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I Ditched Google for DuckDuckGo
- 3xblah 7y agoIs it possible to submit Google queries using HTTP POST. Using POST instead of GET is an option DDG provides. Startpage uses HTTP POST as well.
- ebg13 7y agoSure thing. Get DDG to stop injecting reams of extremely unrelated porn into my image search results (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21516941 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21516941) and I'll consider it.
- leipert 7y agoDoes this also happen with safe search on?
- eesmith 7y agoFWIW, I use DDG and an image search of "filled torus" with "Safe Search: Moderate" doesn't return any porn in an attempt just now. It does seem to treat "torus" and all uses of "tori" as synonyms, giving lots of images of people named Tori, or taken/written by people by that name, rather than more-than-one-torus. Google Image Search doesn't make that association between the singular and plural. You'll need to search for "filled tori" to see plenty of people named Tori.
- saalweachter 7y agoOoooooh, that's what's happening on that search! I had assumed it was some combination of a bad synonym, partial matching, and a sort order that depended too heavily on site popularity and too little on query relevance, but the torus -> tori rewrite never even occurred to me.
- logfromblammo 7y agoTopologically, humans are usually toruses, ignoring that the digestive tract splits into mouth and two nostrils at the caudal end. It actually occurred to me that the search might be that smarty-stupid before being exposed to the idea that the plural of torus is actually the same as the proper first name of a lot of immodest image models. That made me feel a bit smarty-stupid myself.
- saalweachter 7y agoI'd assumed a much more vulgar synonym, myself.
- rocky1138 7y agoI don't get any porn results in image searched on DDG for "filled torus" when set to Moderate or Strict. I think it's fair to expect it to be on the user when searching for something online to be okay with perhaps seeing pornographic or unwanted search results when set to no filtering.
- ebg13 7y agoIt's fair to expect RELEVANT pornographic results, not irrelevant ones. DDG(Bing) is too naive to identify that the plural of torus should not be connected to porn star Tori Black with high priority.
- detaro 7y agoAlso happens with the normal search results (both straight up porn and an odd priority for sex-related results), very peculiar. Example for the latter: searched for "quadriplegic" recently (came up in the home assistant discussion on HN and I wanted to check if I remembered correctly what it means, not being a native English speaker). Comparing the top 10 results: Both Google and DDG bring up dictionaries. Both suggest videos about life as a quadriplegic. Google finds the wikipedia article, DDG doesn't. DDG has in spot 3, 8, 9 and 10 articles/videos about how quadriplegics have sex. (Google also isn't perfect: way to many dictionary results IMHO, although it is set to search both German and English)
- tempsolution 7y agoYeah, but you do you realize that DDG is Bing. And while DDG does not track you, Bing does. So essentially the reason why DDG kinda works well is because a lot of user are still being tracked by Bing.
- jasonjayr 7y agoDo the results page include anything from *.bing.com ? Or any other 3rd party domains that do not share DDG's stated privacy policy?
- Isamu 7y ago>DDG is Bing Eh? Maybe you are saying that because they serve ads from Bing? From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DuckDuckGo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DuckDuckGo : >DuckDuckGo earns revenue by serving ads from the Yahoo-Bing search alliance network and through affiliate relationships with Amazon and eBay. >In July 2016, DuckDuckGo officially announced the extension of its partnership with Yahoo! that brought new features to all users of the search engine, including date filtering of results and additional site links. It also partners with Bing, Yandex, and Wikipedia to produce results or make use of features offered. The company also confirmed that it does not share user information with partner companies, as has always been its policy.
- mikkom 7y agoAFAIK They use bing for [almost] all search results and yes, they seem to try to be vague about it on purpose. Maybe someone from DDG could clarify this?
