7 ms·

I 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 w

I 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 ago
I leave mine on ddg and when it occasionally comes up short append "!g" to search it on google
sshagent 7y ago
Thats 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 ago
  The !g (and other bangs) makes the switch seamless. If I don't like the result just rerun w/ !g.
  - nikisweeting 7y ago
    And then after about 2 months of having to double-search 70% of my queries I always end up switching back...
    - npo9 7y ago
      I 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.
    - JoshTriplett 7y ago
      Every month or two, I run into a query where I don't find anything useful via DDG and expected to, so I try it again with !g...and end up confirming that Google doesn't give me anything useful either. It's been years since I last found a search where Google gave me more useful results. I'd love to know what those 70% of your queries look like. (One interesting observation: when first switching, I found that I liked the DDG results a lot better when I styled them to look like Google results; they felt more "right" somehow.)
      - StavrosK 7y ago
        For me, there are some queries that Google usually gives me better results. I couldn't tell you exactly what (mostly obscure code snippets, I think), and they're a relative minority, but sometimes I do use !g. It's not that often, though, and I'm a happy DDG user on all my computers.
    - nilkn 7y ago
      I too developed this habit. Then I forced myself to stop and realized that DDG actually was working fine for the great majority of my queries. I almost wish the bang wasn't there, because it makes it so easy to second guess DDG's results and develop the habit of always using !g when in reality DDG is actually quite good at this point.
    - sbkg0002 7y ago
      I had the same. Tried qwant.com and now I have it once every 50 searches.
- Ididntdothis 7y ago
  I wish i could create a button that quickly reran the search with “!g” instead of typing it.
  - nefitty 7y ago
    Should be pretty easy. Create a bookmarklet that grabs the window.location.href, then appends '!g' to the beginning of the query and changes the location to the appended string.
  - elliekelly 7y ago
    Alfred lets you set up "fallback searches": https://www.alfredapp.com/help/features/default-results/fallback-searches/ https://www.alfredapp.com/help/features/default-results/fall...
  - durovo 7y ago
    You can bookmark the bookmarklet that I just created at https://codepen.io/durovo-the-typescripter/pen/GRRqRKX https://codepen.io/durovo-the-typescripter/pen/GRRqRKX
- squarefoot 7y ago
  Same here. I tried DDG years ago and gave up pretty quickly because it wasn't there, then tried again more recently and was positively impressed, but it still lacked some accuracy, then I tried again last year and made the switch. So is DDG better than Google to me? Nope, and hopefully it will never be, because the only way to get on par with Google, let alone beating them, would imply on DDG side to get as much data as possible about me just like Google does, which would defeat their entire raison d'etre. So I'm okay with DDG being slightly less accurate, and when it doesn't find what I'm looking for I revert to Google for that single search. Currently I use Google on the average from zero to 3 times per day, which is ok. That's however a choice by someone who values his privacy more than having to press a few more keys or waiting a bit more time to find something; I wouldn't expect the average user to agree with this. DDG could one day conquer hearts and minds of most technical people, but going beyond that will make an entirely different and much harder challenge.
- AcerbicZero 7y ago
  I'm on the other side of this I think. I've been trying to use DDG for everything for the past month or so, but the number of times I'm having to stop, copy what I just searched for, add a !g in front of it, and search again is just getting silly. If there were some way I could just use a hotkey to redo the same search in google, this wouldn't be such a big deal, but having to break up my flow with all the extra copy/pasting or retyping is getting frustrating.
  - jtdor 7y ago
    Something I just recently noticed: You don’t have to put the bang in front of the search. It can actually be anywhere in there: “!g foo bar”, “foo !g bar”, “foo bar !g” all work. Saves quite a lot of time.
  - yesco 7y ago
    You can just put the !g at the end you know, also I'm not sure why you are copy/pasting?
nikisweeting 7y ago
I always end up missing Google's operator behavior. "Kubuntu" OR "KDE" -gnome site:forums.ubuntu.com It's really powerful to require that every result must contain either "Kubuntu" OR "KDE" exactly, especially when searching technical projects that have variant spellings / brandings.
- worble 7y ago
  Google actually honors that for you? It seems for me that no matter how hard I try to tell it that I _absolutely_ want an exact search term, it tells me to go fuck myself and returns results that don't include it. DDG seems to do a much better job at honoring this. Look Google, if you can't find any pages with my search term, it's OK to return nothing! That's valid! It means I need to change my query! Stop trying to make a square peg fit a round hole!
