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DuckDuckGo Search Improvements
- anonu 7y agoI just need to stop doing !g in my ddg searches. None of these improvements point to helping fix that. You've got my attention, but search results need to be better. If you just focused on "coding related" search results that would make a world of difference. Maybe just put stack overflow on top.
- SubiculumCode 7y agoI would love a good coding search engine that would not try to change my query with layman auto-correct suggestions. I know this search was weird...but no I was not trying to type an order for chicken wings.
- WD-42 7y agoI actually emailed them (the have a specific address for suggestions) with this idea. It would be useful if there were topic specific search modes, coding would be an example, that weighted certain domains over others (like stackoverflow and readthedocs). You could imagine this being useful for other topics as well. Of course I never got a response. I think it might be impossible due to their model. They aren't really a search engine, more like a search aggregator, they get results from Bing mostly if I remember correctly.
- stereolambda 7y agoGenuine question, what would putting StackOverflow first improve compared to running "!so query", redirecting to SO's own search? These bang notation commands are often easy to guess, similarly !gi (I use it often, maybe should try more of DDG Images after reading the OP), !gscholar etc. I do like having an alternative general search engine, for one. So imposing a "coding" restriction would be a little sad. Maybe bangs could also indicate topics inside normal search. (edit: sorry, already suggested by a sibling!)
- DHPersonal 7y agoWhy not use Startpage for that?
- olliej 7y agoIt seems to only be UI improvements - the search itself is still terrible. I have DDG as my primary search engine, and I would say I have to repeat 50% of the queries in google, which has actual useful results after the first half page of ads.
- moretai 7y ago99% for me
- unholythree 7y agoIn the past year or so I feel like I've had to resort to bangs like !g more and more. It's like Boolean searches don't work with DDG anymore. Quotation marks in particular seem meaningless to it.
- nikivi 7y agoI wish Google introduced a dark theme too. Hopefully all sites on the internet become dark friendly one day without using external software to make it happen.
- input_sh 7y agoprefers-color-scheme is soon going to be a thing: https://caniuse.com/#search=prefers-color-scheme https://caniuse.com/#search=prefers-color-scheme The idea is to have one OS-wide dark theme switch and your browser to expose that preference to the websites. Latest iOS/Android/Windows already have that OS-wide preference, but, you know, it'll take quite a while before your favorite websites start supporting it.
- 333c 7y agoAs your link says, it already works for Firefox, Safari, and Chrome, which to me makes it "a thing." The only big browser that (apparently) doesn't support it is Edge.
- amirmasoudabdol 7y agoI’ve been adopting and promoting DuckDuckGo for more than 2–3 years now. I can say that the transition period was quite long actually. I was invoking !g very frequently at the beginning but I force myself to at least probe a few first items first before trying Google. After these years I rarely use Google, and every time that I actually search something on Google, before even seeing the result, Google welcomes me by the whole TOS/Privacy stuff and I close the tab and try the DDG a few more times. I think the friction of accepting their privacy policy makes me think twice. If you like DDG, recommend it to friends and coworkers. I usually put a link in newsletter if appropriate.
- dave5104 7y agoI've switched my default browser search engine to DDG, but I still find myself missing Google results. I miss those knowledge graph results (or whatever Google calls those sidebar boxes). Also, I've found that DDG cannot consistently display a weather forecast widget for the query "[zip code] weather". Sometimes it will show a weather forecast, and other times it will not display it--very frustrating. Any idea why? Even just refreshing the results will switch to displaying the weather widget, which leads me to think it's either a bug (I'm in Firefox), or they don't actually have the data for my zip code and are going to fetch it after I make my request?
- sp332 7y agoHow about !weather instead of just weather? You can even pick your source: https://duckduckgo.com/bang?q=weather https://duckduckgo.com/bang?q=weather
- Consultant32452 7y agoWhen I search !weather it ships me off to weather.com. I REALLY don't want that to happen. If I wanted to go there, I would have just typed in that URL.
- sp332 7y ago
- ddtaylor 7y agoI use DDG daily and have been for nearly 2 years now. My biggest complaint UI wise is that there are no page numbers. Yes, you can keep pressing "More results" but you can't easily resume or share search result pages etc. It's an insanely useful feature that is missing and I have no idea why.
