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I 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 o

I 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 ago
  Exactly.
- k_ 6y ago
  They should just call it "Bang" or "Bangs" and be done with it :)
- test1235 6y ago
  bing'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.
  - jack_riminton 6y ago
    I think they were being sarcastic
- evilturnip 6y ago
  Funny... Google was a name specifically coined by a child so he has no leg to stand on with that complaint
  - znpy 6y ago
    No, that's not the story I know. The name google was name chosen after Googol (https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Googol https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Googol) to reflect the amount of webpages that in the founder intentions they were about to index. Apparently when they registered the name the officer/employee was not familiar with the concept and just wrote down the name as they thought it was written: Google. edit: source: https://www.webcitation.org/68ubHzYs7?url=http://graphics.stanford.edu/~dk/google_name_origin.html https://www.webcitation.org/68ubHzYs7?url=http://graphics.st...
    - kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
      And Googol was coined by a 9 year old.
  - Goronmon 6y ago
    "Coined by a child" and "sounds childist" are separate concerns though.
newsbinator 6y ago
> The name is childish and doesn’t inspire confidence either. Gone are the days of search engine names that inspired confidence, like Altavista and Lycos... or AskJeeves.
- tachyonbeam 6y ago
  I guess people forget that Google is an unintentional misspelling of Googol, a word chosen because it sounds funny.
- raindropm 6y ago
  Nothing inspired confidence like the sound of joy after one found answer they looking for....Yahoo!! Also the runners up, Bing.
ZephyrBlu 6y ago
> 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 I find DDG searches to generally be fine and I'm definitely not an ideological purist. Not exactly sure how I might be misguided either. Sometimes I need to use !g if I'm looking for something very specific, but >95% of the time DDG is fine.
- roydivision 6y ago
  Same, I use !g very rarely, and when I do I only get a better result maybe 1/8 times.
- pbronez 6y ago
  Agree. I’m perfectly satisfied with native DDG results most of the time. !g is the exception; I use !w, !hn and !gh much more frequently.
- magicalhippo 6y ago
  One area where DDG is _much_ worse is when it comes to localized results. Say I want to find some hedge trimmers, and I search for "hekksaks" in DDG. Then I get some random videos, links to norwegian-to-english dictionaries and assorted useless pages. If I turn the "Norway" slider on, sure I get decent enough results. But DDG remembers this, so when I later search for some programming related stuff it's awful again. So I need to constantly flip that localized results option on and off, which is super annoying. In comparison, Google shows great results without having toggle some option.
  - cdubzzz 6y ago
    Interesting example. And I can replicate it pretty much exactly as you describe. Two things comes to mind — 1. Would you consider this an “edge case”? Searching for things you want to buy in one language, but researching programming topics in another language? 2. Is the difference in experiences not essentially the result of Google’s data collection practices? Both specifically data about you and your search patterns and data in aggregate that DDG (presumably) does not collect on purpose.
ihadtosayit 6y ago
Funny I usually find that googlers are ideological voids that are misguided, thats just my personal experience though. Maybe you got too accustomed to a search engine that knows everything about you? > The name is childish and doesn’t inspire confidence either. Funny I feel the same way about google and its branding, it almost feels like it is marketed to toddlers and intellectually bankrupt liberals and "minorities"...
corobo 6y ago
You're probably using modern Google-fu if you're anything like I was when I first tried DDG. To get the best results you have to go back to your 2005-10 search skillset I've found. It's more a plain keyword/phrase search than asking it questions
bachmeier 6y ago
> 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. I agree. That is your personal experience. Which is, of course, the whole point of using Google. You share everything in your life with them, and let them monetize your information any way they see fit, and in return they'll provide you with better search results. I haven't used Google as my main search engine, or email provider, or anything else in ages. I'll take DDG search results over Google any day.
automatoney 6y ago
I use DDG and I usually have a pretty ok time without swapping back to google, or when I do I frequently don't have a better time (although much of the time I do!). Also for programming, DDG has a really nice stack overflow custom result. But yes 1000% bangs are worth everything. Even if DDG weren't a search engine, bangs would be enough for me to use it as a meta engine. I still use a lot of google products so they're also super intuitive - g! is google, and if I guess I can usually get the google service I want: gm! maps, gn! news, gi! images (unfortunately gs! is shopping, not scholar which is gsc!). And the thing about bangs is that I bet google won't implement them in such an easy way, since they wouldn't want to have unpredictable behavior for non-power users (and would never think of redirecting users before the search page) Bangs are an absolute game changer, and they're muscle memory now so I end up throwing them into google accidentally. Some of my other common ones are a! amazon, w! wikipedia, yt! youtube, i! DDG images, and n! DDG news.
