6 ms·

I first tried DDG in its early years and it just didn't yield the results I needed, I tried it again a couple of years ago and have stuck with it ever since as

I first tried DDG in its early years and it just didn't yield the results I needed, I tried it again a couple of years ago and have stuck with it ever since as it has must better results these days.

jb3689 8y ago
Totally agree. Had a similar experience as well and then tried again a few months ago and am happy. I do still need to jump over to Le Goog for some searches though. The UI supports a good amount of tweaking which was helpful for getting me used to the switch too
- pixxel 8y ago
  !g search term
  - vanadium 8y ago
    !s = Startpage, anonymizing by proxy the Google SERPs. I know, I'm having to retrain my DDG Bang muscle memory myself.
    - pixxel 8y ago
      Oh! Many thanks :)
    - owaty 8y ago
      Do they have a contract with google? Or how do they get around captchas and cease and desists?
      - vanadium 8y ago
        "Startpage acts as an intermediary between you and Google, so your searches are completely private. Startpage submits your query to Google anonymously, then returns Google results to you privately. Google never sees you and does not know who made the request; they only see Startpage." From: https://support.startpage.com/index.php?/Knowledgebase/Article/View/158/22/what-is-the-relationship-between-startpage-and-google https://support.startpage.com/index.php?/Knowledgebase/Artic... More: https://support.startpage.com/index.php?/Knowledgebase/List/Index/22/google https://support.startpage.com/index.php?/Knowledgebase/List/...
        owaty 8y ago
        This one answers my question better: https://support.startpage.com/index.php?/Knowledgebase/Article/View/147/22/why-does-google-let-startpage-access-their-search-results https://support.startpage.com/index.php?/Knowledgebase/Artic... > Why does Google let Startpage access their search results? > Startpage.com has a contract with Google that allows us to use their official "Syndicated Web Search" feed, so we have to pay them to get those results. So what is their own business model? Do they show ads? (I disabled adblock but didn't see any.)
        saagarjha 8y ago
        Yes, they show non-personalized sponsored links: https://www.startpage.com/en/search/privacy-policy.html https://www.startpage.com/en/search/privacy-policy.html
    - shafyy 8y ago
      Why not just go directly on Startpage instead of DDG -> Startpage?
  - Alan_Dillman 8y ago
    Thank you for teaching me this. It seems there are a whole bunch `!gm search term` will access google maps for instance.
    - NeedMoreTea 8y ago
      https://duckduckgo.com/bang https://duckduckgo.com/bang There's thousands of them !w Wikipedia !hn Here :) !auk Amazon UK !so Stack Overflow
mrweasel 8y ago
Every now and then I search for something and don't get the results I'd expect. So I turn to Google, but for the past year or so I noticed that Google can't find what I expect for those search terms either. The difference seems to be that Google starts guessing and excluding keywords, without understanding that those keywords where important. For me personally, Google is a less pleasant experience these days. The DuckDuckGo privacy extension is currently the only type of "ad-blocker" I currently use. I really like the look and feel, as well as the functionality. The automatic downgrade from an A rating for the lack of an entry on https://tosdr.org/ https://tosdr.org/ is a little over the top for me though.
- jdgoesmarching 8y ago
  THANK YOU. I feel crazy when I tell people this but I 100% agree. Google seems to look at your search as a general guide now rather than actual parameters. I also have to surround each word in quotes or they get excluded on the SECOND OR THIRD RESULT. I'm very upset because this hinders my daily work and research. I'm starting to rely on Bing which is definitely worse than old Google but may be better than current Google. I want to like DDG but it's normally missing article dates or other small features I depend on. I'll keep checking in to see if this changes.
  - solarkraft 8y ago
    Agreed. Feels nice to know others have the same problems.
    - verelo 8y ago
      ha, a few weeks back a very similar post came up and i expressed that i felt the DDG results were letting me down. I just actually switched back to Google yesterday, i tried hard, but it just got too annoying having to search for 50% of things twice.
  - Y_Y 8y ago
    Is there any possible way the old google could be resurrected? By google themselves or just someone cloning the tech? My google-fu keeps getting worse, on pages I know I've found handily in the past. I'd almost pay for a good search, cash or personal data or whatever.
WalterSear 8y ago
My experience has been the opposite. I tried switching to Brave and DuckDuckGo over the last six months, but found myself opening google and re-running the search so often that I recently gave up, and, with misgivings, reset my browser and search preferences back to google. Duckduckgo just never found what I was looking for, and, in broader searches, would return relatively fewer results.
- bad_user 8y ago
