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DuckDuckGo has had 0 search warrants since founding in 2008
- rlpb 5y agoI finally switched my default to DDG after Google introduced their mandatory nag permission box in Incognito windows. It wasn't worth using Google any more after that. I use Incognito often when generally searching the Internet to avoid having to care about cookie-based tracking. Dealing with the nag just wasn't worth it any more.
- FridayoLeary 5y agoAnd with that horrid dark pattern that forces you, for entirely arbitrary reasons to scroll down to click accept. It's really upsetting to see google acting in such a user hostile way. It's too bad.
- NabiDev 5y agohow about searx
- anaganisk 5y agoThis. Searx with Google engine, has been perfect. I host Searx on my VPS. My search is proxied via searx to google anonymously. I didn’t miss google even one bit, since the results are just same.
- kuratkull 5y agoI find DDG good for queries where I know my answer will be one of the top 5 results for sure. If I am skeptical about my question I usually find G fetches better results. But DDG satisfies about 90% of my queries so pretty happy with it.
- joecool1029 5y agoSo the bangs (!) are super useful in DDG for handling the limitations it has. As others have mentioned Google still wins for super technical searches, but only just so. What we now see for Google results for any niche topics is an 'uncanny valley' of about half being valid results and the other half being regurgitated spam/phishing sites with domains that usually end in .it or .de.
- kjaftaedi 5y agoMaybe it's just me, but I can't figure out how to do technical searches in google anymore. If I put something like the name of an obscure powershell cmdlet in quotes, google ignores the quotes and then takes words in the cmdlet and searches for variations of them returning a mess of search results. I've tried using plus signs and all sorts of other stuff that used to work, but these days it seemingly just gives me what it thinks I want, rather than what I asked for.
- vdqtp3 5y agoI have the same problem. I've read that this is because Google is no longer returning results from indexing the web, it's returning results that people usually click on when searching similar things. Which is why you can search exact titles of webpages or exact text in quotes and it will fail to return the page in question.
- keneda7 5y agoAs a developer I agree with you. I try and use DDG for most of my every day stuff. However on complex coding issues I almost always find myself back on Google after a couple frustrating minutes on DDG. I feel like a lot of this has to do with what historical search data Google stores vs DDG.
- beepbooptheory 5y agoI just discovered `hn!` the other day lol
- mike_hock 5y agoI'm an Italo-German prince and just recently came into a huge fortune.
- hda2 5y agoThe reason for me to use duckduckgo over google is because google decided to hobble their search results with ISP-mandated "Strict Safe Search" (or whatever google calls it). Google's programming results became noticeably poorer after this change. I noticed most of the programmers around me have started using duckduckgo too. Duckduckgo works. Google doesn't. I switched.
- avalys 5y agoI understand what they’re trying to say, but…this would also be true if they were just irrelevant.
- pessimizer 5y agoIt would also be true if they were a ham sandwich, but since we know they're not one, we ignore that possibility.
- rudian 5y agoThis reminded me of: > If grandma had wheels she’d be a bicycle
- AlbertCory 5y agoI thought of being sarcastic, but you've done it for me. My version of that saying is "If my grandmother had wheels, she'd be a bus" but this is fine, too.
- avalys 5y agoHas anyone outside of the "I'm deeply concerned about online privacy" brigade even heard of DuckDuckGo?
- scorxn 5y agoI have the same concern. As long as they're shipped as a search option for every major browser, even on mobile, I have hope.
- AlbertCory 5y agoI use DDG for most things, and being totally honest, it's not quite as good as Google, but it's pretty acceptable. Occasionally I'll try the same search on Google, and sometimes it's better. Not always.
- Shared404 5y agoAnd occasionally, Google is worse!
- Lambdanaut 5y agoParticularly when searching for information that our governments have been paid by corporations to keep us from finding. Google is massively censored.
- the-dude 5y agoSuch a claim warrants some examples.
- burnafter182 5y agoHow do you present examples when all it takes is a narrative of "conspiracy theory" to dismiss them? We know both government and corporations are, remain, and will continue to remain corruptible. We know they've done bad things, we know they do bad things, we know they can continue to do bad things.
- cmeacham98 5y agoSo to be clear you have no examples, or proof of any kind for this claim?
- mavhc 5y agodon't you see, the lack of examples is proof I am correct!!!