- lgvld 6y ago
  be aware that an extension ('Search DuckDuckGo bangs') provides DDG bangs to Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/fr/firefox/addon/search-duckduckgo-bangs/ https://addons.mozilla.org/fr/firefox/addon/search-duckduckg... it might simply redirect your !-searches to DDG, I don’t know. but I find it pretty useful.
addicted 6y ago
I’ve rarely had an issue with DDG results. In fact they are way better if the result I want isn’t the topmost one because DDG displays far more results than what Google does on a page. While I definitely believe in not having all my information with Google I’m pretty sure that’s not driving my decision because I have switched away from DDG in the past where it wasn’t meeting my needs.
- versteegen 6y ago
  You can increase the number of results Google shows, up to 100. I have mine set to 30, which in my experience is plenty.
ludocode 6y ago
Before I bought a robotic vacuum cleaner, I read lots of reviews from people saying it wasn't as good as vacuuming manually. It misses areas, it has a hard time in corners, it takes forever. I bought it anyway. The simple fact is it doesn't matter how much worse it is than vacuuming, because I'm not vacuuming. I kind of feel that way about DuckDuckGo. Instead of lazyness, I guess you'd call it ideological purity. I don't care how much worse DuckDuckGo is than Google. It doesn't matter. The simple fact is the privacy implications of Google make it a deal breaker, so I'll use any alternative no matter how much worse it is. In my mind they're not even competing services. Just like comparing a robotic vacuum to manual vacuuming. It's like saying "What's better, a square or the color yellow?" It doesn't compute. I'd be lying if I said I never use !g. I do, when I don't find what I'm looking for and feel like I should. Half the time, I don't find what I wanted on Google either. I always hesitate though, thinking "Do I want Google to log this about me?" I rarely hesitate when searching with DuckDuckGo. There's a certain comfort and peace of mind that is worth any drop in the quality of search results.
- Santosh83 6y ago
  Give this person a cookie, for exhibiting sheer resolve, something that's becoming all too rare in the manipulated, instant-gratification culture we're heading deep into.
  - mgkimsal 6y ago
    Given their privacy focus, do you think that poster is just going to accept random cookies on the internet? ;)
    - Liquix 6y ago
      Hah! I heard Santa dropped 120lb when he found the 'do not accept from third parties' checkbox :)
  - murgindrag 6y ago
    It's not resolve. It's experience. At a young age, you think through short timelines. Crises don't happen. At an old age, once you've been through a few crises, wars, pandemics, law suits, and whatnot, you start calculating expected outcomes a bit differently. I use DuckDuckGo not out of resolve, but because I used the Internet in the nineties, and saw how data I put out then came back in some cases a decade or two later in counter-intuitive ways.
jillesvangurp 6y ago
I switched back to Google this week after a few months of having ddg as the default. It's actually fine most of the time but when it's not you end up wasting time before you figure out that Google has answers. I had some frustrating errors to figure out with junit5 the other day. Literally any search I did landed me to the wrong pages because it ignored parts of my query. Searching for the error is where Google seems to do a better job somehow. Ddg will just ignore the parts it does not understand, which tend to be the most significant parts of the query. Unfortunately, this something I do a lot and I need that to work reliably. !g was pretty much the only bang I used with ddg. On mobile, don't really do a lot of searches. Besides, I have an Android phone so you are kind of stuck with Google unless you really customize everyhting.
Spacemolte 6y ago
I am also using ddg, but I also use !g on 9/10 searches. Spending that much more time on figuring something out due to the missing or incorrect search results is simply a price too high for me. I would love it if it was just as good as google, but it simply isnt right now. It's like comparing a car to a bicycle. I like bicycles, but when going cross country, it simply does not work.
iso1631 6y ago
I use DDG, I don't think I've ever used !g directly, but have used google a few times if I'm on a borrowed computer for instance, I'm shocked how bad the results are in google compared with DDG. I use !gm a lot though.
fareesh 6y ago
This broadly reflects my experience too The !g is so habitual that I find myself typing it on Google too now DDG is also very slow
ddevault 6y ago
I agree that bangs are a killer feature of DDG, but I often see the problem of results quality brought up and I have to speak up about it. Google's search results are good because they're spying on you and they already know what you want. DDG does not do this, so you have to be more specific. If you would search Google for "django", you should search DDG for "django python" or "django framework". This is not DDG being wrong, this is you needing to relearn your habits.
- Kye 6y ago
  I searched for Django on DDG. It alternates between results for the framework, Django (1966), and Django Unchained, getting less specific as it goes down until it shows a result for a restaurant in Des Moines, Iowa at the bottom of the first page. It keeps adding more range in as I click to new results. This is much better than how Google shows page after page of the same thing. Google assumes it got it right and you just haven't found the right site for it even if you're 100 results pages and 20 "we think you're a bot" captchas deep. DDG is not so arrogant and tries different things once it's obvious you didn't find what you were looking for or are looking for serendipity.
