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Advertise on DuckDuckGo Search

264 points by tendto 3y ago

nomel 3y ago
I was able to convince my wife to switch for anything remotely "controversial", when, during the pandemic, we caught the relatively "real time" disappearance of several "against the grain" articles about covid [1]. By disappeared, I mean top results for the rough concept one day to not being able to find it, even with the exact title and text, the next. I want a search engine, more than a curated guide. [1] https://www.mobihealthnews.com/news/google-takes-covid-19-vaccine-misinformation https://www.mobihealthnews.com/news/google-takes-covid-19-va... edit: I think the core problem is that "misinformation" was applied too broadly, and sometimes incorrectly.
- VWWHFSfQ 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - cyberbanjo 3y ago
    Everyone wants a censor on their side, but they rarely are
    - mywittyname 3y ago
      In this particular case, it's about wanting information from the people actually researching a subject vs people making stuff for political or business purposes. Even if researchers are wrong initially, because of lack of data, they are still acting in good faith. Which you can't say for people who are spreading made up or poorly sourced information to make a buck. Society generally frowns upon allowing people to blatantly lie or act in bad faith order to sell products. While that might be a form of censorship, it's one that society largely benefits from having in place.
      - drexlspivey 3y ago
        In this particular case, what product was sold by antivaxxers or how did they make money?
      - tracker1 3y ago
        There were plenty of knowledgable scientists including those with specific familiarity that were censored because it didn't fit the media narrative at the time.
      - VancouverMan 3y ago
        > Even if researchers are wrong initially, because of lack of data, they are still acting in good faith. A researcher or other "expert" should have at least some sense of when the data being used are limited, flawed, or even unavailable. Under such circumstances, the only way to act in good faith would be for such a person to say something along the lines of, "I don't know" or "It's not possible to say at this time." Such a person making some other authoritative pronouncement (even with caveats attached), especially if it turns out to be incorrect, should not be seen as "acting in good faith".
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
    How is your attitude not equivalent to "I can't trust myself to see things I disagree with, I am so weak-willed that there is the horrific danger that I will start believing them"? There are reasons someone might want to find those links, even if they disagree with them. When Google hides them from you without your consent or ability to opt out, they're treating you as if you were a child. Or perhaps more like livestock.
    - jbm 3y ago
      > I am so weak-willed that there is the horrific danger that I will start believing them That's what "Manufacturing Consent" isn't it? That entire concept seems sound and passes the smell test. People see things repeatedly from authoritive-sounding people and they believe it (in the case of the book, by governments and their catspaws). There is no reason a search and social bubble wouldn't wind up with a similar outcome.
      - NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
        Is my authority defiance resource just cranked up to 11? I don't even like those groups I tend to agree with, and when I do find myself agreeing with them I silently sit there wondering if that somehow means I am wrong. I only said it sarcastically about the original commenter because it's difficult to believe that anyone could truly be like that. Sure, we're all aware of the dregs who seem to form their political beliefs from Uncle Creepy's Facebook meme pictures, but I've always believed those people to be nothing more than a (sizable) minority.
        systems_glitch 3y ago
        It's estimated that 50-70% of the world has no inner monologue.
    - hablog 3y ago
      > I can't trust myself to see things I disagree with, I am so weak-willed... The thing is, this likely is true for him. Most people are not equipped to deal with the onslaught of aggressive memes from the internet. Unfortunately, this is an unsolved social problem, and "export my memetic censorship reflex to MEGACORP" is a pretty bad way of doing things. I think a likely way of solving this problem (protecting not-especially-high-mental-horsepower people from getting BTFO by the internet, contracting transmissible psychological diseases and so on) is that religious organizations will start offering (voluntary, in first world countries) censorship services to their members. Your DNS queries or whatever will go through the Vatican/Synod/whatever central DNS server, which will prevent you from looking at porn sites. This would probably be a very socially positive outcome for the bottom 90-something percent of people on the "strength of memetic immune system" distribution.
  - mrangle 3y ago
    Of course you do not mind. But that means that you have no room for complaint when they delete something that you consider to be "not garbage".
    - anamexis 3y ago
      Yes you do. Agreeing with some moderation does not mean you must agree with all moderation.
      - bakugo 3y ago
        Calling censorship "moderation" doesn't make it not censorship.
        anamexis 3y ago
        Ok. Agreeing with some censorship does not mean you must agree with all censorship.
        bakugo 3y ago
        No, it doesn't, but you're a hypocrite if you don't. If you think there's nothing wrong with the idea that "censorship is good as long as I'm not the one being censored", I don't know what to tell you.
        vkou 3y ago
        Not everyone is a speech absolutist, that doesn't make them hypocrites. In fact, as speech absolutists have taken over a few platforms, we've discovered that the primary hypocrisy surrounding speech is that there's a lot of people who claim to be speech absolutists, but aren't when push comes to shove.
        lern_too_spel 3y ago
        If you eat bread, you must also eat shit. If you don't, you're a hypocrite. It's astounding how many people are incapable of making judgments except along artificial lines given to them by sophists.
  - Danjoe4 3y ago
    Much of the "antivax garbage" turned out to be true. In hindsight, do you still believe that censoring true but inconvenient information is morally acceptable?
    - berkle4455 3y ago
      [flagged]
      - edgyquant 3y ago
        They did not say all
        berkle4455 3y ago
        How about none of it.
        AlecSchueler 3y ago
        They also gave no reason to believe the "most" claim. What actually are the things that were proven to be true that were censored as misinformation?
      - WillPostForFood 3y ago
        Truth is messy. The vaccine is an amazing achievement and saved many lives. Understating the health risks to young men (myocarditis), and overstating the efficacy fed the anti-vaxxers, and was a disservice to science and healthcare.
        f6v 3y ago
        And we haven’t even talked about the prevention paradox.
      - suoduandao2 3y ago
        you're avoiding the question.
  - nomel 3y ago
    I somewhat agree. I don't mind if true falsehoods/spam is removed. The problem was, the "anti vax" label was applied to far too much, including things that were later found to be true. The article I was looking for was about intravascular injection of the vaccine, and its possible relation to adverse effects, which now has merit in 2023 [1]. [1] https://pure.hud.ac.uk/en/publications/inadvertent-injection-of-covid-19-vaccine-into-deltoid-muscle-vas https://pure.hud.ac.uk/en/publications/inadvertent-injection...
    - Phil_Latio 3y ago
      "remains at the injection side" was one of the more blatant lies. The funniest lie was "a corona virus outbreak of a novel strain in close distance to a biolab which does experiments on corona viruses ... is without a doubt of natural origin!"
      - nomel 3y ago
        > "remains at the injection side" was one of the more blatant lies. Correct: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9313234/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9313234/
  - flangola7 3y ago
    100% agree.
  - TobyTheDog123 3y ago
    This word is quickly becoming a part of the "does not mean anything" crew from its constant overuse and involvement in strawman-ing.
  - kevin_thibedeau 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - f6v 3y ago
      > despite no proof that it isn't a possibility Because you don’t get to come up with a “theory” and dump the burden of the proof on someone else. That’s incredibly stupid. Not how how science and common sense work.
      - STM32F030R8 3y ago
        Since when? It may not be a good argument but should we be deplatforming people over it? Go to Reddit front page right now and try to find something that isn’t a poorly argued political post. What’s the difference? Just because you may disagree with someone it doesn’t mean they NEED to be silenced.
        stonogo 3y ago
        Politics is about how you think things should be run. Science is about what we have evidence for. They are not the same thing.
        ipaddr 3y ago
        Science is about coming up with a hypnosis or theory and testing it. The evidence comes at the end not before the theory
        muti 3y ago
        We don't give any credence to untested hypotheses
        stonogo 3y ago
        We generally don't employ hypnosis. Sometimes we even skip the hypothesis step, because "what the hell is that" is enough to start generating data. Don't confuse all of scientific research with the scientific method; it's just one method of investigation.
  - Jcampuzano2 3y ago
    I can see both sides to the argument. I personally don't mind deletion of antivax stuff because I'm not antivax. But I can see the point of view those mentioning what happens when there is deletion/censorship of things in the future that I could have interest in. We also do know that there exists "some" subset of things that were mentioned that seemed antivax on the surface but did actually turn out to be true or at least somewhat true. But these were usually not outright false claims, but informed speculations or very niche. It was such a dividing topic that any form of skepticism however small was seen as an attack. This as someone who is vaxed and has gotten every booster available.
    - ifyoubuildit 3y ago
