8 ms·

DDG is great - have been using it for months and I really enjoy the results. Google searches seem to be more of an echo chamber whereas DDG results seem to be m

DDG is great - have been using it for months and I really enjoy the results. Google searches seem to be more of an echo chamber whereas DDG results seem to be more representative across a broad spectrum of sites.

skolos 8y ago
From time to time I'm trying to switch to DDG. However I found its utility very limited by the fact that they don't show time-stamp for search results and there is no "Past Year" time filter.
bad_user 8y ago
To be honest I've never noticed the filter bubble everybody is talking about with Google. They can infer a lot from context, like city or previous searches, however that's primarily helping users, because coming up with precise search queries is not something that normal people can do and even power users like us fail at it. I have been using DuckDuckGo because I'm making health related queries and I'm pretty scared of companies profiling me based on that. But the experience with DDG has been worse, although it is definitely improving. And it's bearable, plus protecting my privacy is worth it.
- 1001101 8y ago
  > To be honest I've never noticed the filter bubble everybody is talking about with Google. Filter bubbles are personalized, so YMMV.
  - rocqua 8y ago
    Nice Kafka trap!
    - dvtrn 8y ago
      That's not what a Kafkatrap is. Though I suppose if one stretches the metaphor far enough...
  - bad_user 8y ago
    I agree that it might not be as bad outside the US, as in the US they have more data to analyze and I'm in the EU, being more interested in news related to the EU. But if we exclude location as a factor, it's not much of an argument because I have the benefit of constantly using both Google and DuckDuckGo, where DDG is now the primary search engine and Google is the fallback. If Google personalizes the results in a way as to bias the information based on my political views or whatever, that's not something I have noticed. And believe me, I'd like more ammo when I criticize Google, but this ain't it in my experience.
  - MattSayar 8y ago
    True, but I've often switched back and forth between Personal Results and Global Results and rarely see a difference.
- orwin 8y ago
  If you're not a native english speaker working in tech, google will sometime show you (in my case) French forums or websites even if the query was entirely written in english. It is quite annoying, and i often get better results using ddg and !g than using google itself.
  - bad_user 8y ago
    I have the opposite problem. I'm Romanian and when searching in Romanian on DuckDuckGo I often get results in English, Spanish, Italian or French, because Romanian is a romance language. Local searches are terrible on DDG.
  - reaperducer 8y ago
    I have a similar problem sometimes. When I'm in Japan, Google seems to try hard to give me results localized to Japan. When I'm in the United States and need to get information about something in Japan, it can't cope with the fact that I'm not in Japan. Where Google thinks I am (even with location tracking turned off) is paramount. Even if I search google.co.jp, I get American results.
- Taylor_OD 8y ago
  I felt like Google only worked well for things I'd done extensive searches on in the past. Like once they collected enough data on me to know WHAT I wanted to know about that topic the search results were better. Otherwise they were not very good. DDG feels like it gives me the same search results every time. Typically they are more helpful than google would have been early on but less helpful than googles were later on. This is entirely anecdotal... Anyone else experience something similar?
- freeflight 8y ago
  > To be honest I've never noticed the filter bubble everybody is talking about with Google. It's extremely obvious/bad when you try Googling some old article about an topic, often political, that has recently regained popularity. You can try adding all kinds of words from the headline, certain terms will always lead to the results being dominated with "current news", like with Russia/Ukraine or more recently with China. Which is made worse by the inability to specify a time-frame for the search. In that regard, the best Google can do is narrow it down to "last changed" with the extended search, which only goes as far back as "last year", anything further back than that and you might as well have to find the needle by manually looking trough the haystack of pages upon pages of search results. It can be extremely frustrating how search results are seemingly dominated by the very same, handful, of articles offering only the very same takes, with only slight variations. It feels quite similar to how YouTube keeps recommending the same kind of weird videos to a large amount of people, like you are being "funneled".
  - marcoperaza 8y ago
    You can specify a date range in Google btw. You click “tools” and then it will present a date option.
    - kyrra 8y ago
      This is exactly what I do as well. Date range filter in on Google is excellent to find old news.
    - Rebelgecko 8y ago
      Unfortunately on mobile you can only use the date ranges that Google suggests (last hour, day, week, month, or year). Which is unfortunate since half the time I want to filter by date it's so I can exclude recent results.
    - freeflight 8y ago
      I remember it being there, but for whatever reason, I was always looking for it under "extended search". Thanks for pointing me in the right direction!
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
burger_moon 8y ago
I've been using it as my primary search engine for about 2 years now. I only use google now when I want to look up places because I don't like that ddg uses yelp. I never felt google searches were bad, nor do I have problems with the results from ddg. This was just a privacy decision I guess, one that is easy to make with little sacrifice.
- cenal 8y ago
  Its been my primary search for about two years as well. I like that it uses Yelp vs Google listings. Yelp has its issues but Google listings are usually less reliable.
simias 8y ago