ravenstine 6y ago
Since this topic keeps coming up, I wish people would save and share with us these supposed failed DDG queries. I wouldn't say that DDG's results are better than the Google of 10 years ago, but I rarely have problems finding what I want. I don't understand how anyone can go as far as to say that DDG is "crap".
- foolmeonce 6y ago
  I don't understand how anyone who isn't only looking up error strings can say Google results are not crap? For normal human things, DDG seems a little worse than earlier Google and Google seems a lot worse. Or maybe people like sifting through the SEO drivle and vaporous landing pages Google has motivated everyone to create?
  - MiroF 6y ago
    Both DDG and Google seem to have regressed to only surfacing lots of blog spam in response to my technical queries, perhaps with a few useful StackOverflow discussions.
    - ravenstine 6y ago
      That's my experience, although I still prefer DDG's results and design over Google's. I think it may not so much be a regression in their algorithms, but that there's just more blog spam than ever. There's a reason I'm hearing the phrase "blogging is dead", and I believe it's because advertising and social media have incentivized more bullshit blogs than ever to pop up. I've come across tons of "blogs" that are really just listing products from Amazon but don't actually do any real analysis on them or tell you which ones are better than the others. In order to get an idea of what products people actually like, you've got to do either `site:reddit.com/r/<subreddit>` or search on YouTube.
- mdaniel 6y ago
  I actually do one better: I use the Feedback link at the bottom of the bogus search results to formally tell DDG about my bad experience. After having done that for years with no improved outcome, it sure does feel like spitting into the wind, but it also has a higher probability of change than just swearing at my monitor I wish people would save and share with us these supposed failed DDG queries https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22docker%22%20%22unable%20to%20find%20user%22%20%22invalid%20argument%22&ia=web https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22docker%22%20%22unable%20to%20fi... Contrast that with the !g of the same query And after grinding on search permutations this was what I was looking for: https://github.com/portainer/portainer/issues/4319#issuecomment-690204016 https://github.com/portainer/portainer/issues/4319#issuecomm... Or this would have been fine, too: https://www.mail-archive.com/debian-bugs-dist@lists.debian.org/msg1764964.html https://www.mail-archive.com/debian-bugs-dist@lists.debian.o... Maybe people who are unhappy with DDG results are just extraordinarily technical, but in the absence of a regex powered search engine, the least DDG could do is honor my quotes and index GitHub issues and major Linux mailing lists (I have some sympathy for not finding that mailing list entry since it is only hours old, but I know for certain that GitHub offers a firehose stream of events that will proactively tell DDG of changes, no crawling required)
manquer 6y ago
Even if the search results are bad that 10/10 I have to use !g .I will still want to use ddg just so that they have the data on search strings which perform poorly and can improve their systems. Also I actually find lot lesser clutter on DDG because SEO folks pretty much optimize for Google, no amp or other google policies to game .
- Kye 6y ago
  Do they track this? I vaguely recall a similar comment in the past where the founder or someone else clarified that they don't keep track of which queries get banged.
  - manquer 6y ago
    According to their privacy page they do save search strings without PII information for product improvement. I guess that includes !bang searches. The 2B searches a month should logically include bangs too.
chongli 6y ago
Bangs are a superpower, a game changer, and by far the best UX for mobile search I’ve seen so far. I feel like we're aiming pretty low if the best UX you've seen so far requires 3 taps to input ! followed by one or more taps to input the rest of the operator plus a space, all before you can begin typing your query. Wouldn't a better system be a grid of icons to choose from, with the ability to rearrange them as you see fit, like the icons on your phone's home screen? That would be much faster than DDG's keyboard dance on mobile.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
drocer88 6y ago
"The name is childish" The names of recent IPOs and direct listings: Unity, Sumo Logic, Asana, Jfrog, Snowflake, Amwell, Ant Financial. 25 years ago we had "Google" and "Yahoo".
- sodapopcan 6y ago
  Also, "google" :)
ab3rC1te 6y ago
Maybe you should try America's Got Talent show since you like ! She bangs all the time. You might end up like the poor Chinese guy or whatever nationality he is, and become famous. Google use to be good back in the day when what you typed, returned what you typed. Now its sad that you can take 2 different computers or phones on the same network and search the same topic and the end result is 2 totally different outcomes from what you searched. That's the current google. You should never have to use special characters to do a deep search for something of topic. I want something that returns the exact words I type to find specific information that's in context of what I search for. Not she bangs all the time.
mempko 6y ago
As someone who doesn't actively use google and mostly uses DDG, I find google's results worse precisely because google hasn't personalized their results for me. So without the personalization, the google results based on my search query seem worse than DDG.