      > I personally don't mind deletion of antivax stuff because I'm not antivax The term antivax is a problem. Very few people are actually anti all vaccines, and nobody should be pro all vaccines for everyone all the time. There have been actual truly failed vaccines, are you "antivax" if you wouldn't volunteer to take them? Should articles about past failed vaccines be censored from the internet? Of course not. The term is sloppy and careless, but people love it, probably because it lets you be part of a team. But everybody means something different by it. Nobody should presume any new implementation of a class is good just because there have been previous successful implementations. Reality doesn't make things so easy for us.
  - apienx 3y ago
    I'd much rather see the antivax garbage debunked. Think of it as a form of vaccination for the mind.
  - colordrops 3y ago
    Nonsense. There isn't some super clearly defined line between pro-vaxx and anti-vaxx across the thousands of issues and questions related to covid. Science isn't anti- or pro- anything. Particular beliefs that were labeled "anti-vaxx" were often just not clear or understood yet. Also, it's not the job of a search engine to be your nanny. What if you are researching conspiracy theories or opposition beliefs, even if you don't believe in them? How would you find them?
- Georgelemental 3y ago
  DDG may not be the best if you want to avoid political meddling. I switched to Brave after https://web.archive.org/web/20220831110219/https://twitter.com/yegg/status/1501716484761997318 https://web.archive.org/web/20220831110219/https://twitter.c...
  - lolinder 3y ago
    I get so tired of seeing yegg raked over the coals for this one. A search engine by definition takes an editorial stance on things. They take in all of the internet and decide what to present to users. For a search engine to take no editorial position is to yield the floor to whoever can best game the system, and a propaganda machine like Russia's is absolutely capable of exploiting a search engine that doesn't proactively take measures to avoid being exploited. That DDG wanted to avoid spreading Russian propaganda that argues against the very existence of the Ukrainian people isn't DDG meddling in politics, it's them steering clear of enabling genocide.
    - allarm 3y ago
      They could simply add a “propaganda” tag and give an option to filter out the search results marked with that tag. If anything I can specifically search for Russian propaganda, for whatever reason.
      - lolinder 3y ago
        Yes, you can, and downranking propaganda wouldn't stop it from turning up if you go looking. But when my naive sister-in-law hears something about how Ukraine isn't a real country, I don't want the first page of results for "history of Ukraine" to turn up Russian propaganda. I live in a red state, and there are astonishing numbers of people here who already buy Putin's story. I'm fully behind DDG deciding they didn't want to play a role in spreading his message even further.
        allarm 3y ago
        > wouldn't stop it from turning up if you go looking. Yeah, same goes for your naïve sister-in-law. So why don’t they add the “propaganda” tag, so that your relatives could clearly see it and I could search for it (for whatever reason)? They could even add some links to some better sources, as an option. And use some disclaimer when you click on these results, like “Hey, this is a propaganda resource, be careful. Here’s the links where you can read up on the topic if you need unbiased information”. That would probably have at least some educational value, unlike removing and/or downranking the results.
- ummonk 3y ago
  It was crazy to see suggestions to wear masks or claims that covid was airborne getting "fact-checked" by the media only to reverse their position months later after WHO put out new statements. In particular, the phrase "no credible evidence" was wildly thrown around without mentioning whether there were any credible high-powered studies that had even attempted to find evidence of the phenomenon.
  - gjsman-1000 3y ago
    The WHO has a lot of blame itself for misinformation. And, I personally believe, a lot of conspiracy theories definitely caught fire from their mistakes. https://twitter.com/who/status/1243972193169616898?lang=en https://twitter.com/who/status/1243972193169616898?lang=en Also, as you can see in the replies, a lot of people called BS at the time, but who were they to question the official WHO line? Yes, the WHO later came around and came up with 6 feet instead of 1 meter, but those who called BS on the WHO's statement may have saved their lives.
  - thatnerdyguy 3y ago
    Uh... are you suggesting that at some not-insignificant point into the pandemic someone credible was arguing COVID was NOT airborne?
    - tjohns 3y ago
      Actually, yes. For the first half of the pandemic, much of the medical community was unsure if COVID was airborne. Examples: - https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/cdc-reverses-again-now-says-covid-19-sometimes-airborne-n1242167 https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/cdc-reverses-agai... - https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00925-7 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00925-7 - https://archive.is/wPD2D https://archive.is/wPD2D (Tweet from WHO) Note that "airborne" has a specific meaning in medical literature. Everyone agreed COVID could be transmitted in the air by respiratory droplets. But to be truly "airborne" means the virus could be aerosolized and float freely, without being attached to a larger droplet. Both droplet-based and aerosolized/"airborne" spread allows viruses to be transmitted in the air. But a truly "airborne" virus can travel much farther. It's the difference between needing 6 feet and 20 feet of distance to prevent spread. (To put it bluntly, it's the difference between avoiding spittle, or avoiding the equivalent of cigarette smoke. Two very different threat models.)
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- low_common 3y ago
  Do you put "everything" in "quotations" all the "time"?
  - nomel 3y ago
    I used it to convey some external concept, rather than my own thoughts. "controversial": Others called it controversial. I did/would not. "against the grain": Others thought that there was a grain. I did/would not. "real time": Not literal. Maybe this is a regional/age thing? edit: actually, asking ChatGPT why they're in quotes gives the similar answers as mine, so I guess it's not too odd. New session prompt with 4.0: "Why are some of these words in quotes?" Fluff removed, same order as my answers: > ... In this case, "controversial" could imply that the speaker doesn't personally find the topics controversial, but acknowledges that others may perceive them as such. > ... indicating that it's being used in its typical idiomatic sense. > ... Here, the quotation marks might be used to stress that the term isn't being used in its strictest sense.
- yegg 3y ago
  x-posting from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35980374 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35980374 (I'm the CEO & Founder of DuckDuckGo.) It is simply not true that we have censored anything or made ourselves "the arbiters of truth." I realized I previously explained how our news rankings work very poorly on Twitter but I subsequently put out a clarification in this help page with a much clearer (and detailed) explanation of how our news rankings actually work: https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/news-rankings/ https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/ne... From that page: "When we apply our own ranking signals we do so in a strictly non-political manner, meaning we don’t evaluate or otherwise take into account any potential political bias or leanings of websites in our search result rankings."
  - BobTheDestroyer 3y ago
    [flagged]
  - calculatte 3y ago
    [flagged]
  - Gareth321 3y ago
    > Many sites may occasionally do one or more of these things, but we take action very rarely, only in the most extreme cases. To identify these rare, extreme cases, we rely on multiple non-governmental and non-political organizations that specialize in objectively assessing journalistic standards. To take any ranking action using this factor, we must see at least three of these organizations independently assess a site as having extremely low journalistic standards and also see that none of these organizations have assessed the same site as having even somewhat robust journalistic standards. This is far too vague. Last year Bazbaz told Recode that sites like RT and Sputnik were "extreme" cases (https://www.vox.com/recode/22981115/duckduckgo-free-speech-privacy-oops https://www.vox.com/recode/22981115/duckduckgo-free-speech-p...). While I tend to agree, which other sites are extreme cases? This isn't published. Despite the claim that none of this is done for political reasons, I find it hard to trust that these "non-governmental and non-political organizations" act and are chosen without any bias. Your method isn't published or explained. I really think these organisations should, at minimum, be listed. So too should all the sites DDG considers to be "extreme" cases. Then we could decide if we think DDG is being politically neutral. My confidence in DDG is shaken, and I don't think I'm alone. We live in a world where so many major software brands we love have made overt moves towards censorship on political grounds. If DDG could prove they reject this authoritarianism I think it would serve as a major USP.
- okwubodu 3y ago
  Oh, DuckDuckGo just does that sometimes. Pretty often I'll pick a result then back out to the search results, and the one I had in mind to click next just isn't there anymore. However annoying, I wouldn't immediately jump to a political motivation.
deafpolygon 3y ago
Remember, DDG is still an advertising company.
- blueflow 3y ago
  and without IPv6 support
  - june_twenty 3y ago
    What impact does that have?
    - Xeoncross 3y ago
      not sure, but the impact is all on IPv4 apparently
      - riwsky 3y ago
        can’t believe they’d censor ipv6 like that smh
      - june_twenty 3y ago
        What does that mean?
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
diebeforei485 3y ago
They're actually reasonably good. I often find that they do weird things like linking to non-US versions of websites instead of a US version. So I end up on the British or Dutch version of a website, with prices quoted in GBP or EUR. I find myself using the "!g" shortcut (which takes me to Google) more often than I'd have liked to. Thankfully, Apple offers this as one of their search engine options (despite being paid "tres comas" every year from Google to be the default search engine).
- threads2 3y ago
