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DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use
- Dkastro92 7y agoAt the moment it's pretty good if you want to fact check something, for almost everything else google is way better (especially for news).
- mnd999 7y agoAgree, news search is the thing I go back to google most for.
- ct0 7y agoIve been using it for 4 years and rarely need to try google. Set it as your default!
- duncan-donuts 7y agoI’ve been using ddg for a little over 5 years. Those first few years of use I found myself using !g a ton, but I think ddg’s results are actually better now. Not that the search is necessarily better, but I don’t have to wade through a bunch of ads. I know this is a tired position around here but honestly there’s very little I get out of google’s search that I don’t get from ddg.
- tombert 7y agoI'd say I still do the !g thing about 10% of the time. DDG is good for my average search case of "I really just need to get to the wikipedia article but I don't know quite what it's titled", or finding an answer on StackOverflow, but if I'm doing anything that's kind of niche, I end up having to use Google.
- johnydepp 7y agoI totally agree with you. I have made ddg my default search on browser but many times I end up Googling. It has increased the time to get the final answere to 1.5 times atleast.
- CivBase 7y agoI've been using DDG for about three years now and I still use !g a lot, but I really shouldn't. Google practically never finds what I'm looking for if DDG can't.
- beckingz 7y ago90% of the time I use !g, google doesn't have anything in the first few pages either.
- wycy 7y agoAgreed. I tried it a few times over the years and found the results to be pretty poor, but I tried again recently and found the results to be good enough to fully switch both my computer and phone to DDG. Although I'm fully switched over, there are 2 drawbacks: * Since DDG tracks you less, the results for local searches may be worse. If you're in Boston, TX you'll probably want to search for "boston, tx restaurants" whereas I'm guessing Google could handle "boston restaurants" if your location is in Boston, TX. * Finding brand new results seems a bit harder. I found this especially true when searching for election results. Searching for, e.g., "nevada election results" was showing me results from 2016 and 2018 on the day of those elections this year. Now the DDG results seem to correctly point to 2020 results.
- IggleSniggle 7y agoYeah I don't like that DDG interface limits you to timeframes of Last Day/Week/Month/Year. There are lots of good reasons to want to search a particular timeframe!
- saalweachter 7y ago> Google could handle "boston restaurants" if your location is in Boston, TX. Location is the single biggest implicit factor for Google search results; "restaurants" would probably get you what you are looking for (well, ignoring that it's an overly broad query, and most places have too many restaurants for a simple ranking of them to really be that helpful).
- onychomys 7y agoI live in Rochester, MN, and that's how I can say with some certainty that google doesn't do a good job of using your location in their search algorithm. If you just search for something simple like "Rochester library hours", it'll default to Rochester NY. Everybody in my town has learned that we have to use "Rochester MN library hours". I get that the one in NY has ten times more residents than we do, but it's not like we're some backwater here!
- Thaxll 7y agoI strongly disagree, especially when you have all the Wikipedia / contact / google map embedded into Google search, with one click it can call phone number from a restaurant. Edit: To add more, it's all those details that makes Google better than other, search engine are not just for searching things it's all about the display and relevance.
- brann0 7y agoMmmh, if you search for a place in the maps tab instead of the general one you usually have a telephone url you can tap to start a phone call. I still find that you're using a very specific use case of a search engine to completely dismiss not using a different search engine.
- PunchTornado 7y agoit's not a specific case. if I type federer on google I get a list of all his recent matches and live scores so it is easy to follow. A lot of my searches on google are like that. I don't even have to click on any links.
- burkaman 7y agoDDG does that too. Most restaurants I search for have a box on the side with phone number and info pulled from Yelp, and a map in whatever provider you want to use.
- simias 7y agoI don't like that stuff in Google, so I'm fine with DDG not over-doing it. Wikipedia overview is fine, but the many widgets just get in the way IMO. If I want a map I go on maps. If I want reviews I go on a review website. Like if I type "apple" on Google search the only web result I get is apple.com, everything else is taking with tangentially related widgets: https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=apple https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=apple Special points for the IMO completely useless "people also search for" widget. DDG tones it down a lot more: https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=apple&ia=web https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=apple&ia=web Here without scrolling I can see potentially useful links to iCloud, Apple TV, Apple's support etc... Back when I first used Google its main selling point was that it was lean and clean and with decent results. DDG is like that for me these days.
- mason55 7y agoI tried switching a bunch of times over the years but finally in the last six months or so I've found DDG to be good enough to use full time. I probably went three or four months without even using the "!g" command. I actually just yesterday ran into some issues and had to use "!g" - for some reason DDG struggled with the concept of "fish shell" and kept bringing me back results about seafood.
- davegauer 7y agoStrange, my top three DDG results for 'fish shell' are for the friendly interactive shell. Maybe you just have really good seafood around your area?
- speps 7y agoIt's only good enough when you're in the US, I live in the UK and DDG consistently returns non local results even though the country is set correctly, it's especially annoying given how many US cities are named after their UK counterpart.
- 4ad 7y agoThat means I should try DDG. I NEVER EVER want local results, and Google always gives me local results. If I'd want local results I would put my country or my city in the search query.
- motogpjimbo 7y agoAlso in the UK. It's noticeable that for many search terms, DDG's top autocomplete suggestion is the term you just typed, with "uk" tacked on the end of it. That suggests that many users in the UK are finding DDG's search results to be too US-centric.
- KuiN 7y agoThis is _by far_ my biggest issue with DDG. I've been trying to use it for most of my searching and I'm fine with having to append '!g' to ~25% of my searches, it's not ideal, but whatever, I can manage. Having to append 'uk' to 90% of searches after the first results page is full of useless American shit, for search terms that Google UK handles flawlessly, gets old, very quick.
- objektif 7y agoIn the last couple of months my experience With DDG has been very good. I consistently got better results than Google.
- vzidex 7y agoAgreed, I've switched my work computer to use it by default and the only place I've noticed it falter is when searching domain-specific niche technical information. Otherwise it works fine, though I still need to switch all my personal computers to it.
- cpascal 7y agoDDG is my daily driver and I do not miss Google Search in the slightest. I rarely need to !g and its often futile because Google returns nearly the same results. However, my favorite feature of DDG is it's native dark theme.
- jamespullar 7y agoI just decided to try DDG out because of this post and am so happy there's a native dark theme. Now if only Github would release one!
- anderspitman 7y agoI switched over to DDG a few weeks ago. I slowly regressed to more and more !g usage, and finally switched back to GOOG a couple days ago. Then just an hour ago I searched for "google fiber stadia", because I was curious how well they work together. The main reddit result opened in an amp page (and of course reddit pressured me to install the mobile app). I went back to the results and started scrolling down. I honestly couldn't tell at a glance what was ads, amp, or normal links. I personally feel like I'm in a bit of a no-man's land right now when it comes to search, but I think DDG really has a window of opportunity.
- hiccuphippo 7y agoYou can use !s in ddg to get google results without google.
- jaggs 7y agoDoes that bring up Startpage results?
- ignoramous 7y agoI'm redirected to startpage for both !s and !sp from duckduckgo. Is there a setting I need to flip?
- xingyzt 7y agoStartpage is a privacy-oriented proxy of Google search results.
- greenimpala 7y agoSwitched 6 months ago on all devices, I actually prefer the experience, I have discovered a bunch of really interesting small independent websites and blogs through it too (wasn't that the original idea of the internet!?). Once or twice a week I need !g to search for a programming specific query. There's still some improvement needed when searching for all the weird characters we use in software.
- svnpenn 7y agoI would like to take any chance I can to avoid Google products, but I dont agree with this. DuckDuckGo is using the infamous "More Results", essentially infinite scroll. Until that changes Im not using DuckDuckGo.