- nvrspyx 7y agoAs far as I know (hence I could be wrong), that’s outdated. Since Yahoo was purchased by Verizon, it is predominately Bing results with some Yahoo/Oath/Verizon Media results sprinkled in, considering it now predominantly uses Bing itself. Yandex is no longer used and Wikipedia is just part of their knowledge cards or whatever they call them, like StackOverflow is. In other words, it’s mainly Bing with DDG’s own crawler used specifically for the knowledge cards and to modify the priority of results pulled from Bing. With that said, I do believe they have a special deal with Microsoft to not pass along any information. Instead, the only information Microsoft sees is DDG requesting the results on behalf of the users (aka Bing/MS just sees DDG’s IP, etc. which can be seen sometimes in the results, not the knowledge card, when you search for “what’s my IP” in DDG). My one gripe though is that they’re definitely not as transparent as they could be about where and how they source results.
- joelrunyon 7y agoI did a guide on leaving Google a few years back. I should go update it now - https://impossiblehq.com/complete-guide-leaving-google/ https://impossiblehq.com/complete-guide-leaving-google/
- app4soft 7y agoHere is another article from 2018 - https://homehack.nl/bye-bye-google/ https://homehack.nl/bye-bye-google/
- kojeovo 7y agoSo you can get proficient with `!g`?
- contravariant 7y agoYou jest but it works better than the other way around.
- eikenberry 7y agoAnd '!w' and '!a' and '!imdb' and '!dpkg' and '!steam' and '!sof' and '!godoc' and ... The !bang commands are DDGs killer feature. Why would you only use google when you can use google and every other searchable resource very conveniently. [edit: link to ddg bang docs; https://duckduckgo.com/bang https://duckduckgo.com/bang]
- AdmiralAsshat 7y agoI was a power user of those for awhile, but then I discovered that Firefox's One-Click Search Engines are more convenient, since they search the sites directly, and don't litter my Firefox search history with a remnant entries of DDG's intermediary links.
- Eric_WVGG 7y agoI switched from Google to DDG on my mobile due to Google AMP pages sometime last summer. While I find DDG to be equally good for most "dry facts" searches, it stinks for the sort of thing that I'm usually looking for on the road — "best Sichuan in Chinatown" or "glossier sticker blackberry" (long story). Ironically, I could probably get by just fine with DDG on the laptop where I'm mostly using search as a proxy for Stack Overflow and Wikipedia, and Google on the mobile for shopping and esoterica.
- tejtm 7y agoAhh, so that must be why I find DDG search results flawless. Just the facts ma'am.
- Isamu 7y agoI hate "Here's Why You Should Too" articles but it's worthwhile trying DDG. You may enjoy having a less menacing overlord in your browser.
- 3xblah 7y ago"It all started with a realization: Most the things I search for are easy to find. Did I really need the all-seeing, all-knowing algorithms of Google to assist me? Probably not." "As a result, I’ve had a fairly tedious but important revelation: I search for really obvious stuff. Google’s own data backs this up. Its annual round-up of the most searched-for terms is basically a list of names and events: World Cup, Avicii, Mac Miller, Stan Lee, Black Panther, Megan Markle. The list goes on. And I don’t need to buy into Google’s leviathan network of privacy-invading trackers to find out what Black Panther is and when I can go and see it at my local cinema." "I had, based on zero evidence, convinced myself that finding things on the internet was hard and, inevitably, involved a fair amount of tracking. After two years of not being tracked and targeted, I have slowly come to realize that this is nonsense." Every user is different. What is appealing to the author may not be appealing to the reader. The author was searching for obvious things. HN readers and commenters may have more difficult searches. Outside of HN, it appears there is a very large quantity of users who search for the same "obvious stuff".
- kelnos 7y agoAs a HN user and commenter, I've found DDG just fine as a daily driver (switched nearly 2 years ago). I do occasionally have to fall back to Google, but most of my searches are served just fine by DDG. Agreed that every user is different. I think the overall verdict is that DDG is certainly not as good at Google on an overall number-of-people-always-satisfied scale, but it does quite a good job for most people.