  I went through the same process, until I realized that Google’s results aren’t better for me because I evolved. What Google does is to have context and to use that context to make the queries more specific. They use for example your location and your history of searches. However being privacy conscious, I deleted my Google history and disabled the collecting of history in my Google account. And then the results became visibly worse. This is important because when people complain loudly about the difference, they usually have a search history in Google going back a decade, reflecting a trail of embarrassing moments of course that most couldn’t make public. Not many people are curious to look at that history, although to Google’s credit, they do expose it in full detail and a nice interface. With DDG you just have to be a little more explicit. For example searching for “ruby” won’t yield results related to programming (except for ruby-lang.org), but searching for “ruby programming” does. So in general you just have to be a little more specific and we’re talking about a word or two. Nowadays whenever I can’t find something on DDG on my first try, I’m confident that I won’t find it with Google either. And lately I feel like DDG is better, maybe due to my changing search patterns. The real gain is privacy and this reflects in the searches you’re doing. I can’t convince myself to search for medical conditions on Google anymore. What if I’d get classified as a diabetic (I’m not)? What if that data leaks and this affects my credit score? No thank you.
  - mr_spothawk 8y ago
    My experience has mirrored yours. Today i found, a little bit surprisingly, that when i went to !G to get a different selection of results, what i got was considerably worse than DDG. my guess as to the reasons for this particular failure of !G is that, because i have been gradually shifting to fastmail for the past 1.2years and the chain of messages between myself and the company i was looking up never managed to make it from linkedin --> gmail.
zolthrowaway 8y ago
I agree. In general, DDG tends to have pretty solid results now. I'm glad it doesn't think it knows what I'm searching for better than I do. The one advantage I will give Google is that the layout can be better in some situations. For example, if I'm getting multiple results from StackOverflow and MDN on the same query, I like how Google groups them. Also, searching for something like sports scores is a better experience on Google because I don't need to click into any links. Other than that, I find DDG just as good if not better in almost every other area.
m-p-3 8y ago
It's my default search engine now, and the bangs shortcuts are handy if I need to temporarily override the search engine (ie: !g for Google, !w for Wikipedia, etc).
vinbreau 8y ago
I use it, but it fails in several areas. It has no filter to limit searches to a year, their options stop after 1 month. Their image search results also lack the depth of Google's. These are features I actually use heavily. So even though I have my browser defaulted to DDG, I find myself having to go to Google several times a day. I really hope they improve this.
taneq 8y ago
Same, at the start I regularly dropped back to Google if I couldn't find what I was looking for, the last few times I tried that the Google results were even less helpful than the DDG ones. Maybe my Google-fu is just rusty, though.
codazoda 8y ago
My main problem with Google was that the entire first screen (above the fold) was full of advertising and included no actual search results, in the majority of my searches. DuckDuckGo is better at that, for now, so I made the switch about a year ago.
- yesenadam 8y ago
  It just occurred to me that I never see ads on Google. I'm not sure why. Possible reasons: I have an old computer, use out-of-date browsers, and my computer is set to spanish (but almost all search results are in english), browser set to 'block web advertising'. But..never any ads, at all - no sponsored results etc, nothing, not on the side or on search results or at the top of the page. (I have seen a load of them on other peoples' computers' google searches, so I know what they look like.)
- dorgo 8y ago
  As I started to work in an advertising agency some years ago they told me about ads on google. I didn't believe them until they showed me. It's beyond me how anybody can use the web without an ad blocker.
Tomte 8y ago
I rarely get useful results from Duckduckgo, so !g is my usual first attempt, not a secondary thing after trying DDG's results. For example, just now, I came across "ED survivor". No idea what "ED" means here (it's eating disorder). I just put it into DDG and got nothing on the first page that looked like it could be pertinent: A user name "ED survivor" on Instagram posting about vegetarianism, Ed Stafford on Wikipedia, "ED: The Survivor" (a mod for a computer game evidently), Devil Survivor Full HD (a film obviously, no idea what ED means here), a few more in this vein, until the page ends with the TV series Survivor on Wikipedia. Google: First hit "Template:ED survivor" in Wikipedia (and that page contains the words "eating disorder". Second hit "Eating Disorder Survivors Wall", third hit "Surviving ED" from HealthyPlace (so it's health-related – and the snippet shown on the result page starts with "Eating Disorders recovery is a long road.). The rest of the results on Google are all similar, all of them(!) clearly tell me what ED means in this context. DDG gave me crap, none of the results(!) came even close to answering my question. This is not a singular occurence, just a thing I wanted to know a few minutes ago. I'd love to take DDG's search results, but when not narrowed down to specific origins with bang commands, the results are usually worthless. Edit: and before people tell me that I should have used quotation marks around my search terms, great, let's try that: Two results with "We would like to show you a description here but the site won't allow us.". From the top three results, one times out, one redirects to a sports betting site, and one to a product in an online apothecary (nothing to do with eating disorder). Then penis extension. Erectile dysfunction, something general about mental disorder, and again two results about penis enlargement.
camillomiller 8y ago
It's unfortunately unusable in any language except English

