12 ms·

DDG has gotten better to the point that I have switched all of my browsers to them and the number of times I have had to fall back to Google Search has dwindled

DDG has gotten better to the point that I have switched all of my browsers to them and the number of times I have had to fall back to Google Search has dwindled to almost nothing. If you were turned off by poor results in the past give them another try.

lostmsu 7y ago
Even better, recently I started to notice when I have to fallback to Google, that usually brings me nothing new. Still do it out of habit, but that will have to go soon.
- taborj 7y ago
  I thought this was just me and the esoteric technical issues I've been searching for lately. But...you're right. Even with general searches.
0x38B 7y ago
I'll second this. DDG has been my default for 2+ years. Google is better for obscure topics that lack good keywords to find them by. I usually know when I need to '!g'.
- klingonopera 7y ago
  What's great about this is that we're still telling DDG what searches we need to do on Google, so they have plenty of diagnostic data available to better their searches (as opposed to skipping DDG entirely). I do have one nitpick though: I clear all private data, and recently I was forced to get along with 16 kbit bandwidth (yes, slower than 56K, and yes, I spent a lot of time on HN for obvious reasons), and DDG definitely loads more data than Google for a query. Google needed maybe 20 seconds to load a page, DDG IIRC just timed out after some point. I'm guessing it's JS-frameworks?
  - lonelappde 7y ago
    And ddg can improve its results by slurping in Google's #1 result for every !g query, like Bing got caught doing.
  - frosted-flakes 7y ago
    DDG does have a lite HTML version of their site that is much faster. https://duckduckgo.com/lite https://duckduckgo.com/lite
lawn 7y ago
Absolutely. They're only really worse at localized results for me (Swedish).
loceng 7y ago
How often do you use !g or other bangs?
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- FrancoisBosun 7y ago
  In 5 years, I used !g maybe once. I use !pg, !wen and others very frequently.
- sp332 7y ago
  I use !g for specific types of searches. Like when I want to compare things, Google handles "vs" queries much better than DDG.
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  I use alternate bangs all the time, which is a major win for DDG, as it skips the "go to the site first, or specify "site:<host> <search>", which actually is NOT equivalent as bang searches use the site or service's native search. Fave bangs: !w wikipedia !wikisource WikiSource !etym Online etymological dictionary !ngram Google Ngram viewer !trends Google Trends !gbooks Google Books !scholar Google Scholar !tineye Image match search !so stack overflow !hn Hacker News !twitter Obv. !thread Threadreader App, Twitter thread presentation, preferred to above ;-) !img Image search (now DDG, Google Image is !gimg) !worldcat Worldcat union catalog !osm Open Streetmap !wayback Internet Archive Wayback Machine !archive Internet Archive global (non-Web + web) search !dict & !define Word look-ups !s startpage (proxied Google search) !bangs will give you a list of bangs / search form for patterns.
- microcolonel 7y ago
  I use them all the time. !wt for Wiktionary, !forvo for forvo, !ji for jisho.org, !w for Wikipedia, !ud for Urban Dictionary, !clojuredocs, and a load of others.
- fl0under 7y ago
  Ones I use frequently are !g google !maps google maps !yt youtube !mwt merriam-webster thesaurus !images ddg images Even though I only regularly use these few I find them very useful.
Eric_WVGG 7y ago
I use Google on my desktop and iPad, and DDG on my iPhone due to Google AMP. While I find that DDG is pretty good for anything work related (e.g. programming stuff), it’s mostly worthless for things like "best chinese food in [some neighborhood]" or "shop cord knit stockings"… ironically, exactly the kind of stuff I gravitate toward my phone for.
- neltnerb 7y ago
  I suppose it's not surprising that DDG is weaker in areas where Google has leveraged their products from other markets to enhance their search results. Well "markets" loosely since advertisers are the actual market, but I mean discrete products. Google has Google Maps. That's why Google can find the best Chinese food in your neighborhood, it's learned to interpret that as a semi-map query right? They also have ads, which means cleaner data on who sells what right? DDG to me seems to be great for when I need to search for keywords rather than a concept or multi-dimensional query for which DDG doesn't have the other n dimensions of source data.
- krtkush 7y ago
  For me, on iPhone Siri handles these kind of contextual questions for me while DDG takes care of other generic stuff.
dstaley 7y ago
I tried switching my phone and computer's default search engine to DDG a few weeks ago, and the quality of programming-related searches was just abysmal compared to Google. Straightforward searches were basically the same results, but searching for error messages or library-specific terms would have a great result in the top slot on Google but nowhere on DDG. I found that I needed to use `!g` for every other search, and figured that if it was causing this much additional effort it would make more sense to just default to Google. One idea that I've had is building an extension that monitors Google searches and compares the results you click on to DDG. You could monitor which percentage of your chosen results appear on the first page of DDG. Maybe then I could actually quantify which queries are problematic.
