7 ms·

I choose to give people the benefit of the doubt regarding their own points of view, so I am forced to consider the idea that "Duck Duck Go is a good search eng

I choose to give people the benefit of the doubt regarding their own points of view, so I am forced to consider the idea that "Duck Duck Go is a good search engine" is a true fact to some people. That forces me to consider how this can possibly be true. I find it's not true for me because of all the ways I typically use Google, DDG does almost none of them. DDG doesn't have local results (search "Chinese" on Google and then on DDG). DDG doesn't have recent news (search "Earthquake" on Google and then on DDG). DDG does not have the coverage to answer a narrow technical question like "does a c++ derived class need to define its own destructor" (answer nowhere to be found on DDG; perfectly relevant stack overflow result is #1 on Google). What DDG does have is plain old search results, albeit not with Google's quality and, of course, without any personalized input. So for those of you who find DDG's generically mediocre retrievals sufficient, I am interested to know what you use for my other cases. When you want to eat Chinese food, do you always use Yelp? What do you use for recent event news?

randlet 13y ago
I'm in the same position I tried (default search in all browsers for a month) but found that I was using a !g on virtually every query. Eventually I just gave up and went back to Google.
- dredmorbius 13y ago
  My suggestions: ⚫ Stick with it. DDG's improved hugely in the past 12-18 months. ⚫ Report your problems to DDG. I've done this in a few cases, and have been stunned to get personal replies in a couple of days. Try getting that from Google (without landing three stories on the top of HN for a day or three).
  - NigelTufnel 13y ago
    I'm sold. For the next week (or couple of minutes if DDG isn't for me) I'll use DDG instead of Google.
    - dredmorbius 13y ago
      I'll be the first to admit it's not perfect. But it's damned good. Hitting Google is a "!g" away -- just prepend / postpend that to your search and hit enter, you'll get Google's results (as I've noted elsewhere here: I usually try "!sp" first, as it's close to, but not quite, Google. What I noticed in my first weeks was that usually the initial results were actually very, very similar, if not identical. Since DDG has the same search syntax ("site:example.com" restricts to a domain or host, "quoted words" are searched together, (either|or) will do booleans), if you're a Google search power user, it's all familiar territory. DDG's information and support pages tell you a lot, and the !bang search syntax is very much worth knowing about. If you want to search !so (stack overflow), the bang syntax is great: https://duckduckgo.com/bang.html https://duckduckgo.com/bang.html There are things DDG doesn't do, which I've also noted. Date-restricted searches and localization are two of the big ones. I don't avoid Google entirely, but it's way down my list. I did enter into this with the mindset of intentionally taking a choice that's not Google, and that I'd have to make some compromises, but that I'd get better privacy as a result. The compromises really have been few, and I'm saying that as a long, long term Google user (since 1998) whose been increasingly disturbed by the company's direction.
    - smonff 13y ago
      As @dredmorbius told, you should seriously read about the !bangs to exploit it in better conditions. That's fun to read.
    - grimman 13y ago
      It took me a solid week to wean off the worst of my habitual falling back on the GOOG. Then another couple of weeks to double check the results side by side when I didn't find something on DDG that I fully expected Google to find for me (they didn't deliver either). In the end it's definitely a huge adjustment.
ForHackernews 13y ago
You can prepend g! to your DDG searches if the native results are insufficient. I don't want "personalized" search results. I don't want Google's algorithms second-guessing what I searched for. If I want current news, I'll read the BBC. If I want a stack overflow result, I'll do a search on SO.
- raldi 13y ago
  Why the scare quotes?
  - prezjordan 13y ago
    I guess the term "personalized" (to use quotes of my own) infers using your personal data to tailor results. People who are opponents of that practice are huge advocates for DDG.
    - dclara 13y ago
      "using your personal data to tailor results", true, I don't like it either. When we are targeted, we always see the outdated ads from 9 out of 10 websites we visited but don't like to re-revisit. So "pull" is more favored than "push". See the book: "Pull - The Power of the Semantic Web to Transform Your Business" by David Siegel. But I do like personalized information storage. Maybe you want to reference to the blog post: Why do we need the Private Web? http://bit.ly/1c2DzN6 http://bit.ly/1c2DzN6
      - mandeepj 13y ago
        " When we are targeted, we always see the outdated ads from 9 out of 10 websites we visited but don't like to re-revisit" this is very true. You have just listed a billion dollar idea. If I search for an adidas shoe or just go to a company website then I start seeing ads related to those just visited sites - how boring. Retargeting just seems to be plain stupid instead consumer should be showed more variety