I first tried DDG in its early years and it just didn't yield the results I needed, I tried it again a couple of years ago and have stuck with it ever since as it has must better results these days.

jb3689 8y ago

Totally agree. Had a similar experience as well and then tried again a few months ago and am happy. I do still need to jump over to Le Goog for some searches though. The UI supports a good amount of tweaking which was helpful for getting me used to the switch too

pixxel 8y ago
!g search term
- vanadium 8y ago
  !s = Startpage, anonymizing by proxy the Google SERPs. I know, I'm having to retrain my DDG Bang muscle memory myself.
  - pixxel 8y ago
    Oh! Many thanks :)
  - owaty 8y ago
    Do they have a contract with google? Or how do they get around captchas and cease and desists?
    - vanadium 8y ago
      "Startpage acts as an intermediary between you and Google, so your searches are completely private. Startpage submits your query to Google anonymously, then returns Google results to you privately. Google never sees you and does not know who made the request; they only see Startpage." From: https://support.startpage.com/index.php?/Knowledgebase/Article/View/158/22/what-is-the-relationship-between-startpage-and-google https://support.startpage.com/index.php?/Knowledgebase/Artic... More: https://support.startpage.com/index.php?/Knowledgebase/List/Index/22/google https://support.startpage.com/index.php?/Knowledgebase/List/...
      - owaty 8y ago
        This one answers my question better: https://support.startpage.com/index.php?/Knowledgebase/Article/View/147/22/why-does-google-let-startpage-access-their-search-results https://support.startpage.com/index.php?/Knowledgebase/Artic... > Why does Google let Startpage access their search results? > Startpage.com has a contract with Google that allows us to use their official "Syndicated Web Search" feed, so we have to pay them to get those results. So what is their own business model? Do they show ads? (I disabled adblock but didn't see any.)
        saagarjha 8y ago
        Yes, they show non-personalized sponsored links: https://www.startpage.com/en/search/privacy-policy.html https://www.startpage.com/en/search/privacy-policy.html
  - shafyy 8y ago
    Why not just go directly on Startpage instead of DDG -> Startpage?
- Alan_Dillman 8y ago
  Thank you for teaching me this. It seems there are a whole bunch `!gm search term` will access google maps for instance.
  - NeedMoreTea 8y ago
    https://duckduckgo.com/bang https://duckduckgo.com/bang There's thousands of them !w Wikipedia !hn Here :) !auk Amazon UK !so Stack Overflow

mrweasel 8y ago

Every now and then I search for something and don't get the results I'd expect. So I turn to Google, but for the past year or so I noticed that Google can't find what I expect for those search terms either. The difference seems to be that Google starts guessing and excluding keywords, without understanding that those keywords where important. For me personally, Google is a less pleasant experience these days. The DuckDuckGo privacy extension is currently the only type of "ad-blocker" I currently use. I really like the look and feel, as well as the functionality. The automatic downgrade from an A rating for the lack of an entry on https://tosdr.org/ https://tosdr.org/ is a little over the top for me though.

jdgoesmarching 8y ago
THANK YOU. I feel crazy when I tell people this but I 100% agree. Google seems to look at your search as a general guide now rather than actual parameters. I also have to surround each word in quotes or they get excluded on the SECOND OR THIRD RESULT. I'm very upset because this hinders my daily work and research. I'm starting to rely on Bing which is definitely worse than old Google but may be better than current Google. I want to like DDG but it's normally missing article dates or other small features I depend on. I'll keep checking in to see if this changes.
- solarkraft 8y ago
  Agreed. Feels nice to know others have the same problems.
  - verelo 8y ago
    ha, a few weeks back a very similar post came up and i expressed that i felt the DDG results were letting me down. I just actually switched back to Google yesterday, i tried hard, but it just got too annoying having to search for 50% of things twice.
- Y_Y 8y ago
  Is there any possible way the old google could be resurrected? By google themselves or just someone cloning the tech? My google-fu keeps getting worse, on pages I know I've found handily in the past. I'd almost pay for a good search, cash or personal data or whatever.