heavyset_go 6y ago
I've been pleased with Searx[1] compared to DDG or Google, given that it aggregates search results from multiple search engines. You can self-host it or use one of the public instances[2]. [1] https://github.com/searx/searx https://github.com/searx/searx [2] https://searx.space/ https://searx.space/
- vstuart 6y ago
  Non-Docker Local Installation of searX on Linux: https://persagen.com/2020/02/02/searx.html https://persagen.com/2020/02/02/searx.html
anthony_romeo 6y ago
I'm going to go against the grain here. For me, Duck Duck Go's results tend to be better than Google's results. For searches that are even just moderately complicated, Google has a tendency of giving me results that contain none of the search terms I give it, making me wade through pages of junk that I didn't actually search for. DDG makes better assumptions in that regard. And when I don't get the exact results immediately in DDG, rather than just slap a !g at the end, I have the audacity to actually refine my search by adding additional search terms and get what I want. (Disclosure: I live in the US, so it's possible Google is far better at search in other countries/languages than DDG)
Tehchops 6y ago
Huh. TIL the "bang" feature. Alfred provides similar functionality on OSX, allowing you to create a key sequence shortcut for any search engine that can parse URL params.
hrktb 6y ago
Google is highly tuned for the user. More so if you are actually logged in without account, so what you are seeing has almost no incidence on what kind of results other people are seeing. If it works for you, more power to you. Otherwise assuming 65 millions of people use anything by ideology is a huge ask. For some Google's results didn't just cut it, and they had to try something else.
AdamGibbins 6y ago
I don't understand the needs for !bang's, I've had bookmark keywords in Firefox a decade. I simply type "a something" in the URL bar and it looks up "something" on Amazon etc. yt/d/g/t/w for youtube/duckduckgo/google/twitter/wikipedia etc. What do DDG's bangs offer over this.
- geraltofrivia 6y ago
  1. You don't have to manually add keywords. 1.1. Far more websites. Reddit, Flicr, Youtube, hell Yahoo, GMaps, Youtube, HN... Google Scholar, Semantic Scholar, DBLP... pretty much all the places I would want to search on are available. 2. Cross browser. I use Chrome on my phone, and FF on my laptop. Safari, when the battery is below 30% and I'm not near a power outlet. Setting default search engine as DDG brings me the bangs across all these places.
bad_user 6y ago
Why would you use bangs, when Firefox and Chrome have perfectly usable custom search keywords? Moreover, some of the bangs suck. Like for example !hn. I’d rather search HN via Google, with my own keyword, because that Angolia engine is crap. Want to save urls in archive.org? You can add a keyword. Want to search a private list on Twitter? Add a keyword. DDG bangs can’t do what your browser can. Also, for privacy purposes, sending your Google searches to DDG first is stupid. On iOS btw, Safari doesn’t do custom search keywords, but Firefox does, and it can sync your keywords across devices.
- corobo 6y ago
  Because setting them up is a pain in the arse
igneo676 6y ago
I see this kind of comment pop up every time DuckDuckGo is brought up. It makes me wonder what the disconnect is. My speculation is that it's all in how you search. When I first started using Google, I learned how to craft my search precisely to get the exact results I needed. More keywords, filtering based on the site(s) that I might want, etc. Years later, this influences how I search considerably. In contrast, most people I know who use Google tend to use much looser terminology and Google gets it roughly correct regardless. When searching for more obscure information I can generally outperform them but otherwise they're getting 90% of the way there As a result my searches on DuckDuckGo haven't given me any worse results than Google would give me. If anything, they've gotten better (even setting aside bangs)
- noahtallen 6y ago
  Part of the issue for me is that what I’ve learned from searching with google for so long might not translate to DDG very well. A real-world example from work recently is the query “vertical flexbox animation css”. In DDG, 0/5 of the top results are about animations and flexbox. They are just generic flexbox documentation. If I search the same phrase with google, 4/5 of the top results are about animations and flexbox. And I would think that CSS is a relatively popular technology compared to some things I could be thinking about! This happens to me with so many queries throughout the day, that I often end up using !g whenever I have a technical-ish query because the top results are usually a lot more relevant. Maybe you are right, and I just need to phrase that better, but most permutations of that string don’t return much clearer results.
TheDesolate0 6y ago
I hate their search results too. I do like being able to search the web with regex.
snapetom 6y ago
I've been using DDG for almost a year now, and as time goes on, I'm less and less confident about the results. Not enough to make me go back to Google, but I'm definitely quicker to try Google these days. The exact quotes issue is absolutely infuriating, especially when I'm trying to find some very specific, obscure technical issue. I know what I'm looking for DDG. Either give it to me, or tell me you don't have anything. It'll save me some time.
gassis 6y ago
The name being childish is not really relevant imo. What's so mature about "google" or "facebook"? Other than that, I agree with what you said. Bangs are extremely useful, and are the primary reason why I stick to DDG as well!

