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Duck duck is barely usable ... but they don't spy on you. The !g and !b commands make it my first choice. If the results aren't getting what you want, try the

Duck duck is barely usable ... but they don't spy on you. The !g and !b commands make it my first choice. If the results aren't getting what you want, try the search on google or bing. IF you don't mind Sergy Brin or Bill Gates tracking you. I still think there's room for a search engine that supports boolean(ish?) operations like AND, OR , NOT and NEAR. Providing links directly to the source and not a redirect to the search engine company would be a really good thing. A cookie-less search engine would be double plus good.

mscarborough 13y ago
Can we stop with this "bill gates is watching your searches" nonsense? I know you're fascinating, but Brin and Gates may be concerned about many things not related your internet activity. Corporations in data monitoring projects, OK.
- tosseraccount 13y ago
  I do not enjoy the "targeted" advertising. If I visit finance.yahoo.com, I'm okay with an advertisement that appears from the same IP address for a brokerage. I am not okay with the 500 advertising companies contacting each other (and slowing down the internet) to track me. Sorry, it sucks.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - bduerst 13y ago
    That's on the webmasters, not the advertising itself. Just because you have fifty different tracking, advertising, retargeting, etc. scripts doesn't mean you should use them all at once on your website.
- arca_vorago 13y ago
  No, we absolutely cannot stop bringing up the privacy implications of an entity knowing more about us than they deserve to, and no amount of waving it away under the (false) pretense that they "need" it to do "other" things is going to work. I'll ignore the entire filter bubble issue and get right down to the privacy implications. When often people use search engines or other related websites (reddit search) to look up all kinds of information that in single snippets would probably be meaningless to most people, in aggregate it can paint an entire picture about that person, their interests, their computer activity and location through IP logs, and I would even venture to say we aren't too far off from a psychologist doing a persons mental profile from their search history in a court case, or even textual analysis of writing style to prove a person wrote something. (dangerous implications) Google and MS are concerned almost entirely with our internet activity, as opposed to your claim. It is the core data metric of what makes them their shit-tons of money. More google than MS, but they are making huge moves into advertising (I have been doing SEO research for my company), and they are increasingly involved in politics of a questionable nature which include the NSA, the State Department, the CIA, and others. So no, we will not stop talking about privacy, and if your argument is that privacy is dead, then at least skip the many times proven bad "if you have nothing to hide" implied argument you make.
  - ithkuil 13y ago
    I think the key point here is that corporation using your data doesn't imply that their CEOs or high executives are personally looking at your activity. On the other hand the fact that a specific person within those companies is not tracking your web activity doesn't make the privacy problem go away. Nevertheless, I just find it silly when somebody just alludes that some actual person (e.g. Bill Gates, Sergey Brin) might actually track your specific searches; although I know nobody actually believes it, it's just a figure of speech, just to give a human body to our fears. That's the problem: corporation aren't humans, yet they have a life of their own. EDIT: thanks to acheron for the name of the figure of speech I was mentioning. My point is that this personification is misleading and causes endless discussions about what can be expected by this or that company, and what you can expect from their employees etc.
    - acheron 13y ago
      I think you're taking it a little too literally, like trying to parse an idiom. The concept here is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synecdoche https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synecdoche
  - cromwellian 13y ago
    The only way for search engines to get better is to model the mental state of the person making the query. If you were asking another human being to help you with a query, they'd take into account your mental state, conversation state, and what they know about you and the situation, to narrow down and disambiguate the query. When people can't do this kind of social modeling, we perceive them as autistic. If you could fit an entire Google data center into your mobile phone, maybe this kind of digital personal assistant could be taken offline, but for the current state of technology, big data requires the cloud. Even in the 24th Century, the Enterprise Computer is a centralized data store which tracks queries made from com-badges.
    - username223 13y ago
      > The only way for search engines to get better is to model the mental state of the person making the query. No. Another way is to make their behavior more predictable. If I type "Chinese" into the search box, Google may tell me about the Chinese language, or it may send me some ads for local take-out places. Either it guesses which I want, or it makes it easy for me to specify what I'm asking; I know which I'd prefer.
- esemiss 13y ago
