28 ms·
DuckDuckGo is growing fast
- skeptronus 6y agoOne thing I hate about ddg is that the search results are quite inaccurate sometimes, especially what you are looking for is relatively uncommon/obscure. I hope to see a change in the future.
- mrweasel 6y agoI think it depends on what you’re looking for. Google just removes keywords if it can’t find what you’re looking for, but rather unintelligently it will frequently removes the most important word. In those cases I prefer DDGs inaccurate results. For the past few years I noticed that if DuckDuckGo can’t find anything relevant, then neither can Google.
- gilrain 6y agoInteresting. For me, DDG is more aggressive than Google about changing my search terms. They both do it, but DDG more frequently asks forgiveness rather than permission. DDG: You meant this. Google: Did you mean this?
- DrAwdeOccarim 6y agoI've been using DDG as my default search engine now for over a year and 95% of the time it's great. It's main failure in my hands it trying to find obscure scientific literature or bleeding edge/just published scientific literature. Anyone else have this problem? I assume it's because the goog has goog scholar and so spent years building a massive scientific journal article database. What I don't get is the lack of same-day/week search results for an exact scientific article title with DDG.
- tgv 6y agoSearch results seem to have worsened around a year ago. Nowadays, when I can't find what I want, I often end up on google, which then frequently does find it. A bit annoying.
- commoner 6y agoSemantic Scholar makes a nice alternative to Google Scholar. https://www.semanticscholar.org https://www.semanticscholar.org The DuckDuckGo bangs for Semantic Scholar are !s2, !semantic, and !smsc.
- divyanka1916 6y agoduckduckgo is very very inaccurate
- ntw1103 6y agoI have been using duckduckgo for over a year, and it works pretty well. One frustration is the mapping. Apple maps is really awful. I end up switching to osm/bing if I need to look something up on a map.
- eruci 6y agoMapping services are all a work in progress. Even Google Maps has been giving some strange responses lately. Say, a location deep in south west Germany shows up as Denmark on GMaps: https://twitter.com/geolytica/status/1300544359004336129 https://twitter.com/geolytica/status/1300544359004336129
- EvilGrin 6y agoYou can redirect a search in DDG to google maps with !maps OpenStreetMaps with !geouri and Bing Maps with !bm
- mhh__ 6y agoI'm assuming it's not as a bad as it was at launch, right? (For example the parallel universes like wibbly wobbly world, and the non-existent village of Basingstoke)
- Jestar342 6y ago`!bm`, `!gm`, `!osm` for Bing, Google, and OpenStreet maps, respectively.
- ntw1103 6y agoThank you, great tip.
- JakeKalstad 6y agoI've been using start page for the past few years as a default, but find myself typing in google.com->tab to search a lot of my day. The difference between pasting in a random golang compiler error into startpage vs google trained me to google all of my software issues. The biggest non-technical hurdle at this point is google maps. The ability to type in an address and get a map with directions and nearby businesses has been pounded into my brain and when I use DDG or startpage with an address I generally end up sighing and pasting it into google.
- EvilGrin 6y agoYou can use a bang in DuckDuckGo for this. Just add !g somewhere in the search and it'll redirect the search to Google. They have bangs setup for all sorts of things. https://duckduckgo.com/bang https://duckduckgo.com/bang
- jameshush 6y agoI use StartPage too and maps and currency conversation are the two things that make me open up Google
- mkayokay 6y agoI use xe.com for currency conversion - short url, easy to use and is not google. But there is no way around maps for me - at least for driving - for outdoor stuff I generally use Locus Map on my phone
- intricatedetail 6y agoI've been using DDG as default for over a year. First I search on DDG and if I don't like the result I go on Google. It's in my muscle memory so I sometimes don't even notice which service I am looking at.
- hoseja 6y agoI suspect you know, but you can search google via ddg by appending the !g bang.
- polote 6y agoit might be worth comparing with google search growth
- petargyurov 6y agoI've been using DDG for a long time. To date, my most common bang usages are still: !g maps !g <obscure programming error> I still recommend it to everyone though.
- przmk 6y agoJust a heads up, you can actually use !m or !gm to access Google Maps directly. There's also !osm for OpenStreetMaps.
- agumonkey 6y ago!wbm wayback machine (urlencoding issues but still) !yt !cache
- dredmorbius 6y ago!hn
- lhoff 6y agoDDG has a direct bang for google maps !maps The have a searchable list for every bang they support. https://duckduckgo.com/bang https://duckduckgo.com/bang
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- petargyurov 6y agoOh nice, didn't know that. Will be using it from now on.