  - kens 7y ago
    Putting terms in double quotes works perfectly for me on Google, forcing results to contain the exact term. I use this very often and never have problems with it. So it's puzzling to see comments that it doesn't work.
    - RussianCow 7y ago
      I've had many cases where I put exact terms in double quotes, but the Google search results still contained pages that do not contain the quoted text at all. It doesn't happen often, but it's often enough to be frustrating.
      - gcarvalho 7y ago
        I'm with you. Google not only show results where your quotation-marked token is not present but will also include results with synonyms to your token. I think I'll analyze my browser history of Google searches that are similar enough because I'm tweaking the query to match what I want.
      - 7y ago
wishinghand 7y ago
I found it inferior back in 2015 for programming but not general use. Nowadays I don't ever get frustrated looking for things, whether for work or personal use. What deficiencies are you finding?
NovaS1X 7y ago
Interesting. I've been using DDG exclusivley for about 2-3 years now and I forget that I'm not using Google half the time. It's just my normal state at this point.
WD-42 7y ago
I'm not sure DDG can actually do much to improve search results with the way they operate. They aren't a first class search engine, they get results from other search engines. Perform a search on DDG, then do the same search on Bing. You'll notice the first results are the same. In order for search results to get better on DDG, they first need to get better on their partner search engines (which I believe Bing is the main) so as far as I can tell it's out of their control.
- MadWombat 7y ago
  > They aren't a first class search engine, they get results from other search engines. Perform a search on DDG, then do the same search on Bing You search for the thing and you find the thing. Why do you expect the results, especially the top results, to be different? Is there any other evidence that they are not doing searches themselves?
  - rvnx 7y ago
    duckduckgo-owned-server.yahoo.net ? Same results and order as Yahoo on obscure keywords
    - rjf72 7y ago
      Which keywords? I just searched (as posted above) for "extent space taco secure". It breaks bing. Yahoo returns results that are closer (including some shared oddities like storage units in Nashville), but they're still very distinctly unique.
      - rvnx 7y ago
        "squalala" Country Estonia 100% match between DDG and Yahoo from my tests
  - WD-42 7y ago
    Because that's how it works? They even document it themselves: https://help.duckduckgo.com/results/sources/?redir=1 https://help.duckduckgo.com/results/sources/?redir=1
stinos 7y ago
I always had the impression Google is pretty good at guessing what you want even if you try your best to enter crappy search terms, whereas you have to tell DDG more 'exactly' what you want, pre-Google era-style. But if you do the results are usually spot on. But I've been on DDG for years so I'm not sure if this distinction is still there.
thinkloop 7y ago
That can't be! DDG has gotten really good. I'm only about 5% !g. S.O. and wiki come up reliably too. Any examples?
haolez 7y ago
Sometimes using !g improves a search, but for the first time in years I'm seeing the opposite in some cases, including computer science related stuff.
Quequau 7y ago
When I first started using DDG, I had a similar experience but every time I went back I'd read some tech news that showed that I really needed to take privacy more seriously. So I'd be back on DDG again. Then I'd use the google bang for stuff that didn't seem privacy sensitive and where I was getting results that didn't seem all that great. Ultimately though I'm a lazy person and once I figured out how to get DDG to return the results I was really looking for (e.g. the wiki bang and weather thing) I eventually quit using google for almost everything. DDG is fine for me, even if it's not perfect and even if occasionally I have futz with search parameters or very occasionally fall back to a google bang. I guess I'll take good enough with better privacy than occasionally better with privacy baggage on the scale that I can only guess about.
yummypaint 7y ago
One of the most noticeable differences for me is how much copyright cebsorship there is on google now. For many years it was possible to find a stream for most popular stuff on the first page of google, but now it can be quite challenging to find anything worthwhile. Google has ended up efficiently delisting all the good pages, leaving only attack sites and endless popup ad circlejerks for their users. It's night and day compared to ddg.
s_chaudhary 7y ago
Maybe this is a good time to plug an extension I published which adds a convenient Google button to switch to Google after seeing DuckDuckGo results: https://twitter.com/ylogx/status/1131152424591339520?s=21 https://twitter.com/ylogx/status/1131152424591339520?s=21 When scrolling with mouse, it feels convenient to have this as a button instead of typing it manually.