  From http://gawker.com/5637234/gcreep-google-engineer-stalked-teens-spied-on-chats http://gawker.com/5637234/gcreep-google-engineer-stalked-tee... In at least four cases, Barksdale spied on minors' Google accounts without their consent, according to a source close to the incidents. In an incident this spring involving a 15-year-old boy who he'd befriended, Barksdale tapped into call logs from Google Voice, Google's Internet phone service, after the boy refused to tell him the name of his new girlfriend, according to our source. After accessing the kid's account to retrieve her name and phone number, Barksdale then taunted the boy and threatened to call her. In other cases involving teens of both sexes, Barksdale exhibited a similar pattern of aggressively violating others' privacy, according to our source. He accessed contact lists and chat transcripts, and in one case quoted from an IM that he'd looked up behind the person's back. (He later apologized to one for retrieving the information without her knowledge.) In another incident, Barksdale unblocked himself from a Gtalk buddy list even though the teen in question had taken steps to cut communications with the Google engineer.
  - enneff 13y ago
    Note this article is from 2010.
    - username223 13y ago
      So? It's not as if they're collecting less information about you now, or are subject to any more legal restrictions (such as those imposed on credit reporting agencies).
      - enneff 13y ago
        The quoted text includes "In an incident this spring..." I mentioned the article's year of publication to provide a chronological reference point for the quote.
adrusi 13y ago
In what way do you find it barely usable? I've used it for about a year and I find the results to be great. I don't think there's been a time when I couldn't find the result I wanted with ddg but could with google.
- tosseraccount 13y ago
  Good question. Google is better at guessing your focus. I'm not sure how they do it. Sometimes duckduck is pretty lost and scattershot. I have the opportunity of rephrasing the query or just hitting !g . If I don't mind google tracking the query, then I'll do a !g and often what I want is in the top 3. Sometimes, I don't want google tracking me (e.g. to check out a health issue) , then I'll work out a better query on duck duck.
  - LordIllidan 13y ago
    Perhaps Google is better at guessing your focus precisely because they are tracking you?
    - shubb 13y ago
      The queries I find myself switching to Google for are: * When I want a local result (i.e. I'm googling for business cards, and I want a UK based company that will sell them to me). This is because DuckDuckGo doesn't use your location (by default). * When I am searching for a word that means something different to me than for the general population. For instance when I search for Python I don't want to see snakes. Google does this by tracking the results you click and forming a profile of you. I guess the DuckDuckGo way is to search these by !uk and !programming, but that is a whole extra word to type. It would be nice if it let you list your interests in its settings page, creating your own filter bubble.
      - ithkuil 13y ago
        I wonder if this could be solved by creating fake personas, like "computer geek", or "professional programmer". You opt into one or few of this personae and each query sent to a search engine would track this persona. The key is that these categories should be few and predefined (i.e. offered by the search engine) so that they cannot be used to track individual users.
rjzzleep 13y ago
+1 i've started using it as my main engine a while back but i absolutely have to go back to google fairly often. i'm using pentadactyl so i never noticed the !g !gi etc. commands. thanks!
- tosseraccount 13y ago
  By the way ... for anybody interested in !g and !b it's literally "!g" or "!b" in the actual query. Use spaces on both sides if you need to separate it. Easiest thing is just append it to your query you typed in. It works in the duckduck default search on your browser, too. It is not !g typed when you are not focused on the query box.
hootener 13y ago
Or there's always the best of both worlds: http://www.duckduckgoog.com/ http://www.duckduckgoog.com/
- therealmarv 13y ago
  I also tried to use duckduckgoog some time. The biggest difference is speed. And this is also my main concern with duckduckgo. I'm faster with Google and auto suggestion and the loading of search result is also faster.
- Zarel 13y ago
  I'm confused. What does it do? "Searches Google and !bangs DuckDuckGo." What does this mean? It's the equivalent of a DDG !g search? Isn't that exactly the same as just searching Google?
jmsduran 13y ago
I applaud what DDG is doing. I've been using it as my default search engine for roughly 2 years. Yes, there are some areas for improvement, especially when it comes to complex technical queries. But for the majority of everyday things, DDG is excellent, and returns less advertisement bloat within its results than Google/Bing. Plus ducks are my favorite animal, so launching DDG as I begin the work day is a joy!
- TallGuyShort 13y ago
  >> Plus ducks are my favorite animal The "I'm feeling ducky" feature never fails to illicit a smile from me.
  - chris_mahan 13y ago
    elicit. (Why correct him? Because I care.)
    - TallGuyShort 13y ago
      Oh my, that is quite a difference in meaning. Thank you!
      - dredmorbius 13y ago
        Kinky is feathers. Illicit is using the whole duck ;-)
    - desouzt 13y ago
      Why correct him?
      - ithkuil 13y ago
        OP's motivations might be different, but a non native english speaker might find that this kind of short, unoffensive and straight to the point corrections could be very useful indeed.
unicornporn 13y ago
Barely usable, yes I agree. So use Startpage.com. They also say they don't spy on you. It works just as good as Google, because it uses Google (see it as a proxy). DDG is especially terrible if you are used localized versions of Google. I was used to "Swedish Google", and using a localized (Swedish) DDG was totally unusable. And so I found Startpage. Works better than the real deal for me. There are a few differences though. A search operator like site: is named host: as an example.