- nvalis 6y agoYou can also use !gm directly!
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- dankerr 6y ago
- alzaeem 6y agoDDG is the default search engine I use on the desktop and in iOS Safari for more than a year. I'm glad to see them growing and hope their privacy centric approach becomes dominant across the web, but the reality is that their search results can be quite poor except for simple queries. I used to use bing in the past and I don't recall having as many frustrations. I hope DDG are able to invest more in this area as they grow, because for most consumers the compromise in search quality may not be worth the privacy gains
- rrrhys 6y ago> for most consumers the compromise in search quality may not be worth the privacy gains This is exactly me - I moved back to google for search when I realised I was subconsciously adding `g!` to every single search
- darrmit 6y agoI've been using DDG for a long time and it really seems like the results have gotten less accurate and informative in the last year or so. For a while I was very satisfied and typically could find what I was looking for, even in the arena of obscure technical knowledge. I'll keep using it because at this point my brain is wired to !g when I can't find something, and the benefits outweigh the lack of results, but I do hope they can improve and continue to grow.
- extropy 6y agoProbably the SEO teams took notice and starting to optimize for DDG (Bing) algorithm too.
- sunaurus 6y agoI love the idea of DDG, but after using it for about a year, I realized that I'm redoing most of my searches with !g. DDG seems to be quite bad at searches that are in my native language and somehow also often doesn't find good results for programming related queries. I ended up switching back to Google. It was painful from a privacy standpoint, but what good is privacy if I don't get useful search results.
- pabo 6y agoI have a similar experience, though I stayed on DDG. It's a bit funny, but I built a habit to use !s. This means, I use DDG to use StartPage, which in turn uses Google.
- OscarCunningham 6y agoWas this recent? I had the same experience but recently tried again and found that DDG was now about as good as Google. When I do try !g because DDG failed to find something then usually Google doesn't find it either. Sadly I think that the way that DDG caught up was that Google got worse because of SEO spam, while only DDG got a little better.
- DanBC 6y agoThe thing that really made Google harder to use was the switch to natural language questions rather than search terms. If you ask Google a question you get better results than if you carefully select some search terms.
- ykevinator 6y agoTotally agree. Google assumes you and your mom are equally trained in logic and determinism.
- fileeditview 6y agoI use DDG now for over a year and similar to you I most of the time use !g. However I still stick to DDG because of all the other bangs i constantly use such as: !w, !yt, !godoc, !yc and more. You can find them all here: https://duckduckgo.com/bang https://duckduckgo.com/bang?
- pkamb 6y agoI wish there was a search engine that dedicated the first X results to Stack Exchange and Reddit. Neither DDG or Google are very good at that, but those sites are consistently the best and most honest results. On Google many searches give mostly affiliate blogspam articles unless I append "reddit" or "forum" or "stack" to the search, at which point I get great results.
- kevincox 6y agoYou can kind of do this yourself on Google. Add `site:stackoverflow.com OR site:reddit.com OR site:stackexchange.com` to your default search engine. Then if you don't find something you link on the first page remove them. It isn't as automatic as you are asking for but that is probably more than you can really expect for what seems like a very niche desire.
- guywhocodes 6y agoI want this but a like match for almost all my searches. Search engines are horrible at matching queries with types of result I'm looking for
- guywhocodes 6y agoI hate that about Google. Clearly they know that they're serving us ads. Even adding forum etc works worse now than it did 10 years ago. Why is it getting harder and harder to find real information even when we tell google where to look for it?
- amelius 6y agoWhat I hate about Google is that they say that they need our information to "improve our experience", yet we can't even tell them what sites we prefer, or which should be omitted, in/from our search results.
- dredmorbius 6y ago!se or !r respectively on DDG. (Also !reddit and !oldreddit) Bangs: https://duckduckgo.com/bang https://duckduckgo.com/bang Bang search: !bang <site description>
- pkamb 6y agoTip for mobile users: remap "ggg" to input "!g" to make the Google shortcut much easier to type.
- jeromenerf 6y agoI use ddg as my entry point for any search, using bangs to Wikipedia, start page as a google alternative, Reddit, images. Google results are sometimes better but most of the time, I find search results heavily biased towards “social platforms”, commercial and otherwise SEO’d resources. Old content is just hard to find, whether it is a prominent news paper article, a niche personal website, etc. I don’t know how this search engines rank their results today, but I would pay for a way to filter out « big names » out of the search results and explore this long tail set by published date, etc. Use cases are very different between « searching » and « researching ». I want a research engine :)
- Mediterraneo10 6y agoFor niche personal websites that are not readily shown on DDG, a good resource to try is millionshort.com.