robertlagrant 6y ago

> The name is childish and doesn’t inspire confidence either. Good point. Not like "Google" or "Bing".

readarticle 6y ago
Exactly.
k_ 6y ago
They should just call it "Bang" or "Bangs" and be done with it :)
test1235 6y ago
bing'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.
- jack_riminton 6y ago
  I think they were being sarcastic
evilturnip 6y ago
Funny... Google was a name specifically coined by a child so he has no leg to stand on with that complaint
- znpy 6y ago
  No, that's not the story I know. The name google was name chosen after Googol (https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Googol https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Googol) to reflect the amount of webpages that in the founder intentions they were about to index. Apparently when they registered the name the officer/employee was not familiar with the concept and just wrote down the name as they thought it was written: Google. edit: source: https://www.webcitation.org/68ubHzYs7?url=http://graphics.stanford.edu/~dk/google_name_origin.html https://www.webcitation.org/68ubHzYs7?url=http://graphics.st...
  - kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
    And Googol was coined by a 9 year old.
- Goronmon 6y ago
  "Coined by a child" and "sounds childist" are separate concerns though.

newsbinator 6y ago

> The name is childish and doesn’t inspire confidence either. Gone are the days of search engine names that inspired confidence, like Altavista and Lycos... or AskJeeves.

tachyonbeam 6y ago
I guess people forget that Google is an unintentional misspelling of Googol, a word chosen because it sounds funny.
raindropm 6y ago
Nothing inspired confidence like the sound of joy after one found answer they looking for....Yahoo!! Also the runners up, Bing.

ZephyrBlu 6y ago

> 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 I find DDG searches to generally be fine and I'm definitely not an ideological purist. Not exactly sure how I might be misguided either. Sometimes I need to use !g if I'm looking for something very specific, but >95% of the time DDG is fine.

roydivision 6y ago
Same, I use !g very rarely, and when I do I only get a better result maybe 1/8 times.
pbronez 6y ago
Agree. I’m perfectly satisfied with native DDG results most of the time. !g is the exception; I use !w, !hn and !gh much more frequently.
magicalhippo 6y ago
One area where DDG is _much_ worse is when it comes to localized results. Say I want to find some hedge trimmers, and I search for "hekksaks" in DDG. Then I get some random videos, links to norwegian-to-english dictionaries and assorted useless pages. If I turn the "Norway" slider on, sure I get decent enough results. But DDG remembers this, so when I later search for some programming related stuff it's awful again. So I need to constantly flip that localized results option on and off, which is super annoying. In comparison, Google shows great results without having toggle some option.
- cdubzzz 6y ago
  Interesting example. And I can replicate it pretty much exactly as you describe. Two things comes to mind — 1. Would you consider this an “edge case”? Searching for things you want to buy in one language, but researching programming topics in another language? 2. Is the difference in experiences not essentially the result of Google’s data collection practices? Both specifically data about you and your search patterns and data in aggregate that DDG (presumably) does not collect on purpose.

ihadtosayit 6y ago

Funny I usually find that googlers are ideological voids that are misguided, thats just my personal experience though. Maybe you got too accustomed to a search engine that knows everything about you? > The name is childish and doesn’t inspire confidence either. Funny I feel the same way about google and its branding, it almost feels like it is marketed to toddlers and intellectually bankrupt liberals and "minorities"...

corobo 6y ago

You're probably using modern Google-fu if you're anything like I was when I first tried DDG. To get the best results you have to go back to your 2005-10 search skillset I've found. It's more a plain keyword/phrase search than asking it questions

bachmeier 6y ago

> 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. I agree. That is your personal experience. Which is, of course, the whole point of using Google. You share everything in your life with them, and let them monetize your information any way they see fit, and in return they'll provide you with better search results. I haven't used Google as my main search engine, or email provider, or anything else in ages. I'll take DDG search results over Google any day.

automatoney 6y ago

I use DDG and I usually have a pretty ok time without swapping back to google, or when I do I frequently don't have a better time (although much of the time I do!). Also for programming, DDG has a really nice stack overflow custom result. But yes 1000% bangs are worth everything. Even if DDG weren't a search engine, bangs would be enough for me to use it as a meta engine. I still use a lot of google products so they're also super intuitive - g! is google, and if I guess I can usually get the google service I want: gm! maps, gn! news, gi! images (unfortunately gs! is shopping, not scholar which is gsc!). And the thing about bangs is that I bet google won't implement them in such an easy way, since they wouldn't want to have unpredictable behavior for non-power users (and would never think of redirecting users before the search page) Bangs are an absolute game changer, and they're muscle memory now so I end up throwing them into google accidentally. Some of my other common ones are a! amazon, w! wikipedia, yt! youtube, i! DDG images, and n! DDG news.