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- paulpauper 5y agotoo bad the results are not that good. when using duckduckgo you have to be very specific or you just get unrelated crud
- dandotway 5y agoDo you have recent real examples? 98% of the time for me both DDG and Google pull up the same Wikipedia article or Stack Overflow answer or Github repo or news story. Occasionally I still do "!g" or "!gi" in DDG to see what Google has but less and less.
- jeffbee 5y agoI just tried to plug in my most recent search from Google: UnsafeVarint, where I was looking for the protobuf method. Google gets me a direct hit to the source code. Perhaps "unfair" because Google knows this result is relevant to that search for me. I put the same search into DDG and it gives me two mainsteam media articles about COVID as #1 and #2. Useless. People who defend Bing are just out of their minds. Imagine defending a search engine by microsoft that top-ranks irrelevant articles from its own wholly-owned subsidiary, MSN. Just absolutely the worst search results anyone can imagine.
- rPlayer6554 5y agoMy first result was something in another language but my second result was the GitHub link for a file in protobuf.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- dandotway 5y agoI just tried "UnsafeVarint" in DDG and while #1 and #2 were useless COVID hits as you said, DDG #4 was the same as Google's #1 hit which was this GitHub issue: https://github.com/tensorflow/models/issues/7420 https://github.com/tensorflow/models/issues/7420 Google's #2 hit for me was blogspam at "bankoftrans [dot] com" that copied the source code for UnsafeVarint in order to game Google search results. (A growing problem others in this discussion have been complaining about.) So Google isn't stellar for your search, either, though perhaps it was working better for you because you were logged in with your Google Account. Like I said, I do still use Google via "!g" and "!gi" when DDG's results are garbage, but often in these cases Google's results are also junk.
- strombofulous 5y agoI can't help but feel like anyone who is celebrating this is just going through a slightly modified thought process of https://xkcd.com/538/ https://xkcd.com/538/ The fact that the government has never requested anything probably just means they get it from somewhere else. If there was actually a pedo-terror-arsonist on the loose using ddg to find information on their targets, I'm very confident that the government would still be able to figure out what they were searching for
- nitrogen 5y agoThat's probably what people want anyway. Targeted surveillance is much more acceptable than blanket surveillance.
- albatross13 5y agoThat's because the warrants all go to Bing, lol.
- arkadiyt 5y agoAre you saying that DuckDuckGo passes the client ip address to Bing?
- MerelyMortal 5y agoOr people look up "bad" stuff using that search engine (Bing is notorious for porn).
- chasil 5y agoPerhaps not everything. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DuckDuckGo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DuckDuckGo "It uses various APIs of other websites to show quick results to queries and for traditional links it uses the help of its partners (mainly Bing) and its own crawler."
- bduerst 5y agoI think the bigger point here is that it's impossible to know either way because DDG doesn't undergo independent verification of their privacy. It's closed-source code from a privately-owned, for-profit corporation based in the U.S. We have no idea what information they share or don't share, other than the claims they make about themselves.
- S_A_P 5y agoOne thing I notice DDG lags behind google in is certain cases where I want the most timely information regarding something. A few examples: I’m not a huge sports fan but knowing a bit about the latest games helps for small talk among acquaintances. On Google I can type “Texas A&M football” and I get the most recent score right on top. DDG doesn’t do this and I usually have to dig through a few links to find it. Another example- there have been 4 house fires in my area in the last few weeks. It’s enough and close proximity enough that I wondered if arson is involved. I DDG house fires in my area and got mostly results from 2012. Google was not perfect here but much more current results were returned. Now I could probably adjust my search query/criteria and get better results but it seems that in general Google knows when to return current results vs general information about some regardless of publish date.
- ziml77 5y agoThat's a category of queries that leads me to use Google. If I'm looking up current events or something that changes a lot over time, Google seems to be much better at giving me what I want without me needing to tweak my query or add time range restrictions on the search. Also for some reason error messages come up with better results on Google. DDG will make it look like no one has ever written anything about the error I'm running into, Google usually has something in its index to show me.
- 1970-01-01 5y agoAnd you should believe them because they said so.
- julianlam 5y agoHa, well tinfoil hat on... Maybe they have not had to process any search warrants, because the various three-letter agencies know to just ask nicely and they'll hand it over.
- bluGill 5y agoThe conspiracy theorist in me says they get got a court order to make the press release along with a warrant for some information...