- jeswin 6y agoI have tried to use DDG several times, but Google is just better. For instance, if you search 'Serena Williams' on Google you see her recent US Open results nicely presented. Similarly, if you search for GOOG (on Chromium-based browsers [1]) you get a stock chart. The point is, Google saves me time due to the domain-specific customization they've done. The bigger issue for me is that if DDG becomes popular, they might chart a path similar to Google in terms of privacy. It's another ad supported search engine after all. [1]: They show dumber results on Firefox and should be in anti-trust territory, but that's a different discussion.
- brianush1 6y agoRE: [1] They show the exact same page for me both on Firefox and Chrome when I search for GOOG. I use Firefox as my main browser, and am logged in to my Google account on Chrome.
- commoner 6y agoGoogle shows a less powerful search interface on Firefox for Android. If you change the user agent to Chrome, Google then shows the same interface it shows to Chrome. This has been such a noticeable problem that a Firefox add-on (Google Search Fixer) was created to fix it: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/google-search-fixer/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/google-search... Google Search Fixer is currently available on Firefox Nightly for Android.
- jeswin 6y agoSorry I forgot to mention I was talking about FF Android, as commoner mentioned. I use it as my main browser and many Google sites downgrade the experience; merely changing the user agent gives me the same result as Google Chrome. I don't particularly like doing that since it reduces FF Android user count in Analytics.
- j-james 6y agoDuckDuckGo "instant answer" infrastructure used to be open-source and community-contributed until a few years back. (But to be fair, searching for GOOG on DDG still gives you a little blurb about stock prices) https://github.com/duckduckgo/duckduckgo https://github.com/duckduckgo/duckduckgo
- iamsb 6y agoI really hope they focus on non english searches as primary focus. Google has pretty much stopped innovating in non English, non Latin script search quality and it will be much easier to target that market. It may not immediately drive revenue, but it will build enough search market share for DDG to become dominant player in non-English speaking geographies.
- mopsi 6y agoAMP alone is a good enough reason for switching to DDG.
- Multicomp 6y agoApparently I am a grandma searcher because DDG does fine, if I occasionally make a trip to the second serp. That's searching for programming errors etc as well.
- TallGuyShort 6y agoActually I found a few years ago that DDG suddenly got really good at programming searches. I still use it for most queries and have better results than most HN comments, but I'd say I use !g the least at work.
- lazzlazzlazz 6y agoI also use DDG by default, but I redo about 50% of searches with the `!g` prefix. Image search on DDG is awful though.
- diegoperini 6y agoDDG is the default search engine in my browser. Unfortunately it doesn't always retrieve the results I'm looking for. But I insist on typing my terms before I fallback to Google. This way, DDG will know that I searched but wasn't impressed with the result. If they are not collecting this level of analytics, they should definitely do so. I'm willing to opt-in.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- readarticle 6y agoI absolutely cannot stand the quality of DuckDuckGo results, programming related or not. I use !g on almost any general search query out of a conditioned lack of faith in the ability of DDG to surface anything useful. The name is childish and doesn’t inspire confidence either. People I encounter that argue the results are “not that bad” are 9/10 times ideological purists, or otherwise misguided, that’s purely my personal experience though. That said, after a few months of frustration I switched my search engine back to Google earlier this year and almost immediately switched it back to DDG the second I needed a bang operator. Bangs are a superpower, a game changer, and by far the best UX for mobile search I’ve seen so far. I bang everything and everyone, bang bang. Googling with site:x.com doesn’t even come close. More characters, Google determines the sorting and mixes in marketing copy results with the UGC I’m looking for, “exact quotes” no longer work, forced AMP results for e.g. Reddit etc. DDG as a search engine is utter crap and I’ve little patience left to hear otherwise, but as a way of turning iOS Safari into a sort of meta search engine it’s invaluable and I genuinely cannot stop recommending it to other “power users”. Gram gram is sticking with google though, and the second Safari replicates bangs I’m outta here.
- robertlagrant 6y ago> The name is childish and doesn’t inspire confidence either. Good point. Not like "Google" or "Bing".
- readarticle 6y agoExactly.
- k_ 6y agoThey should just call it "Bang" or "Bangs" and be done with it :)
- test1235 6y agobing's not a good example here - everyone took the piss out of its name when it was released (and it still said in mocking tones), and it isn't all that popular as a search engine either.