- NotSammyHagar 7y ago
  That's counter to what i have found. Are you just seeing this on local or location related searches?
  - dstaley 7y ago
    No, those are a whole separate thing that I wouldn't expect DDG to match the quality of. It's primarily been software development related queries. For example, a few days ago I searched for "react dnd expected to find a valid target" on Google, and the first result is a GitHub issue describing the issue. All the results on the first page are related to the react-dnd library. The first result for the same query on DDG is an article titled "11 Prison Truths, Revealed By A Female Guard". None of the results on the first page are programming related.
    - NeedMoreTea 7y ago
      Don't use react, and it's not in my search set, but regularly and happily search for programming and tech issues on DDG. I find it's far better than Google these days. So I thought I'd try your search without the quotes, as your first result is so far from my experience. First result: https://github.com/react-dnd/react-dnd/issues/1127 https://github.com/react-dnd/react-dnd/issues/1127 Then a couple more from react-dnd's github, then the other seven on the first page are a mix of relevant SO, and github. Seems quite a few people have opened issues on that topic! Maybe they fixed it. :)
colordrops 7y ago
It's not just that DDG is good enough - it seems that DDG has better results than Google for many searches. Any topic where Google engineers and their algorithms believe they know better than you will return "worse" results. I believe they are weighting results by some measure of truth-value for a particular type of information, and this is bad for a couple reasons. First, they might get the measure of truth wrong, either out of ignorance or conflict of interest. Second, you might want a more literal search where the keywords match exactly even though the info might not be very accurate, for instance if you were researching alternate theories. Examples of where Google search fails to return relevant results because they know better than you are medical, political, illicit/illegal, conspiracy theory, and famous people. Often times the first page of results don't contain the keywords and don't seem to have anything to do with your search query, whereas DDG results do.
- Liquix 7y ago
  Thanks for explaining! It's infuriating to craft a search query containing all the keywords/operators needed to return relevant results - a search query that would return relevant results 24 months ago - only to see Google ignore 75% of keywords completely, extract some commonly-used pair of words from the query, and return 5 pages of results based exclusively on said pair. What was the motive behind this change? Was the previous algorithm really giving people results so bad that Google felt they had to hamstring their flagship product? It seemed to be getting better and better until this...
  - marcosdumay 7y ago
    This is a long going change. Google has been making their search fuzzier for years claiming it gets better results for most people. For a while I personally experienced better results on the queries I didn't know the exact name of the thing I was searching for. But those days are gone, because nowadays their search is so fuzzy that it can't extract the correct context from those queries.
  - staticassertion 7y ago
    Because you aren't supposed to Google search by entering in a bunch of keywords you're supposed to ask Google questions. Not that your workflow is incorrect, I'm a DDG user and I do the same thing, but that's what Google wants people using their product to do.
dstroot 7y ago
Can someone explain the DDG business model? How does this company make money? How am I as a user being monetized? At least I understand Google’s approach.
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  Advertising. Untargeted advertising.
- marcosdumay 7y ago
  There are some ads there. I don't think they have been very successful selling them, but it looks like search is cheaper to provide than it used to be.
- tagawa 7y ago
  As others have said, we get revenue from contextual advertising as opposed to behavioural advertising. In other words, if you search for "car" you'd see a car-related ad rather than an ad based on your search history or personal profile (which we don't have anyway). There's more info about our business model here: https://spreadprivacy.com/duckduckgo-revenue-model/ https://spreadprivacy.com/duckduckgo-revenue-model/ Disclaimer: DuckDuckGo staff
oh_hello 7y ago
I have had the same experience. Over the years I tried DDG and gave up a few different times. A year or so ago I gave it another try and never left.
keithnz 7y ago
I have mixed results, sometimes DDG is pretty good, a lot of times its about the same, but reasonably regularly it leaves me high and dry on an entire page of results and then usually the top hits on google give me what I want. However, I always go DDG first, then !g if I don't get what I want.
- stjohnswarts 7y ago
  this is when you use !sp instead of google :)

lostmsu 7y ago

Even better, recently I started to notice when I have to fallback to Google, that usually brings me nothing new. Still do it out of habit, but that will have to go soon.

taborj 7y ago
I thought this was just me and the esoteric technical issues I've been searching for lately. But...you're right. Even with general searches.