        13y ago
username223 13y ago
> search "Chinese" on Google I get a bunch of stuff about restaurants in small-town Missouri, which is somewhat reassuring, since I live nowhere near there, then actual information about the Chinese language. Awful.
- thrownaway2424 13y ago
  Great, so when you are looking for a Chinese restaurant in your area, what do you use?
  - kevinh 13y ago
    Chinese Restaurant <City I Live In>
  - username223 13y ago
    Yelp, or maybe a search for "Chinese near ZIPCODE". I know that this is hard.
  - mverwijs 13y ago
    http://www.iens.nl http://www.iens.nl, as it gives me information about restaurants and allows me to select the area I want to dine in (as opposed to where Google thinks I might be dining).
- drakaal 13y ago
  Maybe I don't want food? http://www.plexisearch.com/?q=chinese http://www.plexisearch.com/?q=chinese
higherpurpose 13y ago
You make it sound as if there has always been a high threshold of "goodness" in search engines, and Google has always been above that. I think it was only 2-3 years ago when people were saying how bad Google search had become because of all the spammy sites popping up in search results. And years before that Google was even worse. So how did people manage then? If they did it then, they can do it now, too, if there are other factors that are of higher priority to them, such as privacy. This feels like the "but Intel will always be more powerful than ARM" kind of argument (which hopefully, many have learned by now that it was a pointless and irrelevant argument when it came to the success of ARM).
orf 13y ago
I was skeptical but decided to actually give it a go as my main search engine. I love it, for most queries its sufficient but for some (programming specific ones mostly) I switch to Google.
BrainInAJar 13y ago
> DDG doesn't have local results (search "Chinese" on Google and then on DDG). DDG doesn't have recent news (search "Earthquake" on Google and then on DDG) That is completely on purpose.
- DanBC 13y ago
  There is an odd bubble that I'd like to break out from. When I search for a word I'd like the euro language translation of that word to also be searched, and returns returned. Yes, i know that I'm going to get a bunch of lousy results. But I'm also going to widen my web horizons and see more of the Internet. One of the things that I find frustrating with DDG is the UScentric results.
  - frabcus 13y ago
    It took me ages to find "More | Settings | Region" to skew DuckDuckGo results to a different country.
- thrownaway2424 13y ago
  Didn't answer the question. What other tools do you use for these other cases?
  - Steko 13y ago
    "DDG doesn't have local results " (1) Many people don't search local often. (2) People can type their location in the search engine for local results. (3) There are alternatives like Yelp as you mention. "DDG doesn't have recent news" (4) !gn (5) DDG doesn't give me news links when I'm not looking for them. "DDG does not have the coverage to answer a narrow technical question" (6) Google wins on your example but the answer for your example can most certainly be found in one of the top links on DDG. (7) !so > site:stackoverflow.com ... (8) "Duck Duck Go is a good search engine" is not incompatible with "Google has better search results than DDG" or "Google has faster search results than DDG".
- raldi 13y ago
  Nobody claimed it was an accident.
matteotom 13y ago
I switched to DDG a few months ago. At first I was a bit disappointed at the result quality, but I have come to like some of its other features. First is that it puts a little Wikipedia box on top of most search results, which solves ~50% of my queries. Next is the ! operators: if I don't find what I need, I can use !g to search google, or !gi for google images, or !w for wikipedia. It has tons of others: https://duckduckgo.com/bang.html https://duckduckgo.com/bang.html Also, I just found a ton of other cool features: https://duckduckgo.com/goodies#Programming https://duckduckgo.com/goodies#Programming such as qrcodes and regular expressions. Also, it will give news stories if you put "news" in your search query.
- jonathanjaeger 13y ago
  The problem for mainstream is that that is work. Not only is it a ton of work (when adding extra queries over time), but it is a question of educating the masses. That's an even bigger hurdle.
  - matteotom 13y ago
    I'm not saying it's right for everyone, but I like it.
  - zanny 13y ago
    I always found myself using site:xxxxxxxxxx on google in the same way bangs work on ddg. That, and the convenient info boxes for most sites (it even supports arch packages and bulbapedia articles) solve 90% of my queries.
oscilloscope 13y ago
DDG is much faster than Google for me. All Google services are very slow when I'm logged in. GMail, Google Search, Finance, YouTube, everything. They can take 4-8 seconds to load a page, and sometimes they hang indefinitely. Incognito mode or a different browser brings Google back to sub-second speeds, but it's frustrating enough that I set DDG as my default so that straightforward searches resolve quickly. I switch over with !g whenever I need better search results, news, etc.
- robrenaud 13y ago