- indymike 6y agoI use DDG for everything but searching for code and programming issues. Google seems to have much better results for code related searches, but for everything else, DDG does well enough.
- lazyjones 6y agoDDG has been good enough for me for years (2013 or so I switched), but I fear that pressure will be increasing for Weinberg to sell to some online giant who offers billions for that kind of traffic.
- newsbinator 6y agoEvery few months I read on HN how much more accurate DDG searches are than they used to be, I try it for a day, I get frustrated, and I return to Google. There's no benefit to !g if you use it for 4 out of 5 searches.
- Semaphor 6y agoCould you give some example searches? I always read this, but I have far below 10% of my searches with !g
- ZephyrBlu 6y agoSeconded. This polarization between "it's good" and "it's shit" is very hard to understand.
- gen3 6y agoI think part of it has to do with the “style” people use to search. I’ve found searching DDG with how I searched google in 2010 to work well. Modern “magic” google searches don’t work as well, it’s more throwing key words together.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- ricardo81 6y agoThere's definitely been a move towards de-googling and more pro-privacy services. I'd tried DDG in the past but found their response times a bit slow (perhaps due to Bing API?) but that does not seem to be the case now, moreso because they switched from Amazon to Microsoft servers. DDG is perhaps the best known private search engine, though Mojeek and Startpage were pro-privacy a good number of years earlier. searchenginemap.com is quite useful for exploring some of the alternative private engines, and shows who powers their search results. It is English focused. Not a huge DDG fan but appreciate they're offering privacy on a larger English speaking search index, and would prefer people use it over Google if they can help it.
- manquer 6y agoThey dont just proxy your requests real time to bing in real time so unlikely it is because of bing API.
- _qulr 6y agoIMO the biggest issue with DDG is that you can't really advertise specifically on DDG. Most people don't realize this, but DDG doesn't sell their own advertising, they use Microsoft's advertising network! This just seems bizarre to me that they're outsourcing the whole reason they're supposed to be independent of the other search engines. I tried signing up for Microsoft's network, but it was a bad user interface (typical MS), very confusing, and I couldn't really figure out how to specifically target DDG and only DDG. I just gave up. DDG needs to bring advertising in-house, or I don't see why they have a reason to exist. They're almost a subsidiary of MS at this point.
- chris_f 6y agoSince DDG also sources their organic results from Bing, I wouldn't be surprised if there was also a contractual obligation that required DDG to use Bing ads to reduce the cost they pay for the search results. Over the last few months I have been working on an alternative search engine. Maybe naively, I thought the most difficult part was going to be to convince people to use it, but the real challenge if figuring out a way to monetize the service in a way that maintains privacy and respects users. The more I go down this path, the more I realize the next big search engine will be one that provides better results AND comes up with a better way for monetization. I wrote a little about it here [0] if anyone is interested. [0] https://coil.com/p/runnaroo/Privacy-and-Search-Engine-Monetization/5dXAW6NwF https://coil.com/p/runnaroo/Privacy-and-Search-Engine-Moneti...
- jameshush 6y agoDDG is probably doing a revenue share with Bing. Every ad that’s clicked a % goes to DDG and MS.
- chris_f 6y agoAlso interesting is that the Bing API TOS [0] has the below line that prevents users from using any other display advertising not provided by Microsoft: "Display advertising that is not provided by Microsoft on any page that displays any part of a response." DDG is big enough that they are probably on a completely separate agreement than the standard TOS though. [0] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cognitive-services/bing-web-search/use-display-requirements https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cognitive-services/bi...
- Semaphor 6y agoBeen using DDG well over a year by now. My single biggest complaint (and that’s inexplicably something that got worse) is that they sometimes ignore search terms, even if you use "" to force a term. This is the main reason for me to use !g as DDG results become useless when that happens. My most common bangs are !w (Wikipedia), !wde (German wikipedia), !ddgde (DDG toggled to German results), !rt (Rotten Tomatoes for TV reviews), !imdb (looking up actors) and !gm (Google Maps. Sadly still the best results if I search for a name instead of an address)
- jonny383 6y agoSorry, but DDG is trash in comparison to Google in terms of relevant results and finding things. Before you get all bent out of shape: yes it's less evil, yes it's better for privacy, etc. But it really doesn't compete on a fundamental level of search.
- leokennis 6y agoI disagree completely. For some things Google is better, namely for stuff where you have almost no clue ("song with children screaming over tv noises"). However for searches where you do have some clue ("error code 456 when installing xyz"), Google will drown you in AMP, useless "answer boxes" and scammy sites while DDG will generally find you the vendors site and some Stack Exchange discussions.