0x38B 7y ago

I'll second this. DDG has been my default for 2+ years. Google is better for obscure topics that lack good keywords to find them by. I usually know when I need to '!g'.

klingonopera 7y ago
What's great about this is that we're still telling DDG what searches we need to do on Google, so they have plenty of diagnostic data available to better their searches (as opposed to skipping DDG entirely). I do have one nitpick though: I clear all private data, and recently I was forced to get along with 16 kbit bandwidth (yes, slower than 56K, and yes, I spent a lot of time on HN for obvious reasons), and DDG definitely loads more data than Google for a query. Google needed maybe 20 seconds to load a page, DDG IIRC just timed out after some point. I'm guessing it's JS-frameworks?
- lonelappde 7y ago
  And ddg can improve its results by slurping in Google's #1 result for every !g query, like Bing got caught doing.
- frosted-flakes 7y ago
  DDG does have a lite HTML version of their site that is much faster. https://duckduckgo.com/lite https://duckduckgo.com/lite

lawn 7y ago

Absolutely. They're only really worse at localized results for me (Swedish).

loceng 7y ago

How often do you use !g or other bangs?

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
FrancoisBosun 7y ago
In 5 years, I used !g maybe once. I use !pg, !wen and others very frequently.
sp332 7y ago
I use !g for specific types of searches. Like when I want to compare things, Google handles "vs" queries much better than DDG.
dredmorbius 7y ago
I use alternate bangs all the time, which is a major win for DDG, as it skips the "go to the site first, or specify "site:<host> <search>", which actually is NOT equivalent as bang searches use the site or service's native search. Fave bangs: !w wikipedia !wikisource WikiSource !etym Online etymological dictionary !ngram Google Ngram viewer !trends Google Trends !gbooks Google Books !scholar Google Scholar !tineye Image match search !so stack overflow !hn Hacker News !twitter Obv. !thread Threadreader App, Twitter thread presentation, preferred to above ;-) !img Image search (now DDG, Google Image is !gimg) !worldcat Worldcat union catalog !osm Open Streetmap !wayback Internet Archive Wayback Machine !archive Internet Archive global (non-Web + web) search !dict & !define Word look-ups !s startpage (proxied Google search) !bangs will give you a list of bangs / search form for patterns.
microcolonel 7y ago
I use them all the time. !wt for Wiktionary, !forvo for forvo, !ji for jisho.org, !w for Wikipedia, !ud for Urban Dictionary, !clojuredocs, and a load of others.
fl0under 7y ago
Ones I use frequently are !g google !maps google maps !yt youtube !mwt merriam-webster thesaurus !images ddg images Even though I only regularly use these few I find them very useful.

Eric_WVGG 7y ago

I use Google on my desktop and iPad, and DDG on my iPhone due to Google AMP. While I find that DDG is pretty good for anything work related (e.g. programming stuff), it’s mostly worthless for things like "best chinese food in [some neighborhood]" or "shop cord knit stockings"… ironically, exactly the kind of stuff I gravitate toward my phone for.

neltnerb 7y ago
I suppose it's not surprising that DDG is weaker in areas where Google has leveraged their products from other markets to enhance their search results. Well "markets" loosely since advertisers are the actual market, but I mean discrete products. Google has Google Maps. That's why Google can find the best Chinese food in your neighborhood, it's learned to interpret that as a semi-map query right? They also have ads, which means cleaner data on who sells what right? DDG to me seems to be great for when I need to search for keywords rather than a concept or multi-dimensional query for which DDG doesn't have the other n dimensions of source data.
krtkush 7y ago
For me, on iPhone Siri handles these kind of contextual questions for me while DDG takes care of other generic stuff.

dstaley 7y ago

I tried switching my phone and computer's default search engine to DDG a few weeks ago, and the quality of programming-related searches was just abysmal compared to Google. Straightforward searches were basically the same results, but searching for error messages or library-specific terms would have a great result in the top slot on Google but nowhere on DDG. I found that I needed to use `!g` for every other search, and figured that if it was causing this much additional effort it would make more sense to just default to Google. One idea that I've had is building an extension that monitors Google searches and compares the results you click on to DDG. You could monitor which percentage of your chosen results appear on the first page of DDG. Maybe then I could actually quantify which queries are problematic.

