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Safari to Include DuckDuckGo as a Built-In Search Option
- tomrod 12y agoHow is duckduckgo's search quality nowadays?
- mey 12y agoI've switched over to it for 90% of requests. The only thing I find really fails are very precise technical questions. Edit: Let me rephrase, it's my default search engine. If the result isn't great, I may rerun it with !g which will then forward my request on to google. Makes it really easy to migrated while still being able to fall back when needed.
- gcb0 12y agoI have one default search engine on each computer/device... drives me crazy most of the time. Yeah, google is still the best for SOME technical term. if it has too much symbols, yahoo/bing/duck are better.... but only so slightly. the scary part is that even google still being the best, technical terms results are becoming awful everywhere.
- logn 12y agoI agree with this. For programming issues I normally use !g to search Google. I suspect Google is better for programming queries because they did a lot of indexing of newsgroups, blogs, and StackOverflow. But for everyday queries, DDG works fine (and I prefer it to Google as I don't usually want to see Google Reviews/Maps/Plus links in the top 50% of the screen area... and I don't need to see results for alternate queries on the bottom 50%).
- dredmorbius 12y agoFor technical questions, my first go-to is generally StackExchange (!so) or a site-specific search (w3.org is great for specific CSS spec queries which I seem to have been doing a lot lately) via DDG bang syntax. Google's my third choice.
- jlarocco 12y agoAgreed, but only for "real" questions. Meaning, if I just need to RTFM, DDG finds it for me. If I search for "Pymongo find function" it will return the documentation I want. If I'm having a problem or debugging something not explained in the manual, there's a slight chance I'll have to use !g and use Google. If I search for "Pymongo find function not returning all results while sorting" I might need Google. The number of searches where I've had to use Google has decreased significantly in the last year.
- nfriedly 12y agoI'm in about the same boat as mey. It's my default search engine, and I rarely fall back to google. On the occasion when I do see oddball results, I report them and it gets straightened out promptly. (It's kind of awesome to be able to report a spam site, get a human response, and have the site removed within a day or two. I'm sure it won't be that way forever, but their results also keep getting better and better.)
- mey 12y agoI did not know you could do that, how is reporting done?
- dredmorbius 12y agoThrough the feedback link, you can report bad relevancy. It's buried a bit, I suspect on purpose. https://duck.co/help/results/spam https://duck.co/help/results/spam
- nfriedly 12y agoYes, what dredmorbius said. There's also https://duckduckgo.com/feedback https://duckduckgo.com/feedback which lets you report/request all kinds of stuff. (It's listed as "Feedback" in the menu at the top-right of the results page.) Initially it was just "send Gabriel an email", which he still graciously responds to, but I've been trying to do things the "right" way more recently because I'm sure he gets a lot of email :)
- jmgrosen 12y agoIt's my default search engine... but I find myself going to Google for about 75% of searches -- at least for my searches, they just aren't good enough yet.
- dredmorbius 12y agoI've been using it exclusively as my primary search for a year now, and it's as good as or better than Google for nearly all purposes. You can re-run any search on google with the "!g" bang notation (or "!sp" for a proxied StartPage search, which is nearly the same). The recent UI changes have been nice (my biggest observation was that my local CSS changes no longer actually change anything about the site, which is to say, my annoyances have all been addressed). The primary lacking features are date-bounded search (I still use Google for this), and certain specialized searches (e.g., Google Books, Google Scholar, Google News), though DDG have been expanding their tools, and I'm increasingly using site-specific searches (e.g., reddit, HN, StackExchange, and certain blogs) rather than general Web searches.
- sleepyhead 12y agoLove the bang keywords. Using !g less and less now, especially after the upgrade last week.
- arrrg 12y agoNice, but they should open up everything more and let people install any search engine. Apple did open up quite a bit today (in terms of letting others access their platform in places where Apple previously was the sole decider), so it’s not unlikely to eventually happen.
- gcb0 12y agoApple is not about giving the user control. it is about damaging competitors. My guess is that they were testing a new search engine, and since they gave that up/wasn't done in time/turned too expensive, they just put duck duck there. or maybe they didn't even tried... anway, that does not matter. Since the point was not to have a search engine, it was to not have google by default until google pay it up to be there. ...the fact that you hope apple will relinquish control of any aspect of your mac/ios usage is cute.
- hcarvalhoalves 12y agoYou can set the search provider on current Safari, so I'm guessing there'll be a way to install a system-wide search provider. That would be very handy and I can see Spotlight being a lot more powerful if that's possible (integrating with specialized fact DBs, SaaS, etc.).