wlesieutre 7y ago

I leave mine on ddg and when it occasionally comes up short append "!g" to search it on google

sshagent 7y ago

Thats 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 ago
The !g (and other bangs) makes the switch seamless. If I don't like the result just rerun w/ !g.
- nikisweeting 7y ago
  And then after about 2 months of having to double-search 70% of my queries I always end up switching back...
  - npo9 7y ago
    I 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.
  - JoshTriplett 7y ago
    Every month or two, I run into a query where I don't find anything useful via DDG and expected to, so I try it again with !g...and end up confirming that Google doesn't give me anything useful either. It's been years since I last found a search where Google gave me more useful results. I'd love to know what those 70% of your queries look like. (One interesting observation: when first switching, I found that I liked the DDG results a lot better when I styled them to look like Google results; they felt more "right" somehow.)
    - StavrosK 7y ago
      For me, there are some queries that Google usually gives me better results. I couldn't tell you exactly what (mostly obscure code snippets, I think), and they're a relative minority, but sometimes I do use !g. It's not that often, though, and I'm a happy DDG user on all my computers.
  - nilkn 7y ago
    I too developed this habit. Then I forced myself to stop and realized that DDG actually was working fine for the great majority of my queries. I almost wish the bang wasn't there, because it makes it so easy to second guess DDG's results and develop the habit of always using !g when in reality DDG is actually quite good at this point.
  - sbkg0002 7y ago
    I had the same. Tried qwant.com and now I have it once every 50 searches.
Ididntdothis 7y ago
I wish i could create a button that quickly reran the search with “!g” instead of typing it.
- nefitty 7y ago
  Should be pretty easy. Create a bookmarklet that grabs the window.location.href, then appends '!g' to the beginning of the query and changes the location to the appended string.
- elliekelly 7y ago
  Alfred lets you set up "fallback searches": https://www.alfredapp.com/help/features/default-results/fallback-searches/ https://www.alfredapp.com/help/features/default-results/fall...
- durovo 7y ago
  You can bookmark the bookmarklet that I just created at https://codepen.io/durovo-the-typescripter/pen/GRRqRKX https://codepen.io/durovo-the-typescripter/pen/GRRqRKX
squarefoot 7y ago
Same here. I tried DDG years ago and gave up pretty quickly because it wasn't there, then tried again more recently and was positively impressed, but it still lacked some accuracy, then I tried again last year and made the switch. So is DDG better than Google to me? Nope, and hopefully it will never be, because the only way to get on par with Google, let alone beating them, would imply on DDG side to get as much data as possible about me just like Google does, which would defeat their entire raison d'etre. So I'm okay with DDG being slightly less accurate, and when it doesn't find what I'm looking for I revert to Google for that single search. Currently I use Google on the average from zero to 3 times per day, which is ok. That's however a choice by someone who values his privacy more than having to press a few more keys or waiting a bit more time to find something; I wouldn't expect the average user to agree with this. DDG could one day conquer hearts and minds of most technical people, but going beyond that will make an entirely different and much harder challenge.
AcerbicZero 7y ago
I'm on the other side of this I think. I've been trying to use DDG for everything for the past month or so, but the number of times I'm having to stop, copy what I just searched for, add a !g in front of it, and search again is just getting silly. If there were some way I could just use a hotkey to redo the same search in google, this wouldn't be such a big deal, but having to break up my flow with all the extra copy/pasting or retyping is getting frustrating.
- jtdor 7y ago
  Something I just recently noticed: You don’t have to put the bang in front of the search. It can actually be anywhere in there: “!g foo bar”, “foo !g bar”, “foo bar !g” all work. Saves quite a lot of time.
- yesco 7y ago
  You can just put the !g at the end you know, also I'm not sure why you are copy/pasting?

nikisweeting 7y ago

I always end up missing Google's operator behavior. "Kubuntu" OR "KDE" -gnome site:forums.ubuntu.com It's really powerful to require that every result must contain either "Kubuntu" OR "KDE" exactly, especially when searching technical projects that have variant spellings / brandings.