  This sounds like a legitimate and very bad bug. If you are willing to share your account name with me, as well as any other things you think could have triggered the slowness, or approximately when you think it started, etc, I'll happily report it to our own internal bug tracker. rrenaud@google.com
kevind23 13y ago
I do not want localised search results. If I wanted to search for Chinese food in Chicago, then I would ask for it specifically. I initially switched to DDG because of the insistence on giving me "personalised" results. BS. I came here to search the entire internet, not just for things that are specific to Google's picture of me. It almost always made for awful results, especially when it ranked local sites higher than anything actually relevant or useful. Same goes for recent news. If I want recent news, I'll go to the website of a newspaper in my area. Why would I search for that? Maybe it's because I grew up with web search as just that -- a way of finding websites. I don't search for information; I search for websites which provide me the information I need. I can see how Google's algorithms work for some people, but for me, DDG is exactly what I want. If I typed everything I ever wanted to know directly into Google, then I'm getting the information Google wants me to see, including if someone pays for the placement. I don't like that kind of control, and I don't like the idea of a single entity controlling the flow of knowledge over the internet. So I don't use Google.
panacea 13y ago
!g
jon_black 13y ago
Using a search engine is an art in itself. You've become accustomed to the way Google works. Do you assume that Google is the way a search engine should work and all other search engines should follow that? That is, should all search engines produce the same output given the same input?
ernesth 13y ago
> what you use for my other cases. For local searches, I use my GPS. Google often errors by 100 kilometers when trying to localise me, so local search is a pity. Otherwise, I use pagesjaunes.fr which does not work in your country. I don't search recent news! I read news on some newspapers websites. Whenever I want to search for news, it is for old articles I remember having read but cannot find anymore. ddg is good enough for that. I discovered stackoverflow through ddg, so when searching for answers to technical questions, ddg is also good enough for me. For your question, I believe that clicking "more from stackoverflow" gives an answer in the first five results. The case where I used to bitch about ddg's search results was when pasting error messages, but either ddg improved, or google degraded as recently, whenever ddg did not answer satisfactorily to such requests, google did not either...
virtualwhys 13y ago
1) DDG doesn't have local results meh 2) DDG doesn't have recent news Don't you love it when searching google with keywords vital to your business' placement in the results, a few News headlines show up, pushing you from 4 down to 8 or 9? Me neither, if I want news, I'll go to the BBC, NY Times, etc. 3) DDG does not have the coverage to answer a narrow technical question valid use case, yes 4) What DDG does have is plain old search results Yes! Remember in the early days when Google was just that? I do. Google has become something else in the meantime, and organic search results are not at the top of their priority list (read: advertising is, they spam my gmail account pretty much daily with advice on how I can reactivate the adwords campaigns that I suspended, how, if I call now, a Google rep. will advise me [try to upsell me in everyway possible] on how to get the most out of my campaigns, and so on). Google rules the search engine landscape (basically a monopoly); that's not a great situation as we (site owners, admins, etc.) are all completely beholden to a single corporation and are forced to play by their rules whether we agree with them or not.
- josteink 13y ago
  1) While that may be a bummer to you, it's a feature to me. I hate having Google assume I want local content or value that higher than other content. 2) I don't go to a search-engine for news. There are better tools and sites for that. 3) Excuse me. I just suffered a parsing error. 4) And this is why I use it. Google search has become a bloated UX disaster and Google is a creepy company. Just plain search sounds great!
hornetblack 13y ago
I live in an area where google doesn't give very good local results.
hornetblack 13y ago
I live in an area where google doesn't give very good local results.
hornetblack 13y ago
I live in an area where google doesn't give very good local results.
ronaldx 13y ago
On the other hand, I don't understand why you would be searching for those results on a general search engine. If I search for "Chinese", I explicitly don't want restaurant results (I would have specified that). If I search for "earthquake", I explicitly don't want news results (I would have specified that). The fact that Google makes assumptions about what I want rarely benefits me.
- thrownaway2424 13y ago
  Right this points out one of the differences between the two. Google has instant results that appear while you type so when I wanted Chinese food I started typing and just stopped when Google results appeared relevant which was actually at "chine" but momentum carried me to the end of the word. On DDG you have to make the effort to estimate the marginal utility of further typing because you don't get the results until you submit the query. If you don't like the result the iteration cycle is slower on DDG.