- MisterWebz 13y ago
  How come Startpage always shows me local results?
  - cpeterso 13y ago
    They could use GeoIP targeting without tracking users with cookies.
- rjzzleep 13y ago
  why don't inurl: site: etc. work properly in startpage.com anyway?
  - greglindahl 13y ago
    Scrapers use inurl: and site: a lot; humans, not so much.
- dredmorbius 13y ago
  !sp == StartPage. That's usually my first fallback before going !g
rakoo 13y ago
> but they don't spy on you How can you be so sure of that ? A few months ago, pretty much anyone would say "but the NSA don't spy on you". From a paranoid (ie security) point of view, DDG is not better than Google et al. Now, I do believe they are more respective of everyone's privacy, but there's absolutely nothing more than words to back this.
- Munksgaard 13y ago
  I don't think anyone with just a tiny bit of knowledge of NSA would have said that. After all, the Utah data center was public knowledge. What surprised everyone was the extent of their spying.
wslh 13y ago
Google supports AND, OR, NOT and NEAR. There is an AROUND operator that is similar to NEAR. I think the way DDG can gain more traction is motivating top sites to enhance their local search pagerank. It's incredible how Google search restricted to Stack Overflow works better than the Stack Overflow local search engine. I wrote a rant about this at Challenging Google’s Search Engine [1]. [1] http://blog.databigbang.com/letters-from-the-future-challenging-googles-search-engine/ http://blog.databigbang.com/letters-from-the-future-challeng...
- lostlogin 13y ago
  If double up votes were possible... This isn't uncommon though. Try search "yllow submarine" on Spotify. Is there any other thing this could refer to? Not only do they not have the Beatles, but the search is awful. Nearly as awful as Apple mail. I suspect the real problem isn't that others are bad - Google has spoilt us with how good it is.
  - motdiem 13y ago
    It's even more the case for local searches. Google routinely finds badly misspelled locations (from I gather interpolating with my location?) - for these kinds of searches, I don't think any of the alternatives comes close.
- dclara 13y ago
  It's interesting that you are talking about "two-tiered search would decentralize efforts to improve algorithms". But you mentioned that "this solution does not need to be distributed: sites can share their local indexes and ranking algorithms with the routing search engine." Can you elaborate a little bit about why it's not a distributed solution if sites share their local indexes with the routing search engine?
  - wslh 13y ago
    Can you elaborate a little bit about why it's not a distributed solution if sites share their local indexes with the routing search engine? Yes, sure. I use the concept of distribution in the sense of separating a process within different entities (search router and local searches). In the distributed case the "search router" queries other sites to determine the best results. For example, searching for code samples involved querying Stack Overflow, Code Project, Forums, etc. This approach is clearly expensive: you rely on the other sites speed, web service availability, etc. The non distributed approach is just receiving their algorithms and data and processing everything in the router search engine. Obviously this solution can be implemented in a distributed way inside the search engine but it is not distributed in the sense of distributing the process within different entities. In the two cases you are distributing efforts, one of the key goals of this approach because it is really difficult to compete with Google. Google "knows" how to give good results in diverse areas while in the proposed attack vector you rely on others for part of this optimization. A movie site should know how to give good results about movies while a site related to books knows about books. It's important to note that the vast majority of search results ends in relatively few sites, so if the top visited sites implement this approach Google search market share can be challenged. Obviously we don't really know if this approach will work in practice until we see it.
laureny 13y ago
> Duck duck is barely usable ... but they don't spy on you. 1. You don't know that. 2. No search engine ever spied on you when they started.
- rjzzleep 13y ago
  absolutely true, but basically it just means, we need to make it easy to build search engine infrastructure
- sdegutis 13y ago
  I wonder if it's possible to make a search engine that people can verify is not spying on them. One where the source is truly open source. Not just on github, but where anyone who wants to can ssh into the server and have full read-only access to the whole system to verify that the code they see is really what's running. Sure, there'd be some security things to work out to make it balance how easy it'd be to hack it, but maybe it's doable.
  - timmclean 13y ago
    See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homomorphic_encryption https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homomorphic_encryption
  - jarofgreen 13y ago
    If I can SSH in and have full read only access on the server what's to stop me seeing what other users are doing, thus ending user privacy?
  - dandelion_lover 13y ago
    I am really surprised people on HN do not know about YaCy [1]. It's p2p opensource and free search engine. So it is verifiable. [1]. yacy.net
- a1a 13y ago
  1. I guess nothing is certain - but even if they are a complete hoax they still can't correlate searches with my other data (mobile, mail, documents, http header data from javascript api calls on basically every site I visit, ....). This correlation is something other search engines explicitly state that they will do. 2. You don't know that.