- burkaman 7y agoYou can turn that off in the settings: https://duckduckgo.com/settings https://duckduckgo.com/settings
- svnpenn 7y agoNo you cant. You can turn off auto loading, but you cant set it so that results are paginated.
- CmdrKrool 7y agoThis is true. Unfortunately DDG is flatly not interested in offering paginated results, if this 2 year old post by the staff member 'moollaza' on Reddit still applies. https://old.reddit.com/r/duckduckgo/comments/757gde/how_to_make_search_result_paginate/ https://old.reddit.com/r/duckduckgo/comments/757gde/how_to_m... My post there as 'the_minion_in_red' details how turning off "Auto-Load" works inconsistently depending on how you scroll, anyway - a behaviour which I see is still present and incorrect today. And the 'lite' and 'html' views I suggest for the benefit of another poster, I don't much like because they're doing something to make the address bar URL not change so I can't easily bookmark a search.
- irrational 7y agoI’ve been using DDG exclusively for years. People talk about how hard it is to switch, but I’ve never had any trouble getting exactly the results I’m searching for. I sometimes wonder what makes google search results so amazing, but not enough to risk it.
- IggleSniggle 7y agoThe quality of my Google results plummeted when I blocked and opted out of as much tracking as I could. I'm not really happy with Google or DDG results at this point. It doesn't help that search engines have been progressively hiding more and more functionality. Just last night I was trying to search for results within a window of "published after 18 months ago" but couldn't figure out how to do it. It was probably just another search away from finding the answer, but why are search UIs removing/hiding their best Advanced Search features?
- magicalhippo 7y agoGuess it depends on domain. I've changed the default in Firefox a few weeks ago and find that for "regular" searching DDG is enough that I don't go to Google. But for specialized searches I frequently reach for the Google override, and sure enough Google has significantly better results. Like searching specific, weird errors messages and such.
- irrational 7y agoThat’s the thing. The vast majority of my searches are development/coding related. I always find what I’m looking for in the first few returns. I sometimes wonder if I’d get even better results on google?
- magicalhippo 7y agoIn my experience yes. But as I said, often the DDG is good enough.
- bobbylarrybobby 7y agoTo people who use DuckDuckGo: how do you deal with its inability to answer simple queries with factual answers? Things like “distance from Los Angeles to New York”, “Joe Biden age”, “knives out cast”, “capital of South Africa”, etc. The time it takes to click a result on DuckDuckGo and navigate to the answer is so much longer than just getting the answer at the top of the results page, as google (and even bing) provide. This is the main reason I can’t use DuckDuckGo, as much as I’d like to
- davegauer 7y agoFor facts like these, I use WolframAlpha. For everything else, it's DDG.
- ghastmaster 7y agoI use my search engine to direct me to a source. I do not expect it to be the source. That is just how my brain sees the purpose of the engine. I can, however, understand why anyone would like it to provide you with instant factual and reliable information! That would be a godsend. I do not trust the instant answers most of the time. I like seeing forum answers and comments, finding age in wikipedia and stumbling upon more information, and generally getting lost in the web.
- Normal_gaussian 7y agoEither it appears as part of the first result or one of the top results have it. This is the case for all of your queries, and the result to select is obvious - normally wikipedia or imdb. This is arguably harder (+1 click and page load). However for capital of south africa this is arguably more correct. My google test shows no distinction between the capitals, whereas the wiki page does. Of course the wiki page is accessible on google as well. I'm wary of cases when these facts are incorrect. Google declares them while trying to hide the source. This was very important recently when a friend googled for caucus winners and recieved an incorrect fact at the top of Google, something that would have rang alarm bells when seen on its candidate affiliated source page
- kube-system 7y ago
- osehgol 7y agoI switched after Google's redesign too, this time it's good enough for good.
- bramjans 7y agoIndeed, been using DDG for a couple of years now, and since Google's redesign I've been using a lot less "!g".
- bprasanna 7y agoSwitched to DDG 3 years back! Only to check if Google lists anything different, checked it rarely. DDG is very GOOD imho. Since, you see organic results mostly based on the ranking rather than preference to mobile sites, AMP & advertisers, it feels refreshing and good.
- chuckgreenman 7y agoI think I've figured out what is happening when people tell me that DuckDuckGo's results "aren't good enough". What's really happening is that they've been trained to search a certain way to using Google and because DDG doesn't have all the historical data of your searches on their platform they can't fill in the gaps as well. After a couple days using DDG I found the right vocabulary to get good local results and which bangs to use to get results from the sites that I want. It's a more effective tool if you learn how to use it.
- questionfor 7y agoCan you share what is the right vocabulary for example? I have DDG as main engine for the phone and unless it’s Wikipedia level question, I have to use g!
- Semaphor 7y agoDon’t use natural language, use keywords and quotes. Essentially the way people searched 5-10 years ago. I rarely need !g
- Proziam 7y agoThis is the trick. Google got good at letting people search using 'natural' language. DDG is just a bit different. In some ways, I think it's better because my results are more specific in a lot of cases. I look up a lot of academic stuff where Google has the tendency to feed me a lot of garbage that DDG doesn't.
- UncleMeat 7y ago> Don’t use natural language So... its worse. People want to use natural language.
- zozbot234 7y agoIf I wanted to search using natural language, I'd use Ask Jeeves. DDG is just fine in my experience.
- onychomys 7y agoLike the author, I switched over when the google ad thing happened, and for the same reason. But instead of DDG, I decided to try out ecosia ( https://www.ecosia.org https://www.ecosia.org ) which is a wrapper over Bing. But they'll take all the ad revenue and use it to plant trees. So I get decent search results (bing isn't quite as good as google, but it's pretty decent for what I need) and also get to save the earth a little bit.
- wickerman 7y agoI use DDG as my main search engine - for most things it works just fine, when I can't find what I'm looking for I go to google. I find it hilarious that the image search function works a lot like Google used to in the past - I'm constantly looking for reference when drawing and more often than not if you type something innocuous like "man with hand in front of face" you'll end up with a first page full of porn in DDG whereas it's all SFW in Google, even with all restrictions off. Luckily DDG offers a nudity filter which works pretty well - even if it still fails to catch the odd gore picture.
- Ardia 7y agoThey should shorten the name - DuckDuckGo.com is too long to type out.
- NoGravitas 7y agoTry "duck.com", or "ddg.gg".
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- rudolph9 7y agoIt’s gotten better! I still use google for very obscure things but the vast majority of my searches these days are duckduckgo
- vesinisa 7y agoI don't know. I am using DDG from outside the U.S. but with English as the primary search language. The Google's localized results are just an order of magnitude better. I end up re-doing almost 10-20% of my searches in Google after being dissapointed with DDG results. Most of the time Google results are sadly superior. And don't get me even started in searching in my native language (Finnish). DDG is close to useless there, since it can not parse the different, obscure word forms we use (although I type word X in form A, I want my searches to include results in of word X in semantically related forms B and C). Google did not initially parse Finnish very well, but it eventually became amzingly good something like a decade ago.
- benhurmarcel 7y agoFor the same reason I find DDG very useful when I don’t want localized results, which is hard to get with Google. I currently live in Spain and Google returns mostly Spanish results, even on unrelated queries like programming or a device review.
- vesinisa 7y agoBe sure to set your search language to English. It will still return localized results, but in English.
- Semaphor 7y agoDDG is great for anything that has many results. Obscure errors? They decide to ignore half your query and show you pages of completely unrelated results. Even when there is no result, I wouldn’t know with DDG. For normal searches I never need !g, for obscure problems I always do because DDG (or maybe Bing? I don’t know how the integration exactly works) for some arcane reason deliberately breaks their own search.