smonff 13y ago
DDG don't have all this because they do have develop it to remove the fact that your search result can be different depending on your location or interestings or sexual orientation or whatever. It's important, because if you live in random country, you don't especially want to get news from what-the-search-engine-believe-that-people-want-to-read-in-random-country. In other words, tell people what they should read or not using computation and / or economic, politic rules. When I live in random country, I'm often interested to know what newspapers from another random country can tell about random country. It makes me feel safer when obtaining the same result than you do. Edit : more => DDG do have a region parameter, see https://duckduckgo.com/settings https://duckduckgo.com/settings
kome 13y ago
> DDG doesn't have local results (search "Chinese" on Google and then on DDG). Sorry too much facepalm here. I's just that you've become accustomed to the way Google works, not vice versa.
fafner 13y ago
My default is now DDG. It works great when I really want to look up Wikipedia or some similar website which is featured by DDG. But as soon as I start to do some real web searching I usually quickly put !g (shortcut for go to Google) in front and use Google again. Maybe switching back to Google would be the easiest step. But there is more involved in this decision than comfort. It is futile to rely on one service. The customer never benefits in a monopoly or oligopoly scheme. Google is the enemy of anonymity on the web and collects quite a lot of data from anybody. Google is doing a lot of evil these days, such as pushing DRM into HTML5. So yeah I often go back to Google Search. But I hope this will decrease over time. Meanwhile I help and support one of the few serious contenders to Google. And it's not that Google Search is perfect. It constantly tries to second guess you and nowadays I end up constantly adding more and more quotes to my search terms to somehow prevent that.
- walden42 13y ago
  The only search engines I use are DDG and Startpage. Startpage uses Google results, so I'm never missing out anything, but I still keep my privacy. DDG is for definitions, wiki lookups, unit conversions, some random stuff, and SP is for the specific searches, like for programming help.
gabriel34 13y ago
I don't really see your point, I search almost exclusively through DDG and almost always get good results, even with very specific subjects. Seldom does a query that yields no usable results on DDG has better outcome on Google (I'd say less than a dozen times in years) Perhaps the issue is how you phrase your query. I tend to use only keywords which I find relevant. Also DDG does not remove the quotation marks from queries(which is a big plus in my opinion). There is a specific syntax for news (sort:date, IIRC) albeit it has a smaller index. I don't have the numbers, but I believe DDG indexes a sufficient portion of the internet to answer satisfactorily a great portion of my queries. Sites like StackOverflow must be as indexed as Google at about 100%. The differential must be on sites with a very low pagerank which are quite irrelevant for the great majority of queries. If your query returns more than half a dozen pages on google it's probable DDG would also yield usable results. >>>EDIT: region:cn returns results from Chinese sites I prefer this to the alternative of the search engine guessing if I want information about Chinese people and culture, Chinese restaurants, or from China, but I guess Google adds value after you train it a bit and learns what do you usually mean in your queries, while on the other hand DDG requires that you learn how to use it effectively. This value added from Google comes at the price of privacy which is much more valuable for me.
josteink 13y ago
Your milage may vary, but I've found that queries which works fine for Google does not work equally well for DDG and visa verse. You search DDG differently than you search Google. And let's face it, you're already well trained in searching Google, even though you don't really think much about it. If you doubt me, ask someone new to the web try to use Google. The way they search will make your eyes roll. Because you know better how to use it. Same with DDG. You're just not there yet. Besides Google has a more opinionated search, so it will more aggressively attempt to exclude parts of your search query and infer other possible meanings from the words left. And then it will search on what it assumes you meant, no matter if it is right or wrong. DDG will search for what I ask it to search for. As a technical user and pedant, that suits me better. I also have to say that your queries sounds very unnatural to me. They go along as if they were almost English. With DDG I just search for the basic keywords. If I know I need/want domain-specific limitations, I can apply bang-operators for that !so to get stack overflow, !w for wikipedia, etc. In complex matters like these, there's obviously room for taste and opinions. But with that said, I'm getting fed up with the meme that DDG is inferior to Google. For my needs, I consider Google search the inferior product by now.