  I cant give up DDG cause those shortcuts are just too damn good. !m and !ud
  - diebeforei485 3y ago
    Annoyingly, !g is right next to !h on most keyboards, and I often find myself searching through Haskell documentation instead of searching Google.
mrangle 3y ago
The sole benefit of DDG is their claim that they don't track. One problem with this narrow focus is that many people mistakenly carry this statement over to an assumption that DDG doesn't censor their search results. I suspect that DDG both knows and counts on this as an aspect of an undeserved reputation. DDG's search results aren't acceptable for anything even mildly controversial. I'll use them for image searches, but there are better search engines for internet access and that give equivalent or better privacy. Also in my opinion, DDG's penchant for censorship harms the credibility of their assertion that they do not track.
- rlpb 3y ago
  A huge benefit of DDG for me is that I can use it in a private browser window and it just works without stupid popups getting in the way. In contrast Google is far less useable for a quick search. This alone is why I have DDG as default and I only drop back to Google when I'm struggling to find what I want. Most of the time DDG is fine for me.
  - bitL 3y ago
    Recently so many unrelated sites pop up a tiny Google login window somewhere on the page, obstructing what I want to see, like as if Google was super desperate for more tracking and engagement. Like why would I like to login to Google while viewing a forum about skyscrapers if I just wanted to read about the progress of some construction? Passive-aggressive at its core.
    - yegg 3y ago
      Note that we added support to remove those Google login pop-ups on third-party sites within our apps/extensions. See https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/privacy/web-tracking-protections/#google-sign-in-pop-up-protection https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/privacy/we... for details and https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/privacy/web-tracking-protections/ https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/privacy/we... for the full list of other protections.
    - 3y ago
alphabet9000 3y ago
is there even a way to ignore words from a search any more on DDG? using "-" in front of a word doesnt prevent the word from showing up in results.
soared 3y ago
https://www.statista.com/statistics/511358/market-share-mobile-search-usa/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/511358/market-share-mobi... Better link - DDG is in #2 with a behemoth 1.8% market share, closely followed by yahoo and and bing at 1.6% and 1.3%.
anonymousab 3y ago
The bugs around Exact match and text/content (not site!) exclusion operators not working at all are what keeps me from using it as an actual substitute for Google or Bing. I hope that getting that stuff fixed is a high priority. DDG is the default in a lot of privacy-oriented browsers and forks, but it gives users a really bad first impression when their first search just doesn't work. But I suppose that the average mobile search engine user these days doesn't use most search modifiers or operators so maybe they aren't the things to prioritize.
- rurp 3y ago
  I strongly second this. Respecting exact terms was the main factor that got me to switch from Google search. The functionality has been declining for a while now and seems particularly bad lately.
- reaperducer 3y ago
  The bugs around Exact match and exclusion operators not working at all are what keeps me from using it as an actual substitute for Google or Bing. Duck used to be great for only searching for what you asked for. But in the last few months, it's fallen into the Google trap of showing me things it thinks I want, and not what I asked for. And no method of punctuation seems to get around that. At this point, the only reason I still use Duck is because the other option is Google.
  - anonymousab 3y ago
    I think in this case, the functionality outright broke - that is, this is a bug - due to how their indexing works. The CEO (HN user yegg) talked about it a bit in another post - they modified their READMEs to remove mention of some operators because they're malfunctioning. So they still get the benefit of the doubt (as you say, the other choices are just Google) but the real test will be in how they communicate about this going forward and whether they fix it.
    - yegg 3y ago
      We are working on it. We also updated the README again to reflect that.
TobyTheDog123 3y ago
These companies are solely built around the concept of trust. Your average person just doesn't care that Google is tracking them, and will therefore not take the obvious productivity hit by using a service with lower quality results (anything not Google). I feel like DuckDuckGo has had enough controversy in the trust department that it's entirely worthless as a company and as a service. Anything I do need to actually search these days, I just use Google, as I don't care about Google knowing I needed help with a Golang compiler error. It's not a worthwhile tradeoff for me.
- anonymousab 3y ago
  > Anything I do need to actually search these days, I just use Google, as I don't care about Google knowing I needed help with a Golang compiler error. It's not a worthwhile tradeoff for me. The problem is when you need to research or learn about something that is verboten. Even something as simple as "x worker strike" or "x protest" won't necessarily break any laws but will be of interest to certain automations, agencies and systems that may then endeavor to make your life hard without necessarily stepping over the legal line. Not for being an undesirable to a ruling authority, but for looking up information related to them. And of course, this will evolve in more dystopic ways when it is all inevitably factored in to (financial|social) credit scores, insurance, access to services, etc. in the future. Either directly or laundered through AI or other systems. That is less an argument in favor of DDG and more of a statement of why search engine privacy will become more and more important in the mid term.
yosito 3y ago
I was using DDG exclusively for over a year. It gives way better results than Google. Recently I switched to Kagi, for its ability to prioritize my favorite sites, and block others. I'm paying $5 a month for it, and I've honestly not been this confident in the search results I'm getting for a long long time.
- alx__ 3y ago
  Same. Kagi has better results than Google in general. Even programming ones. I don't mind paying for better Love that it can do groupings, especially when you're searching for something that will also turn up seo garbage, like products for your home. So you can see the cluster of "review sites" and then actual product companies
yegg 3y ago
For anyone curious, the best search market share data is from Cloudflare. Here is the latest report: https://radar.cloudflare.com/reports/searchengines-2023-q1 https://radar.cloudflare.com/reports/searchengines-2023-q1. And here is our reasoning of why it is the best: https://spreadprivacy.com/search-engine-market-share-data-two-new-sources-cloudflare-and-wikipedia/ https://spreadprivacy.com/search-engine-market-share-data-tw...
- sah2ed 3y ago
  Would be nice if you could ask the DDG team to cite the links you provided as footnotes to your claim "DuckDuckGo owns the #2 position in mobile market share in the US, and 18 other markets ..." in TFA.
  - yegg 3y ago
    Good point, will do that.
- newZWhoDis 3y ago
  first link’s page is broken on mobile safari.
ghastmaster 3y ago
I switch to DDG from brave when I want to do an image search. Brave forwards image searches to either Google or Bing based on your choice. Even if DDG is getting their images from those sources, I still prefer the DDG image search UI.
eykanal 3y ago
From that page: "To advertise on DuckDuckGo, visit Microsoft Advertising." Is DDG the #2 position or Microsoft? Kind of a notable difference there... if DDG is just an arm of Microsoft it rings a different tune.
- Minor49er 3y ago
  DDG grew up being a whitelabeled version of Bing. As far as I understand, DDG has since started implementing more of their own search patterns and results, but has not completely removed themselves from Bing
  - yegg 3y ago
    We actually always had a bunch of our own stuff, and still do, as well as work with other partners. For example, the number one module on mobile is local, and we don't get any local stuff from Bing at all. Similarly, the number one module desktop is knowledge graph, and we don't get that from Bing at all either.
    - jll29 3y ago
      Hi Gabriel, would you be potentially available to write a technical blog post about how DDG plugins are federated for The Informer, the blog of the British Computing Society's Information Retrieval specialist group (BCS IRSG)? (Is Kamyl Bazbaz the best person to discuss such requests, or how can you be reached? Thanks!)
      - yegg 3y ago
        Yes, he is the best person to discuss such requests.
    - caractacus 3y ago
      Sorry to piggyback on this. I applied for a Director role at DDG about a month ago. Had the autoreply which said DDG would follow up whether it was a yes, let's talk! or a nope, sorry. But nothing at all which was a bit disappointing. The role has been taken down for a few weeks now. I wasn't looking for a new position at all but the description strongly appealed and it was DDG, a company I'd admired for years (and fully remote!).
mromanuk 3y ago
The link is broken
propogandist 3y ago
one of the contributing factors is because iOS offers native search support for DDG and they don't any other providers (eg. Brave)
api_or_ipa 3y ago
Note that you can turn off advertisements in DDG. Not sure how long that business model will continue to last, but I would _happily_ pay money to not see ads and blog spam on my serps. You need to trust your search engine before you can trust just about anything else you find on the internet, and I truly feel like Google is no longer a trustworthy company.
- loehnsberg 3y ago
  Take a look at Kagi Search [1] where you pay with money instead of your data. Have been using it for over a year now and must say that the search engine is surprisingly good. The only time I ever use !g bangs is when I want live updates of sports events or so. [1] https://kagi.com/ https://kagi.com/
thecopy 3y ago
DDG honestly have better results for me. Google usually have worse results when i cannot find what i want on DDG and use the !g command.
mattkevan 3y ago