- codyb 7y agoYea I’m the same way, switched a long time ago, probably about two years like you and haven’t really had to look back. Maybe it’s because I mostly browse with private pages, never sign in to Chrome, always deny requests for location, etc and my results were never particularly tailored to me in the first place? I can’t remember the last time I “!g”’d actually. Maybe what I’m searching for hasn’t been particularly daunting and mainly consists of jumps to Mozilla’s JavaScript docs lately.
- whalesalad 7y agoDDG just doesn’t work as well. Also, to ease switching friction it needs a gradient mode where it will start in what looks and feels like Google and then slowly transitions to their normal product. Once you get over the initial UI muscle memory shock you eventually realize that the results aren’t as good and you jump back. I can rarely find what I need with DDG and usually always find it instantly with google.
- noja 7y ago> it needs a gradient mode add !g somewhere in your ddg query to search google
- whalesalad 7y agoYeah that’s the problem. If I need to add that to all my queries why use it at all?
- Thaxll 7y agoFor privacy.
- whalesalad 7y agoPrivacy is useless if I can’t do my job.
- Bekwnn 7y agoYou can do your job and type two extra characters, or you could just use it for personal use and not at work. DDG is actually better than google in many cases when it comes to searching for code related things. After a month or so you start to have a sense of what sort of searches need to fall back to using !g (which is pretty much only obscure questions/answers, I find). If you don't care about your privacy and don't want to dealing with learning a new search engine to the level you've learned google, then this article probably isn't for you. The idea you wouldn't be able to do your job or that it would be impacted in a nontrivial way by switching to a different search bar in your browser seems ridiculous, correct me if I'm wrong.
- skinnyasianboi 7y agoLittle fun fact: DDG respects my macbook dark mode settings, google doesn't
- blakesterz 7y agoJumping in here with an example, since I'm in the middle of doing this right now.... I maybe have some ID Theft issues, so I'm doing some searches to try and figure out if I can find anything that might help me answer what's going on. Did this company screw up and confuse my account with someone else or do I have a real problem? I'm doing different searches for names, locations and some other searches for very specific things. Google results are far and away better, in that they are returning things that are useful. DDG results are... different, and when compared to what I'm getting with Google, they are not as good. I don't know how much I can generalize from this one example, I don't normally compare G with DDG, but right now, G is winning. It's really interesting comparing the results though. DDG may indeed find something G didn't since the results are pretty different.
- reaperducer 7y agoAt this point, each has its strong points and weak points. For what you're doing right now, Google sounds like the better choice. But my experience has been that it really depends on what you're doing. There are a number of projects I've researched where the duck has provided better information. For now, it's worth trying both. That can be seen as a disadvantage because it's twice the work, or as progress because competition is a good thing.
- JTon 7y agoI use DDG as my primary engine and my habit is to search there first. I have to say, I often don't get the results I'm looking for. So, I simply "bang" out a google search immediately after using DDG search "!g [search phrase]". My coworkers chastise me for being inefficient, but hey, I see it as a small price to pay to support DDG while still getting the results I need.
- pteraspidomorph 7y agoYou can append the !g at the end!
- disneycember 7y ago
- papermachete 7y agoDDG and Startpage are owned by data brokers. Use searx.me or if you run into trouble, an instance of it like search.privacytools.io. It aggregates results from other engines including Google and DDG, and is FOSS. You can host an instance of it if you wish so.
- einpoklum 7y agoEvidence for your claim regarding DDG?
- kelnos 7y agoGiven that DDG explicitly states that they don't track you or share your search history[0], and that they're also listed on privacytools.io as a privacy-respecting option[1], what's your evidence to back up this claim? [0] https://duckduckgo.com/privacy https://duckduckgo.com/privacy [1] https://www.privacytools.io/providers/search-engines/ https://www.privacytools.io/providers/search-engines/
- bumbacloth 7y agoI have been using duckduckgo for years now and Im very satisfied. On google a lot of the search results are ads so they are most of the time useless for me. With ducduckgo I always find what Im looking for and the things I search for dont come back to haunt me in the form of ads.I feel like I have a more "clean" experience of the web. If I do a search for a smartphone I will not have ads trying to sell it to me on every other website I visit afterwards.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- pkamb 7y agoI switched on mobile to eliminate AMP pages.