- boynamedsue 7y agoI've been wondering how much value a privacy-focused search engine has when the links in its search results are full of privacy-invading trackers.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- crashbunny 7y agoEveryone is talking about the quality of results, but how much better is it in terms of tracking and sharing data? ATM I'm using quant.com, a french company bound by European privacy laws. It has its own index and I rarely need to use google. I have no idea who is better in terms of privacy but I'm preferring the french company over the American duckduckgo atm.
- rovr138 7y agoMy only issue is with some of the operators. Sometimes they break the results in really weird ways.
- scarecrowbob 7y agoI moved away from Chrome and Google about 6 months ago. There are two places where I find DDG to be better: - when I know specifically what page/site I am looking for, but don't know the address - when I am looking for results that are heavily monetized (like, say, which pedal steel guitar amp might be suited to my project) I still find myself using g!, especially when the first couple of results for, say, a cryptic log message or esoteric programming term aren't giving me what I want. If I know it's a hard to search term, or a specific image result, I will just default to g! But even if, say, 60% of the time I'm using g!, I still feel better because I feel like DDG is a less "creepy" system and using it as a default at least leaves some amount of a hole in one company's records of my activities. (admittedly, that's a goofy and questionable reason).
- madoublet 7y agoI use DDG, but do not currently recommend it to others. I think you still have to be cautious about the results it surfaces b/c it doesn't have the same anti-spam mechanisms in place that Google has. For instance, I recently searched for holding mail for the USPS and the first result was a scam site that looked pretty convincing. So, I like the idea of DDG but still do not fully trust it.
- tjakab 7y agoI switched over from Google to DDG back in 2013 and never looked back. I use it heavily on a day to day basis ranging from obscure java error messages for my job to just general searches and once in a great while I have to throw a !g in front of the search, but that's really it.
- jccalhoun 7y agoI wish DDG all the best but for me, "good enough" isn't enough. I don't care about tracking so that isn't a real incentive for me either. I use Bing for my main search because they bribe me with points I can use to buy Amazon gift cards. It regularly isn't good enough so I regularly end up at google. I want more competition in search so I'm glad people use DDG but it isn't for me yet
- jaggs 7y agoGeneral day to day searches? DDG is great for me Niche or deep dive searches? Still !g I'm afraid Big plus is that DDG is getting better every month. Google seems to be getting worse (ads, fluff etc).
- uk_programmer 7y agoThe only thing that Google is significantly better at than google in location based searches in the UK i.e. local businesses. DDG map search is wrong for me about 50% of the time. Everything else is pretty much the same as google or better in some cases (google seems to de-rank certain things). The code snippets when just quickly searching "How do I do <X> in <programming language L>" is quite nice.
- VikingCoder 7y agoIt's Lent, so I just searched for "Fish Tacos" and clicked on Map. It showed four places, none of which are anywhere near me. I click on Directions and it takes me to Bing. Do the same thing on Google, see a dozen places in my neighborhood, and I get Google Maps navigation. What do you get in your searches for Fish Tacos? Do you have a better experience with DDG?
- calderarrow 7y agoI'm a die-hard DDG fan, but for some things -- particularly mapping related issues -- google maps is so superior. I append a !gm to my searches for stores and it automatically opens in google maps.
- ce4 7y agoGoogle Maps has a number of features that contribute to that: * maps timeline (location recording) * maps "local guides" status with * Gamification for POI data enrichment * Google Survey app with payouts per survey finished
- godshatter 7y agoDon't make the assumption that a privacy-centered search engine is going to look at your location data. Add your location to the query itself.
- VikingCoder 7y agoYeah, but it did. It knew where I was, based off of IP I presume.
- godshatter 7y agoI'm surprised by that. I guess I shouldn't make the assumption that a privacy-centered search engine isn't going to look at your location data.
- jefurii 7y ago> DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use This is news to people?
- fiatjaf 7y agoYou can't get direct links to images when using Google Image Search, but you can when using DuckDuckGo Image Search. That should be enough for you to switch.
- nkingsy 7y agoDuckDuckGo is a for profit company. There are no guarantees it will not seek more profits at a later date. See: Google. That being said, competition that hurts Google’s bottom line would likely result in better behavior. Ddg has a long way to go to be an impactful competitor in the market, though.
- calderarrow 7y agoQuestion for google search users on HN: Do y'all use adblockers? I noticed less of a difference in my one-off searches after I had been using an ad blocker for a while, so I wonder if using an adblocker would be a way for people to transition away from Google.
- stiglitz 7y agoAnyone got a specific search term that gave poor results on ddg compared to google or vice versa? I see zero specific examples in the comments right now. For all I know, you people are searching for “howbakecarrotsovengsgshd”. In my experience there’s no difference in quality worth talking about between any of the popular search engines.
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- jug 7y agoI noticed the same. It wasn’t fit for my use a few years ago but I think the user uptake has helped somehow, or inspired their devs. Now I feel like it’s more about not being quite used to the results. It’s just a matter of unlearning the old though, with Google’s overly strong echo chamber results.
- weystrom 7y agoI find myself using !g more than I'd like to, even before I even look at DDG results. I just don't seem to trust it with complex queries and go straight to google. But it has gotten better, that's true. Side effect - I started using built-in Firefox wikipedia and Stackoverflow search way more, skipping DDG and Google altogether.
- realradicalwash 7y agoi've been using DDG for a few years now. i generally like it a lot. however, i have decided to stop using them for image search. their filters are just not good enough. two examples: I've searched for some kind of speedo (jammers?) and got to see a really problematic image I thought of reporting to the police. and just recently, i image searched 'martin from the simpsons', because I came across his name and forgot which character that was. near the top of the results were some really wtf images (now removed). I don't want to see that stuff - so if anyone at DDG sees this: please up your image filters.
- Grimm1 7y agoTo my knowledge duck duck go uses Bing's search API to get their results. To me Bing and Google have not been sufficient for my searching needs and the needs of a large group around me for a long time now. On a separate but related issue because DDG is using Bing the overall experience is lackluster, as other user's have noted things like very slow to re-index new results, new information climbs up to the top very slowly and often times I have to switch off their search with a ! command to get my results because they just aren't working. But if I have to do that I'd rather be on that other search site entirely. To be fair google also for the last few years has also started providing a very lack luster search experience and using dark patterns around their results to get you to click ads. They all kind of suck. My opinion is biased though because I'm currently working on a new search engine to solve these things.
- diffeomorphism 7y ago> To my knowledge duck duck go uses Bing's search API to get their results. And their own crawler and wikipedia and stackexchange and about 400 other sources: https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/sources/ https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/so... That said, yeah it is mainly a better Bing.
- bla3 7y agoThat page basically confirms this. It says > To do that, we've developed an open source Instant Answer platform called DuckDuckHack, which links to https://duckduckhack.com/ https://duckduckhack.com/ which says "DuckDuckHack is now in Maintenance Mode". And the "four hundred sources" link links to 400 special case replies. They are probably useful, but fire rarely. It's basically Bing, and that page is a bunch of spin.
- elliottback 7y agoA search in Bing for "cult of the dead cow" seems to give me some localized (Japan) results, while DDG has a bunch of American Beto O'Rourke politics news pieces added.
- burlesona 7y agoA few years ago I switched my desktops to use DDG while leaving my phone using Google. At first I had to !g all the time. Now that’s rare. Now I’m starting to have the other problem. If I search for a company, product, person, etc., on DDG it’s the first hit. But on google I just get a wall of ads and videos, and it’s hard to tell where the actual homepage is for the thing I’m looking for. So as of now I would say, google is still better if you’re looking for something obscure and especially if you don’t know what it’s called. But today I would say DDG is better if you are searching for something specific by name.