quadrangle 13y ago
I don't know what the hell you mean, "barely usable". I basically just use it and I search for things and find things, there's nothing "barely" about it's usability. Maybe I don't know what I'm missing, but I've never experienced search as though it magically reads my mind.
josteink 13y ago
Duck duck is barely usable On the contrary, I find Google barely usable these days, with everything covered in layers and layers of horrible bloat, random UX mess of the week and constant pestering about G+. DDG is nice and clean, has features Google is (still) lacking and just gets me the results. I may resort to other search-engines (like Google) once a week or so, but at this point, there's no way I'm going back to having Google as default. That's just not worth it.
- SomeCallMeTim 13y ago
  I've been using DDG as my primary search from desktop for several years now, and I find its results to be equivalent to or better than Google's most of the time. When I can't find something, I'll try a !g, but only rarely does that help any more.
  - bhrgunatha 13y ago
    I agree completely. In fact I'll also say that when I first switched I used the !g pretty often - maybe even as much as 20%-30%. These days I rarely use !g - the results have improved considerably and the bang searches are a very clever way of not requiring me to change search engine to search another site specifically.
  - Derbasti 13y ago
    I totally agree. In the beginning, I was !g a lot. These days, I mostly !g for more natural language kind of questions. For more technical searches, Google has become next to useless for me. "lupdate.exe not working Qt" transforms to "did you mean 'Update not working'?" (lupdate.exe is part of the Qt translation toolchain and Windows forces it to run as admin only because there is "update" in its file name. The Google 'correction' of that is perfectly useless).
    - protomyth 13y ago
      The second huge fail of google with technical queries is when it starts substituting synonyms for words in your query the make the search useless. It makes you not want to name commands in a common sense style.
teaneedz 13y ago
It replaced Google search for me. I like adding !sp whenever I feel like getting Googly ;)
edj 13y ago
Duck duck is barely usable ... but they don't spy on you. The !g and !b commands make it my first choice. I keep leaving DDG for the not-always-super-relevant results, and I keep coming back for the privacy, clean interface, and !bang syntax. I love that using it means my searches are private by default. But the real killer feature is !bang. I find that it's faster to do a Google image search using DDG with "!gi" than to search in Google and then move my hand to the mouse and click "Images".
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- joesb 13y ago
  Why do people talk about this !bang syntax so much? I can do the same thing with search provider shortcut in my browser. For example, after setting up once, I can press "Ctrl+L" then type "gi" then "Tab" and start typing my search keyword. I don't even have to first go to Google or DDG.
  - ngpio 13y ago
    Because setting up a shortcut once for many hundreds[1] of sites is more demanding work than typing ! each time. There's a bang for almost every site I frequent, and when a site changes its domain or search URI the bang is updated to reflect it almost immediately with no work on my end. After a few weeks of acquainting myself with the bang system, I started to see web search from a completely different perspective. I think of a search engine now as less of an "everything index" and more of an "index of contextual searches". My mind, instead of just thinking "I'll google it", thinks "I'll choose a context for it". Google is like a system-wide grep whose output is altered by advertising, and DDG w/ bangs is like a vast collection of commands piped into a grep. [1] https://duckduckgo.com/bang.html https://duckduckgo.com/bang.html
treenyc 13y ago
toseraccount, I know what you mean by 'barely usable'. I often find it hard to find programming related (as well as other things) on DDG. However, I do mostly use DDG. That shall give you some idea on how important privacy is to some people. They would rather have what you consider 'barely usable' results than compromise privacy. It is not so much that I am not willing to share stuff (even with the government). I used to run a small SaaS for a specific legal industry, and I was subpoenas by the attorney general's office. So I am well aware of the process and I do think in some cases, government do need access to our data to ensure security. The difference is to ask for permission (court order and transparent due procedure) and have transparency. Maybe the big difference is the exercise of Power instead of Force. And power is a word with many means, so to be rigorous, this is what I meant by power: "Power means pretty much the same thing as freedom. Power is a thing that everybody wants the most they can possibly have of. That is, skiing is power, sex appeal is power, the ability to make yourself heard by your congressman is power. Anything that comes out of you and goes out into the world is power and in addition to that, the ablity to be open, to appreciate, to receive love, to respond to others, to listen to music, to understand literature, all of that is power. By "power" I mean human faculties exercised to the largest possible degree. So, in a way, in a large sense, by power I mean individual intelligence. Now when you reach out to another person through the energy or creativity that is in you and that other person responds, you are exercising power. When you make somebody else do something against their will, to me that is not power at all, that is force, and force to me is the negation of power." - Charles Reich And Free Software (Free as in freedom) is a good real world exercise in power.