I always made sure to log out of Google to avoid this issue, however after a couple of years using the Duck the main thing I notice when I end up on Google is how cluttered the search results have become. You have a bunch of widgets everywhere trying to give you "smart" results, related searches etc... Usually when I search for something I don't care about any of that, I just want to see the organic matches, not "People also ask" and "People also search for" widgets that are of no value to me. DDG only has the wikipedia widget (which I actually find pretty useful generally) and sometimes the video or image carousel at the top which is sometimes relevant and doesn't waste a lot of screen real estate. I hope it'll continue that way.
- elliekelly 8y ago
  > I always made sure to log out of Google to avoid this issue Does this work? I was under the impression that had little to no impact on their tracking/suggestions for "personalization" purposes
- creddit 8y ago
  WRT the cluttered results, at this point I pretty much refuse to use Google search on mobile because it's so often that the results are presented on the most useless, cluttered web page I've seen from any major internet company. Abysmal, really. It's especially bad if searching for a product or movie or anything else that can be bought/sold.
realradicalwash 8y ago
more representative in a broader sense - and also really good for specific searches. they really have been upping their game and continue to do so. the other day, I was looking for a specific paper, not so old, from 2012. admittedly, for papers, I still use Google, I guess because of the link to G scholar. I couldn't find it within about 5mins and switched to DDG. it was on p.1 of DDG. that was really great to see.
stephen_g 8y ago
Yeah, I'd made two serious attempts at switching over the last few years, and only this last time have I stuck with it. Almost a year now on my phone and laptop. I still use Google on my work computer but might eventually switch that one too. The main things I find myself still using the !g code for is news and maps. But for other searches I finally find I get just as good results.
Kiro 8y ago
As usual, I feel I need to point out that DDG gets all its results from Bing and Yahoo. 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 also source from a variety of partners, including Oath (formerly Yahoo) and Bing. What this means is that they use 400 sources for things like Instant Answers and other widgets but Yahoo and Bing for all their organic search results.
- reaperducer 8y ago
  What this means is that they use 400 sources for things like Instant Answers and other widgets but Yahoo and Bing for all their organic search results. So, the DuckDuckBot that you cited doesn't contribute to DDG's organic results? 90% of what Google returns to me is Wikipedia, IMDB, and other verticals anyway, so it's not that much different IME.
  - Kiro 8y ago
    > So, the DuckDuckBot that you cited doesn't contribute to DDG's organic results? Correct. > We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we also source from a variety of partners, including Oath (formerly Yahoo) and Bing. Traditional links = organic results.
laurent123456 8y ago
I wouldn't say it's better than Google - it's a bit worse for non-English queries, and similar for English ones. Both have in common that if they don't know the answer to your query, they assume they know better than you and give you unrelated results. I'd prefer if they'd just print "Can't find anything" and let me tweak my query instead of sending back random results.
- gradys 8y ago
  It's difficult in general to know that the results you're returning are definitely not what the user wants. You're not seeing them think that they know better than you, you're seeing lower confidence results. Perhaps search engines could just not show you lower confidence results, but then you risk making it impossible to find certains kinds of content, and you forgo the rarer, but still extant wins, you get from showing those results. Users can generally tell when results aren't relevant and will reformulate anyway.
zigzaggy 8y ago
I agree. I switched to DDG years ago, and brought several people with me. I never have any problems finding what I need. I’m as de-Googled as I can be. I caught a lot of slack (?) from some people over it. But it’s a relief for me.
- stedaniels 8y ago
  *flack
  - nasredin 8y ago
    "flak" https://en.Wikipedia.org/wiki/8.8_cm_Flak_18/36/37/41 https://en.Wikipedia.org/wiki/8.8_cm_Flak_18/36/37/41
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- macinjosh 8y ago
  *flak see: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/flak https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/flak
- zigzaggy 8y ago
  Flak - exactly the word I was looking for, thanks all! I knew that didn’t sound quite right.
utopcell 8y ago
There are no DDG results: DDG serves Bing results. What you are really saying is that you prefer Bing to Google results.
- zuron7 8y ago
  No they aren't. DuckDuckGo does add some of their own stuff in there. Ending up with different results. You can verify.
  - utopcell 8y ago
    Of course they have other stuff, but their web search results come directly from Yahoo/Bing and the Russian search engine Yandex. This is widely known [1]. On their FAQ though [2], they mention Yahoo and Bing, but "forget" to mention Yandex. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DuckDuckGo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DuckDuckGo [2] https://duck.co/help/results/sources https://duck.co/help/results/sources
    - Kiro 8y ago
      Can someone explain why all the comments mentioning this get downvoted? utopcell even links to DuckDuckGo directly where they openly confirm it.
  - mda 8y ago
    Yes they do, mostly bing + yahoo and yandex. Do they give which percentage of backends they use for any non trivial search?
- mda 8y ago
  plus they really sell themelves as the all gloriuos knight, savior of people from evils of big bad wolf. Fine, but who is actually under the shiny helmet? Answer is not that glorious. The knight is just a puppet.
konart 8y ago
DDG works good with siple search phrases. Once you can't really formulate something like 'db2 error -418' or 'apple pie recipe' and have to go with 'something is not really working with this and that in some certain case' - DDG is useless compared to Google in my experience.