- teekert 7y agoMy story is the same! Also, when I want colouring pictures for my kids, DDG just lets met tap them and print them. That is nolonger possible using Google since some months. I also very much appreciate the code snippets when (already started typing "Googling"!) Searching for code related things.
- bloodorange 7y agoI recently had to search for something similar to this: march 12 2019 + 366 days and DuckDuckGo gave me exactly what I wanted while Google gave me not-very-useful results.
- encoderer 7y agoI tried it when I switched to FireFox. Switched back after 30 days. Still in Firefox.
- allovernow 7y agoI think this is more of a reflection on how far Google results have fallen. But I really glad to see someone gaining at least some ground against Google while at least claiming to be privacy focused.
- smeeth 7y agoMy primary work use of search is looking for academic papers. I understand its a rarer use-case but DDG just isn't there yet unfortunately. Looking forward to when they are!
- microcolonel 7y agoIt used to be that Google would handle unstructured queries better for me, but lately things I'm looking for are, without explanation, invisible, or demoted to the fifth or sixth page. For me at least, the average search result quality from DuckDuckGo for me is better than Google. I think there three main difficult scenarios remaining with DuckDuckGo: 1) If your query is very abstract, and you don't know what to call the thing you're talking about, DuckDuckGo will less often be able to figure out what you're talking about. 2) If your query is not in English, Chinese, or Russian (and probably a handful of other languages which they/their vendors support well), it may have a hard time making your query general enough to return results. 3) If you really care about local results, you may not be satisfied unless you provide location information in the query, and maybe not even then.
- ufo 7y agoDoes anyone know if there is a way to emulate DDG's bangs using Firefox search engine keywords? I tried forcing myself to use keywords but apparently they only work on the address bar (and not on the search bar) and also only if you type them at the start of the query. DDG bangs also work on any part of the query, including at the end.
- kylebenzle 7y agoSame, DDG works better for me.
- urtrs 7y agoI exclusively use DuckDuckGo mostly because google results got worse. What worries me though is that I get different results when I browse with tor.
- drivingmenuts 7y agoSo, DDG is good enough - but, is it better than Google?
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- syphilis2 7y agoI'd really like to see people post screenshots comparing Google and DDG results for cases where they consider one better than the other.
- mcyukon 7y agoI've been using DDG for about the last 2 years. The only thing that throws me for a loop once in awhile is that some local businesses only have their open hours entered with Google. Searching for that business in DDG will show their address but not their open hours. Their hours are also not listed on facebook, Yelp, or TripAdvisor. Where as on Google, it's right there in their little knowledge panel on the right. A business where this is happening: Pho 5 Star Vietnamese Cuisine - Whitehorse Yukon Other than that, most of the time DDG gets me better results than Google. I work in the trades and look up a lot of tools/tool reviews and google results are a dumpster fire of bad results full of these odd adsites that all look similar, have obvious generated URLs, and clone amazon descriptions and reviews. They are also ranked high on page 1 of Googles search results, and the trust worthy sites are getting pushed down or even to the next page.
- ebg13 7y agoI'll believe this when the third result for "filled torus" isn't "Cum Filled Pussy Porn Videos" unless safe search is enabled. DDG's contextual awareness is abysmal.
- kazinator 7y agoConfirmed. Wow!
- chadlavi 7y agoI do find that I get... a lot of porn images in any DDG image search past, say, the 20th image result. For literally any search term, it seems.
- nice_byte 7y agoi'm not getting porn but this is nonetheless a perfect example of how bad ddg is. first result is the "torus" article on wiki, which is _not_ what the query asks for. by contrast, google's top result is the "solid torus" wiki article - much better.
- auiya 7y agoMaybe you just under-estimate the prevalence of porn searches on the Internet? Once could easily argue that your esoteric geometry search is likely not nearly as common as the results they returned you on what they surmised was a porn search with a typo for instance.
- 7y ago
- Andrew_nenakhov 7y agoI'm on DDG on all my devices for more than a year. Tried to use Google recently on a friend's computer, was shocked by horrible UI and lack of links. Not OK,Google.
- SubiculumCode 7y agoI will give DDG in a similar try, but I am more like the HN crowd than the average user....lots of searches for statistical and programming functions/ideas that most people have never heard or think about :e.g. "model selection among non-nested fractional polynomial mixed level models"
- Pmop 7y agoIt'd be awesome if they had an mirror that starts with "go", so we can reuse muscle memory and browser's url autocomplete.
- bonsai80 7y agoI agree. I have switched and used to feel like the switch was failing when I had to use Google for some things, but realized that's just fine. I also occasionally use Wolfram Alpha for things too. Both there if needed, but otherwise getting great results from a company that respects me.
- Wheaties466 7y agoI've been using DDG on my one browser for the past 3 years and the amount of things I have to search twice, once through DDG and then again in google is absurd.
- bgrohman 7y agoI’ve been using DuckDuckGo for years now. It’s great. I probably use the !g fallback to Google a few times a year.
- jordache 7y agono it was garbage for my use case of searching programming questions, or searching a business (where it links me to open street map, instead of google maps).
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- ara24 7y agoI have been using duckduckgo on all browsers, including mobiles, for 2-3 years now. There are occasions when I don't get good results. But when I try the same query on G, the results are equally useless. So, I have since stopped using anything else. Although, I should say, bing was equally good when I used it before duckduckgo, until they added that horrendous news feed in the bottom.
- computerex 7y agoI have tried to do this a couple times and have always had to resort to switching back to Google. As a software engineer I use Google heavily and do dozens of searches a day. In my personal qualitative experience Google seems to return better results for technical queries. For day to day use I think DDG is more than sufficient however. I think DDG is certainly usable even for my work related searches but it simply takes longer to arrive to the answer in my experience.
- jryb 7y agoI exclusively used DDG for the past couple of years but gave up on it recently. I never kept track of how often I used the "!g" google fallback but in the past year or so it started to be the overwhelming majority of searches, even for simple things like the name of an organization.
- pricees 7y agoI recently switched to DDG after giving it a shot 2 years ago and finding it wanting. Good, bad, or indifferent, I land on the same 5-10 platforms (or did Google only promote those platforms??) for 95% of my searches. This makes DuckDuckGo's !bang commands more efficient than a Google search. Google wins for completely agnostic default searches and rich map functionality. For everything else, I am very satisfied with DDG.
- typpo 7y agoTo add a little data on this thread, here's a list of queries that I subsequently !g'ed over a 30 day period. Maybe Duck/Bing developers will find it useful: https://gist.github.com/typpo/605a7cd9da88c3be061c6958a31fa2ed https://gist.github.com/typpo/605a7cd9da88c3be061c6958a31fa2... Aside from a limited set of head queries where they've added their own custom stuff, DDG is a wrapper around Bing. The results are identical and any webmaster can tell you that Duckduckbot is not crawling the web like Google/Bing. In the same way that "Google is an advertising company", I see DDG as a marketing company. They've done a good job marketing Bing results with a privacy wrapper. I recognize the value, but it's different from competing directly on search.
- bluntfang 7y agoi just recently switched to DDG as my primary search. It's not as good as google, especially when it comes to software engineering documentation and maps, but everything else is fine.
- woofie11 7y agoI've been using DDG forever. I do !g once in a long time, but not often. I think the most common use case is Google's excellent calculator. DDG is buggy, and when it works, just isn't as good.
- rykuno 7y agoDDG is fantastic and now my preference. I tried it a couple years ago and was constantly second guessing their results. To have come this far as to it now becoming my daily preference, the team has come a long way and has instilled great confidence that they will continue to improve the platform
- Bombthecat 7y agoSooo, when do you guys think Google will pull the plug from ddg?
- Kiro 7y agoYou mean Bing?
- stuaxo 7y agoI am a regular user. Is there a way to report bad search results ?