lgvld 6y ago
be aware that an extension ('Search DuckDuckGo bangs') provides DDG bangs to Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/fr/firefox/addon/search-duckduckgo-bangs/ https://addons.mozilla.org/fr/firefox/addon/search-duckduckg... it might simply redirect your !-searches to DDG, I don’t know. but I find it pretty useful.

addicted 6y ago

I’ve rarely had an issue with DDG results. In fact they are way better if the result I want isn’t the topmost one because DDG displays far more results than what Google does on a page. While I definitely believe in not having all my information with Google I’m pretty sure that’s not driving my decision because I have switched away from DDG in the past where it wasn’t meeting my needs.

versteegen 6y ago
You can increase the number of results Google shows, up to 100. I have mine set to 30, which in my experience is plenty.

ludocode 6y ago

Before I bought a robotic vacuum cleaner, I read lots of reviews from people saying it wasn't as good as vacuuming manually. It misses areas, it has a hard time in corners, it takes forever. I bought it anyway. The simple fact is it doesn't matter how much worse it is than vacuuming, because I'm not vacuuming. I kind of feel that way about DuckDuckGo. Instead of lazyness, I guess you'd call it ideological purity. I don't care how much worse DuckDuckGo is than Google. It doesn't matter. The simple fact is the privacy implications of Google make it a deal breaker, so I'll use any alternative no matter how much worse it is. In my mind they're not even competing services. Just like comparing a robotic vacuum to manual vacuuming. It's like saying "What's better, a square or the color yellow?" It doesn't compute. I'd be lying if I said I never use !g. I do, when I don't find what I'm looking for and feel like I should. Half the time, I don't find what I wanted on Google either. I always hesitate though, thinking "Do I want Google to log this about me?" I rarely hesitate when searching with DuckDuckGo. There's a certain comfort and peace of mind that is worth any drop in the quality of search results.

Santosh83 6y ago
Give this person a cookie, for exhibiting sheer resolve, something that's becoming all too rare in the manipulated, instant-gratification culture we're heading deep into.
- mgkimsal 6y ago
  Given their privacy focus, do you think that poster is just going to accept random cookies on the internet? ;)
  - Liquix 6y ago
    Hah! I heard Santa dropped 120lb when he found the 'do not accept from third parties' checkbox :)
- murgindrag 6y ago
  It's not resolve. It's experience. At a young age, you think through short timelines. Crises don't happen. At an old age, once you've been through a few crises, wars, pandemics, law suits, and whatnot, you start calculating expected outcomes a bit differently. I use DuckDuckGo not out of resolve, but because I used the Internet in the nineties, and saw how data I put out then came back in some cases a decade or two later in counter-intuitive ways.

jillesvangurp 6y ago

I switched back to Google this week after a few months of having ddg as the default. It's actually fine most of the time but when it's not you end up wasting time before you figure out that Google has answers. I had some frustrating errors to figure out with junit5 the other day. Literally any search I did landed me to the wrong pages because it ignored parts of my query. Searching for the error is where Google seems to do a better job somehow. Ddg will just ignore the parts it does not understand, which tend to be the most significant parts of the query. Unfortunately, this something I do a lot and I need that to work reliably. !g was pretty much the only bang I used with ddg. On mobile, don't really do a lot of searches. Besides, I have an Android phone so you are kind of stuck with Google unless you really customize everyhting.

Spacemolte 6y ago

I am also using ddg, but I also use !g on 9/10 searches. Spending that much more time on figuring something out due to the missing or incorrect search results is simply a price too high for me. I would love it if it was just as good as google, but it simply isnt right now. It's like comparing a car to a bicycle. I like bicycles, but when going cross country, it simply does not work.

iso1631 6y ago

I use DDG, I don't think I've ever used !g directly, but have used google a few times if I'm on a borrowed computer for instance, I'm shocked how bad the results are in google compared with DDG. I use !gm a lot though.

fareesh 6y ago

This broadly reflects my experience too The !g is so habitual that I find myself typing it on Google too now DDG is also very slow

ddevault 6y ago

I agree that bangs are a killer feature of DDG, but I often see the problem of results quality brought up and I have to speak up about it. Google's search results are good because they're spying on you and they already know what you want. DDG does not do this, so you have to be more specific. If you would search Google for "django", you should search DDG for "django python" or "django framework". This is not DDG being wrong, this is you needing to relearn your habits.