- abhchand 7y agoIt takes a lot to even replicate some of the functionality of Google search. Huge credit to the DDG team for providing the second-best search results out there along with a much cleaner and privacy focused UI. I do occasionally go back to Google but that's for less than <10% of my queries and when I do it's after a few attempts at finding something on DDG. Definitely recommend to anyone for use.
- XCSme 7y agoIsn't Bing second best search engine?
- GolDDranks 7y agoI've been using DDG for a half year now, and I'm digging it. A feature request: A quick language filter! I use three languages in my daily live. However, false friends (similar words with different meanings) and the fact that some topics are more relevant in some languages make searching sometimes an agony. Google suffers from this too; I can change languages from the settings, but what I really want is a quick language filter, similar to the date filter, since I tend to juggle with that many, many times per day. Or would, if it weren't painful.
- jraph 7y agoMaybe a solution for you would be using Firefox containers, with one container per language?
- finalfantasia 7y agoIf you're using Firefox, this extension might be a search engine-agnostic solution for you: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/languageswitch/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/languageswitc...
- zpallin 7y agoI've been using duckduckgo as my primary search engine for a few years now, since 2014. It has improved significantly over that period of time and I am happy that it has come so far. I used to use g! flagrantly, but now I find myself using it less and less. Still, I wish there was some way to stop using yt! I think it's time to switch to the dark theme. Thanks duckduckgo!
- trpc 7y agoFor some unknown reason, nobody can post a criticizing comment on HN about DuckDuckGo poor search engine and the excessive and aggressive marketing used by the company without being punished, his comment getting buried and even getting banned. DuckDuckGo has one of the most successful and complex shilling online campaign armies on "tech"-related forums for years and years now.
- ocdtrekkie 7y agoDuckDuckGo isn't that big of a company. It's more than likely it just has a lot of legitimate enthusiastic fans.
- monkin 7y agoAre you not mistaking DDG with Stallman? ;)
- input_sh 7y agoA privacy-oriented search engine (as in, results without personalization) being hyped on a site called HackerNews? I'm shocked! What's next, HN commenters hyping Tor and Signal?
- bduerst 7y agoOkay, but how do you know Duck Duck Go is privacy orientated? Duck Duck Go is: - A privately-owned, for-profit corporation based in the U.S. and subject to its laws - Closed source software that is not open to the open-source community - Not doing third party privacy or security audits to verify claims of privacy - Basically a reskin of Bing (and Yandex) search engines while trying to masquerade as one The social media (and HN) comments promoting it are nearing creepy levels considering there is nothing to back up it's claims of privacy. Throw in their online promotions across Quora and other sites and their privacy-oriented branding efforts are suspicious considering they don't back them up.
- rvnx 7y agoThey will jump and say "no we have 300 hundreds sources and own index blabla" but in practice it's essentially a Yahoo reskin. Yahoo itself is running on top of Microsoft Bing which explains some similarities you have seen. DDG's official address even was duckduckgo-owned-server.yahoo.net When you click on ads, of course your IP and search query is sent to Verizon, and Microsoft. It's even directly sent by the client browser.
- mymythisisthis 7y agoSearch is broken, almost all searches I do now, the first dozen links are all crap (no content, gamed the algorithm). This is for Google or DuckDuckGo. I hate the modern internet.
- freediver 7y agoI rarely find this the case. Do you mind sharing some example queries?
- mymythisisthis 7y agoI was looking for the etymology of a city name. Got buried in ads.
- noja 7y agoFor those of you using a single search engine: try DDG, but if your query doesn't get the results you want (less often these days), prepend it with !g to search google instead. Or use Firefox's smart keywords https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-search-from-address-bar?redirectlocale=en-US&redirectslug=Smart+keywords https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-search-from-address... You could configure it to use: g something # to search google d something # to search DDG
- cuddlybacon 7y agoYou can also use the bang as a suffix, which I find a bit easier when I already have a query.
- corobo 7y agoYou can even !g put it in the middle of the query if your text cursor happens to be there
- reaperducer 7y agoI've found that both !{string} and {string}! works equally well.
