8y agoI've been using DDG for quite a few years now, and it's been great, but I wish they would stop with the Yummly recipe results when I search for recipes. Yummly is a cancer on the Internet, they're just an aggregator as far as I can tell, that gets in the way. We didn't need a recipe site aggregator, search engines work fine. Awful UI/UX while they try and advertise to you and shove things down your throat. DDG, banish Yummly please.
- moneytide1 8y agoAn very simple reason I use it: being able to push the arrow keys to cycle through search hits. Google used to have it, but it's gone now.