skolos 8y ago

From time to time I'm trying to switch to DDG. However I found its utility very limited by the fact that they don't show time-stamp for search results and there is no "Past Year" time filter.

bad_user 8y ago

To be honest I've never noticed the filter bubble everybody is talking about with Google. They can infer a lot from context, like city or previous searches, however that's primarily helping users, because coming up with precise search queries is not something that normal people can do and even power users like us fail at it. I have been using DuckDuckGo because I'm making health related queries and I'm pretty scared of companies profiling me based on that. But the experience with DDG has been worse, although it is definitely improving. And it's bearable, plus protecting my privacy is worth it.

1001101 8y ago
> To be honest I've never noticed the filter bubble everybody is talking about with Google. Filter bubbles are personalized, so YMMV.
- rocqua 8y ago
  Nice Kafka trap!
  - dvtrn 8y ago
    That's not what a Kafkatrap is. Though I suppose if one stretches the metaphor far enough...
- bad_user 8y ago
  I agree that it might not be as bad outside the US, as in the US they have more data to analyze and I'm in the EU, being more interested in news related to the EU. But if we exclude location as a factor, it's not much of an argument because I have the benefit of constantly using both Google and DuckDuckGo, where DDG is now the primary search engine and Google is the fallback. If Google personalizes the results in a way as to bias the information based on my political views or whatever, that's not something I have noticed. And believe me, I'd like more ammo when I criticize Google, but this ain't it in my experience.
- MattSayar 8y ago
  True, but I've often switched back and forth between Personal Results and Global Results and rarely see a difference.
orwin 8y ago
If you're not a native english speaker working in tech, google will sometime show you (in my case) French forums or websites even if the query was entirely written in english. It is quite annoying, and i often get better results using ddg and !g than using google itself.
- bad_user 8y ago
  I have the opposite problem. I'm Romanian and when searching in Romanian on DuckDuckGo I often get results in English, Spanish, Italian or French, because Romanian is a romance language. Local searches are terrible on DDG.
- reaperducer 8y ago
  I have a similar problem sometimes. When I'm in Japan, Google seems to try hard to give me results localized to Japan. When I'm in the United States and need to get information about something in Japan, it can't cope with the fact that I'm not in Japan. Where Google thinks I am (even with location tracking turned off) is paramount. Even if I search google.co.jp, I get American results.
Taylor_OD 8y ago
I felt like Google only worked well for things I'd done extensive searches on in the past. Like once they collected enough data on me to know WHAT I wanted to know about that topic the search results were better. Otherwise they were not very good. DDG feels like it gives me the same search results every time. Typically they are more helpful than google would have been early on but less helpful than googles were later on. This is entirely anecdotal... Anyone else experience something similar?
freeflight 8y ago
> To be honest I've never noticed the filter bubble everybody is talking about with Google. It's extremely obvious/bad when you try Googling some old article about an topic, often political, that has recently regained popularity. You can try adding all kinds of words from the headline, certain terms will always lead to the results being dominated with "current news", like with Russia/Ukraine or more recently with China. Which is made worse by the inability to specify a time-frame for the search. In that regard, the best Google can do is narrow it down to "last changed" with the extended search, which only goes as far back as "last year", anything further back than that and you might as well have to find the needle by manually looking trough the haystack of pages upon pages of search results. It can be extremely frustrating how search results are seemingly dominated by the very same, handful, of articles offering only the very same takes, with only slight variations. It feels quite similar to how YouTube keeps recommending the same kind of weird videos to a large amount of people, like you are being "funneled".