- kilroy123 6y agoI really wish Apple would make a privacy-focused search engine. Google search has gotten so bad lately. I'm sure Apple could make a product that is "good enough."
- mwexler 6y agoGiven their ads over the last three months, I'm not surprised to see growth. The real question is if they can keep the new users. For those not in the adv area, we saw billboards, radio and TV spots, and transit posters (vehicle side and station walls)... On top of their growing digital spend, all emphasizing privacy. Apple is obviously taking this push too, and some folks will care.... But is this positioning enough? <popcorn><couch>
- holri 6y agoFor non Americans it does not make much sense to use an American company fpr privavy reasons, because the NSA has direct access to them. I like qwant and startpage as a good alternative.
- megalomanu 6y agoI agree, but the main reason that I'm using Qwant myself is that non-English results on DuckDuckGo are not good at all. Qwant results are pretty convincing today, much better than a few years ago when it looked like an opportunist product. The only thing I'm really missing from Google is the integration with Maps, Google Search is so convenient for finding a good restaurant, shop or bar around you. There were alternatives in the past (like Yelp) but Google killed them all, at least in France.
- holri 6y agoFor maps I use OpenStreetMap. Good enough for me and I can fix issues and add data myself and contribute for a common good.
- megalomanu 6y agoI must say I'm not as virtuous as you :)
- loughnane 6y agoI’m a native English speaker and have been using it primarily since 2012-13. I love it, as I’ve said here in the past. I came for the privacy and have stayed for the bang syntax. Paradoxically it lets me search with google products better than google. Under google I type in “Boston, MA” then need to click with a mouse. Under ddg I type “Boston, MA !gm” and am brought right to the map. Same thing for the hundreds of other bangs
- goalieca 6y agoI too like banging but i find myself banging less and less these days because she knows exactly what i want and gives it good the first time.
- mindfulhack 6y agoMy own usage scenario is reflecting the changing landscape I think: - I've noticed DDG's quality slowly improve, while Google's slowly decrease. But Google is still on top. - When I really want to search for something, I'm using a mix of Google, Yandex, DDG, and sometimes another weird one like Dogpile.com The times they are a-changin', but slowly, over time. It's quite ironic now that when I want to do some Internet searching, I will use search engines - NOT (just) Google. If I want to 'use google', I use Google. They're definitely not a pure search engine anymore, for better or for worse. What they offer is nice very often, but sometimes all I want is the ability to do some deep searching and nothing be withheld from me. Google increasingly censors and filters out information for an increasing number of their own reasons, none of which I ever asked for. That's not why I fell in love with the Internet. Google is now fundamentally out of sync with the soul of the Internet at the core level. Thankfully, the Internet is bigger than it.
- blntechie 6y agoI use DDG for everything except for programming and local searches. For everything else, DDG works almost 100% of the time for me.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- Jestar342 6y agoDDG user for nearly 11 years (IIRC). Switched almost immediately to it after it launched. I prefer the results I get to Google. Maybe I've mastered DDG-fu or something but I also cannot stand looking at Google results anymore, especially not if there is page upon page from the same site (e.g. if the thing I'm searching for has results on Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, experts-exchange, etc, etc - it often has page upon page of mild variations of the same link) which DDG doesn't seem to do. The bangs are what wins me though. Their value to me dwarfs that of the privacy concerns (which is really important to me, anyway) it's like a curated list of specific searches available to me as long as I can get online, and I don't need to sync anything. So good.
- input_sh 6y agoI'm not that old of a user, but I've been using somewhere between 6-8 years now. It basically boils down to two things: a) bangs, and b) just seeing the same results as everyone else does. Usually when I can't find stuff on DDG, I can't find them with !g neither. I don't see myself switching to anything else unless I'm forced to (if it goes out of business or something).
- codyb 6y agoThis seems to gel with my experience. I probably end up trying Google maybe once or twice a month, and generally I don’t find much. I don’t use bangs frequently although they are neat. I don’t think I’m some search savante, or a hardcore purist/idealist despite moving to DDG for the privacy reasons. Maybe it’s because generally I’m looking for docs rather than specific answers these days.
