7 ms·
Over the past 5 years I’ve tried DDG several times. Each time except the last I wanted to stick with it but the results simply didn’t stand up to what I’d see o
by nbrempel 7y ago
Over the past 5 years I’ve tried DDG several times. Each time except the last I wanted to stick with it but the results simply didn’t stand up to what I’d see on Google.
About 6 months ago (a year? I can’t remember) I switched and haven’t looked back. Now, when I look at google, the results actually look less relevant. As well, the ads on Google have become very obnoxious. I don’t feel like I’m being served the best results but instead results of companies who paid the most.
- LilBytes 7y agoI've had very similar experiences, I'd tried DDG several times over the years but around ~12 months ago I found DDG's usability and quality of searches to jump significantly.
- Axsuul 7y agoNot to mention DDG now supports native dark mode!
- BLKNSLVR 7y agoAnd don't forget lite mode: https://duckduckgo.com/lite https://duckduckgo.com/lite
- mcpeepants 7y agojust waiting for DDG lite 'n dark
- soheil 7y agoI can't tell if this is sarcasm or you're actually giving too much weight to 3 lines of css.
- ehsankia 7y agoAnd you way under estimate how much work it takes to make and maintain a proper dark mode across a site. If it was truly 3 lines of CSS, every single website out there would have native dark mode.
- soheil 7y agoI completely disagree on the quality front. I really wanted DDG to be good and I tried sticking with it for a while. I found usability (reads keyboard shortcuts, special keywords, etc.) a breath of fresh air compared to Google. But it's no substitute for the significant lack of quality results. For when you don't really need search it works great.
- FabHK 7y agoI must not be really needing search much, because I almost never switch to another search engine (let alone google, which would be my last resort).
- mattmanser 7y agoDDG is terrible at any location type search and extremely US centric. You can switch to country mode but then it stops including loads of results. A perfect example is when you search for a product or book or something. Without the switch, it returns the company website and amazon.com, the latter being utterly useless and irrelevant to anyone outside the US. But if you turn the switch on, the company website disappears, but you get amazon.co.uk. Or another example, I was searching for a butternut squash soup recipe. Oddly DDG had no BBC food results. Until I clicked the switch, then it did, but loads of good other recipes completely disappeared. As for bar, restaurant, etc. names, ugh. DDG is useless. They need to figure out how to do local searches with privacy, a way I can set a rough location and they remember it. At the moment their location centric searches are a decade behind Google.
- FabHK 7y agoWell, as DDG doesn't track you, you'll have to provide it a bit more context, such as the city you'd like to conduct the search for (or language or country), either in the search query itself, or using the switch displayed conveniently on top of every page of search results. I don't find that too onerous. Conversely, I find it annoying when Google gives me Swedish results, just because my VPN happens to route through Uppsala today. I've searched for books, bars, restaurants, opera, and plenty more in many countries (with VPN routed to plenty of other countries) in the last several years on DDG without any issues, and with no need to switch to other search engines.
- sansnomme 7y agoDuckDuckGo uses Bing underneath so the company whom you should really be complaining to is MSFT.
- kucing 7y agoCan I get a reference to this? :)
- Kiro 7y agohttps://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/sources/ https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/so... > We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we also source from a variety of partners, including Verizon Media (formerly Yahoo) and Bing.
- kucing 7y ago> In fact, DuckDuckGo gets its results from over four hundred sources. These include hundreds of vertical sources delivering niche Instant Answers, DuckDuckBot (our crawler) and crowd-sourced sites (like Wikipedia, stored in our answer indexes). We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we also source from a variety of partners, including Verizon Media (formerly Yahoo) and Bing. Hmm I think the Bing is overemphasized if we say that "DuckDuckGo uses Bing underneath so the company whom you should really be complaining to is MSFT." CMIIW!
- mda 7y agoThe explanation is fluff and has no meaning if they don't give which percentage of queries is answered by which source. e.g. it is probably all bing for any non trivial query. To me, it seems they just want to create an illusion that it is more than a glorified proxy / meta search engine.
- soraminazuki 7y agoI doubt this because DDG usually gives me very different results from ecosia, an actual Bing proxy.
- abhs 7y agoSame, when I first tried DDG (2 yrs ago) the results were horrible. Now I've switched to DDG permanently 2 weeks ago as the results are good enough. Later I'm gonna change my parent's default search engine to DDG in a few days of more testing. I love that DDG has almost no spam and the fact that it's so on point to the queries and doesnt perform the wide search. My dad has a few websites that he's visits daily, and he just goes to them directly. Since Google and DDG cant differentiate themselves much any more, I feel like the next direction for every tech company is a larger emphasis on user privacy and it's only going to be more important for already established markets as a differentiator. Once DDG grows by 2x more, it'll become a significant competitor to Google. At the point, that additional data advantages likely approaches diminishing returns. Remember, network effects arent exponential in real life, they follow an "S" curve.
- Polylactic_acid 7y agoI think I mentally give DDG a harder time than it deserves. When I search something and don't see the result I want I think "Wow ddg is shit, I'll try this on google" And then I still don't see what I want and think "The info I am looking for doesn't exist or my search was wrong" Despite both failing I tend to be a lot more lenient to google.
- AJ007 7y agoBing and Yandex are worth trying too. I just had a total failure from a Google search yesterday, where the official site for a piece of software wasn’t on the first 3 pages. I went over to bing and it was #1. I’m getting to the point where I predict a search will fail on google and I go to another engine. This never happened before, even in the Demand Media content farm debacle where horse shit ehow ranking for millions of major keywords. I’ve been using the web since the best option was Yahoo’s hand curated directories. Google is in really serious trouble. These search engine switches happen very quickly, as soon as one of them is showing better results, the switch happens abruptly and it’s one way.