WalterSear 8y ago

My experience has been the opposite. I tried switching to Brave and DuckDuckGo over the last six months, but found myself opening google and re-running the search so often that I recently gave up, and, with misgivings, reset my browser and search preferences back to google. Duckduckgo just never found what I was looking for, and, in broader searches, would return relatively fewer results.

bad_user 8y ago
I went through the same process, until I realized that Google’s results aren’t better for me because I evolved. What Google does is to have context and to use that context to make the queries more specific. They use for example your location and your history of searches. However being privacy conscious, I deleted my Google history and disabled the collecting of history in my Google account. And then the results became visibly worse. This is important because when people complain loudly about the difference, they usually have a search history in Google going back a decade, reflecting a trail of embarrassing moments of course that most couldn’t make public. Not many people are curious to look at that history, although to Google’s credit, they do expose it in full detail and a nice interface. With DDG you just have to be a little more explicit. For example searching for “ruby” won’t yield results related to programming (except for ruby-lang.org), but searching for “ruby programming” does. So in general you just have to be a little more specific and we’re talking about a word or two. Nowadays whenever I can’t find something on DDG on my first try, I’m confident that I won’t find it with Google either. And lately I feel like DDG is better, maybe due to my changing search patterns. The real gain is privacy and this reflects in the searches you’re doing. I can’t convince myself to search for medical conditions on Google anymore. What if I’d get classified as a diabetic (I’m not)? What if that data leaks and this affects my credit score? No thank you.
- mr_spothawk 8y ago
  My experience has mirrored yours. Today i found, a little bit surprisingly, that when i went to !G to get a different selection of results, what i got was considerably worse than DDG. my guess as to the reasons for this particular failure of !G is that, because i have been gradually shifting to fastmail for the past 1.2years and the chain of messages between myself and the company i was looking up never managed to make it from linkedin --> gmail.

zolthrowaway 8y ago

I agree. In general, DDG tends to have pretty solid results now. I'm glad it doesn't think it knows what I'm searching for better than I do. The one advantage I will give Google is that the layout can be better in some situations. For example, if I'm getting multiple results from StackOverflow and MDN on the same query, I like how Google groups them. Also, searching for something like sports scores is a better experience on Google because I don't need to click into any links. Other than that, I find DDG just as good if not better in almost every other area.

m-p-3 8y ago

It's my default search engine now, and the bangs shortcuts are handy if I need to temporarily override the search engine (ie: !g for Google, !w for Wikipedia, etc).

vinbreau 8y ago

I use it, but it fails in several areas. It has no filter to limit searches to a year, their options stop after 1 month. Their image search results also lack the depth of Google's. These are features I actually use heavily. So even though I have my browser defaulted to DDG, I find myself having to go to Google several times a day. I really hope they improve this.

taneq 8y ago

Same, at the start I regularly dropped back to Google if I couldn't find what I was looking for, the last few times I tried that the Google results were even less helpful than the DDG ones. Maybe my Google-fu is just rusty, though.

codazoda 8y ago

My main problem with Google was that the entire first screen (above the fold) was full of advertising and included no actual search results, in the majority of my searches. DuckDuckGo is better at that, for now, so I made the switch about a year ago.

yesenadam 8y ago
It just occurred to me that I never see ads on Google. I'm not sure why. Possible reasons: I have an old computer, use out-of-date browsers, and my computer is set to spanish (but almost all search results are in english), browser set to 'block web advertising'. But..never any ads, at all - no sponsored results etc, nothing, not on the side or on search results or at the top of the page. (I have seen a load of them on other peoples' computers' google searches, so I know what they look like.)
dorgo 8y ago
As I started to work in an advertising agency some years ago they told me about ads on google. I didn't believe them until they showed me. It's beyond me how anybody can use the web without an ad blocker.

Tomte 8y ago

I rarely get useful results from Duckduckgo, so !g is my usual first attempt, not a secondary thing after trying DDG's results. For example, just now, I came across "ED survivor". No idea what "ED" means here (it's eating disorder). I just put it into DDG and got nothing on the first page that looked like it could be pertinent: A user name "ED survivor" on Instagram posting about vegetarianism, Ed Stafford on Wikipedia, "ED: The Survivor" (a mod for a computer game evidently), Devil Survivor Full HD (a film obviously, no idea what ED means here), a few more in this vein, until the page ends with the TV series Survivor on Wikipedia. Google: First hit "Template:ED survivor" in Wikipedia (and that page contains the words "eating disorder". Second hit "Eating Disorder Survivors Wall", third hit "Surviving ED" from HealthyPlace (so it's health-related – and the snippet shown on the result page starts with "Eating Disorders recovery is a long road.). The rest of the results on Google are all similar, all of them(!) clearly tell me what ED means in this context. DDG gave me crap, none of the results(!) came even close to answering my question. This is not a singular occurence, just a thing I wanted to know a few minutes ago. I'd love to take DDG's search results, but when not narrowed down to specific origins with bang commands, the results are usually worthless. Edit: and before people tell me that I should have used quotation marks around my search terms, great, let's try that: Two results with "We would like to show you a description here but the site won't allow us.". From the top three results, one times out, one redirects to a sports betting site, and one to a product in an online apothecary (nothing to do with eating disorder). Then penis extension. Erectile dysfunction, something general about mental disorder, and again two results about penis enlargement.

camillomiller 8y ago

It's unfortunately unusable in any language except English