randlet 13y ago

I'm in the same position I tried (default search in all browsers for a month) but found that I was using a !g on virtually every query. Eventually I just gave up and went back to Google.

dredmorbius 13y ago
My suggestions: ⚫ Stick with it. DDG's improved hugely in the past 12-18 months. ⚫ Report your problems to DDG. I've done this in a few cases, and have been stunned to get personal replies in a couple of days. Try getting that from Google (without landing three stories on the top of HN for a day or three).
- NigelTufnel 13y ago
  I'm sold. For the next week (or couple of minutes if DDG isn't for me) I'll use DDG instead of Google.
  - dredmorbius 13y ago
    I'll be the first to admit it's not perfect. But it's damned good. Hitting Google is a "!g" away -- just prepend / postpend that to your search and hit enter, you'll get Google's results (as I've noted elsewhere here: I usually try "!sp" first, as it's close to, but not quite, Google. What I noticed in my first weeks was that usually the initial results were actually very, very similar, if not identical. Since DDG has the same search syntax ("site:example.com" restricts to a domain or host, "quoted words" are searched together, (either|or) will do booleans), if you're a Google search power user, it's all familiar territory. DDG's information and support pages tell you a lot, and the !bang search syntax is very much worth knowing about. If you want to search !so (stack overflow), the bang syntax is great: https://duckduckgo.com/bang.html https://duckduckgo.com/bang.html There are things DDG doesn't do, which I've also noted. Date-restricted searches and localization are two of the big ones. I don't avoid Google entirely, but it's way down my list. I did enter into this with the mindset of intentionally taking a choice that's not Google, and that I'd have to make some compromises, but that I'd get better privacy as a result. The compromises really have been few, and I'm saying that as a long, long term Google user (since 1998) whose been increasingly disturbed by the company's direction.
  - smonff 13y ago
    As @dredmorbius told, you should seriously read about the !bangs to exploit it in better conditions. That's fun to read.
  - grimman 13y ago
    It took me a solid week to wean off the worst of my habitual falling back on the GOOG. Then another couple of weeks to double check the results side by side when I didn't find something on DDG that I fully expected Google to find for me (they didn't deliver either). In the end it's definitely a huge adjustment.

ForHackernews 13y ago

You can prepend g! to your DDG searches if the native results are insufficient. I don't want "personalized" search results. I don't want Google's algorithms second-guessing what I searched for. If I want current news, I'll read the BBC. If I want a stack overflow result, I'll do a search on SO.

raldi 13y ago
Why the scare quotes?
- prezjordan 13y ago
  I guess the term "personalized" (to use quotes of my own) infers using your personal data to tailor results. People who are opponents of that practice are huge advocates for DDG.
  - dclara 13y ago
    "using your personal data to tailor results", true, I don't like it either. When we are targeted, we always see the outdated ads from 9 out of 10 websites we visited but don't like to re-revisit. So "pull" is more favored than "push". See the book: "Pull - The Power of the Semantic Web to Transform Your Business" by David Siegel. But I do like personalized information storage. Maybe you want to reference to the blog post: Why do we need the Private Web? http://bit.ly/1c2DzN6 http://bit.ly/1c2DzN6
    - mandeepj 13y ago
      " When we are targeted, we always see the outdated ads from 9 out of 10 websites we visited but don't like to re-revisit" this is very true. You have just listed a billion dollar idea. If I search for an adidas shoe or just go to a company website then I start seeing ads related to those just visited sites - how boring. Retargeting just seems to be plain stupid instead consumer should be showed more variety
      - 13y ago

username223 13y ago

> search "Chinese" on Google I get a bunch of stuff about restaurants in small-town Missouri, which is somewhat reassuring, since I live nowhere near there, then actual information about the Chinese language. Awful.