I've used DDG as my main search engine for about 4 years now. Until recently I found I was still having to go to Google for specific queries, mainly answering coding problems. But in the last 6 months or so, Google's results have gotten so bad and DDG has continued to improve to the point where I no longer bother with !g. When I do use Google I often find myself in the strange position of not actually being able to find what I'm looking for. It's a very unsettling feeling, and not one I've experienced in a long time, possibly not since the pre-Google days of Yahoo, Lycos and AltaVista. Amazing that Google have let their core value proposition of 'we are much better at finding what you're looking for than everyone else' rot quite so much.
- nly 3y ago
  I still have to use !g daily.
  - nortonham 3y ago
    same
- teaearlgraycold 3y ago
  I use chatgpt, the version with web browsing, instead of Google search some of the time and it does pretty well.
  - mattkevan 3y ago
    Yeah ChatGPT is pretty good at solving coding problems - 'My apologies for the confusion, I misunderstood your requirements earlier. Let's try another approach...' is much better than 'Never mind I fixed it' on a four-year-old Stack Overflow post.
  - furyofantares 3y ago
    And takes 10x as long. It's good, but it's gotta get a whole lot faster (which I'm sure it will.) It would be really nice if it would in-line the source links it summarized piece of info from too.
dcdc123 3y ago
I am not really surpsrised. If you don't care about privacy, you use Google because it is the best. If you care about privacy, you use DDG because it is the best that offers improved privacy.
conradfr 3y ago
I use the widget and it's freeing to do silly searches without having them tied to my Google account. The problem is that you can't remove the Google equivalent on a Pixel phone, so it's really wasted screen space and feel like anti-competitive. Until someone in the EU commission notices it and regulates it I guess...
- commoner 3y ago
  You can remove the Google search bar from a Pixel phone or any other Android phone by replacing the launcher. I recommend Neo Launcher, which is free and open source: https://github.com/NeoApplications/Neo-Launcher https://github.com/NeoApplications/Neo-Launcher
tredre3 3y ago
Duckduckgo search results are spotty at best. I can live with the mild censorship (yes yes I know, they censor the side that you don't like so it's totally not censorship and just blocking evil propaganda, they're the good guys etc etc). Their web browsers are great however and I've been using them on android for years and on desktop for months! I wish I could use them with a better search engine, though (Typing !g in all queries is now a reflex for me).
IceWreck 3y ago
I use DDG for almost everything except local results. It works but I would feel better if they reduced their dependency on Bing.
classified 3y ago
Google's search results have become pure garbage by now, so anything not-Google should be #1.
Semaphor 3y ago
No idea about general numbers (our no-js server side logging has FF barely behind chrome) , but while 2 orders of magnitude behind Google, DDG is actually 2nd for us as well (German photography site). I was pretty happy with DDG for years (switched to Kagi last year), and I think they are great for general usage (I often read about issues with local search, their search for Germany (!ddgde) was always topnotch).
aimor 3y ago
Might as well ask here: Why does DDG change my search results when I use the Back button, and how can I get it to stop. When I use DDG if I do a search, click on a link to open it in the same tab, then click back to the search results I notice the results are in a different order. This drives me crazy.
Andrew_nenakhov 3y ago
I love DDG and use it daily on all my devices, but I would take such marketing statement with some scepticism: Previously, DDG used to have a page [0] with usage stats, but it was deactivated somewhere around this time last year. Instead of a very clear data that was clearly showing the state of things (which had a rather concerning slowing of growth), we now have vague statents about #2 position in mobile market in the US. [0]: https://duckduckgo.com/traffic https://duckduckgo.com/traffic
- aembleton 3y ago
  The last copy I can find of it: https://web.archive.org/web/20221118045948/https://duckduckgo.com/traffic https://web.archive.org/web/20221118045948/https://duckduckg... Looks like number of searches was down from the previous year.
uncletaco 3y ago
I use ddg solely to have bang search like in chrome without using chrome
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
Gareth321 3y ago
I stopped using DDG when they admitted they are censoring political content (https://www.vox.com/recode/22981115/duckduckgo-free-speech-privacy-oops https://www.vox.com/recode/22981115/duckduckgo-free-speech-p...). I'm really tired of companies telling me what I may and may not view.
sam0x17 3y ago
btw it is literally just bing. The only reason they can afford it is bing gives them free API access. Would be impossible for DDG to afford the usual API fees without something like a $5/month subscription for normal usage. If they didn't give it away for free to DDG, bing itself would lose double digit usage numbers, since they report DDG usage as their own usage. Source: worked for a competitor.
Zren 3y ago
I originally switched just for the hell of it. But nowadays I get annoyed when I use Google since it doesn't have keyboard/arrow key shortcuts. ⬇, ⬇, Ctrl+Enter (open in new tab) or "/" to edit the search box is a great DDG feature.
pengaru 3y ago
ddg has served my search needs just fine for years now, but I still go to google for image search and maps. One thing has really bothered me with the state of the web in general though, which has directly affected the quality of results for all search engines: Tons of communications have moved into undiscoverable forms/walled gardens. What used to happen in public, crawled, textual mailing list discussions, particularly in the FOSS/IT space, is now happening in Discord/Slack/video meetings. Even upstream systemd devs have been using Telegram of all things for discussing development topics as opposed to systemd-devel. It's an absolute disaster. I sorely miss the days of https://google.com/linux https://google.com/linux where I'd find pages and pages of relevant, high-quality mailing list discussions for everything I searched for.
lannisterstark 3y ago
I've personally switched to a selfhosted instance of SearX-ng and I can't be happier. Yes, it still queries other engines, but that's fine. I'd rather "average" it out than trust any single search provider, DDG included.
dang 3y ago
On HN, it's not ok to use the title field to point out what you think is important about an article. That's called editorializing, and it's disallowed by https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize." (Submitted title was "DuckDuckGo owns the #2 position in mobile market share in the US".) If you want to say what you think is important about an article, that's fine, but do it by adding a comment to the thread. Then your view will be on a level playing field with everyone else's: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=%22level%20playing%20field%22%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so... Titles are by far the biggest influence on discussion, so this is an important rule.
- croutonwagon 3y ago
  Thanks for this clarification dang. I was confused as the title in my RSS feed was much different than when I clicked through to the thread. Thought there was an issue with my rss aggregator for a second.
  - zdbrandon 3y ago
    Aside: If you don't mind sharing; which url and reader are you using? Either my reader or url is so slow that I only saw the amended title in my feed. My url tries to grab only the most popular posts, so that may be the largest contributor, but I'd love to know if there's a faster way.
    - croutonwagon 3y ago
      I use my own miniflux instance on a linode/VPS. It tends to pick stuff up fairly quickly (in most cases). https://miniflux.app/ https://miniflux.app/
      - zdbrandon 3y ago
        Thanks!
MrDresden 3y ago
Been mostly using DDg for the last 3 years, but in the last two months the experience has really gone down. First off the results take upwards to 6 second to load and the quality seems to have been hit as well. I have been wondering if thisnis due to some changes with Bing (which is the underlying engine as far as I know).
Implicated 3y ago
On the other side of this... I've recently been working on a new project that is more or less utilizing a 'long-tail first' SEO strategy (ugh, I know) and I've seen very surprising numbers from DDG... responsible for effectively 1/3 of my search referred traffic (google representing 50%).
franczesko 3y ago
They used to share traffic data at duckduckgo.com/traffic. The website is unavailable anymore (wonder why?), but before switching to Brave search (way better than DDG imo) it was noticable, that the number of queries had stalled.
Decabytes 3y ago
Duck Duck Go and Bing have both indexed my blog but Google has yet to. I've been increasingly disappointed with Google's search results the past couple of years. Might have to give DDG a try!
foverzar 3y ago
I loved DDG before it started engaging in heavy censorship. I mean, I get it, it's a public-facing service, some guard-rails should be present. But political censorship on a search-engine that poses itself as a "good guy" privacy focused search engine? On a search engine that is used by default in a Tor browser? That is just an unacceptable abuse and misrepresentation. And judging by their press releases, DDG seems to be quite proud of themselves fighting "misinformation". I mean, even if it came from the good intentions, it had essentially broken the core search functionality to the point it where works far worse than google or any other search engine. And if that's the case, what is even the point? If you are researching some political topic, don't ever use DDG, they will 1984 your search results and act like they did good. It's like their target userbase aren't even educated engineers, but silly gullible grans who need curated experience. P.S. If you search "duckduckgo censorship" in different search engines, DDG's first result labels anyone complaining as "far right", ironic. Seems like every other search engine is "far right" these days, judging by sheer brokennes of DDG compared to others.
edpichler 3y ago
DDG is my default search engine for a year, and I am not being idealistic, I feel that I am getting better more interesting results. To make it short (my humble conclusion): Google is using too much UI space to fill with ads and too many websites hacked the SEO algorithm, creating bad quality information pages getting in the top results.
algustionesa 3y ago
I hope DuckDuckGo has something similar to Search Console or Webmaster Tools.