- phaedryx 7y agoI think what finally sold me was the bangs. For example I can search "Array !mdn" and get right to the MDN docs and not worry about w3schools stuff.
- giantrobot 7y agoI switched to DDG soon after they launched. I've been using search engines since the days of WebCrawler and out of habit still search today like I did back then. I don't do natural language queries, I search for keywords and want to use logical operators to narrow down my search. I also usually know some sites to search for things so I regularly limit searched with "site:...". For most of the past decade Google's support for the way I think about searching has sucked. They got obsessed with tailoring results to users and linking everything to their profiles. They also went nuts with natural language search, filling results pages with bullshit, and letting paid placement overtake meaningful search results. For me this was all made worse because I don't stay logged into accounts and I don't use GMail as my primary e-mail. When I need to log into account I do so in a private browser window. I also use ad blockers and have for decades now. This all adds together to make Google useless for me. I'm sure plenty of people like their features but they don't do me any good. It's aggravating to me because for a while in the 00s, before the DoubleClick reverse buyout, Google's search was vastly superior to the competition. Where all others were inundated with keyword spam and other early SEO bullshit Google returned germane results for just about everything. Their search page ads were even relevant because they were looking at what I had searched for instead of some historical profile. DDG is closest to what old Google search used to be. I don't want to ask questions in an NLP search box most of the time. When I do I'll go to WolframAlpha. I'm really interested in just a full text search of the web with good result sorting. This is what old Google did fantastically and current DDG does well enough for my needs.
- incanus77 7y agoGoogle search was an unfortunate period in my life between my otherwise great search history bookends of AltaVista and DuckDuckGo. I think I’ve been on DDG for probably 5-6 years now. Results are absolutely good enough.
- rcarmo 7y agoI switched six months ago and never looked back. I will occasionally use other engines deliberately (Google when I’m looking for more obscure things that warrant wading through pages of ads and Bing for image searches), but it is now my default on most devices.
- vstuart 7y agoNon-Docker Local Installation of searX on Linux | https://persagen.com/2020/02/02/searx.html https://persagen.com/2020/02/02/searx.html searX is a free metasearch engine with the aim of protecting the privacy of its users. * searX does not share users’ IP addresses or search history. * Tracking cookies served by the search engines are blocked. * searX queries do not appear in search engine webserver logs. In addition to the general search, the engine also features tabs to search within specific domains: General | Files | Images | IT | Maps | Music | News | Science | Social Media | Videos Notably: * Each search result is given as a direct link to the respective site, rather than a tracked redirect link as used by Google. * When available, these direct links are accompanied by “cached” and/or “proxied” links that allow viewing results pages without actually visiting the sites in question. * The “cached” links point to saved versions of a page on archive.org, while the “proxied” links allow viewing the current live page via a searX-based web proxy. Tip: I do a lot of technical searches (StackOverflow …) and in my preliminary use of searX I find that selecting “General” (only) as the Default Category (in Preferences) gives the best results.
- TheRealPomax 7y agoIt really isn't. It was great for a while but has become progressively less useful and more nonsense filled in its results over the last 2 years to the point where today I still have it set as default search engine, but for almost everything immediately go "oh ffs" and research with !g added.
- tomxor 7y ago> Most of my searches relate to my job, which means that most of my searches are technical queries. Recently I've found google infuriating for technical searches because it has started automatically searching for "what it thinks you meant", which when using technical terms or program parameters etc are always wrong.
- iamaelephant 7y agoIt's not
- patricklovesoj 7y agoSwitched to the duck 3 months ago. Don't really feel any pain really.
- staticassertion 7y agoI've been using DDG for years. It's perfectly fine. What I've found is I don't use general search engines much in general anyways - I use ddg macros like !rust to search rust docs, or other common places I search.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- leed25d 7y agoOf the google bangs, I find myself using !gm (google maps) the most.
- sandes 7y agoEngine search global market share: Google 92.54% so, who cares?
- newscracker 7y agoIf we are comparing anecdotes, like in this article, DDG is still not good enough for me for certain kinds of queries. My default search engine is DDG, but even today I had to switch to startpage (!s) for some searches. IIRC, these were just some searches related to some themes and features of Ghost (the publishing platform), Hugo (static site generator), etc. In my daily use, I still rely on startpage, and the next level, which is Google (!g), to get to what I need. Forget about instant answers and similar things. DDG’s index of the web is not as vast as Google’s...or maybe it is but it’s unable to figure out relevance as well as Google does. I still recommend DDG to people and tell them about a few bang commands. But as of today, DDG is not something I can totally rely on within the scope of its search results. The new Edge browser from Microsoft uses Bing as the default search engine. It works better than DDG for several cases (for me), but whenever it doesn’t, I miss the bang commands that make the act of performing the same search on another engine so quick and easy.
- nice_byte 7y agothis is most likely not true. i keep trying ddg every now and then - last attempt was ~ 6 months ago - and every time i have to return to google search with renewed appreciation. i have no idea why it's so bad - i think my queries should be very easy because most of the time i google referential material (e.g. information on a widely used api) and not something obscure.
- JackMcMack 7y agoI love duckduckgo, but for some reason my home ip address (new-to-me but fixed) seems to be banned on at least one server, and I have to flush my dns cache often to be able to reach duckduckgo.com . I've tried reaching out to info@duckduckgo.com but only got a generic "thanks for the feedback response", and I don't have twitter. Is anyone from duckduckgo reading this?
- marssaxman 7y agoDuckDuckGo has certainly been good enough for my regular use for several years now. Switching the search engine to DDG is part of my standard new-browser setup, along with resetting the "new tab" content to blank and installing uBlock Origin. I may have had an easier switch because I never used a google account, and thus never had to deal with personalized search results. I also never liked the natural-language style of search query - too fuzzy - and have continued using the same kind of keyword-based searches that worked when the web was young.
- k_bx 7y agoWhat's interesting, for me, a Ukrainian guy, it became better than Google as a default. Google ignores my settings that set to only Ukrainian and English results and constantly throws Russian at me, be it Russian Wikipedia (horrible place) or Russian version of MDN articles and similar things. DuckDuckGo is "ok", and often times when you think "omg, results are shit, Google would work here", Google shows same results.
- k_bx 7y agoWhat I don't get is why DDG has no "google it" button. I mean, typing !g is not convenient, esp on mobile.
- zeta0x10 7y agoFor people complaining about worse local results: You can also use the `site:` argument on TLDs. E.g. "kino dresden site:.de" If you can guess the TLD obviously.
- artursapek 7y agoHow sad is it that this is the best way to make a substantial announcement on Twitter. A pixelated image of text. Twitter should work on some less-frequently-used tweet mode that allows for more characters for stuff like this. https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/1220768243318571008 https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/1220768243318571008
- ryanmcbride 7y agoI switched to DDG pretty much as soon as they were on the scene and it's been awesome watching them grow. Several of my team members have switched to DDG after watching me use it for so long too. I can't recall the last time I had to !g.
- thethethethe 7y agoI use DuckDuckGo as the primary browser on my phone so I don’t accidentally search things on my corporate Google account and I can say the DDG is demonstrably worse in many situations. If you have no idea how to spell a complex word, you can type absolute gibberish into Google and it will know what you meant. DDG will figure it out sometimes but less frequently. Google also has better answer cards than DDG. Try searching “Facebook revenue” on DDG and Google. Google gives you the answer and DDG shows you nothing. The notion that DDG is better than Google, which is only ever evangelized in these HN threads, is delusional idealism. Sure, DDG has some nice features (namely not being Google), but suggesting that it is better than Google and that the billions of unwashed masses are wrong about Google is silly and kind of elitist.