mscarborough 13y ago

Can we stop with this "bill gates is watching your searches" nonsense? I know you're fascinating, but Brin and Gates may be concerned about many things not related your internet activity. Corporations in data monitoring projects, OK.

tosseraccount 13y ago
I do not enjoy the "targeted" advertising. If I visit finance.yahoo.com, I'm okay with an advertisement that appears from the same IP address for a brokerage. I am not okay with the 500 advertising companies contacting each other (and slowing down the internet) to track me. Sorry, it sucks.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- bduerst 13y ago
  That's on the webmasters, not the advertising itself. Just because you have fifty different tracking, advertising, retargeting, etc. scripts doesn't mean you should use them all at once on your website.
arca_vorago 13y ago
No, we absolutely cannot stop bringing up the privacy implications of an entity knowing more about us than they deserve to, and no amount of waving it away under the (false) pretense that they "need" it to do "other" things is going to work. I'll ignore the entire filter bubble issue and get right down to the privacy implications. When often people use search engines or other related websites (reddit search) to look up all kinds of information that in single snippets would probably be meaningless to most people, in aggregate it can paint an entire picture about that person, their interests, their computer activity and location through IP logs, and I would even venture to say we aren't too far off from a psychologist doing a persons mental profile from their search history in a court case, or even textual analysis of writing style to prove a person wrote something. (dangerous implications) Google and MS are concerned almost entirely with our internet activity, as opposed to your claim. It is the core data metric of what makes them their shit-tons of money. More google than MS, but they are making huge moves into advertising (I have been doing SEO research for my company), and they are increasingly involved in politics of a questionable nature which include the NSA, the State Department, the CIA, and others. So no, we will not stop talking about privacy, and if your argument is that privacy is dead, then at least skip the many times proven bad "if you have nothing to hide" implied argument you make.
- ithkuil 13y ago
  I think the key point here is that corporation using your data doesn't imply that their CEOs or high executives are personally looking at your activity. On the other hand the fact that a specific person within those companies is not tracking your web activity doesn't make the privacy problem go away. Nevertheless, I just find it silly when somebody just alludes that some actual person (e.g. Bill Gates, Sergey Brin) might actually track your specific searches; although I know nobody actually believes it, it's just a figure of speech, just to give a human body to our fears. That's the problem: corporation aren't humans, yet they have a life of their own. EDIT: thanks to acheron for the name of the figure of speech I was mentioning. My point is that this personification is misleading and causes endless discussions about what can be expected by this or that company, and what you can expect from their employees etc.
  - acheron 13y ago
    I think you're taking it a little too literally, like trying to parse an idiom. The concept here is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synecdoche https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synecdoche
- cromwellian 13y ago
  The only way for search engines to get better is to model the mental state of the person making the query. If you were asking another human being to help you with a query, they'd take into account your mental state, conversation state, and what they know about you and the situation, to narrow down and disambiguate the query. When people can't do this kind of social modeling, we perceive them as autistic. If you could fit an entire Google data center into your mobile phone, maybe this kind of digital personal assistant could be taken offline, but for the current state of technology, big data requires the cloud. Even in the 24th Century, the Enterprise Computer is a centralized data store which tracks queries made from com-badges.
  - username223 13y ago
    > The only way for search engines to get better is to model the mental state of the person making the query. No. Another way is to make their behavior more predictable. If I type "Chinese" into the search box, Google may tell me about the Chinese language, or it may send me some ads for local take-out places. Either it guesses which I want, or it makes it easy for me to specify what I'm asking; I know which I'd prefer.
esemiss 13y ago
From http://gawker.com/5637234/gcreep-google-engineer-stalked-teens-spied-on-chats http://gawker.com/5637234/gcreep-google-engineer-stalked-tee... In at least four cases, Barksdale spied on minors' Google accounts without their consent, according to a source close to the incidents. In an incident this spring involving a 15-year-old boy who he'd befriended, Barksdale tapped into call logs from Google Voice, Google's Internet phone service, after the boy refused to tell him the name of his new girlfriend, according to our source. After accessing the kid's account to retrieve her name and phone number, Barksdale then taunted the boy and threatened to call her. In other cases involving teens of both sexes, Barksdale exhibited a similar pattern of aggressively violating others' privacy, according to our source. He accessed contact lists and chat transcripts, and in one case quoted from an IM that he'd looked up behind the person's back. (He later apologized to one for retrieving the information without her knowledge.) In another incident, Barksdale unblocked himself from a Gtalk buddy list even though the teen in question had taken steps to cut communications with the Google engineer.
- enneff 13y ago
  Note this article is from 2010.
  - username223 13y ago
    So? It's not as if they're collecting less information about you now, or are subject to any more legal restrictions (such as those imposed on credit reporting agencies).
    - enneff 13y ago
      The quoted text includes "In an incident this spring..." I mentioned the article's year of publication to provide a chronological reference point for the quote.