264 points by tendto 3y ago

I was able to convince my wife to switch for anything remotely "controversial", when, during the pandemic, we caught the relatively "real time" disappearance of several "against the grain" articles about covid [1]. By disappeared, I mean top results for the rough concept one day to not being able to find it, even with the exact title and text, the next. I want a search engine, more than a curated guide. [1] https://www.mobihealthnews.com/news/google-takes-covid-19-vaccine-misinformation https://www.mobihealthnews.com/news/google-takes-covid-19-va... edit: I think the core problem is that "misinformation" was applied too broadly, and sometimes incorrectly.

VWWHFSfQ 3y ago
[flagged]
- cyberbanjo 3y ago
  Everyone wants a censor on their side, but they rarely are
  - mywittyname 3y ago
    In this particular case, it's about wanting information from the people actually researching a subject vs people making stuff for political or business purposes. Even if researchers are wrong initially, because of lack of data, they are still acting in good faith. Which you can't say for people who are spreading made up or poorly sourced information to make a buck. Society generally frowns upon allowing people to blatantly lie or act in bad faith order to sell products. While that might be a form of censorship, it's one that society largely benefits from having in place.
    - drexlspivey 3y ago
      In this particular case, what product was sold by antivaxxers or how did they make money?
    - tracker1 3y ago
      There were plenty of knowledgable scientists including those with specific familiarity that were censored because it didn't fit the media narrative at the time.
    - VancouverMan 3y ago
      > Even if researchers are wrong initially, because of lack of data, they are still acting in good faith. A researcher or other "expert" should have at least some sense of when the data being used are limited, flawed, or even unavailable. Under such circumstances, the only way to act in good faith would be for such a person to say something along the lines of, "I don't know" or "It's not possible to say at this time." Such a person making some other authoritative pronouncement (even with caveats attached), especially if it turns out to be incorrect, should not be seen as "acting in good faith".
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
  How is your attitude not equivalent to "I can't trust myself to see things I disagree with, I am so weak-willed that there is the horrific danger that I will start believing them"? There are reasons someone might want to find those links, even if they disagree with them. When Google hides them from you without your consent or ability to opt out, they're treating you as if you were a child. Or perhaps more like livestock.
  - jbm 3y ago
    > I am so weak-willed that there is the horrific danger that I will start believing them That's what "Manufacturing Consent" isn't it? That entire concept seems sound and passes the smell test. People see things repeatedly from authoritive-sounding people and they believe it (in the case of the book, by governments and their catspaws). There is no reason a search and social bubble wouldn't wind up with a similar outcome.
    - NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
      Is my authority defiance resource just cranked up to 11? I don't even like those groups I tend to agree with, and when I do find myself agreeing with them I silently sit there wondering if that somehow means I am wrong. I only said it sarcastically about the original commenter because it's difficult to believe that anyone could truly be like that. Sure, we're all aware of the dregs who seem to form their political beliefs from Uncle Creepy's Facebook meme pictures, but I've always believed those people to be nothing more than a (sizable) minority.
      - systems_glitch 3y ago
        It's estimated that 50-70% of the world has no inner monologue.
  - hablog 3y ago
    > I can't trust myself to see things I disagree with, I am so weak-willed... The thing is, this likely is true for him. Most people are not equipped to deal with the onslaught of aggressive memes from the internet. Unfortunately, this is an unsolved social problem, and "export my memetic censorship reflex to MEGACORP" is a pretty bad way of doing things. I think a likely way of solving this problem (protecting not-especially-high-mental-horsepower people from getting BTFO by the internet, contracting transmissible psychological diseases and so on) is that religious organizations will start offering (voluntary, in first world countries) censorship services to their members. Your DNS queries or whatever will go through the Vatican/Synod/whatever central DNS server, which will prevent you from looking at porn sites. This would probably be a very socially positive outcome for the bottom 90-something percent of people on the "strength of memetic immune system" distribution.
- mrangle 3y ago
  Of course you do not mind. But that means that you have no room for complaint when they delete something that you consider to be "not garbage".
  - anamexis 3y ago
    Yes you do. Agreeing with some moderation does not mean you must agree with all moderation.
    - bakugo 3y ago
      Calling censorship "moderation" doesn't make it not censorship.
      - anamexis 3y ago
        Ok. Agreeing with some censorship does not mean you must agree with all censorship.
        bakugo 3y ago
        No, it doesn't, but you're a hypocrite if you don't. If you think there's nothing wrong with the idea that "censorship is good as long as I'm not the one being censored", I don't know what to tell you.
        vkou 3y ago
        Not everyone is a speech absolutist, that doesn't make them hypocrites. In fact, as speech absolutists have taken over a few platforms, we've discovered that the primary hypocrisy surrounding speech is that there's a lot of people who claim to be speech absolutists, but aren't when push comes to shove.
        lern_too_spel 3y ago
        If you eat bread, you must also eat shit. If you don't, you're a hypocrite. It's astounding how many people are incapable of making judgments except along artificial lines given to them by sophists.
- Danjoe4 3y ago
  Much of the "antivax garbage" turned out to be true. In hindsight, do you still believe that censoring true but inconvenient information is morally acceptable?
  - berkle4455 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - edgyquant 3y ago
      They did not say all
      - berkle4455 3y ago
        How about none of it.
      - AlecSchueler 3y ago
        They also gave no reason to believe the "most" claim. What actually are the things that were proven to be true that were censored as misinformation?
    - WillPostForFood 3y ago
      Truth is messy. The vaccine is an amazing achievement and saved many lives. Understating the health risks to young men (myocarditis), and overstating the efficacy fed the anti-vaxxers, and was a disservice to science and healthcare.
      - f6v 3y ago
        And we haven’t even talked about the prevention paradox.
    - suoduandao2 3y ago
      you're avoiding the question.
- nomel 3y ago
  I somewhat agree. I don't mind if true falsehoods/spam is removed. The problem was, the "anti vax" label was applied to far too much, including things that were later found to be true. The article I was looking for was about intravascular injection of the vaccine, and its possible relation to adverse effects, which now has merit in 2023 [1]. [1] https://pure.hud.ac.uk/en/publications/inadvertent-injection-of-covid-19-vaccine-into-deltoid-muscle-vas https://pure.hud.ac.uk/en/publications/inadvertent-injection...
  - Phil_Latio 3y ago
    "remains at the injection side" was one of the more blatant lies. The funniest lie was "a corona virus outbreak of a novel strain in close distance to a biolab which does experiments on corona viruses ... is without a doubt of natural origin!"
    - nomel 3y ago
      > "remains at the injection side" was one of the more blatant lies. Correct: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9313234/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9313234/
- flangola7 3y ago
  100% agree.
- TobyTheDog123 3y ago
  This word is quickly becoming a part of the "does not mean anything" crew from its constant overuse and involvement in strawman-ing.
- kevin_thibedeau 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - f6v 3y ago
    > despite no proof that it isn't a possibility Because you don’t get to come up with a “theory” and dump the burden of the proof on someone else. That’s incredibly stupid. Not how how science and common sense work.
    - STM32F030R8 3y ago
      Since when? It may not be a good argument but should we be deplatforming people over it? Go to Reddit front page right now and try to find something that isn’t a poorly argued political post. What’s the difference? Just because you may disagree with someone it doesn’t mean they NEED to be silenced.
      - stonogo 3y ago
        Politics is about how you think things should be run. Science is about what we have evidence for. They are not the same thing.
        ipaddr 3y ago
        Science is about coming up with a hypnosis or theory and testing it. The evidence comes at the end not before the theory
        muti 3y ago
        We don't give any credence to untested hypotheses
        stonogo 3y ago
        We generally don't employ hypnosis. Sometimes we even skip the hypothesis step, because "what the hell is that" is enough to start generating data. Don't confuse all of scientific research with the scientific method; it's just one method of investigation.
- Jcampuzano2 3y ago
  I can see both sides to the argument. I personally don't mind deletion of antivax stuff because I'm not antivax. But I can see the point of view those mentioning what happens when there is deletion/censorship of things in the future that I could have interest in. We also do know that there exists "some" subset of things that were mentioned that seemed antivax on the surface but did actually turn out to be true or at least somewhat true. But these were usually not outright false claims, but informed speculations or very niche. It was such a dividing topic that any form of skepticism however small was seen as an attack. This as someone who is vaxed and has gotten every booster available.