- Anointmous 7y agoIt doesn't matter how good some results are, if the search engine manipulates the results, tracks the users, and even more so - steals the ideas and profiles the users. Google has had some very public news stories of manipulating search results, tracking users, and profiling users -- people en mass left google's news site when they started manipulating it, profiling results for total control of Chinese population is pretty recent too, there are dozens of examples. And google profiling users and trying to guess what they are researching or thinking about it is too easy. And face it, google no longer has a way to innovate but go the way of tracking, monitoring, and theft.
- okintheory 7y agoLinks?
- CWuestefeld 7y agoJust the fact of the competition is a good thing. And even if DDG is but a drop in the bucket, it appears that they've made a difference. Having been a DDG user since pretty much the beginning, I watched their zero-click results evolve, and it very much looks to me like this innovation drove much of Google's current search experience.
- johnpowell 7y agoI tried DDG within the last year. And I tried really hard. But I used !G about 25% of the time. Then I switched to ecosia.org, I know it is a front-end for Bing. But it is clean interface and the search results are more in-line with what Google would return. In months I have had to use Google for search arount ten times in the last month. And that was to find stuff I already searched on Google. But I knew what I was looking for was obvious.
- thdrdt 7y agoI use DDG as my main search engine because I like more privacy. But to be fair I think Google is way better most of the time. And I believe this is because Google is much more context aware. A fake example: if you search "lounge new york" DDG might show you lounge seats and things from New York, while Google 'understands' that you are looking for a place to chill in New York. But while this gives better results for lets say 80% of the time in Google, the other 20% of the time it's very hard to search for things in Google if it uses the wrong context. At those times DDG is way better.
- kylebenzle 7y agoI can take your point but your fake example does return very similar results in both cases, I'd be hard pressed to find a real example that acts the way you describe on DDG.
- kylebenzle 7y agoI too have ditched Google! DDG is way better and no reason to stick with google, its gone to the dogs, just thank go we have a replacement.
- residentfoam 7y agoI have also recently switched to DuckDuckGo and so far I am happy with it.
- turc1656 7y ago100% agree with this. I switched a while ago and 98% of my searches are easily found through DDG. I use Google's search as a backup when I'm in the rare case of actually searching for something hard to find or very complex. And sometimes it's just something that can't be found or doesn't exist, even on Google. But using it as the backup is perfect.
- alxmdev 7y agoThe headline is great: > Once you realize most things you search for online are boring and obvious, you realize you don't really need Google in your life. Yes! DDG really does work just as well as any other search engine for most day-to-day things, and then there's always the !g prefix. The first page of Google search results are half Amp and YouTube carousels anyway...
- alias_neo 7y agoI made an interesting realisation yesterday. I already use DDG everywhere, but I was having an issue with a site in Firefox, it just refused to work, so I launched chrome and entered the same term in the box. Google popped up with the privacy/terms field thing it does and refuses to let you pass this modal popup until you satisfy them. Immediately, with the results sitting behind it, I realised, all I had to do was stick .com on the end and I don't have any of this to deal with, I was just being lazy. I remember the early 2000s when we would press CTRL(?)+<something> to complete the www. and .com etc... I entered the site address in the address bar and hit enter, realising I should really try to be less lazy, or at least set a book mark.
- kpennell 7y agoOnce you start using DDG bangs (especially ! for going right to the site), it changes how you use a browser. Ditto for !wikipedia, !gmaps, etc. so so cool
- lancesells 7y agoThey are great. Just want to point out you can use !w for wikipedia and !gm for google maps.