- dyingkneepad 5y agoI use DDG as my default search engine and it works fine if what you're searching is in English and is easy to find. When I'm looking for an exact page and type stuff that I remember is there Google always seems to find it, while DDG sometimes misses what I want. Also, for programming terms that also may have other meaning (e.g., python referring to snakes or programming), Google seems to always get me what I want, while DDG may get royally confused. Now, when it comes to non-English, the fact that Google knows what is my native language makes it 10000% better. I often type stuff in my native language and those words are the same in Spanish then DDG shows me a buch of stupid Spanish results, when what I really wanted was my native language. In the end I always end up reflecting that allowing the search engine to learn stuff about you is indeed somewhat useful. Still, DDG is the default search, Google will only get the queries it handles better. Edit: I guess DDG could try asking my browser about what language it's configured in and prioritize that over Spanish....
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- ed312 5y agoUsually in threads about DDG a common refrain is "but the results are worse!" - generally to mean less specific. I always thought that was the feature -- they don't compile a history on you, track your location, etc. As a result, they take a best guess from a global context. FWIW, I've been a DDG user full time (mobile and desktop) for ~5 years. I have learned to increase the specificity of my search (e.g. start with a programming language before typing an error string). Feels like a very small price to pay to avoid Google.
- 34g34vb34v3 5y agoI don't think that argument holds very much water. You can test both in sanitized environments, and Google's search is still better. Their algorithm is so much more than "surface content based on personal data" but people are so quick to deduce it down to just that. I want DDG to succeed, but their search product sucks, and its not because they don't collect data.
- id02009 5y agoI use DDG for years, and it's at most once a month when I can't find something and need to fall back to Google. Maybe I got used to the suckiness? Or maybe it's relative?
- Forbo 5y agoAny time DDG fails me, I just append "!s" to proxy the search through StartPage instead. I've found it scratches the itch pretty well for 99% of my use cases.
- okay475008 5y agothis isn't real. Google has the worst results in comparison to both yandex, baidu, and even ddg/startpage/bing/any other google clone like duckduckgo.
- dmoy 5y agoWhich is just google, right?
- chriscappuccio 5y agoI would be more interested in subpoenas for user information than "search warrants" which I'm sure most companies have near zero since 2008 unless they have cartel tiea or whatever
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- majjam 5y agoJust on the offchance anyone from ddg reads this - a while I and orhers requested a bang for search.marginalia.nu - a more old school web search and would love it if I could !mg search :) Edit for hn link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28550764 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28550764
- lancemurdock 5y agoI use StartPage over DDG. The results are just way better. Likely because StartPage anonymously using google index. However, for programming related questions I couldn't live without google.
- gundmc 5y agoWouldn't it be more impressive if they were served warrants but refused or were unable to comply? This just makes it sound like no one uses DDG so the authorities don't care to request that information.
- shusson 5y agoAs mentioned in the tweet, the impressive part is that "DuckDuckGo doesn't have any search histories by design and, bc of that, has had 0 search warrants"
- lbriner 5y agotbf, DDG can't know that they have no requests because they don't collect history, although that wouldn't be a completely mad assumption. It is also conceivable that their market share is simply so small that no-one the police are chasing are known to use DDG for their web searches. In fact the second is more likely since otherwise the Tweet would read, "we haven't been able to serve any warrant requests", rather than "we haven't received any"
- mike_hock 5y agoOr, you know, the tweet may be a lie.
- encryptluks2 5y agoRight... The one privacy-based search engine included in browser search engine lists. If the government wanted to make a secret deal with a company, it's not like they would make it known. Heck, they could even get cases redacted that mention it. People gotta make money.
- vadfa 5y agoAs if that assurance by DDG would've stopped the authorities from requesting something.
- 5y ago
- franczesko 5y agoI used DDG for 2 years. Recently, I've been testing brave search, which I personally think is much better. They're investing in their own index, whereas DDG is just Bing, but without tracking.
- Minor49er 5y agoYou don't count Amazon affiliate linking as tracking?
- bredren 5y agoWarrants follow requests to compel sharing of information known to exist. So, DDG very well may have been served requests for available information on a given user or IP, its just that the information the company had was not enough for LEOs to request a warrant. It's still impressive, but it would be interesting to know if LEOs continue to ask, (as in, "has anything changed on your end where now we can get this stuff?") or if LEOs know DDG is a dead end and are no longer even making information requests.