  - ifyoubuildit 3y ago
    > I personally don't mind deletion of antivax stuff because I'm not antivax The term antivax is a problem. Very few people are actually anti all vaccines, and nobody should be pro all vaccines for everyone all the time. There have been actual truly failed vaccines, are you "antivax" if you wouldn't volunteer to take them? Should articles about past failed vaccines be censored from the internet? Of course not. The term is sloppy and careless, but people love it, probably because it lets you be part of a team. But everybody means something different by it. Nobody should presume any new implementation of a class is good just because there have been previous successful implementations. Reality doesn't make things so easy for us.
- apienx 3y ago
  I'd much rather see the antivax garbage debunked. Think of it as a form of vaccination for the mind.
- colordrops 3y ago
  Nonsense. There isn't some super clearly defined line between pro-vaxx and anti-vaxx across the thousands of issues and questions related to covid. Science isn't anti- or pro- anything. Particular beliefs that were labeled "anti-vaxx" were often just not clear or understood yet. Also, it's not the job of a search engine to be your nanny. What if you are researching conspiracy theories or opposition beliefs, even if you don't believe in them? How would you find them?
Georgelemental 3y ago
DDG may not be the best if you want to avoid political meddling. I switched to Brave after https://web.archive.org/web/20220831110219/https://twitter.com/yegg/status/1501716484761997318 https://web.archive.org/web/20220831110219/https://twitter.c...
- lolinder 3y ago
  I get so tired of seeing yegg raked over the coals for this one. A search engine by definition takes an editorial stance on things. They take in all of the internet and decide what to present to users. For a search engine to take no editorial position is to yield the floor to whoever can best game the system, and a propaganda machine like Russia's is absolutely capable of exploiting a search engine that doesn't proactively take measures to avoid being exploited. That DDG wanted to avoid spreading Russian propaganda that argues against the very existence of the Ukrainian people isn't DDG meddling in politics, it's them steering clear of enabling genocide.
  - allarm 3y ago
    They could simply add a “propaganda” tag and give an option to filter out the search results marked with that tag. If anything I can specifically search for Russian propaganda, for whatever reason.
    - lolinder 3y ago
      Yes, you can, and downranking propaganda wouldn't stop it from turning up if you go looking. But when my naive sister-in-law hears something about how Ukraine isn't a real country, I don't want the first page of results for "history of Ukraine" to turn up Russian propaganda. I live in a red state, and there are astonishing numbers of people here who already buy Putin's story. I'm fully behind DDG deciding they didn't want to play a role in spreading his message even further.
      - allarm 3y ago
        > wouldn't stop it from turning up if you go looking. Yeah, same goes for your naïve sister-in-law. So why don’t they add the “propaganda” tag, so that your relatives could clearly see it and I could search for it (for whatever reason)? They could even add some links to some better sources, as an option. And use some disclaimer when you click on these results, like “Hey, this is a propaganda resource, be careful. Here’s the links where you can read up on the topic if you need unbiased information”. That would probably have at least some educational value, unlike removing and/or downranking the results.
ummonk 3y ago
It was crazy to see suggestions to wear masks or claims that covid was airborne getting "fact-checked" by the media only to reverse their position months later after WHO put out new statements. In particular, the phrase "no credible evidence" was wildly thrown around without mentioning whether there were any credible high-powered studies that had even attempted to find evidence of the phenomenon.
- gjsman-1000 3y ago
  The WHO has a lot of blame itself for misinformation. And, I personally believe, a lot of conspiracy theories definitely caught fire from their mistakes. https://twitter.com/who/status/1243972193169616898?lang=en https://twitter.com/who/status/1243972193169616898?lang=en Also, as you can see in the replies, a lot of people called BS at the time, but who were they to question the official WHO line? Yes, the WHO later came around and came up with 6 feet instead of 1 meter, but those who called BS on the WHO's statement may have saved their lives.
- thatnerdyguy 3y ago
  Uh... are you suggesting that at some not-insignificant point into the pandemic someone credible was arguing COVID was NOT airborne?
  - tjohns 3y ago
    Actually, yes. For the first half of the pandemic, much of the medical community was unsure if COVID was airborne. Examples: - https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/cdc-reverses-again-now-says-covid-19-sometimes-airborne-n1242167 https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/cdc-reverses-agai... - https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00925-7 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00925-7 - https://archive.is/wPD2D https://archive.is/wPD2D (Tweet from WHO) Note that "airborne" has a specific meaning in medical literature. Everyone agreed COVID could be transmitted in the air by respiratory droplets. But to be truly "airborne" means the virus could be aerosolized and float freely, without being attached to a larger droplet. Both droplet-based and aerosolized/"airborne" spread allows viruses to be transmitted in the air. But a truly "airborne" virus can travel much farther. It's the difference between needing 6 feet and 20 feet of distance to prevent spread. (To put it bluntly, it's the difference between avoiding spittle, or avoiding the equivalent of cigarette smoke. Two very different threat models.)
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
low_common 3y ago
Do you put "everything" in "quotations" all the "time"?
- nomel 3y ago
  I used it to convey some external concept, rather than my own thoughts. "controversial": Others called it controversial. I did/would not. "against the grain": Others thought that there was a grain. I did/would not. "real time": Not literal. Maybe this is a regional/age thing? edit: actually, asking ChatGPT why they're in quotes gives the similar answers as mine, so I guess it's not too odd. New session prompt with 4.0: "Why are some of these words in quotes?" Fluff removed, same order as my answers: > ... In this case, "controversial" could imply that the speaker doesn't personally find the topics controversial, but acknowledges that others may perceive them as such. > ... indicating that it's being used in its typical idiomatic sense. > ... Here, the quotation marks might be used to stress that the term isn't being used in its strictest sense.
yegg 3y ago
x-posting from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35980374 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35980374 (I'm the CEO & Founder of DuckDuckGo.) It is simply not true that we have censored anything or made ourselves "the arbiters of truth." I realized I previously explained how our news rankings work very poorly on Twitter but I subsequently put out a clarification in this help page with a much clearer (and detailed) explanation of how our news rankings actually work: https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/news-rankings/ https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/ne... From that page: "When we apply our own ranking signals we do so in a strictly non-political manner, meaning we don’t evaluate or otherwise take into account any potential political bias or leanings of websites in our search result rankings."
- BobTheDestroyer 3y ago
  [flagged]
- calculatte 3y ago
  [flagged]
- Gareth321 3y ago
  > Many sites may occasionally do one or more of these things, but we take action very rarely, only in the most extreme cases. To identify these rare, extreme cases, we rely on multiple non-governmental and non-political organizations that specialize in objectively assessing journalistic standards. To take any ranking action using this factor, we must see at least three of these organizations independently assess a site as having extremely low journalistic standards and also see that none of these organizations have assessed the same site as having even somewhat robust journalistic standards. This is far too vague. Last year Bazbaz told Recode that sites like RT and Sputnik were "extreme" cases (https://www.vox.com/recode/22981115/duckduckgo-free-speech-privacy-oops https://www.vox.com/recode/22981115/duckduckgo-free-speech-p...). While I tend to agree, which other sites are extreme cases? This isn't published. Despite the claim that none of this is done for political reasons, I find it hard to trust that these "non-governmental and non-political organizations" act and are chosen without any bias. Your method isn't published or explained. I really think these organisations should, at minimum, be listed. So too should all the sites DDG considers to be "extreme" cases. Then we could decide if we think DDG is being politically neutral. My confidence in DDG is shaken, and I don't think I'm alone. We live in a world where so many major software brands we love have made overt moves towards censorship on political grounds. If DDG could prove they reject this authoritarianism I think it would serve as a major USP.
okwubodu 3y ago
Oh, DuckDuckGo just does that sometimes. Pretty often I'll pick a result then back out to the search results, and the one I had in mind to click next just isn't there anymore. However annoying, I wouldn't immediately jump to a political motivation.