Kye 6y ago
I searched for Django on DDG. It alternates between results for the framework, Django (1966), and Django Unchained, getting less specific as it goes down until it shows a result for a restaurant in Des Moines, Iowa at the bottom of the first page. It keeps adding more range in as I click to new results. This is much better than how Google shows page after page of the same thing. Google assumes it got it right and you just haven't found the right site for it even if you're 100 results pages and 20 "we think you're a bot" captchas deep. DDG is not so arrogant and tries different things once it's obvious you didn't find what you were looking for or are looking for serendipity.

ravenstine 6y ago

Since this topic keeps coming up, I wish people would save and share with us these supposed failed DDG queries. I wouldn't say that DDG's results are better than the Google of 10 years ago, but I rarely have problems finding what I want. I don't understand how anyone can go as far as to say that DDG is "crap".

foolmeonce 6y ago
I don't understand how anyone who isn't only looking up error strings can say Google results are not crap? For normal human things, DDG seems a little worse than earlier Google and Google seems a lot worse. Or maybe people like sifting through the SEO drivle and vaporous landing pages Google has motivated everyone to create?
- MiroF 6y ago
  Both DDG and Google seem to have regressed to only surfacing lots of blog spam in response to my technical queries, perhaps with a few useful StackOverflow discussions.
  - ravenstine 6y ago
    That's my experience, although I still prefer DDG's results and design over Google's. I think it may not so much be a regression in their algorithms, but that there's just more blog spam than ever. There's a reason I'm hearing the phrase "blogging is dead", and I believe it's because advertising and social media have incentivized more bullshit blogs than ever to pop up. I've come across tons of "blogs" that are really just listing products from Amazon but don't actually do any real analysis on them or tell you which ones are better than the others. In order to get an idea of what products people actually like, you've got to do either `site:reddit.com/r/<subreddit>` or search on YouTube.
mdaniel 6y ago
I actually do one better: I use the Feedback link at the bottom of the bogus search results to formally tell DDG about my bad experience. After having done that for years with no improved outcome, it sure does feel like spitting into the wind, but it also has a higher probability of change than just swearing at my monitor I wish people would save and share with us these supposed failed DDG queries https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22docker%22%20%22unable%20to%20find%20user%22%20%22invalid%20argument%22&ia=web https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22docker%22%20%22unable%20to%20fi... Contrast that with the !g of the same query And after grinding on search permutations this was what I was looking for: https://github.com/portainer/portainer/issues/4319#issuecomment-690204016 https://github.com/portainer/portainer/issues/4319#issuecomm... Or this would have been fine, too: https://www.mail-archive.com/debian-bugs-dist@lists.debian.org/msg1764964.html https://www.mail-archive.com/debian-bugs-dist@lists.debian.o... Maybe people who are unhappy with DDG results are just extraordinarily technical, but in the absence of a regex powered search engine, the least DDG could do is honor my quotes and index GitHub issues and major Linux mailing lists (I have some sympathy for not finding that mailing list entry since it is only hours old, but I know for certain that GitHub offers a firehose stream of events that will proactively tell DDG of changes, no crawling required)

manquer 6y ago

Even if the search results are bad that 10/10 I have to use !g .I will still want to use ddg just so that they have the data on search strings which perform poorly and can improve their systems. Also I actually find lot lesser clutter on DDG because SEO folks pretty much optimize for Google, no amp or other google policies to game .

Kye 6y ago
Do they track this? I vaguely recall a similar comment in the past where the founder or someone else clarified that they don't keep track of which queries get banged.
- manquer 6y ago
  According to their privacy page they do save search strings without PII information for product improvement. I guess that includes !bang searches. The 2B searches a month should logically include bangs too.

chongli 6y ago

Bangs are a superpower, a game changer, and by far the best UX for mobile search I’ve seen so far. I feel like we're aiming pretty low if the best UX you've seen so far requires 3 taps to input ! followed by one or more taps to input the rest of the operator plus a space, all before you can begin typing your query. Wouldn't a better system be a grid of icons to choose from, with the ability to rearrange them as you see fit, like the icons on your phone's home screen? That would be much faster than DDG's keyboard dance on mobile.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

drocer88 6y ago

"The name is childish" The names of recent IPOs and direct listings: Unity, Sumo Logic, Asana, Jfrog, Snowflake, Amwell, Ant Financial. 25 years ago we had "Google" and "Yahoo".

sodapopcan 6y ago
Also, "google" :)

ab3rC1te 6y ago

Maybe you should try America's Got Talent show since you like ! She bangs all the time. You might end up like the poor Chinese guy or whatever nationality he is, and become famous. Google use to be good back in the day when what you typed, returned what you typed. Now its sad that you can take 2 different computers or phones on the same network and search the same topic and the end result is 2 totally different outcomes from what you searched. That's the current google. You should never have to use special characters to do a deep search for something of topic. I want something that returns the exact words I type to find specific information that's in context of what I search for. Not she bangs all the time.

mempko 6y ago

As someone who doesn't actively use google and mostly uses DDG, I find google's results worse precisely because google hasn't personalized their results for me. So without the personalization, the google results based on my search query seem worse than DDG.