- godshatter 6y agoSearch engines have been aiming for the lowest common denominator for a long time now. It's all about asking a vague question and letting it's knowledge of you and people like you lead you to the answer. I prefer telling it exactly what I want. Like every other piece of software these days, I keep fighting it because it tries to out-think me. Not a hard task some days, but still. Does DDG allow "and", "or", parens, etc? I tried a query of the form A and (B or C) and it brought back things but I can't tell if it just ignored the parens and "and" and "or" keywords or if it actually used them. Does it honor double-quotes and plus and minus signs? I tend to give DDG more information than it needs, such as "c programming enum" instead of just "enum" for example. I'd love to be able to treat it as a pseudo sql query instead.
- tarkin2 6y agoI use ddg for 95% of my searches. I sometimes go to google but I can’t say they’re necessarily better.
- bumblebritches5 6y agoGood, It's been my default search engine for a few years now.
- Hippocrates 6y agoI’ve been on DDG for at least 3 years and not missed google. DDG is my default engine on all devices. I think it does fine, and I’m a power-user doing hundreds of searches a day (programmer/internet junkie obviously). If google is any better (I’m sure it is) it is not better enough to matter. Id still like to see more competition and disruption in the space.
- babuskov 6y agoOn one of my old devices, I still have an old version of Safari (which fails to update) and when I open Google it asks to accept some terms, but their JavaScript is "modern" so I cannot click that dialog away. So, I'm switched to DDG on it and it works fine for general search, esp. as it seems less attacked by "SEO optimized" spam sites. But Google is still better in some areas. Like when I check something that has a date+time as an answer, Google computes it into my timezone. And non-English search is much, much better in Google.
- mlthoughts2018 6y agoThey still aren’t building out their own in-house search & machine learning systems. It’s very disappointing. Until they are willing to invest significant money & staffing to do that, the quality is just going to continue to be too poor. It’s just a different ad model on someone else’s (Bing) search engine, without actually learning from customer behavior unique to their search engine.
- Angostura 6y agoI use DDG on mobile devices, for one reason only - so I don;t see those damned AMP pages.
- 627467 6y agoI was using ddg before recently switching to runnaroo for a couple of months now. Runnaroo seems to always surface wikipedia, stack overflow and github which is almost always what I'm looking for. And if it's not there a quick scroll to the bottom gives me a Google link I can click. Like others, using ddg previously have trained me to add !g automatically meaning I almost never looked at ddg. I can still add !g to runnaroo but since i know google (or ddg) is just a quick swipe away I never type it. I would definitely move back to ddg (anything but google) if I ever have a reason to stop using runnaroo.
- 627467 6y agoBut, if I'm making a date based search I'd still use ddg, given that runnaroo doesn't seem to support it yet.
- chris_f 6y agoRunnaroo does have a date restriction similar to DDG, it's just in a different place. See the arrow in the below: https://imgur.com/sY4qi63 https://imgur.com/sY4qi63 Always room for improvement with it though.
- martopix 6y agoI used to use DDG and disliked the quality of results. I use Ecosia now, also doesn't track (they say), but uses microsoft results, which are better. Plus their revenue goes to planting trees. Does anyone have criticisms of Ecosia?
- nafizh 6y agoInstead of complaining about DDG on every DDG related post, maybe we can do some constructive comments on how they can improve. Love it or hate it, they are the only alternative to Google if you like your privacy.
- ed312 6y agoCan we get some examples of searches from the "DDG is terrible" camp? I've been using DDG for 100% of my searches on laptop and phone for ~3 years without any complaint. I've never used the "pipe it through google" search option.
- hombre_fatal 6y agoEvery time I try to use it, almost every search query I write while trying to get work done I end up retrying with "!g". Eventually I find myself using "!g" preemptively because I don't want to miss out on results like long tail StackOverflow hits. Though "elm list" is still my classic example.
- majewsky 6y agoWhen you type "elm list" into Google and it understands that you mean the language instead of the tree, it's because they have an extensive profile on you. Of course DuckDuckGo won't do that since that's their unique selling point. I can see this being a legitimate gripe of an end user that just compares search engines, but I was under the impression that this crowd understands the proposition of DDG and doesn't complain when it's working as designed.
- hombre_fatal 6y agoI hear this presumption a lot from people trying to defend DDG, but you can trivially disprove this by googling it anonymously from a random IP address. Try it with "elm list". Frankly, when I compare my logged-in, static-IP Google results to anonymous queries, I can see that the degree of "personalization" that people claim is vastly overstated; not much seems to change. It just seems like wishful thinking when the obvious reality is that Google is just more advanced in its ability to semanticize input. DDG "rust cargo" gives me images and results for cargo ships.