worble 7y ago
Google actually honors that for you? It seems for me that no matter how hard I try to tell it that I _absolutely_ want an exact search term, it tells me to go fuck myself and returns results that don't include it. DDG seems to do a much better job at honoring this. Look Google, if you can't find any pages with my search term, it's OK to return nothing! That's valid! It means I need to change my query! Stop trying to make a square peg fit a round hole!
- kens 7y ago
  Putting terms in double quotes works perfectly for me on Google, forcing results to contain the exact term. I use this very often and never have problems with it. So it's puzzling to see comments that it doesn't work.
  - RussianCow 7y ago
    I've had many cases where I put exact terms in double quotes, but the Google search results still contained pages that do not contain the quoted text at all. It doesn't happen often, but it's often enough to be frustrating.
    - gcarvalho 7y ago
      I'm with you. Google not only show results where your quotation-marked token is not present but will also include results with synonyms to your token. I think I'll analyze my browser history of Google searches that are similar enough because I'm tweaking the query to match what I want.
    - 7y ago

wishinghand 7y ago

I found it inferior back in 2015 for programming but not general use. Nowadays I don't ever get frustrated looking for things, whether for work or personal use. What deficiencies are you finding?

NovaS1X 7y ago

Interesting. I've been using DDG exclusivley for about 2-3 years now and I forget that I'm not using Google half the time. It's just my normal state at this point.

WD-42 7y ago

I'm not sure DDG can actually do much to improve search results with the way they operate. They aren't a first class search engine, they get results from other search engines. Perform a search on DDG, then do the same search on Bing. You'll notice the first results are the same. In order for search results to get better on DDG, they first need to get better on their partner search engines (which I believe Bing is the main) so as far as I can tell it's out of their control.

MadWombat 7y ago
> They aren't a first class search engine, they get results from other search engines. Perform a search on DDG, then do the same search on Bing You search for the thing and you find the thing. Why do you expect the results, especially the top results, to be different? Is there any other evidence that they are not doing searches themselves?
- rvnx 7y ago
  duckduckgo-owned-server.yahoo.net ? Same results and order as Yahoo on obscure keywords
  - rjf72 7y ago
    Which keywords? I just searched (as posted above) for "extent space taco secure". It breaks bing. Yahoo returns results that are closer (including some shared oddities like storage units in Nashville), but they're still very distinctly unique.
    - rvnx 7y ago
      "squalala" Country Estonia 100% match between DDG and Yahoo from my tests
- WD-42 7y ago
  Because that's how it works? They even document it themselves: https://help.duckduckgo.com/results/sources/?redir=1 https://help.duckduckgo.com/results/sources/?redir=1

stinos 7y ago

I always had the impression Google is pretty good at guessing what you want even if you try your best to enter crappy search terms, whereas you have to tell DDG more 'exactly' what you want, pre-Google era-style. But if you do the results are usually spot on. But I've been on DDG for years so I'm not sure if this distinction is still there.

thinkloop 7y ago

That can't be! DDG has gotten really good. I'm only about 5% !g. S.O. and wiki come up reliably too. Any examples?

haolez 7y ago

Sometimes using !g improves a search, but for the first time in years I'm seeing the opposite in some cases, including computer science related stuff.

Quequau 7y ago

When I first started using DDG, I had a similar experience but every time I went back I'd read some tech news that showed that I really needed to take privacy more seriously. So I'd be back on DDG again. Then I'd use the google bang for stuff that didn't seem privacy sensitive and where I was getting results that didn't seem all that great. Ultimately though I'm a lazy person and once I figured out how to get DDG to return the results I was really looking for (e.g. the wiki bang and weather thing) I eventually quit using google for almost everything. DDG is fine for me, even if it's not perfect and even if occasionally I have futz with search parameters or very occasionally fall back to a google bang. I guess I'll take good enough with better privacy than occasionally better with privacy baggage on the scale that I can only guess about.

yummypaint 7y ago

One of the most noticeable differences for me is how much copyright cebsorship there is on google now. For many years it was possible to find a stream for most popular stuff on the first page of google, but now it can be quite challenging to find anything worthwhile. Google has ended up efficiently delisting all the good pages, leaving only attack sites and endless popup ad circlejerks for their users. It's night and day compared to ddg.

s_chaudhary 7y ago

Maybe this is a good time to plug an extension I published which adds a convenient Google button to switch to Google after seeing DuckDuckGo results: https://twitter.com/ylogx/status/1131152424591339520?s=21 https://twitter.com/ylogx/status/1131152424591339520?s=21 When scrolling with mouse, it feels convenient to have this as a button instead of typing it manually.