deafpolygon 3y ago

Remember, DDG is still an advertising company.

blueflow 3y ago
and without IPv6 support
- june_twenty 3y ago
  What impact does that have?
  - Xeoncross 3y ago
    not sure, but the impact is all on IPv4 apparently
    - riwsky 3y ago
      can’t believe they’d censor ipv6 like that smh
    - june_twenty 3y ago
      What does that mean?

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

diebeforei485 3y ago

They're actually reasonably good. I often find that they do weird things like linking to non-US versions of websites instead of a US version. So I end up on the British or Dutch version of a website, with prices quoted in GBP or EUR. I find myself using the "!g" shortcut (which takes me to Google) more often than I'd have liked to. Thankfully, Apple offers this as one of their search engine options (despite being paid "tres comas" every year from Google to be the default search engine).

threads2 3y ago
I cant give up DDG cause those shortcuts are just too damn good. !m and !ud
- diebeforei485 3y ago
  Annoyingly, !g is right next to !h on most keyboards, and I often find myself searching through Haskell documentation instead of searching Google.

mrangle 3y ago

The sole benefit of DDG is their claim that they don't track. One problem with this narrow focus is that many people mistakenly carry this statement over to an assumption that DDG doesn't censor their search results. I suspect that DDG both knows and counts on this as an aspect of an undeserved reputation. DDG's search results aren't acceptable for anything even mildly controversial. I'll use them for image searches, but there are better search engines for internet access and that give equivalent or better privacy. Also in my opinion, DDG's penchant for censorship harms the credibility of their assertion that they do not track.

rlpb 3y ago
A huge benefit of DDG for me is that I can use it in a private browser window and it just works without stupid popups getting in the way. In contrast Google is far less useable for a quick search. This alone is why I have DDG as default and I only drop back to Google when I'm struggling to find what I want. Most of the time DDG is fine for me.
- bitL 3y ago
  Recently so many unrelated sites pop up a tiny Google login window somewhere on the page, obstructing what I want to see, like as if Google was super desperate for more tracking and engagement. Like why would I like to login to Google while viewing a forum about skyscrapers if I just wanted to read about the progress of some construction? Passive-aggressive at its core.
  - yegg 3y ago
    Note that we added support to remove those Google login pop-ups on third-party sites within our apps/extensions. See https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/privacy/web-tracking-protections/#google-sign-in-pop-up-protection https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/privacy/we... for details and https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/privacy/web-tracking-protections/ https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/privacy/we... for the full list of other protections.
  - 3y ago

alphabet9000 3y ago

is there even a way to ignore words from a search any more on DDG? using "-" in front of a word doesnt prevent the word from showing up in results.

soared 3y ago

https://www.statista.com/statistics/511358/market-share-mobile-search-usa/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/511358/market-share-mobi... Better link - DDG is in #2 with a behemoth 1.8% market share, closely followed by yahoo and and bing at 1.6% and 1.3%.

anonymousab 3y ago

The bugs around Exact match and text/content (not site!) exclusion operators not working at all are what keeps me from using it as an actual substitute for Google or Bing. I hope that getting that stuff fixed is a high priority. DDG is the default in a lot of privacy-oriented browsers and forks, but it gives users a really bad first impression when their first search just doesn't work. But I suppose that the average mobile search engine user these days doesn't use most search modifiers or operators so maybe they aren't the things to prioritize.

rurp 3y ago
I strongly second this. Respecting exact terms was the main factor that got me to switch from Google search. The functionality has been declining for a while now and seems particularly bad lately.
reaperducer 3y ago
The bugs around Exact match and exclusion operators not working at all are what keeps me from using it as an actual substitute for Google or Bing. Duck used to be great for only searching for what you asked for. But in the last few months, it's fallen into the Google trap of showing me things it thinks I want, and not what I asked for. And no method of punctuation seems to get around that. At this point, the only reason I still use Duck is because the other option is Google.
- anonymousab 3y ago
  I think in this case, the functionality outright broke - that is, this is a bug - due to how their indexing works. The CEO (HN user yegg) talked about it a bit in another post - they modified their READMEs to remove mention of some operators because they're malfunctioning. So they still get the benefit of the doubt (as you say, the other choices are just Google) but the real test will be in how they communicate about this going forward and whether they fix it.
  - yegg 3y ago
    We are working on it. We also updated the README again to reflect that.

TobyTheDog123 3y ago

These companies are solely built around the concept of trust. Your average person just doesn't care that Google is tracking them, and will therefore not take the obvious productivity hit by using a service with lower quality results (anything not Google). I feel like DuckDuckGo has had enough controversy in the trust department that it's entirely worthless as a company and as a service. Anything I do need to actually search these days, I just use Google, as I don't care about Google knowing I needed help with a Golang compiler error. It's not a worthwhile tradeoff for me.

anonymousab 3y ago
> Anything I do need to actually search these days, I just use Google, as I don't care about Google knowing I needed help with a Golang compiler error. It's not a worthwhile tradeoff for me. The problem is when you need to research or learn about something that is verboten. Even something as simple as "x worker strike" or "x protest" won't necessarily break any laws but will be of interest to certain automations, agencies and systems that may then endeavor to make your life hard without necessarily stepping over the legal line. Not for being an undesirable to a ruling authority, but for looking up information related to them. And of course, this will evolve in more dystopic ways when it is all inevitably factored in to (financial|social) credit scores, insurance, access to services, etc. in the future. Either directly or laundered through AI or other systems. That is less an argument in favor of DDG and more of a statement of why search engine privacy will become more and more important in the mid term.

yosito 3y ago

I was using DDG exclusively for over a year. It gives way better results than Google. Recently I switched to Kagi, for its ability to prioritize my favorite sites, and block others. I'm paying $5 a month for it, and I've honestly not been this confident in the search results I'm getting for a long long time.

alx__ 3y ago
Same. Kagi has better results than Google in general. Even programming ones. I don't mind paying for better Love that it can do groupings, especially when you're searching for something that will also turn up seo garbage, like products for your home. So you can see the cluster of "review sites" and then actual product companies

yegg 3y ago

For anyone curious, the best search market share data is from Cloudflare. Here is the latest report: https://radar.cloudflare.com/reports/searchengines-2023-q1 https://radar.cloudflare.com/reports/searchengines-2023-q1. And here is our reasoning of why it is the best: https://spreadprivacy.com/search-engine-market-share-data-two-new-sources-cloudflare-and-wikipedia/ https://spreadprivacy.com/search-engine-market-share-data-tw...

sah2ed 3y ago
Would be nice if you could ask the DDG team to cite the links you provided as footnotes to your claim "DuckDuckGo owns the #2 position in mobile market share in the US, and 18 other markets ..." in TFA.
- yegg 3y ago
  Good point, will do that.
newZWhoDis 3y ago
first link’s page is broken on mobile safari.

ghastmaster 3y ago

I switch to DDG from brave when I want to do an image search. Brave forwards image searches to either Google or Bing based on your choice. Even if DDG is getting their images from those sources, I still prefer the DDG image search UI.

eykanal 3y ago

From that page: "To advertise on DuckDuckGo, visit Microsoft Advertising." Is DDG the #2 position or Microsoft? Kind of a notable difference there... if DDG is just an arm of Microsoft it rings a different tune.

Minor49er 3y ago
DDG grew up being a whitelabeled version of Bing. As far as I understand, DDG has since started implementing more of their own search patterns and results, but has not completely removed themselves from Bing
- yegg 3y ago
  We actually always had a bunch of our own stuff, and still do, as well as work with other partners. For example, the number one module on mobile is local, and we don't get any local stuff from Bing at all. Similarly, the number one module desktop is knowledge graph, and we don't get that from Bing at all either.
  - jll29 3y ago
    Hi Gabriel, would you be potentially available to write a technical blog post about how DDG plugins are federated for The Informer, the blog of the British Computing Society's Information Retrieval specialist group (BCS IRSG)? (Is Kamyl Bazbaz the best person to discuss such requests, or how can you be reached? Thanks!)
    - yegg 3y ago
      Yes, he is the best person to discuss such requests.
  - caractacus 3y ago
    Sorry to piggyback on this. I applied for a Director role at DDG about a month ago. Had the autoreply which said DDG would follow up whether it was a yes, let's talk! or a nope, sorry. But nothing at all which was a bit disappointing. The role has been taken down for a few weeks now. I wasn't looking for a new position at all but the description strongly appealed and it was DDG, a company I'd admired for years (and fully remote!).

mromanuk 3y ago

The link is broken

propogandist 3y ago

one of the contributing factors is because iOS offers native search support for DDG and they don't any other providers (eg. Brave)

api_or_ipa 3y ago

Note that you can turn off advertisements in DDG. Not sure how long that business model will continue to last, but I would _happily_ pay money to not see ads and blog spam on my serps. You need to trust your search engine before you can trust just about anything else you find on the internet, and I truly feel like Google is no longer a trustworthy company.

loehnsberg 3y ago
Take a look at Kagi Search [1] where you pay with money instead of your data. Have been using it for over a year now and must say that the search engine is surprisingly good. The only time I ever use !g bangs is when I want live updates of sports events or so. [1] https://kagi.com/ https://kagi.com/

thecopy 3y ago

DDG honestly have better results for me. Google usually have worse results when i cannot find what i want on DDG and use the !g command.

mattkevan 3y ago

I've used DDG as my main search engine for about 4 years now. Until recently I found I was still having to go to Google for specific queries, mainly answering coding problems. But in the last 6 months or so, Google's results have gotten so bad and DDG has continued to improve to the point where I no longer bother with !g. When I do use Google I often find myself in the strange position of not actually being able to find what I'm looking for. It's a very unsettling feeling, and not one I've experienced in a long time, possibly not since the pre-Google days of Yahoo, Lycos and AltaVista. Amazing that Google have let their core value proposition of 'we are much better at finding what you're looking for than everyone else' rot quite so much.