- ckrailo 7y agoI mostly shared the Wired author's experience, but theming is what made me switch to DDG everywhere! If you've themed your whole OS, terminal, text editor, etc to your favorite theme (solarized, nord, etc), then DDG is the search engine for you. Solarized Dark Dark Go, for example... 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...
- notadoc 7y agoSometimes DDG is better, particularly when google tries to infer intent rather than just searching for the keywords typed. Sometimes DDG is worse, just generally, and sometimes much worse. Either way, I think DuckDuckGo needs a different and simpler brand. DuckDuckGo does not roll off the tongue, it's not a verb or even verbable, and outside of the tech world very few have heard of it. Call it Duck, call it Go, call it something simpler and memorable.
- lightedman 7y agoI ditched Google and DDG by knowing what websites I want to visit for information in the first place, so that I may avoid most of the BS.
- JasonFruit 7y agoDDG is great, and I use it by preference. The only thing I prefer Google for is when I want to search for something in a specific geographical location. Otherwise, I find DuckDuckGo more useful, and I wonder why others don't. Maybe it's residual search mannerisms I've retained from my Altavista days.
- x__x 7y agoIn the beginning, G was a search engine. Now it just seems like a recommendation and answers engine.
- TurkishPoptart 7y agoUsing the bangs (!g, !wiki, !youtube) makes it for me. When I have a feeling a result won't show up on DDG, I drop a !g bang in there and it works.
- therealmarv 7y agoThe Bing skin with privacy sprinkles. If you really want to get out of US censorship & political correctness influenced search bubble try Yandex (at least sometimes). One example: Just compare specific NSFW results in image search on these search engines. It's also a blessing to use search engines which are not that much SEO hacked as Google sometimes.
- CamelCaseName 7y agoDuplicate: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21620744 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21620744 (Same story, same site, different TLD)
- dgzl 7y agoI've using DDG for a while. Anytime I don't find a good result I just add a g! to my query and it will respect to Google instead.
- thanhhaimai 7y agoI'm glad that you and others are happy DDG users. I think the search engine market could use more diversity and competition. However, seeing this comment over and over again on DDG related threads is getting old. It's like saying: "I quit eating beef and switched to eat veggies only because meat is bad. Whenever veggies don't fill me up, I put beef steak in the bowl and it satisfies my hunger." Imagine hearing that whenever the topic of vegetarian comes up. It's not very useful, and it dilutes the message.
- scarecrowbob 7y agoI dunno... what about this: most of the time, I have a pretty good meal out of just veggies and try to be vegan with my diet most of the time. Sometimes I want a steak or some BBQ, so I do it. That's actually a message that a lot of my vegan friends push out, because like most things life doesn't have to be absolute. It has massively reduced my meat intake, that's for sure. I find it is the same with google. 99% of the time ddg is a-okay, but sometimes I'm not getting an answer so I google something, and the g! thing is how I do it. I am using substantially less google search this way... why is that a worse situation than the alternative of either just using ddg and not finding stuff or just using google and having fewer options?
- dgzl 7y agoI don't think eating meat is bad, but I'll try playing along. >Imagine hearing that whenever the topic of vegetarian comes up. It's not very useful, and it dilutes the message. What kind of a message does sacrificing nutrition for hunger send?
- collsni 7y agoFrom the sound of the comments alot of people don't know how to search in DDG. I have absolutely no problem finding the information I need and would say I'm a pretty serious power user. Or I've just been using it for so long I don't know what I'm missing.
- zigzaggy 7y agoMy thoughts exactly. I always hear these complaints but I never have an issue. If I’m going technical I’ll use the bang feature (! g) and I’m all set. I’m not going back to ggle
- Skunkleton 7y ago> If I’m going technical I’ll use the bang feature (! g) and I’m all set. I’m not going back to ggle So you are going to not go back to google by using google?