- manaskarekar 7y ago> if your query doesn't get the results you want (less often these days), prepend it with !g to search google instead. The `!g` can show up anywhere, not just at the beginning of your query. Also, other possible `bang` shortcuts: https://duckduckgo.com/bang https://duckduckgo.com/bang
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- scns 7y agoMy favorite bangshortcuts are !gh for github and !aw for the archwiki
- IB885588 7y agoI'd use the DDG iOS app if only the search field wasn't at the very top, out of reach in one-hand phone typing... It's terrible UX on anything but the smallest phones out there.
- bitL 7y agoLast week I had a lot of issues with DDG where it barely returned a single page for some development-related queries it shined on before. I am wondering if something went wrong with their algorithms? I also periodically observed disappearance and reappearance of certain sites as a result of the same query (and not just different ranking, but them either completely vanishing from the results or you could get to them at some point).
- savingGrace 7y agoI keep trying DDG. Year after year I set all of my computers to use DDG. I last a week, a month, but in the end I always give up and set it back to Google. I was really hoping the title meant like it read. Maybe my hopefulness was reading too much into 'Search Improvements.' It is also possible that I don't need a search engine. I'm guessing that at least half of the questions/searches result in a post on SO or Wikipedia. There's probably a quarter of them that shoot me to some Medium entry. I guess I could always just bookmark those sites and skip the search engine..
- wlesieutre 7y agoI leave mine on ddg and when it occasionally comes up short append "!g" to search it on google
- sshagent 7y agoThats kind of where i was. Now though i'm persevering with DDG. If I'm unhappy with a search i just prefix it with a !g and runs it again via google. I hope that shows something to the DDG guys to know some things we still use Google for, but overall I'm fairly happy with DDG
- mey 7y agoThe !g (and other bangs) makes the switch seamless. If I don't like the result just rerun w/ !g.
- nikisweeting 7y agoAnd then after about 2 months of having to double-search 70% of my queries I always end up switching back...
- npo9 7y agoI double-search less than 10% of my queries. I’ve been using ddg for the last four years. I think people that have to double search very often have been trained by google to use queries that aren’t supported by ddg. Google proper has several value-adds besides the search results. Solving math equations put in the search bar for example. I usually use a dedicated service for things like converting feet to meters instead of typing it into google.
- kgwxd 7y agoI noticed Past Year a few days ago. I had hit the drop down to use Past Month, saw Past Year and thought, whoops I'm on Google. This eliminates the top reason I fallback to !g.
- spookybones 7y agoWow. Been waiting for this.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- Vaslo 7y agoI will be that guy and probably disliked for this but I use Bing. I get points for just doing what I always do and I almost always get what I need. I’ve got a few hundred Thousand points saved up and am waiting to get enough to buy something new. When Bing occasionally sucks like it does when searching for news, I go to Google. I use DDG as part of TOR but the results are just not that good, and I really want them to be.
- Grimm665 7y agoBing was an invaluable resource while traveling in China. Wikipedia is blocked by the GFW, and I was really missing it since I use it daily. Adding "wiki" to the end of most search terms on the English version of Bing will bring up a little section with almost the entire Wikipedia article loaded through Bing's domain, bypassing the block without the need for VPN, Shadowsocks, etc.
- johnpowell 7y agoI tried to use DDG so hard. Changed my browser, changed my phone. I have pretty much gotten away from Google for everything except Youtube. I ended up using !G around 25% of the time and got tired of it. So I ended up switching to Ecosia which is a cleaner front-end for Bing. I never really find myself using using google for search anymore. Bing is good enough.
- 333c 7y agoDDG itself is a front-end for bing. It gets results from there.
- bduerst 7y agoDDG is Bing search (unless you search in Russian, then it's Yandex). You may as well just keep using Bing and get the rewards.
- rvnx 7y agoIt's Yahoo actually and Yahoo is running on top of Bing. (Hold your finger on a DDG ad and you can see the chain of redirects).
- jolmg 7y agoSomething that just strikes me as weird is how the tabs (for images, videos, news, etc.) aren't really tabs to different pages, but rather some sort of inline expansion thing. When I look at images, the regular results are still there if you scroll to the bottom. They're there for a second until infinite scroll triggers and loads the next batch of images, pushing the regular results to the bottom again. It's not really an inconvenience. It's just weird. Why do it like that?