- elagost 7y agoMost people, I believe, could be served just fine by most "Free" alternatives. Many people, I believe, wouldn't notice if you replaced 1) their desktop OS with GNU/Linux, 2) their browser with Firefox, 3) their search engine with DuckDuckGo, 4) MS office with LibreOffice or FreeOffice, and 5) their various smartphone apps and social media services with webapps and/or Free alternatives. How is this surprising? As long as it "just works" most people are going to be fine and won't really notice a difference. I !g occasionally in DDG (which I've been using full time for over 4 years) but have found that Google's results aren't better, just different.
- guerrilla 7y agoFunny you should ask. This morning I was apparently talking in my sleep, angrily saying "Don't delete my fucking search terms!" I've been using DDG for about 5 years but I feel it's actually been getting worse in that it more often randomly deletes terms when whatever I'm searching for is too specific for it's heuristic. On the other hand, Google does the exact same thing.
- mkchoi212 7y agoFeel like DuckDuckGo has been good enough for regular use for awhile. Search results are decent and what seems like an absence of ads is great. The only thing I miss from Google? The giant cards that show up with an answer if I ask something like "How old is [Insert Celebrity Name Here]"
- tus88 7y agoWas it not yesterday or the day before?
- astatine 7y agoI have DDG set up as the default search engine and it works quite well. I would think that I don't need to use g! about 75% of the time. When the result is from wikipedia or stack overflow or some similar popular site, DDG works alright but seems to miss specialized blogs. So if I don't find the answer on the mainstream sites I find myself doing g! more often. 75% is not bad at all and if you approach with that perspective then DDG works just great but if you think you should never have to use Google, then please wait - not sure how long.
- LegitShady 7y agoI switched to ddg because google is acting politically and I no longer trust them to act as responsible stewards of information and search. But ddg isn't as good as google and just barely qualifies as good enough.
- yingw787 7y agoI switched from Chrome/Google to Firefox/DDG three months ago, as part of a larger switch from macOS to laptop Ubuntu. There are things I don't like about DDG. DDG continually offers to play YouTube videos in its own window due to privacy concerns, and it's not clear to me when it redirects and when it offers its own window. Some searches don't work well; for example, "weather 22203" returns weather for Arlington, TX instead of Arlington, VA in the DDG modal, and for things like precipitation I still need to g! the query. These minor concerns are all peanuts compared to the benefits though. I've found I'm very much a "live free or die" kind of guy, and I like how both Firefox and DDG care about the user. I also like how they work well without too much configuration out of the box :P
- kjgkjhfkjf 7y agoIf you ask a question at work, and the answer is in the first page of Google's search results, then you risk being ridiculed. Saying "I looked on DDG" will not help you in this case; it will likely make the ridicule increase.
- samatman 7y agoThe main thing I still use g! for is "wolfram lite". I just tried "3 watts * 4 hours" on Google, it gave me the answer in joules (which, I think situationally watt-hours would be the better unit, but...) and DDG gave me a top hit of a site that could do the conversion for me.
- dredmorbius 7y agoDDG crossed this threshold for me years ago, and I've been using it consistently since 2013. (With fairly frequent statements to that effect on HN.) For much of that time the principle justifications were 1) It Is Not Google, 2) results are roughly comparable, and 3) an improved privacy impact. Over the past year or two, the rationale's shifted: results and most especially experience are markedly better. Google's polluting the SERP with advertising, bringing to mind the environment into which Google first emerged in the late 1990s, with what many at the time considered a mature search-engine environment, is most especially notable. My use of console browsers and commandline queries (not a typical use case, though extraordinarily convenient) is another huge factor. Google is now utterly unusable in console-mode browsers. By contrast, the default DDG site works, and works well, and the "lite" site is ... amazeballs: https://duckduckgo.com/lite https://duckduckgo.com/lite As a Bash/bourne shell function: ddg () { /usr/bin/w3m "https://duckduckgo.com/lite?q=$*&kd=-1" } As of a few weeks ago, DDG added "region" and "time" selectors to the lite results page, matching the capabilities recently added to the default DDG site. The fact that "lite" not only works but is actively maintained speaks volumes. The search box is one tab away (it's 12 in Google). Search results are directly clickable. I don't know what new idiocy has infected Google, but when I view a Google results page in, say, w3m, I cannot click the links: http://www.google.com/search?ie=ISO-8859-1&hl=en&source=hp&biw=&bih=&q=why+is+duckduckgo+so+much+better+than+google%3F&btnG=Google+Search&iflsig=AINFCbYAAAAAXmKtKTsHJSquuU_BZU0CxEcmhMULfqFg&gbv=1 http://www.google.com/search?ie=ISO-8859-1&hl=en&source=hp&b... (This is beyond the "the links are redirected for tracking", not the case on DDG with a URL parameter, but Google has broken its own search links.) I can only assume Google are telling advanced users that they are no longer of interest to the firm. In a graphical browser, results are crammed with ads and filler, annoying, hard to parse, and quite frequently just not very good. There are occasional exceptions: 1. For date-ranged search, Google (and specifically desktop) is the only option. 2. Some older content isn't accessible on DDG. Generally this is pre-2005 / pre-2000 content. 3. Some obscure content only appears on Google, though to a vastly lesser extent than was true only a few years ago. Also, again, DDG's bang searches are hugely useful, with at least a couple dozen in frequent use by me. The broader picture, though, is that Web search seems generally less useful than it was 5-10 years ago. That seems to be a mix of far more crap online, as well as black-hat SEO winning over Web search companies (death penalties really ought to be a thing), and far more "traditional" content (books, scientific articles, other published sources) now being accessible online. I'll hit up Wikipedia, search for references, and follow those, or go to Worldcat and run a subject search, then read books, magazines, or articles directly (through Library Genesis or Sci-Hub), rather than waste my time on Web glurge. Yes, there are still some good voices out there, but between crap content, crap Web UI/UX, and general web annoyances, it's become a net negative. AdTech and Surveillance Capitalism destroy everything.
- qwerty456127 7y agoIndeed.
- kuon 7y agoI have been using DDG for years and did not know the !g I copy paste search often when DDG results are lacking, I feel so stupid.
- mdrachuk 7y agoI have ddg setup as default on my laptop, phone and iPad for over the year. I’m using google fallback almost half of the time. In particular, non-English queries and software development queries are way better in google.
- habosa 7y agoI am really trying to use DDG more but I dunno, it's not very good in my experience. Specifically these use cases fail: * When searching for local business / places. * When searching for something I want to buy. * The news index doesn't seem very real-time. However it has some things I love: * !twitter to search Twitter! * Sometimes non-personalized results help me find something outside my bubble
- alex_young 7y agoI switched for a month and went back to Google. DDG is about 95% there for me, but that missing 5% is the crucial on point results for technical questions I rely on. In these cases DDG point me at useful stuff, but not as useful as Google, and that edge costs time spent traversing and sorting information. I’m happy there is a good competition here and I’ll try again, but for now I’m happy with Google results even with the ads.
- SirLotsaLocks 7y agoIt really is, I've been using ddg for a few months now near exclusively. The bangs, though I still haven't gotten particularly fluent in them, really help sell it for people who aren't sure (like I was). Now like others in this thread have said, for more obscure things like when im bug fixing I use google but for most things ddg is sufficient.