- marcoperaza 8y ago
  You can specify a date range in Google btw. You click “tools” and then it will present a date option.
  - kyrra 8y ago
    This is exactly what I do as well. Date range filter in on Google is excellent to find old news.
  - Rebelgecko 8y ago
    Unfortunately on mobile you can only use the date ranges that Google suggests (last hour, day, week, month, or year). Which is unfortunate since half the time I want to filter by date it's so I can exclude recent results.
  - freeflight 8y ago
    I remember it being there, but for whatever reason, I was always looking for it under "extended search". Thanks for pointing me in the right direction!

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

burger_moon 8y ago

I've been using it as my primary search engine for about 2 years now. I only use google now when I want to look up places because I don't like that ddg uses yelp. I never felt google searches were bad, nor do I have problems with the results from ddg. This was just a privacy decision I guess, one that is easy to make with little sacrifice.

cenal 8y ago
Its been my primary search for about two years as well. I like that it uses Yelp vs Google listings. Yelp has its issues but Google listings are usually less reliable.

simias 8y ago

I always made sure to log out of Google to avoid this issue, however after a couple of years using the Duck the main thing I notice when I end up on Google is how cluttered the search results have become. You have a bunch of widgets everywhere trying to give you "smart" results, related searches etc... Usually when I search for something I don't care about any of that, I just want to see the organic matches, not "People also ask" and "People also search for" widgets that are of no value to me. DDG only has the wikipedia widget (which I actually find pretty useful generally) and sometimes the video or image carousel at the top which is sometimes relevant and doesn't waste a lot of screen real estate. I hope it'll continue that way.

elliekelly 8y ago
> I always made sure to log out of Google to avoid this issue Does this work? I was under the impression that had little to no impact on their tracking/suggestions for "personalization" purposes
creddit 8y ago
WRT the cluttered results, at this point I pretty much refuse to use Google search on mobile because it's so often that the results are presented on the most useless, cluttered web page I've seen from any major internet company. Abysmal, really. It's especially bad if searching for a product or movie or anything else that can be bought/sold.

realradicalwash 8y ago

more representative in a broader sense - and also really good for specific searches. they really have been upping their game and continue to do so. the other day, I was looking for a specific paper, not so old, from 2012. admittedly, for papers, I still use Google, I guess because of the link to G scholar. I couldn't find it within about 5mins and switched to DDG. it was on p.1 of DDG. that was really great to see.

stephen_g 8y ago

Yeah, I'd made two serious attempts at switching over the last few years, and only this last time have I stuck with it. Almost a year now on my phone and laptop. I still use Google on my work computer but might eventually switch that one too. The main things I find myself still using the !g code for is news and maps. But for other searches I finally find I get just as good results.