thrownaway2424 13y ago
Great, so when you are looking for a Chinese restaurant in your area, what do you use?
- kevinh 13y ago
  Chinese Restaurant <City I Live In>
- username223 13y ago
  Yelp, or maybe a search for "Chinese near ZIPCODE". I know that this is hard.
- mverwijs 13y ago
  http://www.iens.nl http://www.iens.nl, as it gives me information about restaurants and allows me to select the area I want to dine in (as opposed to where Google thinks I might be dining).
drakaal 13y ago
Maybe I don't want food? http://www.plexisearch.com/?q=chinese http://www.plexisearch.com/?q=chinese

higherpurpose 13y ago

You make it sound as if there has always been a high threshold of "goodness" in search engines, and Google has always been above that. I think it was only 2-3 years ago when people were saying how bad Google search had become because of all the spammy sites popping up in search results. And years before that Google was even worse. So how did people manage then? If they did it then, they can do it now, too, if there are other factors that are of higher priority to them, such as privacy. This feels like the "but Intel will always be more powerful than ARM" kind of argument (which hopefully, many have learned by now that it was a pointless and irrelevant argument when it came to the success of ARM).

orf 13y ago

I was skeptical but decided to actually give it a go as my main search engine. I love it, for most queries its sufficient but for some (programming specific ones mostly) I switch to Google.

BrainInAJar 13y ago

> DDG doesn't have local results (search "Chinese" on Google and then on DDG). DDG doesn't have recent news (search "Earthquake" on Google and then on DDG) That is completely on purpose.

DanBC 13y ago
There is an odd bubble that I'd like to break out from. When I search for a word I'd like the euro language translation of that word to also be searched, and returns returned. Yes, i know that I'm going to get a bunch of lousy results. But I'm also going to widen my web horizons and see more of the Internet. One of the things that I find frustrating with DDG is the UScentric results.
- frabcus 13y ago
  It took me ages to find "More | Settings | Region" to skew DuckDuckGo results to a different country.
thrownaway2424 13y ago
Didn't answer the question. What other tools do you use for these other cases?
- Steko 13y ago
  "DDG doesn't have local results " (1) Many people don't search local often. (2) People can type their location in the search engine for local results. (3) There are alternatives like Yelp as you mention. "DDG doesn't have recent news" (4) !gn (5) DDG doesn't give me news links when I'm not looking for them. "DDG does not have the coverage to answer a narrow technical question" (6) Google wins on your example but the answer for your example can most certainly be found in one of the top links on DDG. (7) !so > site:stackoverflow.com ... (8) "Duck Duck Go is a good search engine" is not incompatible with "Google has better search results than DDG" or "Google has faster search results than DDG".
raldi 13y ago
Nobody claimed it was an accident.

matteotom 13y ago

I switched to DDG a few months ago. At first I was a bit disappointed at the result quality, but I have come to like some of its other features. First is that it puts a little Wikipedia box on top of most search results, which solves ~50% of my queries. Next is the ! operators: if I don't find what I need, I can use !g to search google, or !gi for google images, or !w for wikipedia. It has tons of others: https://duckduckgo.com/bang.html https://duckduckgo.com/bang.html Also, I just found a ton of other cool features: https://duckduckgo.com/goodies#Programming https://duckduckgo.com/goodies#Programming such as qrcodes and regular expressions. Also, it will give news stories if you put "news" in your search query.

jonathanjaeger 13y ago
The problem for mainstream is that that is work. Not only is it a ton of work (when adding extra queries over time), but it is a question of educating the masses. That's an even bigger hurdle.
- matteotom 13y ago
  I'm not saying it's right for everyone, but I like it.
- zanny 13y ago
  I always found myself using site:xxxxxxxxxx on google in the same way bangs work on ddg. That, and the convenient info boxes for most sites (it even supports arch packages and bulbapedia articles) solve 90% of my queries.

oscilloscope 13y ago

DDG is much faster than Google for me. All Google services are very slow when I'm logged in. GMail, Google Search, Finance, YouTube, everything. They can take 4-8 seconds to load a page, and sometimes they hang indefinitely. Incognito mode or a different browser brings Google back to sub-second speeds, but it's frustrating enough that I set DDG as my default so that straightforward searches resolve quickly. I switch over with !g whenever I need better search results, news, etc.