- cookie_monsta 7y agoI tried DDG for around a month. I really wanted to like it, but the results were just too inconsistent. I ended up using !g about 90% of the time after getting unsatisfactory results, which just doubled my time spent searching for what were sometimes quite simple things. I know it's more, but DDG really just feels like bing with privacy. I ended up using startpage.com which basically gives you Google results without all the stalky tracking nonsense. Now I only resort to Google for about 10% of searches.
- paul7986 7y agoDaily users and lately I use !g three out of ten searches which is a decrease. Apple Map integration and its recent satellite view is great! Things I still use Google for are... - getting Distance from one city to another - getting X business locations nearby with hours - movie times/listings And unfortunately - email...would love to use a DDG email service .. wish DDG would somehow let me use my iCloud email through its interface. I and I think millions of others would move away from Gmail then.
- throwawaymanbot 7y agoDoes it still use Russias "Yandex"???? Not using it if it does.
- mattsfrey 7y agoThe problem is google isn't just a search engine it's the information seeking megalith of our time. That little text input takes what you give it, determines what the hell you're trying to figure out, and delivers results on a level that just vastly supersedes anything else. I love the concept of DDG and would greatly prefer to use it, it's just a painfully inferior tool and shows no signs of coming close to what google offers.
- mempko 7y agoI don't bother with google anymore. In fact, google's search results for me have actually declined over time (maybe because I'm using it less?). DuckDuckGo is designed for someone like me. The Bang syntax is very tech friendly and it provides me with instant search access to hundreds of sites saving me precious time. It's faster if I know where the data is than google. Google is like word, and DuckDuckGo is like vim.
- jlarocco 7y agoThat's great if it works for you, but doesn't match my experience. I've been using DDG for years now, and rarely bother with Google any more. If I can't find what I need with DDG I have better luck with Bing than with Google.
- 1123581321 7y agoThe simplest explanation is that you don’t know how good Google is anymore. I use DDG because I think it’s important and have family members doing it too, but it costs us time when we search because the search completion is poor and the results aren’t as intelligent as I expect. Perhaps maintaining those expectations is my problem to solve, but that does not make the product’s deficiencies go away.
- macintux 7y agoIs Google that effective if you’re not logged in? I try not to give them any more hooks into my privacy than I need to, so I never search while logged in.
- ggambetta 7y agoHonest question: does anyone actually use DDG, other than the HN crowd? I don't know anyone in real life that has ever heard of it, let alone use it.
- jlawson 7y agoI know some blue collar folks who have talked about it. It's a thing.
- divyamistry 7y agoI think it's utilized more than we might think. DDG put up pretty big bill-boards around a lot of small and large cities. I believe those were mostly around "tech-forward cities" because it might be an easier crowd to get under the fold. They have a neat stats page where they track site traffic. https://duckduckgo.com/traffic https://duckduckgo.com/traffic It certainly looks promising. I've switched to ddg as my primary search, and I regularly do find queries that goog answers better. My partner often uses one of my devices and they have not complained about not being able to find what they were looking for. There's certainly power of default at play where people just don't want something seemingly unfamiliar, but there's also plenty of queries that the big G answers without a sweat that DDG just can't seem to gather info on. Anyways, that's a long winded way of saying that yea, I think a respectable number of "real world" people use dduckgo.
- cjohansson 7y agoI prefer DDG over other search-engines any day, the thing I love best is that the search results are impersonal to me, the problem with Google is that it learns your preferences and ends up being just an echo chamber for your own opinions
- Andrew_nenakhov 7y agoI have recently switched to DDG as the main search engine on all my devices, home and work. My estimate that 80% of all my queries are done with DDG, turning to Google and local Yandex only rarely.
- cabaalis 7y agoI'm a fan of ddg but have recently switched exclusively to ecosia. Sure, it's Bing. But the results I get are pretty decent. Only occasionally do I have to go to Google for better results.
- eternalny1 7y agoI love how it detects your OS settings and if you are in dark mode like I am, the page is in dark mode now too. I wish more sites would do this, but I have an extension for that.
- hart_russell 7y agoRemember to disable your adblock extensions on DDG. Let them earn some money for their privacy focused search engine.
- nbrempel 7y agoI've now completely switched to DDG. I still occasionally use !g, but it's quite rare. The results have been getting much better over time and I'd argue that the quality of Google's results is actually declining. Some queries return almost an entire 1st page full of ads.