- Brakenshire 12y agoBe interesting to see whether it has any effect on the numbers: https://duckduckgo.com/traffic.html https://duckduckgo.com/traffic.html
- stardotstar 12y agoWow! Look at the surge in the traffic after "Surveillance revelations". Future look very optimistic for DDG.
- Holbein 12y agoSearch engine placement is big business - doesn't Firefox make millions each year with Google referrals? Apple did not add ddg in the past few years despite people asking them to, which might indicate that Apple, too, asks for money for these referrals. So this begs the question - how how much did ddg have to pay?
- sheetjs 12y ago> doesn't Firefox make millions each year with Google referrals? Mozilla grossed 311M for FY2012, almost all of which came from their deal with google: https://static.mozilla.com/moco/en-US/pdf/Mozilla_Audited_Financials_2012.pdf https://static.mozilla.com/moco/en-US/pdf/Mozilla_Audited_Fi...
- devNoise 12y agoI wonder if they had to pay or if Apple decided to include of free in our post Snowden era. A couple of years ago, I was at a ddg hackathon when inclusion came up. I believe they mentioned that it was on the order of a 7 digit number to be include in the list of search engine. Regardless of how much it was, they couldn't justify spending that much money on being include in Apple devices.
- ChrisLTD 12y agoAwesome. I've been using a router hack* to accomplish this on iOS, but it'll be nice to have DuckDuckGo when I'm not on my home network. * http://chrisltd.com/blog/2013/04/duck-duck-go-iphone-ipad/ http://chrisltd.com/blog/2013/04/duck-duck-go-iphone-ipad/
- JohnTHaller 12y agoWait, iOS won't let you customize your search engine beyond the 3 presets?!? Just... wow.
- burkaman 12y agoAndroid doesn't either, it gives you the same three presets.
- admax88q 12y agoOf course on Android you can always just install any app you want, such as firefox, and rock and roll. Fuck Apple deciding what I can and can not run on my phone.
- giovannibajo1 12y agoFWIW you can install alternative browsers with alternative search engines in iOS as well. I regularly use a Tor browser, for instance. The only thing that's fixed is the Webkit engine, but that's immaterial to this discussion.
- gaelian 12y agoJust curious, which Tor browser do you use for iOS?
- giovannibajo1 12y agoOnion Browser, it's open source: https://github.com/mtigas/iOS-OnionBrowser https://github.com/mtigas/iOS-OnionBrowser
- Holbein 12y agoFrom the article: "Private Browsing mode — which doesn’t save your browsing history" I wonder whether iCloud tabs still work in private browsing mode. In other words, do Apple and others still get to see all your supposedly "private" URLs?
- k-mcgrady 12y agoJust set it as my default on iOS and searched for osx 10.10 Top part of the screen shows a Wikipedia result and the remainder shows an ad. Switching back to google. If they can make that mobile UI much better I'll make it my default but I've essentially done a search and saw no results without having to scroll.
- r00fus 12y agoI presume you're on iOS8 beta? Presumably when iOS8 goes gold in the fall, the DDG landing page for mobile users will be greatly improved. This is a great partnership, as both companies, unlike Google, seem to see privacy as a major feature.
- k-mcgrady 12y agoI don't see why their mobile page should be different when iOS 8 is reelased. It's the same problem I have with their desktop site actually. The quick answer box at the top of search results that thinks it knows what I want takes up way too much space.
- r00fus 12y agoBecause a) they want to take the time to do it right and b) the floodgates for new iOS users (the majority non-betas) will open then. Don't expect a beta experience to be awesome when DDG has months to get it right for the real release date.
- k-mcgrady 12y agoI don't see why their mobile page should be different when iOS 8 is reelased. It's the same problem I have with their desktop site actually. The quick answer box at the top of search results that thinks it knows what I want takes up way too much space.
- moyaRD 12y agoFor months i have been in transition to DuckDuckGo. The only missing bit was native search in safari for iOS and OSX. This definitely seal the deal. And is good for all the industry that a viable second choice exist to bring balance to the force , and bring humility to google monopoly in search.
- pervycreeper 12y agoMeanwhile, 10.10 will track more keystrokes and gather more personal data than ever. Doesn't have anything to do with privacy. More to do with being at war with Google.
- r00fus 12y agoCan you give me more specifics as to what's being captured?
- kevinh 12y agoTyping in the search field on iOS 8 will fetch web results as well, which means some web server is being hit with what you're typing. Spotlight on Yosemite is getting a similar feature as well.
- D4AHNGM 12y agoI'd suspect that at least on Yosemite you'll be able to disable the web search. You can already choose to chop out huge sections of Spotlight's optional functionality on Mavericks, so I don't see why that'd change come Yosemite.