- babypistol 7y agoI have used DuckDuckGo a couple of years back, but, after some more consideration switched back to Google. Apart from privacy I never really liked the direction DuckDuckGo was going in (more below). Just recently I decided to search for an alternative search engine once again. Things I want to consider are: 1. Reasonable privacy - I don't want the search engine to take super invasive steps to track me (but still keep in mind that I need to send my queries to someone, so there's really no expectation of full privacy) 2. No personalization - I want to be sure that only obvious parameters affect the ranking of search results (e.g. manual language or location selection, manual time selection, ...). Want to avoid personalization and a search bubble at all cost. 3. No results processing - I want links to original sources, not processed or aggregated information with little or no references to sources. 4. Independence - I'd like to support a search engine that can operate as independently as possible. A search engine with it's own crawler seem far more resilient to external influence than a meta or proxying search engine. Google falls short on 1, 2 and 3. But holds up very well on 4. With Bing or Yandex I don't have much experience, but expect something similar. DuckDuckGo heavily advertises 1. I guess 2 follows from it but didn't find it mentioned as an explicit goal. On 3 and 4 it falls short. If I remember correctly DuckDuckGo was one of the first to offer processed results (Instant answers). I'm not sure about the situation now, but I believe it started of as a meta search engine and proxied most searches to Yahoo, Bing or Yandex. https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/sources/ https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/so... still lists Bing prominently. Startpage.com seems to get me 1 and 3. But 2 is questionable since the results are still tailored by Google (not to me personally, but it's still not clear what factors into ranking). And 4 obviously doesn't apply. To find a better alternative I started looking for search engines with independent web crawlers. So far I found mojeek.com, beta.cliqz.com and qwant.com. mojeek.com looks good on 1,2,3,4 but results aren't quite good enough. With Cliqz I'm not sure about personalization, but otherwise looks good. I finally settled on Qwant.com for now. It promises privacy and no personalization explicitly. Has an independent crawler. Sometimes it tries to provide a processed answer card, but so far I managed to ignore that. Results are surprisingly good.
- alkonaut 7y agoIt’s not. Not even close. There should be some sort of “search benchmark” that could show this more objectively. A table of searches with search queries and the correct first resukt. In maby cases it’s clear what the correct result is (Search for a major company and I want their website index page for example). In other cases the expected result is “what google does”, e.g when searching for “123 GBP in USD”. It’s not that DDG doesn’t let me find what I want eventually, it’s that it doesn’t have the right result as #1 which is extremely frustrating when you are used to the I’m feeling lucky-click on the first result without reading. To switch I’d want google quality results with zero added effort on my part e.g in learning better DDG-querying or accepting a slightly longer time to browse results. That’s pretty tough to pull off without the resources and data that Google has.
- IlIlI 7y agoIf such a test existed, i would expect ddg to be on par or better than google. For finding index pages, I prefer ddg because the actual company isnt placed below advertised results of competitors. Currency conversions are supported. It also shows SO answers, github project info, latex commands and more on the results page. I'd recommend revisiting it.
- igravious 7y agoAbsolutely. Completely anecdotally I know but I switched to the Brave browser recently to try it out. It came with DDG installed by default so I started using it in the omnibar or whatever it's called. Like many here I do some coding so I've been looking up stuff to do with Ruby, Vue.js. APIs, and the lambda calculus. DDG results were not very helpful so I've gotten used to navigating to google.com just like the old days. As in, I'm so used to ctrl+t and type something to search that I had to train myself to type begin typing google.com again. Yeah, I could switch the default search engine but being forced to compare results is a good habit. These articles about how DDG is hit the front page time and again on Hackernews, this has never been my experience. I appreciate the privacy aspects 100% so I'd actually prefer if it was genuinely competitive with the big G but sadly this has never been my experience.
- amelius 7y agoAccording to which benchmark?
- TrumpMyGuns 7y agoNo, it's really not. I hate google as much as the next average HN poster, but this is just not true. It's just Bing, anyway.
- valleyjo 7y agoSo is bing
- lostgame 7y agoVery strange timing on what is unfortunately a horribly inaccurate title based on my personal experience. I tried swapping to DuckDuckGo yesterday on my iPhone as the primary search tool and reverted unfortunately back to Google after only two hours. It’s hard to define all of the reasons the ‘mobile’ experience is so unbearable, but I’ll try: 1) No video or image results at the top of the page when that is most relevant. 2) No IMDB/overviews for movies, music, books, etc. 3) I am used to one of the first results in my search consistently being Wikipedia. This was the case about 1/3rd of the time vs. Google. 4) Results often appeared extremely out of order in terms of relevancy vs. Google, with the actual relevant like often being on the second(!) page. 5) Personal taste, but super relevant - In terms of UI/UX, the interface feels dated, actually harkening back to the days of AltaVista - I’m unfortunately honest when I say I feel like I’m using something designed 10-15 years ago. 6) Autocomplete seemed to have significant issues, and, for some reason, sometimes even taking several seconds to appear. I couldn’t express my disappointment enough. I really wanted to give up the ghost, and just move on from Google - but I am so used to so many of the apparently fantastic nuances of Google, I believe it will unfortunately take 4-5 years before I can even get past enough of these significant issues to make it worth using. On Desktop - the experience seems to be significantly better. I can’t even point out enough reasons why it’s so poor on mobile, it could unfortunately fill several blog posts and I don’t have time to point out the myriad of issues and inconsistencies here at this time. If there’s jobs available at DDG - I’d love to help, in all seriousness.
- psweber 7y agoIt's not going to be convenient to get off any Google product. If privacy and escaping algorithm bubbles is important enough to you, DDG can probably be "good enough".
- lostgame 7y agoUnfortunately I need a search engine to be functional. The trade off privacy is certainly not worth it, and the algorithms aren’t half as good, at least in terms of search results. It’s a damn shame.
- eddhead 7y agoSwitched to Bing a while ago and have stayed put. Never needed Google cos the results are garbage nowadays. DDG isn't there yet, but Bing reminds me of Google 5 years ago
- zszugyi 7y agoI've switched to Qwant a few months ago at home. Aside a few usability issues (like hijacking the space button), the search results are fine both for random searches and for programming-related ones (aka. SO, JavaDoc, cppreference search). Their map search is not great, so had to switch back to google for that.
- tyteen4a03 7y agoThe only reason I am not using DDG for everything is because location based search simply suck. I live in Europe but all the search results default to US. I wish I can tell DDG that they can use my rough location for search queries.
- unixsheikh 7y agoI think I switched to Duckduckgo about 3 years ago and I have not done any searching on Google since then (with a very few exceptions just to compare). I have been very happy with the results Duckduckgo provides. The only exception, which is something I find really annoying, is when you want to limit the search to something specific using quotes and it ignores the quotes and provides results that are completely useless. Startpage.com respects the quotes.
- Jaxkr 7y agoNo it isn’t. I try to switch every few months, usually sticking with it as my only search engine on mobile and desktop. The results suck, and it is completely lacking in information about real-time topics. Just compare the results for a live sports game across DuckDuckGo and Google. Or the query “democratic primary”. In both of these google presents relevant accessible information while DDG does not. DuckDuckGo wastes your time but protects your privacy. At the moment Google‘s results are so much better that I am willing to give up privacy in exchange for convenience. I will continue trying DuckDuckGo every few months. Hopefully someday I will not feel drawn back to Google.
- einpoklum 7y agoThe author does not remove ads. That skews the comparison relative to my experience. Anyway - in my experience, DDG is good enough for most of my searches, but not all.
- paul7986 7y agoWould any other DDG users like to see - DDG Mail service - DDG News.. i still use Google News begrudgingly - a DDG Video site.. Youtube replacement (not easy to do with Youtube having so much content) Personally, I'd drop all Google services if such were available. Maybe others would too?
- sedatk 7y agoNo, it's not. I've tried DuckDuckGo countless times, it only works for common search keywords. For the rest it fails spectacularly. I'm tired of typing the same keywords with !g in front of them.