NotSammyHagar 7y ago
That's counter to what i have found. Are you just seeing this on local or location related searches?
- dstaley 7y ago
  No, those are a whole separate thing that I wouldn't expect DDG to match the quality of. It's primarily been software development related queries. For example, a few days ago I searched for "react dnd expected to find a valid target" on Google, and the first result is a GitHub issue describing the issue. All the results on the first page are related to the react-dnd library. The first result for the same query on DDG is an article titled "11 Prison Truths, Revealed By A Female Guard". None of the results on the first page are programming related.
  - NeedMoreTea 7y ago
    Don't use react, and it's not in my search set, but regularly and happily search for programming and tech issues on DDG. I find it's far better than Google these days. So I thought I'd try your search without the quotes, as your first result is so far from my experience. First result: https://github.com/react-dnd/react-dnd/issues/1127 https://github.com/react-dnd/react-dnd/issues/1127 Then a couple more from react-dnd's github, then the other seven on the first page are a mix of relevant SO, and github. Seems quite a few people have opened issues on that topic! Maybe they fixed it. :)

colordrops 7y ago

It's not just that DDG is good enough - it seems that DDG has better results than Google for many searches. Any topic where Google engineers and their algorithms believe they know better than you will return "worse" results. I believe they are weighting results by some measure of truth-value for a particular type of information, and this is bad for a couple reasons. First, they might get the measure of truth wrong, either out of ignorance or conflict of interest. Second, you might want a more literal search where the keywords match exactly even though the info might not be very accurate, for instance if you were researching alternate theories. Examples of where Google search fails to return relevant results because they know better than you are medical, political, illicit/illegal, conspiracy theory, and famous people. Often times the first page of results don't contain the keywords and don't seem to have anything to do with your search query, whereas DDG results do.

Liquix 7y ago
Thanks for explaining! It's infuriating to craft a search query containing all the keywords/operators needed to return relevant results - a search query that would return relevant results 24 months ago - only to see Google ignore 75% of keywords completely, extract some commonly-used pair of words from the query, and return 5 pages of results based exclusively on said pair. What was the motive behind this change? Was the previous algorithm really giving people results so bad that Google felt they had to hamstring their flagship product? It seemed to be getting better and better until this...
- marcosdumay 7y ago
  This is a long going change. Google has been making their search fuzzier for years claiming it gets better results for most people. For a while I personally experienced better results on the queries I didn't know the exact name of the thing I was searching for. But those days are gone, because nowadays their search is so fuzzy that it can't extract the correct context from those queries.
- staticassertion 7y ago
  Because you aren't supposed to Google search by entering in a bunch of keywords you're supposed to ask Google questions. Not that your workflow is incorrect, I'm a DDG user and I do the same thing, but that's what Google wants people using their product to do.

dstroot 7y ago

Can someone explain the DDG business model? How does this company make money? How am I as a user being monetized? At least I understand Google’s approach.

dredmorbius 7y ago
Advertising. Untargeted advertising.
marcosdumay 7y ago
There are some ads there. I don't think they have been very successful selling them, but it looks like search is cheaper to provide than it used to be.
tagawa 7y ago
As others have said, we get revenue from contextual advertising as opposed to behavioural advertising. In other words, if you search for "car" you'd see a car-related ad rather than an ad based on your search history or personal profile (which we don't have anyway). There's more info about our business model here: https://spreadprivacy.com/duckduckgo-revenue-model/ https://spreadprivacy.com/duckduckgo-revenue-model/ Disclaimer: DuckDuckGo staff

oh_hello 7y ago

I have had the same experience. Over the years I tried DDG and gave up a few different times. A year or so ago I gave it another try and never left.

keithnz 7y ago

I have mixed results, sometimes DDG is pretty good, a lot of times its about the same, but reasonably regularly it leaves me high and dry on an entire page of results and then usually the top hits on google give me what I want. However, I always go DDG first, then !g if I don't get what I want.

stjohnswarts 7y ago
this is when you use !sp instead of google :)