- dfrankow 7y agoIsn't ddg Bing results?
- frosted-flakes 7y agoDDG has their own crawler, but they augment results using Yandex and perhaps Bing too.
- IndexPointer 7y agoI remember reading that it uses only Bing for web results and their crawler for Wikipedia only.
- kube-system 7y ago
- throwaway_2047 7y agoI have similar experience. Upon reflection, when searching, I had some preconceived expectation about the result, maybe a stackoverflow answer, maybe a wiki article, that made me "think" google result was better. But in reality, it was because I was expecting the result, in particular the result from google, before having the result. The longer you use DDG, the less google-specific result I expect. Of course, DDG's search is improving, but I think it is my own search result expectation that leads to the impression that google's search was better. Now I use DDG exclusively.
- jethro_tell 7y agoyeah, once you realize you already know what you are looking for, then you can create custom searches or use the !bang notation. !stack 'Error message'
- kccqzy 7y agoGoogle's results have definitely become more quirky. Just now I was writing some SQLite database code and was wondering how the sum() aggregate handles integer overflow. So I searched for "sqlite integer overflow" in DDG and Google. To my surprise the first result in Google is someone's random blog post[0] from 2011 describing their experience which doesn't answer my question at all. I am very surprised Google decided to put this as the first result. Both DDG and Google gave me results on Stack Overflow, but only Google managed to give me the official documentation of aggregate functions on the sqlite website, with the snippet highlighting the relevant fact: "Sum() will throw an 'integer overflow' exception if all inputs are integers or NULL and an integer overflow occurs at any point during the computation." Overall I still believe for sloppily constructed queries for which I want specific results Google seems to read my mind better and produce better results than DDG, but Google is very quirky. [0]: http://jakegoulding.com/blog/2011/02/06/sqlite-64-bit-integers/ http://jakegoulding.com/blog/2011/02/06/sqlite-64-bit-intege...
- klingonopera 7y agoThis is a particularly interesting query, as both SO and the query itself share the word overflow, which probably is throwing off DDG from the result you were looking for. For me, on DDG, it's the first result on the 2nd page, on Google, it's the third result. It would appear that DDG and Google's results differentiate in a way, that the sequence of words probably don't matter on DDG, but do matter on Google.
- bovermyer 7y agoI had the exact same experience. Several attempts, never took, and then the last time it just clicked. Now I almost never even use the bang commands, just pure DDG.
- flyinghamster 7y agoIt's the cycle of search engines. We saw this with AltaVista et.al. back in the Web 1.0 days, which crufted up their user interfaces only for a neat new upstart to come along: Google. What set Google apart was that it had a simple, effective, and above all clean user interface, with minimal cruft. Inevitably, Google has succumbed to the same temptation that AltaVista did, and now there's a neat new upstart to come along, with a clean user interface and minimal cruft: DuckDuckGo. Lather, rinse, repeat.
- adventured 7y ago> and now there's a neat new upstart to come along DuckDuckGo is 12 years old. They're far away from being a new upstart. To put that into perspective, AltaVista's prime years only lasted six or seven years (~1996-2002; sold off in 2003). DDG is now one of the oldest independent search engines in Internet history. Their very long-term, very slow, grinding upwards is one of the most amazing aspects of what they're accomplishing. It's incredibly difficult to do versus an entrenched monopoly (and one of the most powerful brands and corporations in the world at that). You almost never see it happen in tech once a monopoly is stable.
- frank2 7y agoMicrosoft could decide to terminate their access to Bing APIs at any time resulting in DDG’s immediately losing most of their users. DDG does not have their own crawler or index.
- FabHK 7y agoAnd until then, I’ll happily use DDG.
- frosted-flakes 7y agoDuckDuckGo do have their own crawler (DuckDuckBot), and they augment their results with other search providers other than Bing, including Yandex.
- wayoutthere 7y agoAgree 100%. I recently switched all my devices to DDG as default search because the quality of Google search results has declined significantly. The same 5 sites are at the top of every search in a given problem domain. It's turning the Internet into a monoculture.
- mehdix 7y agoI have the exact same experience. Howerver on some edge cases still Google provides better results probably because of deep learning or similar.
- dangerface 7y agoSame, I don't think DDG's results have improved, but googles results have defiantly went down the drain.
- el_cujo 7y agoThe only thing I prefer about google at this point is that occasionally if I search something where I just want an answer and not a result link, google will just give me the answer in that little box at the top of the result page. Something like "when are the oscars". It's a nice little convenience that saves me from having to click some article and scan for the info. If DDG had something like that, I'd never even miss google.
- smhenderson 7y agoKeep trying it though, it's getting there. They have the Wikipedia box on the right of the page for most results. They bring up a calculator if you search for an equation (e.g. 4+4), there's a currency converter summary and typing weather + zipcode brings up a short summary of the local forecast. I'm sure there are lots of other examples as well. But yeah, "when are the Oscars" just brought up links to go.com, an ABC TV web presence if IRC. As others have shared I've used DDG off and on for a few years. In the beginning if I didn't see what I wanted I switched to google for that search but left DDG as the default. It's been quite a while since I last had to to this, DDG's results seem to be on par with G these days, at least in my experience.
- MuffinFlavored 7y ago> As well, the ads on Google have become very obnoxious Why don't people use ad-blockers?
- TheOperator 7y agoI've had the same experience with me basically tossing in the towel with DDG because my need for efficiency outweighed my need for privacy. It seems like Google is systemically showing more crap in advertisements, making it harder to distinguish between ads and genuine search results, and their advantage is dwindling. That and it's just annoying to be sending information to Google as a default from a privacy point of view. Maybe I should give Bing another go?