robrenaud 13y ago
This sounds like a legitimate and very bad bug. If you are willing to share your account name with me, as well as any other things you think could have triggered the slowness, or approximately when you think it started, etc, I'll happily report it to our own internal bug tracker. rrenaud@google.com

kevind23 13y ago

I do not want localised search results. If I wanted to search for Chinese food in Chicago, then I would ask for it specifically. I initially switched to DDG because of the insistence on giving me "personalised" results. BS. I came here to search the entire internet, not just for things that are specific to Google's picture of me. It almost always made for awful results, especially when it ranked local sites higher than anything actually relevant or useful. Same goes for recent news. If I want recent news, I'll go to the website of a newspaper in my area. Why would I search for that? Maybe it's because I grew up with web search as just that -- a way of finding websites. I don't search for information; I search for websites which provide me the information I need. I can see how Google's algorithms work for some people, but for me, DDG is exactly what I want. If I typed everything I ever wanted to know directly into Google, then I'm getting the information Google wants me to see, including if someone pays for the placement. I don't like that kind of control, and I don't like the idea of a single entity controlling the flow of knowledge over the internet. So I don't use Google.

panacea 13y ago

jon_black 13y ago

Using a search engine is an art in itself. You've become accustomed to the way Google works. Do you assume that Google is the way a search engine should work and all other search engines should follow that? That is, should all search engines produce the same output given the same input?

ernesth 13y ago

> what you use for my other cases. For local searches, I use my GPS. Google often errors by 100 kilometers when trying to localise me, so local search is a pity. Otherwise, I use pagesjaunes.fr which does not work in your country. I don't search recent news! I read news on some newspapers websites. Whenever I want to search for news, it is for old articles I remember having read but cannot find anymore. ddg is good enough for that. I discovered stackoverflow through ddg, so when searching for answers to technical questions, ddg is also good enough for me. For your question, I believe that clicking "more from stackoverflow" gives an answer in the first five results. The case where I used to bitch about ddg's search results was when pasting error messages, but either ddg improved, or google degraded as recently, whenever ddg did not answer satisfactorily to such requests, google did not either...

virtualwhys 13y ago

1) DDG doesn't have local results meh 2) DDG doesn't have recent news Don't you love it when searching google with keywords vital to your business' placement in the results, a few News headlines show up, pushing you from 4 down to 8 or 9? Me neither, if I want news, I'll go to the BBC, NY Times, etc. 3) DDG does not have the coverage to answer a narrow technical question valid use case, yes 4) What DDG does have is plain old search results Yes! Remember in the early days when Google was just that? I do. Google has become something else in the meantime, and organic search results are not at the top of their priority list (read: advertising is, they spam my gmail account pretty much daily with advice on how I can reactivate the adwords campaigns that I suspended, how, if I call now, a Google rep. will advise me [try to upsell me in everyway possible] on how to get the most out of my campaigns, and so on). Google rules the search engine landscape (basically a monopoly); that's not a great situation as we (site owners, admins, etc.) are all completely beholden to a single corporation and are forced to play by their rules whether we agree with them or not.

josteink 13y ago
1) While that may be a bummer to you, it's a feature to me. I hate having Google assume I want local content or value that higher than other content. 2) I don't go to a search-engine for news. There are better tools and sites for that. 3) Excuse me. I just suffered a parsing error. 4) And this is why I use it. Google search has become a bloated UX disaster and Google is a creepy company. Just plain search sounds great!

hornetblack 13y ago

I live in an area where google doesn't give very good local results.

hornetblack 13y ago

I live in an area where google doesn't give very good local results.

hornetblack 13y ago

I live in an area where google doesn't give very good local results.

ronaldx 13y ago

On the other hand, I don't understand why you would be searching for those results on a general search engine. If I search for "Chinese", I explicitly don't want restaurant results (I would have specified that). If I search for "earthquake", I explicitly don't want news results (I would have specified that). The fact that Google makes assumptions about what I want rarely benefits me.

thrownaway2424 13y ago
Right this points out one of the differences between the two. Google has instant results that appear while you type so when I wanted Chinese food I started typing and just stopped when Google results appeared relevant which was actually at "chine" but momentum carried me to the end of the word. On DDG you have to make the effort to estimate the marginal utility of further typing because you don't get the results until you submit the query. If you don't like the result the iteration cycle is slower on DDG.