heavyset_go 6y ago

I've been pleased with Searx[1] compared to DDG or Google, given that it aggregates search results from multiple search engines. You can self-host it or use one of the public instances[2]. [1] https://github.com/searx/searx https://github.com/searx/searx [2] https://searx.space/ https://searx.space/

vstuart 6y ago
Non-Docker Local Installation of searX on Linux: https://persagen.com/2020/02/02/searx.html https://persagen.com/2020/02/02/searx.html

anthony_romeo 6y ago

I'm going to go against the grain here. For me, Duck Duck Go's results tend to be better than Google's results. For searches that are even just moderately complicated, Google has a tendency of giving me results that contain none of the search terms I give it, making me wade through pages of junk that I didn't actually search for. DDG makes better assumptions in that regard. And when I don't get the exact results immediately in DDG, rather than just slap a !g at the end, I have the audacity to actually refine my search by adding additional search terms and get what I want. (Disclosure: I live in the US, so it's possible Google is far better at search in other countries/languages than DDG)

Tehchops 6y ago

Huh. TIL the "bang" feature. Alfred provides similar functionality on OSX, allowing you to create a key sequence shortcut for any search engine that can parse URL params.

hrktb 6y ago

Google is highly tuned for the user. More so if you are actually logged in without account, so what you are seeing has almost no incidence on what kind of results other people are seeing. If it works for you, more power to you. Otherwise assuming 65 millions of people use anything by ideology is a huge ask. For some Google's results didn't just cut it, and they had to try something else.

AdamGibbins 6y ago

I don't understand the needs for !bang's, I've had bookmark keywords in Firefox a decade. I simply type "a something" in the URL bar and it looks up "something" on Amazon etc. yt/d/g/t/w for youtube/duckduckgo/google/twitter/wikipedia etc. What do DDG's bangs offer over this.

geraltofrivia 6y ago
1. You don't have to manually add keywords. 1.1. Far more websites. Reddit, Flicr, Youtube, hell Yahoo, GMaps, Youtube, HN... Google Scholar, Semantic Scholar, DBLP... pretty much all the places I would want to search on are available. 2. Cross browser. I use Chrome on my phone, and FF on my laptop. Safari, when the battery is below 30% and I'm not near a power outlet. Setting default search engine as DDG brings me the bangs across all these places.

bad_user 6y ago

Why would you use bangs, when Firefox and Chrome have perfectly usable custom search keywords? Moreover, some of the bangs suck. Like for example !hn. I’d rather search HN via Google, with my own keyword, because that Angolia engine is crap. Want to save urls in archive.org? You can add a keyword. Want to search a private list on Twitter? Add a keyword. DDG bangs can’t do what your browser can. Also, for privacy purposes, sending your Google searches to DDG first is stupid. On iOS btw, Safari doesn’t do custom search keywords, but Firefox does, and it can sync your keywords across devices.

corobo 6y ago
Because setting them up is a pain in the arse

igneo676 6y ago

I see this kind of comment pop up every time DuckDuckGo is brought up. It makes me wonder what the disconnect is. My speculation is that it's all in how you search. When I first started using Google, I learned how to craft my search precisely to get the exact results I needed. More keywords, filtering based on the site(s) that I might want, etc. Years later, this influences how I search considerably. In contrast, most people I know who use Google tend to use much looser terminology and Google gets it roughly correct regardless. When searching for more obscure information I can generally outperform them but otherwise they're getting 90% of the way there As a result my searches on DuckDuckGo haven't given me any worse results than Google would give me. If anything, they've gotten better (even setting aside bangs)

noahtallen 6y ago
Part of the issue for me is that what I’ve learned from searching with google for so long might not translate to DDG very well. A real-world example from work recently is the query “vertical flexbox animation css”. In DDG, 0/5 of the top results are about animations and flexbox. They are just generic flexbox documentation. If I search the same phrase with google, 4/5 of the top results are about animations and flexbox. And I would think that CSS is a relatively popular technology compared to some things I could be thinking about! This happens to me with so many queries throughout the day, that I often end up using !g whenever I have a technical-ish query because the top results are usually a lot more relevant. Maybe you are right, and I just need to phrase that better, but most permutations of that string don’t return much clearer results.

TheDesolate0 6y ago

I hate their search results too. I do like being able to search the web with regex.

snapetom 6y ago

I've been using DDG for almost a year now, and as time goes on, I'm less and less confident about the results. Not enough to make me go back to Google, but I'm definitely quicker to try Google these days. The exact quotes issue is absolutely infuriating, especially when I'm trying to find some very specific, obscure technical issue. I know what I'm looking for DDG. Either give it to me, or tell me you don't have anything. It'll save me some time.

gassis 6y ago

The name being childish is not really relevant imo. What's so mature about "google" or "facebook"? Other than that, I agree with what you said. Bangs are extremely useful, and are the primary reason why I stick to DDG as well!