nly 3y ago
I still have to use !g daily.
- nortonham 3y ago
  same
teaearlgraycold 3y ago
I use chatgpt, the version with web browsing, instead of Google search some of the time and it does pretty well.
- mattkevan 3y ago
  Yeah ChatGPT is pretty good at solving coding problems - 'My apologies for the confusion, I misunderstood your requirements earlier. Let's try another approach...' is much better than 'Never mind I fixed it' on a four-year-old Stack Overflow post.
- furyofantares 3y ago
  And takes 10x as long. It's good, but it's gotta get a whole lot faster (which I'm sure it will.) It would be really nice if it would in-line the source links it summarized piece of info from too.

dcdc123 3y ago

I am not really surpsrised. If you don't care about privacy, you use Google because it is the best. If you care about privacy, you use DDG because it is the best that offers improved privacy.

conradfr 3y ago

I use the widget and it's freeing to do silly searches without having them tied to my Google account. The problem is that you can't remove the Google equivalent on a Pixel phone, so it's really wasted screen space and feel like anti-competitive. Until someone in the EU commission notices it and regulates it I guess...

commoner 3y ago
You can remove the Google search bar from a Pixel phone or any other Android phone by replacing the launcher. I recommend Neo Launcher, which is free and open source: https://github.com/NeoApplications/Neo-Launcher https://github.com/NeoApplications/Neo-Launcher

tredre3 3y ago

Duckduckgo search results are spotty at best. I can live with the mild censorship (yes yes I know, they censor the side that you don't like so it's totally not censorship and just blocking evil propaganda, they're the good guys etc etc). Their web browsers are great however and I've been using them on android for years and on desktop for months! I wish I could use them with a better search engine, though (Typing !g in all queries is now a reflex for me).

IceWreck 3y ago

I use DDG for almost everything except local results. It works but I would feel better if they reduced their dependency on Bing.

classified 3y ago

Google's search results have become pure garbage by now, so anything not-Google should be #1.

Semaphor 3y ago

No idea about general numbers (our no-js server side logging has FF barely behind chrome) , but while 2 orders of magnitude behind Google, DDG is actually 2nd for us as well (German photography site). I was pretty happy with DDG for years (switched to Kagi last year), and I think they are great for general usage (I often read about issues with local search, their search for Germany (!ddgde) was always topnotch).

aimor 3y ago

Might as well ask here: Why does DDG change my search results when I use the Back button, and how can I get it to stop. When I use DDG if I do a search, click on a link to open it in the same tab, then click back to the search results I notice the results are in a different order. This drives me crazy.

Andrew_nenakhov 3y ago

I love DDG and use it daily on all my devices, but I would take such marketing statement with some scepticism: Previously, DDG used to have a page [0] with usage stats, but it was deactivated somewhere around this time last year. Instead of a very clear data that was clearly showing the state of things (which had a rather concerning slowing of growth), we now have vague statents about #2 position in mobile market in the US. [0]: https://duckduckgo.com/traffic https://duckduckgo.com/traffic

aembleton 3y ago
The last copy I can find of it: https://web.archive.org/web/20221118045948/https://duckduckgo.com/traffic https://web.archive.org/web/20221118045948/https://duckduckg... Looks like number of searches was down from the previous year.

uncletaco 3y ago

I use ddg solely to have bang search like in chrome without using chrome

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

Gareth321 3y ago

I stopped using DDG when they admitted they are censoring political content (https://www.vox.com/recode/22981115/duckduckgo-free-speech-privacy-oops https://www.vox.com/recode/22981115/duckduckgo-free-speech-p...). I'm really tired of companies telling me what I may and may not view.

sam0x17 3y ago

btw it is literally just bing. The only reason they can afford it is bing gives them free API access. Would be impossible for DDG to afford the usual API fees without something like a $5/month subscription for normal usage. If they didn't give it away for free to DDG, bing itself would lose double digit usage numbers, since they report DDG usage as their own usage. Source: worked for a competitor.

Zren 3y ago

I originally switched just for the hell of it. But nowadays I get annoyed when I use Google since it doesn't have keyboard/arrow key shortcuts. ⬇, ⬇, Ctrl+Enter (open in new tab) or "/" to edit the search box is a great DDG feature.

pengaru 3y ago

ddg has served my search needs just fine for years now, but I still go to google for image search and maps. One thing has really bothered me with the state of the web in general though, which has directly affected the quality of results for all search engines: Tons of communications have moved into undiscoverable forms/walled gardens. What used to happen in public, crawled, textual mailing list discussions, particularly in the FOSS/IT space, is now happening in Discord/Slack/video meetings. Even upstream systemd devs have been using Telegram of all things for discussing development topics as opposed to systemd-devel. It's an absolute disaster. I sorely miss the days of https://google.com/linux https://google.com/linux where I'd find pages and pages of relevant, high-quality mailing list discussions for everything I searched for.

lannisterstark 3y ago

I've personally switched to a selfhosted instance of SearX-ng and I can't be happier. Yes, it still queries other engines, but that's fine. I'd rather "average" it out than trust any single search provider, DDG included.

dang 3y ago

On HN, it's not ok to use the title field to point out what you think is important about an article. That's called editorializing, and it's disallowed by https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize." (Submitted title was "DuckDuckGo owns the #2 position in mobile market share in the US".) If you want to say what you think is important about an article, that's fine, but do it by adding a comment to the thread. Then your view will be on a level playing field with everyone else's: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=%22level%20playing%20field%22%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so... Titles are by far the biggest influence on discussion, so this is an important rule.

croutonwagon 3y ago
Thanks for this clarification dang. I was confused as the title in my RSS feed was much different than when I clicked through to the thread. Thought there was an issue with my rss aggregator for a second.
- zdbrandon 3y ago
  Aside: If you don't mind sharing; which url and reader are you using? Either my reader or url is so slow that I only saw the amended title in my feed. My url tries to grab only the most popular posts, so that may be the largest contributor, but I'd love to know if there's a faster way.
  - croutonwagon 3y ago
    I use my own miniflux instance on a linode/VPS. It tends to pick stuff up fairly quickly (in most cases). https://miniflux.app/ https://miniflux.app/
    - zdbrandon 3y ago
      Thanks!

MrDresden 3y ago

Been mostly using DDg for the last 3 years, but in the last two months the experience has really gone down. First off the results take upwards to 6 second to load and the quality seems to have been hit as well. I have been wondering if thisnis due to some changes with Bing (which is the underlying engine as far as I know).

Implicated 3y ago

On the other side of this... I've recently been working on a new project that is more or less utilizing a 'long-tail first' SEO strategy (ugh, I know) and I've seen very surprising numbers from DDG... responsible for effectively 1/3 of my search referred traffic (google representing 50%).

franczesko 3y ago

They used to share traffic data at duckduckgo.com/traffic. The website is unavailable anymore (wonder why?), but before switching to Brave search (way better than DDG imo) it was noticable, that the number of queries had stalled.

Decabytes 3y ago

Duck Duck Go and Bing have both indexed my blog but Google has yet to. I've been increasingly disappointed with Google's search results the past couple of years. Might have to give DDG a try!

foverzar 3y ago

I loved DDG before it started engaging in heavy censorship. I mean, I get it, it's a public-facing service, some guard-rails should be present. But political censorship on a search-engine that poses itself as a "good guy" privacy focused search engine? On a search engine that is used by default in a Tor browser? That is just an unacceptable abuse and misrepresentation. And judging by their press releases, DDG seems to be quite proud of themselves fighting "misinformation". I mean, even if it came from the good intentions, it had essentially broken the core search functionality to the point it where works far worse than google or any other search engine. And if that's the case, what is even the point? If you are researching some political topic, don't ever use DDG, they will 1984 your search results and act like they did good. It's like their target userbase aren't even educated engineers, but silly gullible grans who need curated experience. P.S. If you search "duckduckgo censorship" in different search engines, DDG's first result labels anyone complaining as "far right", ironic. Seems like every other search engine is "far right" these days, judging by sheer brokennes of DDG compared to others.

edpichler 3y ago

DDG is my default search engine for a year, and I am not being idealistic, I feel that I am getting better more interesting results. To make it short (my humble conclusion): Google is using too much UI space to fill with ads and too many websites hacked the SEO algorithm, creating bad quality information pages getting in the top results.

algustionesa 3y ago

I hope DuckDuckGo has something similar to Search Console or Webmaster Tools.