adrusi 13y ago

In what way do you find it barely usable? I've used it for about a year and I find the results to be great. I don't think there's been a time when I couldn't find the result I wanted with ddg but could with google.

tosseraccount 13y ago
Good question. Google is better at guessing your focus. I'm not sure how they do it. Sometimes duckduck is pretty lost and scattershot. I have the opportunity of rephrasing the query or just hitting !g . If I don't mind google tracking the query, then I'll do a !g and often what I want is in the top 3. Sometimes, I don't want google tracking me (e.g. to check out a health issue) , then I'll work out a better query on duck duck.
- LordIllidan 13y ago
  Perhaps Google is better at guessing your focus precisely because they are tracking you?
  - shubb 13y ago
    The queries I find myself switching to Google for are: * When I want a local result (i.e. I'm googling for business cards, and I want a UK based company that will sell them to me). This is because DuckDuckGo doesn't use your location (by default). * When I am searching for a word that means something different to me than for the general population. For instance when I search for Python I don't want to see snakes. Google does this by tracking the results you click and forming a profile of you. I guess the DuckDuckGo way is to search these by !uk and !programming, but that is a whole extra word to type. It would be nice if it let you list your interests in its settings page, creating your own filter bubble.
    - ithkuil 13y ago
      I wonder if this could be solved by creating fake personas, like "computer geek", or "professional programmer". You opt into one or few of this personae and each query sent to a search engine would track this persona. The key is that these categories should be few and predefined (i.e. offered by the search engine) so that they cannot be used to track individual users.

rjzzleep 13y ago

+1 i've started using it as my main engine a while back but i absolutely have to go back to google fairly often. i'm using pentadactyl so i never noticed the !g !gi etc. commands. thanks!

tosseraccount 13y ago
By the way ... for anybody interested in !g and !b it's literally "!g" or "!b" in the actual query. Use spaces on both sides if you need to separate it. Easiest thing is just append it to your query you typed in. It works in the duckduck default search on your browser, too. It is not !g typed when you are not focused on the query box.

hootener 13y ago

Or there's always the best of both worlds: http://www.duckduckgoog.com/ http://www.duckduckgoog.com/

therealmarv 13y ago
I also tried to use duckduckgoog some time. The biggest difference is speed. And this is also my main concern with duckduckgo. I'm faster with Google and auto suggestion and the loading of search result is also faster.
Zarel 13y ago
I'm confused. What does it do? "Searches Google and !bangs DuckDuckGo." What does this mean? It's the equivalent of a DDG !g search? Isn't that exactly the same as just searching Google?

jmsduran 13y ago

I applaud what DDG is doing. I've been using it as my default search engine for roughly 2 years. Yes, there are some areas for improvement, especially when it comes to complex technical queries. But for the majority of everyday things, DDG is excellent, and returns less advertisement bloat within its results than Google/Bing. Plus ducks are my favorite animal, so launching DDG as I begin the work day is a joy!

TallGuyShort 13y ago
>> Plus ducks are my favorite animal The "I'm feeling ducky" feature never fails to illicit a smile from me.
- chris_mahan 13y ago
  elicit. (Why correct him? Because I care.)
  - TallGuyShort 13y ago
    Oh my, that is quite a difference in meaning. Thank you!
    - dredmorbius 13y ago
      Kinky is feathers. Illicit is using the whole duck ;-)
  - desouzt 13y ago
    Why correct him?
    - ithkuil 13y ago
      OP's motivations might be different, but a non native english speaker might find that this kind of short, unoffensive and straight to the point corrections could be very useful indeed.

unicornporn 13y ago

Barely usable, yes I agree. So use Startpage.com. They also say they don't spy on you. It works just as good as Google, because it uses Google (see it as a proxy). DDG is especially terrible if you are used localized versions of Google. I was used to "Swedish Google", and using a localized (Swedish) DDG was totally unusable. And so I found Startpage. Works better than the real deal for me. There are a few differences though. A search operator like site: is named host: as an example.