Kiro 8y ago

As usual, I feel I need to point out that DDG gets all its results from Bing and Yahoo. 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 also source from a variety of partners, including Oath (formerly Yahoo) and Bing. What this means is that they use 400 sources for things like Instant Answers and other widgets but Yahoo and Bing for all their organic search results.

reaperducer 8y ago
What this means is that they use 400 sources for things like Instant Answers and other widgets but Yahoo and Bing for all their organic search results. So, the DuckDuckBot that you cited doesn't contribute to DDG's organic results? 90% of what Google returns to me is Wikipedia, IMDB, and other verticals anyway, so it's not that much different IME.
- Kiro 8y ago
  > So, the DuckDuckBot that you cited doesn't contribute to DDG's organic results? Correct. > We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we also source from a variety of partners, including Oath (formerly Yahoo) and Bing. Traditional links = organic results.

laurent123456 8y ago

I wouldn't say it's better than Google - it's a bit worse for non-English queries, and similar for English ones. Both have in common that if they don't know the answer to your query, they assume they know better than you and give you unrelated results. I'd prefer if they'd just print "Can't find anything" and let me tweak my query instead of sending back random results.

gradys 8y ago
It's difficult in general to know that the results you're returning are definitely not what the user wants. You're not seeing them think that they know better than you, you're seeing lower confidence results. Perhaps search engines could just not show you lower confidence results, but then you risk making it impossible to find certains kinds of content, and you forgo the rarer, but still extant wins, you get from showing those results. Users can generally tell when results aren't relevant and will reformulate anyway.

zigzaggy 8y ago

I agree. I switched to DDG years ago, and brought several people with me. I never have any problems finding what I need. I’m as de-Googled as I can be. I caught a lot of slack (?) from some people over it. But it’s a relief for me.

stedaniels 8y ago
*flack
- nasredin 8y ago
  "flak" https://en.Wikipedia.org/wiki/8.8_cm_Flak_18/36/37/41 https://en.Wikipedia.org/wiki/8.8_cm_Flak_18/36/37/41
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
macinjosh 8y ago
*flak see: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/flak https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/flak
zigzaggy 8y ago
Flak - exactly the word I was looking for, thanks all! I knew that didn’t sound quite right.

utopcell 8y ago

There are no DDG results: DDG serves Bing results. What you are really saying is that you prefer Bing to Google results.

zuron7 8y ago
No they aren't. DuckDuckGo does add some of their own stuff in there. Ending up with different results. You can verify.
- utopcell 8y ago
  Of course they have other stuff, but their web search results come directly from Yahoo/Bing and the Russian search engine Yandex. This is widely known [1]. On their FAQ though [2], they mention Yahoo and Bing, but "forget" to mention Yandex. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DuckDuckGo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DuckDuckGo [2] https://duck.co/help/results/sources https://duck.co/help/results/sources
  - Kiro 8y ago
    Can someone explain why all the comments mentioning this get downvoted? utopcell even links to DuckDuckGo directly where they openly confirm it.
- mda 8y ago
  Yes they do, mostly bing + yahoo and yandex. Do they give which percentage of backends they use for any non trivial search?
mda 8y ago
plus they really sell themelves as the all gloriuos knight, savior of people from evils of big bad wolf. Fine, but who is actually under the shiny helmet? Answer is not that glorious. The knight is just a puppet.

konart 8y ago

DDG works good with siple search phrases. Once you can't really formulate something like 'db2 error -418' or 'apple pie recipe' and have to go with 'something is not really working with this and that in some certain case' - DDG is useless compared to Google in my experience.