- boomka 6y agoI followed your advice, turned on VPN, went private browsing and searched for "elm list". On DDG the first result was elm-lang homepage but the second was a tutorial on lists in Elm. Down the page I also saw a wikipedia entry for a list of elm trees. Seems ok overall to me. Then I tried the same thing with Google and first I was stopped by captcha and had to spend a minute clicking hydrants and traffic lights. Then I got a whole page of results about various programming discussions on lists in Elm, but nothing in the entire page about the trees. That does not seem right, I think regular person would be much more likely to search for a tree, not for an obscure programming language. Verdict: I found DDG results better as in more relevant for general population while still surfacing the programming ones. Also no hydrants on DDG.
- mrlala 6y agoI hardly use DuckDuckGo for actual searching.. mostly on my phone I'll pop open the app if I want an easy way to go to a site or search for something I really don't want tracked. So it's convenient for that, but can't say I use it very often still.
- lhball 6y agoI've been using DDG as my main driver for over 2 years now. Contrary to the vast majority of commenters here, I almost never use !g. 90% of of the time, if my first search didn't produce a useful result on DDG, I end up !stackoverflow or !stackexchange. The other ~10% of the time I do use !g, it's almost always if I'm looking for something very specific, e.g. that one article on markov-chains from HN years ago. Frankly I don't understand how someone can go back to googling after using the DDG interface for so long. There are so may ads on Google now it takes forever to get to the relevant results.
- dchuk 6y agoAs someone who used to do a decent amount of web and search engine results scraping in a past life, one thing I’ve never understood about DDG is how on earth this setup is economical. If they’re hitting (presumably) bing’s api a few billion times a month, surely they’re paying a lot of cash to do that, even at a heavily negotiated rate. Also, so many folks here are saying they use the bang option to search Google, through DDG. So either they’re using google’s search api or scraping on the background, both of which are expensive in their own ways. Beyond technical, at a business level, how are they actually pulling this off?
- dpcan 6y agoJust. Change. Your. Name. Already. Seriously. Please don't instantly down-vote. I think a serious conversation needs to be had around this topic. If you don't agree, I'd love to hear a thought-out answer as to why such a silly name is supposed to be taken seriously. When you get outside the geek bubble, the name is SO important. I honestly believe the name is killing DDG's ability to grow. That, and not having a private email solution. But I don't want to tell someone I'm @ duckduckgo either so... For example, I tried to get my parents to try DuckDuckGo and they giggled, stumbled with the name, and then said they'd stick with Google. I know people giggled at Google when it started too, but it was so easy to start letting "goooogle" roll off the tongue. PLUS it became a VERB! I do not think duckduckgo has that ability. Unfortunately "uck" is NOT a friendly, comfortable sound. It sounds like a profanity. If feels angry or sinister. But "oogle" is comforting, fuzzy, and fun to say. This may sound silly, but I think it's a very real problem DDG has and they should address it so we can move from G to DDG.
- IshKebab 6y agoI agree. Names don't really matter unless the are obviously childish and silly. I think "mebibyte" etc. have the same issue. I don't care how technically correct they might be, I sound like and idiot if I say them so I'm not going to. "Super-sonic acrobatic rocket powered battle cars" (successfully renamed) and "GIMP" (inexplicably kept) also spring to mind.
- iamdamian 6y agoI had a similar experience this weekend. My artist friends are very open to the idea of moving off of Google, because tracking doesn’t fit with their ethics. But they also want confidence up front that the alternative will work for them and is a popular, polished service. My experience is that the name ‘DuckDuckGo’ gives a bad first impression and is holding back growth for the product. IMO the brand is in an uncanny valley where the individual words do mean something to everyday people (unlike, say, Google), and there’s a vague allusion to a children’s game, but the concepts don’t come together or inspire confidence. It’s not so much about being ‘childish’ (re: other threads on this page) as it is about being unpolished and a little nonsensical. They would be better off with 1) a simple one-word name or 2) a more complete name with an obvious and thoughtful layer of meaning, even if more than one word.
- AnonC 6y agoI don’t know what happened with DuckDuckGo in the last one or two years, but I’ve had to resort to !s (startpage) or !g (Google) search most of the time. Even before that, it was never great for software/tech related information. It’s ok for some searches. And I use the !w (Wikipedia) and !imdb when I’m using a browser that doesn’t have multiple search engine support. If it gets even worse, I’d have to give up and choose something else.