- TomVDB 7y agoI switched to DDG for my desktop, laptop and phone a few weeks ago. I'm on the fence about switching back: I find myself using g! all the time to get (better) Google results. I want anything related to soccer (national competitions standings, live results, match results, ...)? DDG doesn't have it. Anything where I know up front that the result will be in some forum? DDG almost never has it. Some kind of local news event, whether recent or not? Don't count on DDG. Typo correction is worse. Relevance of the result is worse. Contextual understanding is close to non-existent. Only for the most basic search operations, DDG is fine for me. Other than that, it's g!. I wish it were different.
- dmode 7y agoSoccer is a great example. Searching "Chelsea" in Google vs DDG demonstrates the differences between the two.
- forkexec 7y agoI've been been using DDG since 2012. No significant complaints. And !bangs (shortcuts to search on other sites) are awesome. One major annoyance for me is the keyboard shortcuts don't work on iPad external keyboards.
- kaonashi 7y agoI still end up reverting back to google a lot, especially for more natural language question-type searches.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- anonu 7y agoI don't know. Ddg is my default but I still !g most of my searches after not getting what I need in the top 3 items. Beyond that I need to scroll and I'll probably try a different query
- ibic 7y agoSimilarly, ecosia is now my daily search engine with little search on Google for comparison. It's good enough and (quoting Peppa) "it's for a good cause"
- mindfulgeek 7y agoI switched over to DDG + brave about 6 months ago. Haven’t looked back.
- ablekh 7y agoI'm wondering about why, unlike Google, DDG doesn't display the number of results for a particular search query. It's quite frustrating.
- topherPedersen 7y agoDuckDuckGo actually does a better job of indexing all of my blog posts than Google does. I discovered this when attempting to use Google to search for one of my blog posts using a domain specific query("site:myblog.com") and was unable to find the post I was searching for. However, I was able to easily find my blog post using the same query on DuckDuckGo. This made quite an impression on me as it was the first chink in Google's armor that I've seen.
- gerash 7y agoCan somebody explain why anyone should use DDG instead of Google when they are both free and ad funded? I just issued my last Google query (some Mac OS troubleshooting) and the results were not even close. I understand that they try to differentiate by claiming they don't store previous queries and are stateless and not personalized in a sense which is a bug IMHO not a feature. Yet they sell it as privacy. If one doesn't like their search queries stored remotely the real private solution is for the search engine to run locally which sounds technically hard/infeasible or some differential privacy magic to obscure individual queries (I'm not sure how exactly) but DDG doesn't seem to have any benefit over Google in a meaningful way. That said, extra competition is always good for consumers
- almstimplmntd 7y agoA bit tangential but related: has anyone else noticed an increased frequency in the desired result of a Google search being the first one on the second page? Particularly for things involving reviews or booking, I have noticed an uptick in the (subjectively) “right” result being kept off page 1... it seems almost like some post processing logic to favor specific sites/companies. The fact that the “right” result in these instances is almost always the first result makes me think the true Ranking function knows the result’s actual value.
- stubish 7y agoI'd go further than damning with faint praise and say that it is more than good enough for regular use. Common wisdom is that it isn't as good as Google, but whenever my results are bad and I fall back to a !g search, those results are also bad.
- metastart 7y agoI care about true privacy and transparency...so I use the Epic Privacy Browser and their ad-free and transparent EpicSearch.in. The claim in the blog post and by DuckDuckGo "They do not collect or share personal information" can not be true depending on how you define personal information since search ads are localized on DuckDuckGo. Incidentally, DuckDuckGo refuses to disclose what data they send to Bing/Yahoo to retrieve search ads (forget about open source, they're not even transparent). This claim is further in question as their search ads link directly to Yahoo/Bing so they direct your IP and personal information directly to them -- while one can see those links while hovering on the links, it's not plainly disclosed (especially for non-technical users). Fundamentally their business is built on sending your personal information to Bing. The results in EpicSearch aren't as good as Bing/Yahoo/DuckDuckGo nor as Google...but they are quite close to any intuitive idea of being private and are as good or better at times at least 80% of the time...so from there I'll click on to Bing or Google if I need more results.
- orthoxerox 7y agoI use DDG as the primary search engine on my own devices and Google at work. DDG is still worse than Google in the following aspects: - autocompletion is crap, DDG thinks that "lyrics" is a word that improves every search - DDG is worse at searching SO/Reddit/GitHub. Just a few days ago I was looking for a solution to an issue with my 3D printer, and DDG missed the most useful Reddit post - a filter bubble is often a good thing, I don't search for political news, but Google knows I usually search for technical issues, so where DDG is happy to return results about tabletop games, rock formations and corrosion, Google knows I am looking for Go, Nim, Crystal and Rust.
- ancymon 7y agoFor query "malesia bus conections search" DDG gives me porn results (I have safe search disabled). That doesn't make me thin it's "good enough".
- hestefisk 7y agoIf you’re in US yes.
- thsealienbstrds 7y agoIt has been for a while. I occasionally need to do !g when I'm searching for obscure errors, but it doesn't happen often.
- GoofballJones 7y agoBeen using DDG now for over a year and I would say, for me, it's about 95% accurate in finding what I want found. It's rare now that I go to Google to search for anything. DDG is the default search engine on Firefox and Safari for me. I no long use Chrome (it's not even loaded on this computer) and rarely Google.com itself.
- pnako 7y agoIt's not. I'm not a big fan of Google the company, but Google the search engine finds what I'm looking for. If I type "the two magicians from TV" in Google, I get what I'm looking for (Penn and Teller). It's way down the list in DDG. I suspect DDG is a glorified regex, whereas Google is able to infer connections and figure out what I meant.
- mjh2539 7y agoI tried using duckduckgo for a period of about two months. It's great that it's not monetized through ads, but it's main function, search, is not best in class. I do not use duckduckgo anymore.
- parski 7y agoStartpage is falling apart. DuckDuckGo is good enough by virtue of being the only option.
- MichaelMoser123 7y agorecently i found myself switching to yandex.ru when i can't find it on google - and it worked. I guess it's better not to be too fixed on any single search engine;
- insulanian 7y agoThe only thing I miss in DDG is number of results. I use it often to check for the right way to compose a phrase. If there is a significant difference in numbers between the two alternatives, it pretty much indicates what's the right one.
- tylerburnam 7y agoNo, it's not Edit: this is coming from someone who wishes it was
- roryokane 7y agoI switched to DuckDuckGo not for privacy, though that is nice, but to get away from a horrid misfeature Google introduced a year or so ago that moves links out from under my cursor right as I try to click on them. Specifically, it's Google's "People also search for" links. Those links used to appear as just another box in the search results. But then Google made them appear when you click a search result and then navigate Back to the search results page. When I go back, usually I am planning to click on the search result below the one I had just clicked on. But right as I move my mouse to where the next search result was and click, a box expands under the link I had just visited with suggested searches. Whenever that box appears, I always end up clicking one of the suggested search links instead of the search result I was aiming for. Google's testers probably don't notice the problem because they are slow to acquire targets with the mouse. They probably click on the Back button with their mouse instead of using a keyboard shortcut like I do. But I'm sticking with DuckDuckGo, because it doesn't ever shift the search results around on the page while I'm looking at it.
- rognjen 7y agoThe article is about how the results are worse but the author doesn't like the way things are shown on Google.
- mneubrand 7y agoI switched a few month back and it's still painful for me. Plain search results are OK but Google is so much better with deep integrations. Some examples: - I google a sports team, it shows me most recent results - I google a flight number, it shows me flight status - I google.g. nyse djia, it shows me the current stock value Unlike the author of this post I very much miss these. Now this means having to click through and find this info on flightaware, ESPN, some finance page, etc. instead of just immediately getting what I want
- tonfreed 7y agoI've been using it for about 18 months now. I find myself barely using !g anymore, and usually it's when I'm looking for something really specific.