- allemagne 5y agoThe unofficial consensus seems to be that "well DDG isn't as good as google, but it's worth it because of privacy." I've been using DDG almost exclusively for software engineering work for roughly the last three years, and can't remember the last time I felt like resorting to "!g", because I can't remember resorting to Google ever actually solving my problem. I don't at all discount the possibility that there's some extra value I'm just able to forego without noticing, but is this really a particularly unique experience for DDG users on HN?
- ldiracdelta 5y agoI use them, because I want them to be better, but I definitely have to fail-over to google every day. I'll still use them, because someone has to compete, but they still aren't as good as google for my searches.
- utopcell 5y agoHow will using them make them better if they don't store any of your searches/results ?
- JTon 5y agoI bang !g all the time still. Wish I didn't feel compelled to. As a point of contrast: I'm not using DDG very often for work, more so personal use.
- kgermino 5y ago> [I] can't remember the last time I felt like resorting to "!g", because I can't remember resorting to Google ever actually solving my problem. I use DDG by default and it covers most of my searches, but I do have 2 main issues. 1. Maps and business information is way better with Google. 2. I usually work with Salesforce, which uses a lot of words from the 'traditional' developer ecosystem, but is an entirely separate world. Google "knows" that the method I'm looking for is in the Apex string class, not the Java one. It's not enough to get me to switch but I find a lot of Salesforce related queries which give perfect results on Google, but overly generic ones on DDG. I suspect that's a common issue when you work in a more niche area where the personalization is more valuable.
- m0zg 5y agoThe only alternative search that doesn't suck currently is Brave - they're the only US-based search engine that has its own index. Everybody else is using Google or Bing which exposes you to algorithmic manipulation and censorship, if not outright tracking. Curiously, though, it shows the same biases in image search as Google: "straight couple" brings up gay couples, and other well known "litmus test" searches are similar as well. In fact almost the same selection of images as Google image search.
- intricatedetail 5y agoAnyone else noticed that Google results are 90% spam and lead to malware gateways? The quality has drastically dropped recently. I don't even use Windows to search out of fear I'll get a virus.
- mrtweetyhack 5y agothat just means nobody uses it
- arthurcolle 5y agoMy biggest gripe with DDG is that the search results are visually not as appealing as $GOOG, and I've tried several times to use it but it causes a barely perceptible eye strain for me and always end up back at big G. I find the ddg results page to have too much decoration/not just the raw links/information. Maybe el Goog has just completely conditioned my brain after years of use. Anyone else have a similar experience?
- sova 5y agoHow does DDG make money?
- ipaddr 5y agoMy issue with ddg is the speed vs google. There is a delay with ddg and that alone pushes me back to google.
- atoav 5y agoI used DDG on my phone for a few years and had the constant comparison to Google on my desktop. The results are not worse, they are just different. It is easier to find rare jewels and non-clickbaity content with DDG this is sometimes way more interesting than the heap of content farms found by google. You sometimes have to give DDG a bit more hints what topic you are searching for by adding search words like "programming" or "city". But thats it. For me it is totally usable. At first I was too lazy to change it, now I don't want to change it anymore.
- b3nji 5y agoI've used ddg since about 2010. Recently I moved to Brave search when that came out. Now I'm enjoying Neeva, has anyone tried that one?
- crashbunny 5y agodoesn't the usa have secret searches a company can't acknowledge? then canaries came about and I can't remember if they were outlawed in the usa. I assume everyone is watching. I'm very boring, though, but I still want some privacy.
- rsync 5y ago"... canaries came about and I can't remember if they were outlawed in the usa ..." Most canaries come and go. The first one[1] is still extant and is updated every Monday morning: https://www.rsync.net/resources/notices/canary.txt https://www.rsync.net/resources/notices/canary.txt [1] https://twitter.com/rsyncnet/status/1387090538273206274 https://twitter.com/rsyncnet/status/1387090538273206274
- crashbunny 5y agocheers. I read somewhere warrant canaries had been outlawed and I just qwanted, it was in my country, australia. https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2015/03/australia_outla.html https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2015/03/australia_out... we have some really scary laws. a spook is allowed to force an employee of a company to spy, collect data, install malware on their employer's computers and of course they can't talk about it to anyone.