MisterWebz 13y ago
How come Startpage always shows me local results?
- cpeterso 13y ago
  They could use GeoIP targeting without tracking users with cookies.
rjzzleep 13y ago
why don't inurl: site: etc. work properly in startpage.com anyway?
- greglindahl 13y ago
  Scrapers use inurl: and site: a lot; humans, not so much.
dredmorbius 13y ago
!sp == StartPage. That's usually my first fallback before going !g

rakoo 13y ago

> but they don't spy on you How can you be so sure of that ? A few months ago, pretty much anyone would say "but the NSA don't spy on you". From a paranoid (ie security) point of view, DDG is not better than Google et al. Now, I do believe they are more respective of everyone's privacy, but there's absolutely nothing more than words to back this.

Munksgaard 13y ago
I don't think anyone with just a tiny bit of knowledge of NSA would have said that. After all, the Utah data center was public knowledge. What surprised everyone was the extent of their spying.

wslh 13y ago

Google supports AND, OR, NOT and NEAR. There is an AROUND operator that is similar to NEAR. I think the way DDG can gain more traction is motivating top sites to enhance their local search pagerank. It's incredible how Google search restricted to Stack Overflow works better than the Stack Overflow local search engine. I wrote a rant about this at Challenging Google’s Search Engine [1]. [1] http://blog.databigbang.com/letters-from-the-future-challenging-googles-search-engine/ http://blog.databigbang.com/letters-from-the-future-challeng...

lostlogin 13y ago
If double up votes were possible... This isn't uncommon though. Try search "yllow submarine" on Spotify. Is there any other thing this could refer to? Not only do they not have the Beatles, but the search is awful. Nearly as awful as Apple mail. I suspect the real problem isn't that others are bad - Google has spoilt us with how good it is.
- motdiem 13y ago
  It's even more the case for local searches. Google routinely finds badly misspelled locations (from I gather interpolating with my location?) - for these kinds of searches, I don't think any of the alternatives comes close.
dclara 13y ago
It's interesting that you are talking about "two-tiered search would decentralize efforts to improve algorithms". But you mentioned that "this solution does not need to be distributed: sites can share their local indexes and ranking algorithms with the routing search engine." Can you elaborate a little bit about why it's not a distributed solution if sites share their local indexes with the routing search engine?
- wslh 13y ago
  Can you elaborate a little bit about why it's not a distributed solution if sites share their local indexes with the routing search engine? Yes, sure. I use the concept of distribution in the sense of separating a process within different entities (search router and local searches). In the distributed case the "search router" queries other sites to determine the best results. For example, searching for code samples involved querying Stack Overflow, Code Project, Forums, etc. This approach is clearly expensive: you rely on the other sites speed, web service availability, etc. The non distributed approach is just receiving their algorithms and data and processing everything in the router search engine. Obviously this solution can be implemented in a distributed way inside the search engine but it is not distributed in the sense of distributing the process within different entities. In the two cases you are distributing efforts, one of the key goals of this approach because it is really difficult to compete with Google. Google "knows" how to give good results in diverse areas while in the proposed attack vector you rely on others for part of this optimization. A movie site should know how to give good results about movies while a site related to books knows about books. It's important to note that the vast majority of search results ends in relatively few sites, so if the top visited sites implement this approach Google search market share can be challenged. Obviously we don't really know if this approach will work in practice until we see it.

laureny 13y ago

> Duck duck is barely usable ... but they don't spy on you. 1. You don't know that. 2. No search engine ever spied on you when they started.

rjzzleep 13y ago
absolutely true, but basically it just means, we need to make it easy to build search engine infrastructure
sdegutis 13y ago
I wonder if it's possible to make a search engine that people can verify is not spying on them. One where the source is truly open source. Not just on github, but where anyone who wants to can ssh into the server and have full read-only access to the whole system to verify that the code they see is really what's running. Sure, there'd be some security things to work out to make it balance how easy it'd be to hack it, but maybe it's doable.
- timmclean 13y ago
  See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homomorphic_encryption https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homomorphic_encryption
- jarofgreen 13y ago
  If I can SSH in and have full read only access on the server what's to stop me seeing what other users are doing, thus ending user privacy?
- dandelion_lover 13y ago
  I am really surprised people on HN do not know about YaCy [1]. It's p2p opensource and free search engine. So it is verifiable. [1]. yacy.net
a1a 13y ago
1. I guess nothing is certain - but even if they are a complete hoax they still can't correlate searches with my other data (mobile, mail, documents, http header data from javascript api calls on basically every site I visit, ....). This correlation is something other search engines explicitly state that they will do. 2. You don't know that.

quadrangle 13y ago

I don't know what the hell you mean, "barely usable". I basically just use it and I search for things and find things, there's nothing "barely" about it's usability. Maybe I don't know what I'm missing, but I've never experienced search as though it magically reads my mind.

josteink 13y ago

Duck duck is barely usable On the contrary, I find Google barely usable these days, with everything covered in layers and layers of horrible bloat, random UX mess of the week and constant pestering about G+. DDG is nice and clean, has features Google is (still) lacking and just gets me the results. I may resort to other search-engines (like Google) once a week or so, but at this point, there's no way I'm going back to having Google as default. That's just not worth it.