- zigzaggy 7y agoHa. Yes it sounds ridiculous on it’s face. But... It’s the privacy thing I’m concerned about. If google the tool was all Google is, then I’d have no problem with it. It’s the rest of Google I have an issue with. I can bang google the tool along with wiki or whatever and still avoid the invasive practices the company uses. I don’t think that’s a complicated concept.
- aledalgrande 7y agoI am on DDG, but I think until a search engine gets to at least 20% of the market, it won't make any difference. It's just too niche. Big G can still do whatever they want and lock in more of the internet with services like AMP.
- EastSmith 7y agoI am using DDG for more than a year as my default search engine on desktop and mobile. On technical topics, recent news and local sites I built a muscle memory to just add !g at the end of the search. For everything else DDG more or less does the job.
- TheRealPomax 7y agoIt's funny, because I'm finding myself using Google far more after switching to DDG years ago. At this point, more often than not the results I get in DDG make me go "oh ffs, !g", and I really wish that wasn't the case, but here we are. It used to be pretty great, now it's just... not?
- every 7y agoI use https://duckduckgo.com/lite https://duckduckgo.com/lite in a terminal but google elsewhere...
- jader201 7y agoThis was just posted last week: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21620744 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21620744
- S_A_P 7y agoI switched a couple of times to DDG, and the first few false starts I remember coming away from that thinking Google was just better. This time around, DDG stuck. While DDG has been steadily improving, I think the quality of google results has steadily worsened significantly. The focus on top of the page answers and other changes seem to favor commerce vs information. I was recently researching home WiFi gear reviews and google was adamant that I was actually trying to buy WiFi gear. DDG has some of those results, but I also noticed that actual reviews and forum posts were returned instead of amazon and Best Buy links.
- themoat 7y agoI know other people have already echoed your comment, but I feel the same. About a month ago I switched from chrome and google search to firefox and ddg. After about 2 days I completely forgot I was using ddg. It just stuck.
- toomim 7y agoSame for me. I find that Google has gotten worse for me over the last two years, and switched to duck-duck-go. It feels like Google is trying to control me and my searches more than it used to. I like my search engine being a tool, not my mom.
- firecall 7y agoTotally. This has exactly been my experience. I tried DDG a few time, but Google knew too much about me, my intent and what sites I liked. Now I find its all ads and other google services. Thus DDG has become perfectly serviceable now and I am very happy with it. Although, I have an idea that the web has changed also. Web pages are different, QA sites like StackOverflow have spammed results, the rise and relentless march of commercial focused SEO, and the death of blogs and personal websites has created a real problem in search.
- paul7986 7y agoI've got use to DDG's results after a year and really don't use the G bang as much as before. DDG's results 8 out of ten times provide what I seek.
- 7y ago
- Wump 7y agoI think DDG is decent and getting better. The tough thing though is that for search the bar is high. Alternatives need to be as good as google, not 80 or 90 or 98% as good. Most users, once they experience just a few instances of worse results will just switch back to google.
- 0xmohit 7y agoIronical that this wired piece attempts device recognition and has 26 cross-site trackers (as reported by Brave [0]). [0] https://brave.com/ https://brave.com/
- hereme888 7y agoSo no one here uses engines like Startpage or Searx? I tried to use DDG consistently a few months ago and didn't always get what I wanted, so I found Startpage. I'll give DDG another try.
- caseyf7 7y agoDDG needs to copy the Google iOS app. The search bar should be the focus of the app and not higher than the middle of the screen so it is easy to reach. Currently the best screen real estate does nothing on the DDG app. That is the only place where I haven’t switched to DDG.
- known 7y agoI built my own search engine. If I'm not satisfied I search in GOOGLE/ECOSIA
- mickotron 7y agoI switched my work and personal device Firefox settings to have ddg as default. I then use the !google bang to search Google if needed. Usually this is for retail queries. This simple step allows the best of both worlds, although the privacy tradeoff is there cause I'm still using Google.