- baryphonic 6y agoI must be the only person who has found that for most searches, DDG gives me what I want better than Google does. The problem is only in the 1-5% of cases where DDG just isn't optimized for the query (programming is one of those). When I use g!, I find the Google experience horrible. The UI/UX sucks, it surfaces a lot of irrelevant results. I also find that the AI meant to improve the experience is rarely a benefit, and often makes it worse. And Google seems so far out of its depth in AI that its systems meant to promote "social justice and equality" often seem to backfire and fail on their own terms. I just now tried to search "black man" in both Google images and DDG images, and the results are exactly representative of my problems with Google's failure as a search engine. The top two G results are George Floyd and Ahmad Arbery, and the fourth is actually a white boy accused of stabbing a black man. The pièce de résistance was two or three rows down, where G suggested "related searches" and the top one was "black man funny" and a thumbnail of a picture that at the very least was mockery (including it as the representation for "black man funny" is just racist). The full list of results included what looked like literal minstrelsy and other mockery. I am by no means a social justice activist, but I detest racism and this is what Google was promoting. And regardless of my views, Google clearly holds itself up as some sort of agent of social change, so why is it so racist? DDG, by contrast, showed pictures of professional men in the top results. (Just as an aside, one of the common themes black people call out about racism is that poor black kids - boys in particular - are indoctrinated to believe that sports, entertainment or crime are their only avenues for opportunity in life. This is usually portrayed as a systemic issue, which teachers, institutions (banks, potential employers, government bureaucracy) and the media perpetuate with a sort of resigned, inertial Kafkaesque belief that things will never change. If we are to accept the views of social justice activists, how do the top Google results not literally reinforce these stereotypes, before promoting a literally racist set of search results?) In my experience, Google started declining when it doubled down on AI far too early, and now their system is too complex for anyone to understand or wrangle. Google is the present-day Leviathan, and independent of their horrible privacy practices and political-ideological alignment, their software just seems defective.
- cletus 6y agoLet's put this in context: 2B searches/month is <1000 QPS. That's not a business. That's a single server side project. And this is after 10 eyars? So cue the usual HN DDG responses of "I switched to DDG and it's fine", "I used DDG and went back to Google" and "I use DDG but !g everything". I personally think DDG is founded on two false premises: 1. People care about privacy. 99% of people don't; and 2. Personalized search doesn't have value. I think Google's dominance here is a good example of why it does. At the end of the day, you can search Google incognito if you want to. People do this. DDG is inserting themselves between the user and Bing/Google. I just don't see how it survives long term doing this.
- dredmorbius 6y agoLooks as if the doubling rate is near 12 months, down from 18 a year or two back. I'd like to see: - A semi-log plot. Or underlying data. - Comparison to overall Internet usage growth. - Comparison to Google search growth.
- Communitivity 6y agoI love the ideology of DuckDuckGo, which is why it is my default search engine. However, I hate how often I have to do a Google search to find the results I want. If DDG wants to compete and win, then they need to compete on more than ideology and start returning better results. It's an uphill battle though unless they have algorithm superiority - Google has many years of experience working through issues and establishing infrastructure, and they have a lot of money to pour into maintaining their lead. I do hope DDG comes out as a long term viable alternative, but they are going to need a lot more money to do it and they're going to need to develop more differentiators than bang operators and ideology.
- tomxor 6y ago> as more and more users have begun to value their privacy on the internet. Google's captcha DoSing me drove me to DDG not privacy... Much of the time the results are poor but I just cannot endure google any longer. I wonder how many others have the same reason. This affects mobile internet users particularly badly.
- mikorym 6y agoFor all the comments about how you have to switch to Google every other search: Try writing out more words that explain what you are looking for. This always works for me. If it doesn't then do !mill and enjoy going down the rabbit hole.
- anderspitman 6y agoDDG has been doing a ton of billboards in Utah. Anyone seeing that elsewhere?
- shadowpawn 6y agoI dont surf porn with out it.
- shadowpawn 6y agoWont surf porn without it.
- mas3god 6y agoI switched and never went back, way better than google. I clearly havent had the same experience as the top commenters in this thread.
- 8bitsrule 6y agoIt might be growing fast, but as a long-time user (since year one), its search has become less-and-less useful to me. It tries to cast a very wide net for its results, and trying to get it to focus on what you really want has become harder and harder. Nowadays if I want something specific, I head straight to Bing -- it's actually responsive to carefully-defined search strings.
- lma21 6y agoI switched from Google to DuckDuckGo a few months ago. I always found myself switching back to Google, whether I was looking up some news info or tech-related or programming hints. I switched back to Google. Any one experienced the same thing? What did you do?