SomeCallMeTim 13y ago
I've been using DDG as my primary search from desktop for several years now, and I find its results to be equivalent to or better than Google's most of the time. When I can't find something, I'll try a !g, but only rarely does that help any more.
- bhrgunatha 13y ago
  I agree completely. In fact I'll also say that when I first switched I used the !g pretty often - maybe even as much as 20%-30%. These days I rarely use !g - the results have improved considerably and the bang searches are a very clever way of not requiring me to change search engine to search another site specifically.
- Derbasti 13y ago
  I totally agree. In the beginning, I was !g a lot. These days, I mostly !g for more natural language kind of questions. For more technical searches, Google has become next to useless for me. "lupdate.exe not working Qt" transforms to "did you mean 'Update not working'?" (lupdate.exe is part of the Qt translation toolchain and Windows forces it to run as admin only because there is "update" in its file name. The Google 'correction' of that is perfectly useless).
  - protomyth 13y ago
    The second huge fail of google with technical queries is when it starts substituting synonyms for words in your query the make the search useless. It makes you not want to name commands in a common sense style.

teaneedz 13y ago

It replaced Google search for me. I like adding !sp whenever I feel like getting Googly ;)

edj 13y ago

Duck duck is barely usable ... but they don't spy on you. The !g and !b commands make it my first choice. I keep leaving DDG for the not-always-super-relevant results, and I keep coming back for the privacy, clean interface, and !bang syntax. I love that using it means my searches are private by default. But the real killer feature is !bang. I find that it's faster to do a Google image search using DDG with "!gi" than to search in Google and then move my hand to the mouse and click "Images".

deleted 13y ago
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joesb 13y ago
Why do people talk about this !bang syntax so much? I can do the same thing with search provider shortcut in my browser. For example, after setting up once, I can press "Ctrl+L" then type "gi" then "Tab" and start typing my search keyword. I don't even have to first go to Google or DDG.
- ngpio 13y ago
  Because setting up a shortcut once for many hundreds[1] of sites is more demanding work than typing ! each time. There's a bang for almost every site I frequent, and when a site changes its domain or search URI the bang is updated to reflect it almost immediately with no work on my end. After a few weeks of acquainting myself with the bang system, I started to see web search from a completely different perspective. I think of a search engine now as less of an "everything index" and more of an "index of contextual searches". My mind, instead of just thinking "I'll google it", thinks "I'll choose a context for it". Google is like a system-wide grep whose output is altered by advertising, and DDG w/ bangs is like a vast collection of commands piped into a grep. [1] https://duckduckgo.com/bang.html https://duckduckgo.com/bang.html

treenyc 13y ago

toseraccount, I know what you mean by 'barely usable'. I often find it hard to find programming related (as well as other things) on DDG. However, I do mostly use DDG. That shall give you some idea on how important privacy is to some people. They would rather have what you consider 'barely usable' results than compromise privacy. It is not so much that I am not willing to share stuff (even with the government). I used to run a small SaaS for a specific legal industry, and I was subpoenas by the attorney general's office. So I am well aware of the process and I do think in some cases, government do need access to our data to ensure security. The difference is to ask for permission (court order and transparent due procedure) and have transparency. Maybe the big difference is the exercise of Power instead of Force. And power is a word with many means, so to be rigorous, this is what I meant by power: "Power means pretty much the same thing as freedom. Power is a thing that everybody wants the most they can possibly have of. That is, skiing is power, sex appeal is power, the ability to make yourself heard by your congressman is power. Anything that comes out of you and goes out into the world is power and in addition to that, the ablity to be open, to appreciate, to receive love, to respond to others, to listen to music, to understand literature, all of that is power. By "power" I mean human faculties exercised to the largest possible degree. So, in a way, in a large sense, by power I mean individual intelligence. Now when you reach out to another person through the energy or creativity that is in you and that other person responds, you are exercising power. When you make somebody else do something against their will, to me that is not power at all, that is force, and force to me is the negation of power." - Charles Reich And Free Software (Free as in freedom) is a good real world exercise in power.