- jotm 7y agoIf every search engine, and most websites, could stop displaying local results (which have nothing to do with what I search) that would be fantastic. Why in the world would you show me local results in the local language when I'm searching in English? Google is the worst offender, they so "helpfully" run stuff through their own translate, resulting in a special kind of garbage SERPs. Yes, I know there's settings, but I just can't be bothered to login every time on a different device or browser. And personalized search has its own problems.
- haolez 7y agoSuggestion: make the favicon match the theme selected, since we see it a lot in the address bar when using DuckDuckGo as the default search engine.
- saagarjha 7y ago> If you've selected a different theme (or have customized your theme) you can open the settings dropdown on the SERP and click the theme that matches your OS theme, and DuckDuckGo will begin matching your OS theme automatically moving forward. Unfortunately this has the side effect of clearing all my three customizations and forcing me to use the default. Is there a way to keep the theme colors but use my own font?
- jb3689 7y agoI've been really impressed with DuckDuckGo lately. Aside from directions I use it for almost everything
- emrehan 7y agoI use DDG everywhere. It really helps to use bangs to directly search in websites. It’s like a supercharged web tool. pro tip: Use !s for StartPage instead of Googling. It is a privacy preserving Google proxy.
- mattkevan 7y agoAfter 3 or so years using DDG full-time, it’s a shock landing back on Google and realising how many ads there are. Out of everything on the first page of a recent search, there were only 8 actual results - everything else was an ad. DDG feels to me like Google did when it first launched - simple, fast and unobtrusive. A world away from the incumbents, like AltaVista and Yahoo, that were intent on becoming ‘portals’, owning every moment of a user’s online activity. Google has become a portal.
- jcomis 7y agoDo you not use an adblocker?
- onlyrealcuzzo 7y agoCurious. What adblocker are you using? I use an AdBlock Plus & uBlock Origin, and when I Google something -- by default -- basically my entire search is ads. Do you need to add some configuration to uBlock Origin or AdBlock Plus? Are you in the US? I just use DuckDuckGo instead on Desktop. But since I have an Android phone, it's just easier to use Google.
- DuskStar 7y agoWait, do you use AdBlock Plus AND uBlock Origin at the same time? That might be your problem - when I run uBlock Origin alone it blocks all those Google search ads. AdBlock Plus has a program where they allow companies to buy spots on their ad whitelist, and I imagine that's interfering with uBlock Origin's more absolutist stance.
- alskdj21 7y agoI've been using DDG for the past three years and I'm impressed. The first few months of transition wasn't that easy as I' missing those Google results with dates. As of now, I would fall back to !g to get a quick overview of events(those tabs when you search e.g. champions league, whatever Google called it).
- ubercow13 7y agoOne thing that makes it impossible to switch to DDG for me is how bad the automatic correction is for simple typos and such. Google is incredibly good at offering to correct your search to what you meant if you completely botch the typing, eg. mashing “havlrt news” is fine to get here. DDG often can’t even correct single letter typos where the character is adjacent. On a phone there is usually no autocorrect or word suggestion in the search box as it doubles as the URL bar, so this means you have to manually fix typos to get the right results.
- caseyf7 7y agoPlease make search the focus of the mobile app. It’s more like a browser and it’s much too hard to tap the top of the phone for the search box. It should be more like the Google app. Make it easy to quickly search.
- ckrailo 7y agoSolarized Dark Duck Go Theme: https://duckduckgo.com/settings#appearance https://duckduckgo.com/settings#appearance Background Color: #002b36 Header Color: #073642 Result Title Color: #fdf6e3 Result Visited Title Color: #93a1a1 Result Description Color: #839496 Result URL Color: #268bd2 Result Hover, Module, and Dropdown Background Color: #073642
- ckrailo 7y agoDiscovered I can share it as a link: https://start.duckduckgo.com/?kae=%23073642&kj=%23073642++&kx=%23268bd2&k7=%23002B36&k8=%23839496&k9=%23fdf6e3&kaa=%2393a1a1 https://start.duckduckgo.com/?kae=%23073642&kj=%23073642++&k...
- Nasreddin_Hodja 7y agoThere are two annoying things that keep me from using ddg by default: * the way they do scrolling by up and down arrow buttons. * "load more" button instead of normal pagination. But sometimes I have to use ddg when google forces me to solve recaptcha (this often happens when I connect via mobile network).