- DigitalSea 12y agoThis is fantastic news for DuckDuckGo and for Apple. A nice solid search engine coupled with a nice new redesign. If I were Google I would be a little bit worried DuckDuckGo are steadily stealing users. They converted me.
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- zmmmmm 12y agoIs Google still the default?
- sudont 12y agoYes, via a new install to an iPad.
- kome 12y agoSo, yandex basically.
- mmahemoff 12y agoI thought something might be up when I saw Gabriel's unassuming tweet. https://twitter.com/yegg/status/473545653667102721 https://twitter.com/yegg/status/473545653667102721 Personally I'm hoping DDG will at some point pick up the slack from Google dropping the Discussions tab (forum search). Evidently it wasn't so popular, but I found it hugely useful for researching product decisions and haven't found a good alternative. Seems like it could be a good niche to cover.
- silverbax88 12y agoAgreed on this. I think the quality of Google searches has gone down dramatically for this type of search, because forum posts are often where people have questions answered. It's not just product research; programming, homework questions, general subject matter, all are often answered best in forum posts.
- mmahemoff 12y agoCould be. I'm not really sure if the quality of search went down, it seems to be a lot better imo after Panda+Penguin purged a lot of ridiculously spammy pages; but I still want a way to just search discussions.
- dredmorbius 12y agoThis makes perfect sense in light of the growing relationship status of Apple and Google as major competitors in devices space (Android and iOS), and as such, it's a brilliant strategic move on Apple's part. DDG have made the first real inroads in search in over a decade, and they've done so quietly. I can think of a number of widely touted alternatives which utterly failed to do so: Cuil, Bing, Blekko, A9, Teoma, and more (a DDG search shows a bunch of skeletons: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22new+search+engine%22+challenge+google https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22new+search+engine%22+challenge+...). None has had the traction DDG seems to have garnered. I see a confluence of a number of things: • Snowden. People are now privacy conscious, and aware of the tremendous amount of information disclosed in Web searches. DDG's huge traffic spike following the Snowden disclosures is testimony to this: https://duckduckgo.com/traffic.html https://duckduckgo.com/traffic.html • Google is the one to beat. Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Rackspace, and others see Google as their primary competition. This creates an alignment of interests among them. • Google has shown vulnerabilities. Failures to execute on a string of social efforts, most recently G+, as well as an increasing sense of distraction, as well as possible signs of weakness in its core search business, suggest a vulnerable underside to Google. DDG isn't big enough to cause real damage yet, but it can certainly get Google's attention. • Democratization of search. Was a time when massive datacenter investments were necessary for search. That's both no longer the case, and DC infrastructure's getting cheaper, both of which cut away at Google's core competency and advantage. • Google's lost its favored status among the technorati. While it's not clear who's won that crown, there's an increasing strong sense among many that Google have failed at their "don't be evil" pledge, have disappointed users, and simply don't have the chops they once demonstrated. • Specialized search is making inroads. OpenStreetMap is taking on geosearch, Wolfram+Alpha and Knoema specialized data search, Wikipedia is a basic more-or-less-trusted repository of actual information (as opposed to random Web sites), Amazon is a product and bibliographic research library. There are places to go for information which, if you've got a specific interest, are better than Google, and they're carving off bits of the search market. So, yes, for the first time in 15 years, search looks like it may be ripe for a bit of disruption. Don't get me wrong: Google does some things amazingly well. Date-bounded Web searches still draw me back (I did some here to turn up a few of the more obscure search contenders from the early 2000s), the Google Books Ngram viewer is fucking awesome, Google Trends isn't bad, and a few other elements. Reliability of Google services is amazing. But there are chinks in the armor.
- jlarocco 12y agoWell, at least I like one thing Apple's doing.
- MiguelHudnandez 12y agoThe enemy of your enemy is your friend, indeed!
- 100rsa 12y agoOne reason I still not use DDG is no support for language specific search (settings not work). It mixed many similar language in the search result, for example, english and spanish.
- stickhandle 12y agoI really really want to like ddg, but I can't seem to get away from a need to !g. Further, though its obviously a loss in privacy, the quality in search results returning from a "context aware" google is just leaps better. Its a trade-off I guess. I know HN is very much in support of the primacy of privacy ... but there is no doubt search and ad relevancy goes down in anonymity.
- bjterry 12y agoI've been using DDG for quite a while now, and I've noticed in the last few weeks or months that their search results have gotten much better. Before I'd have to use !g on most of my queries, but now it's much more of a rarity.
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