smonff 13y ago

DDG don't have all this because they do have develop it to remove the fact that your search result can be different depending on your location or interestings or sexual orientation or whatever. It's important, because if you live in random country, you don't especially want to get news from what-the-search-engine-believe-that-people-want-to-read-in-random-country. In other words, tell people what they should read or not using computation and / or economic, politic rules. When I live in random country, I'm often interested to know what newspapers from another random country can tell about random country. It makes me feel safer when obtaining the same result than you do. Edit : more => DDG do have a region parameter, see https://duckduckgo.com/settings https://duckduckgo.com/settings

kome 13y ago

> DDG doesn't have local results (search "Chinese" on Google and then on DDG). Sorry too much facepalm here. I's just that you've become accustomed to the way Google works, not vice versa.

fafner 13y ago

My default is now DDG. It works great when I really want to look up Wikipedia or some similar website which is featured by DDG. But as soon as I start to do some real web searching I usually quickly put !g (shortcut for go to Google) in front and use Google again. Maybe switching back to Google would be the easiest step. But there is more involved in this decision than comfort. It is futile to rely on one service. The customer never benefits in a monopoly or oligopoly scheme. Google is the enemy of anonymity on the web and collects quite a lot of data from anybody. Google is doing a lot of evil these days, such as pushing DRM into HTML5. So yeah I often go back to Google Search. But I hope this will decrease over time. Meanwhile I help and support one of the few serious contenders to Google. And it's not that Google Search is perfect. It constantly tries to second guess you and nowadays I end up constantly adding more and more quotes to my search terms to somehow prevent that.

walden42 13y ago
The only search engines I use are DDG and Startpage. Startpage uses Google results, so I'm never missing out anything, but I still keep my privacy. DDG is for definitions, wiki lookups, unit conversions, some random stuff, and SP is for the specific searches, like for programming help.

gabriel34 13y ago

I don't really see your point, I search almost exclusively through DDG and almost always get good results, even with very specific subjects. Seldom does a query that yields no usable results on DDG has better outcome on Google (I'd say less than a dozen times in years) Perhaps the issue is how you phrase your query. I tend to use only keywords which I find relevant. Also DDG does not remove the quotation marks from queries(which is a big plus in my opinion). There is a specific syntax for news (sort:date, IIRC) albeit it has a smaller index. I don't have the numbers, but I believe DDG indexes a sufficient portion of the internet to answer satisfactorily a great portion of my queries. Sites like StackOverflow must be as indexed as Google at about 100%. The differential must be on sites with a very low pagerank which are quite irrelevant for the great majority of queries. If your query returns more than half a dozen pages on google it's probable DDG would also yield usable results. >>>EDIT: region:cn returns results from Chinese sites I prefer this to the alternative of the search engine guessing if I want information about Chinese people and culture, Chinese restaurants, or from China, but I guess Google adds value after you train it a bit and learns what do you usually mean in your queries, while on the other hand DDG requires that you learn how to use it effectively. This value added from Google comes at the price of privacy which is much more valuable for me.

josteink 13y ago

Your milage may vary, but I've found that queries which works fine for Google does not work equally well for DDG and visa verse. You search DDG differently than you search Google. And let's face it, you're already well trained in searching Google, even though you don't really think much about it. If you doubt me, ask someone new to the web try to use Google. The way they search will make your eyes roll. Because you know better how to use it. Same with DDG. You're just not there yet. Besides Google has a more opinionated search, so it will more aggressively attempt to exclude parts of your search query and infer other possible meanings from the words left. And then it will search on what it assumes you meant, no matter if it is right or wrong. DDG will search for what I ask it to search for. As a technical user and pedant, that suits me better. I also have to say that your queries sounds very unnatural to me. They go along as if they were almost English. With DDG I just search for the basic keywords. If I know I need/want domain-specific limitations, I can apply bang-operators for that !so to get stack overflow, !w for wikipedia, etc. In complex matters like these, there's obviously room for taste and opinions. But with that said, I'm getting fed up with the meme that DDG is inferior to Google. For my needs, I consider Google search the inferior product by now.