Let's start using DuckDuckGo more often

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19947129

by rms_returns • 7 years ago

208 162 7 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

I'd made a similarly titled post[1] a couple years back and I seriously don't know what kind of usage DuckDuckGo has right now. But I'd like to think that it is extensively used, at least in the developer community. And I strongly believe that people should start degoogling their lives at least slowly and gradually if its not possible to do it at once. If more people start using DDG, the search engine will improve and that least that one aspect of degoogling could be achieved to a certain extent.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13284917

cvnyw2• 7 years ago

I've been using it for a few months and I find myself using !g for like 4 out of 5 requests. Also image search is VERY slow, images load like in a slideshow. I'll end up going back to Google.

I like the idea of DDG and I have a strong dislike for Google but DDG is simply not there yet. Having said that it's better than it was five years ago, when it was simply insufferable. So, maybe in five years? ;)

ravenstine3• 7 years ago

Weird, I haven't found their image search slow. I just wish I could search by usage rights.

Also, I suggest using !s instead of !g so that you still get Google results without actually being redirected to Google.

antidaily• 7 years ago

Same. Its fine.

elandrum• 7 years ago

That’s odd, that’s not been my experience at all. I’ve been using DDG exclusively for probably 4 years now. I rarely use !g.

pseudoramble• 7 years ago

In my experience, I've been using it for a few years now and I've maybe used !g 4 or 5 times total in the past couple of years. I find the performance of image searches just fine myself. So it's always fascinating to see that people report such different experiences with DDG.

It's hard to know for sure what's happening though. Maybe my searches are just very simple and don't need anything complex? Maybe I'm luckier and always have fast internet connections? Maybe it's some other factor I'm not thinking of? Who knows without trying to come up with a more systematic way to compare things.

ravenstine3• 7 years ago

I alsmost never need !s or !g, and I tend to find what I'm looking for. Most of my searches tend to be related to coding, so it just could be that DDG is particularly good at those queries, but I still wonder what exactly it is that people are finding on Google that isn't on DDG. And I used to be one of those people who thought DDG was lousy.

cvnyw2• 7 years ago

It's pretty easy to replicate my problems with image search and I suspect what the problem might be.

They have a proxy (just like google) so they don't directly load the images you search for, they make their servers load the images and then send you a proxified version. If you search for obscure terms, they won't have a cached version available so they will have to request it from the actual server, and that makes all images take a while to load. On the other hand Google always keeps the images cached so they can serve them instantly.

lawl• 7 years ago

When as that? Because I had the same experience of constantly using !g a few years ago. Decided to try ddg again around 6 months ago and it's gotten a lot better imo. Rarely use !g anymore and kept it as my default engine since.

Sometimes ddg results are even straight up better. Most of the time I use !g is when looking up location sensitive stuff, e.g. non-english local government stuff etc.

takeda5• 7 years ago

I had similar experience, at least in my case, I think it is just due to being used to Google. Most of the time I issue !g (when DDG results aren't that good) Google also gives not much better ones.

eettu• 7 years ago

https://duckduckgo.com/bang If you don’t know what !g is

StevePerkins6• 7 years ago

I'm the other way around, I only have to use !g for 1 out of 5 searches (Google still does a lot better when searching technical topics).

Although I DO get frustrated by DDG's image search. Google's actually takes you to the actual image URL, so it's easier to get a link for sharing. DDG shows all images through their weird proxy thing, such that you can't easily get the raw URL.

chongli2• 7 years ago

To get the raw URL in DDG image search, click on the image and then click "View File". This sends you directly to the image itself.

lucb1e14• 7 years ago

Try Bing for images. Again not as good as Google, but a whole lot better than DDG -- in terms of search results, that is. In terms of speed, I think Bing and Google images are on par.

stjohnswarts5• 7 years ago

Not sure, no problem here, images load almost instantly. Searches are find, maybe a few times a week I use !g because ddg didn't find what I was looking for

octosphere4• 7 years ago

I like DuckDuckGo if it wasn't for their data centers being in the U.S. My problem lies in the fact that they could have an intelligence agency like the NSA in their data centers and they could attribute specific queries to specific users by looking at the originating IP. I'm not even sure they have a canary[0] [1] implemented. This is why combining DDG with an anonymous mixer network like Tor is useful (or even a VPN). You're probably wondering why my threat model includes the likes of the NSA. Well I just don't want spying, simple as that.

Sure, Tor might seem like overkill, but over time all those single, isolated queries start to build an elaborate dossier on you and the contents of your mind.

[0] https://duck.co/forum/thread/15228/would-you-adopt-a-canary

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warrant_canary

skellera• 7 years ago

What search engine do you use then?

octosphere4• 7 years ago

I use a few. Putting all my eggs in one basket is a bad idea in general. If you must know, I do use DDG, but strictly with Tor and sometimes a VPN. In no order:

https://eu.startpage.com

https://www.searx.me/

https://www.ecosia.org/

https://millionshort.com/

https://www.mojeek.com/

https://www.qwant.com

(All used with Tor and sometimes a VPN)

beefield• 7 years ago

I like qwant.com. No affiliation.

maverickmax90• 7 years ago

startpage.com

Way better in search and privacy

detaro2• 7 years ago

In what way is it better in privacy?

octosphere4• 7 years ago

https://www.startpage.com/en/search/privacy-policy.html

lunarplague• 7 years ago

startpage always pays google for search results, which is way better than me paying google for search results. I've basically set startpage for all my browsers for years, and it's always been a good time.

ravenstine3• 7 years ago

Does anyone know how to donate to DDG? It doesn't say on their site, but I want to contribute to their success.

StevePerkins6• 7 years ago

Just disable your ad blocker for their site. They're not a philanthropy, they have a profitable ad-based business model.

chongli2• 7 years ago

Plenty of people (particularly here on HN) consider many or even all forms of advertising to be unethical. I don't think it's fair to ask someone to disable their ad blocker. For someone who never clicks on ads, the revenue generated by disabling is negligible anyway.

DougN7• 7 years ago

They use Bing ads. It’s really unfortunate - I’d love to help them and advertise with them, but 99% of my ads will show on Bing and its other properties, which is not what I want to support.

rfugger• 7 years ago

I'm happy to pay. I'm not happy to see ads.

jeromegv• 7 years ago

Started last week. So far so good.

benbristow2• 7 years ago

The thing with Google is that, like it or not, their analytics and their knowledge of you as an individual helps produce better search results for you. Google will always be the better search engine.

That being said DuckDuckGo is definitely getting much better nowadays. Still end up going back to Google after a few days though.

lucb1e14• 7 years ago

You don't have to use either exclusively. Just pick the one you think is best as your default search engine, and for anything that this 'best' one (by whatever standard) cannot handle, you can still fall back to the other.

For example, DDG is really good at documentation lookups like Java or Python docs. Google is much better at complicated queries (I always struggle for an example, had one recently where DDG was just lost and Google gave the perfect top result, and remember thinking "I should write this down" but I don't think I did...), so I use DDG by default and if I can't find what I'm looking for, I fall back to Google. I don't have to fall back for ~90% of my queries, so that's a significant improvement over using Google all the time.

DDG is horrible at images, and Google Images beats Bing Images. But again, 90% of my image queries can be answered by Bing, so in only 10% of the cases I fall back to Google for images.

benbristow2• 7 years ago

For example, DDG is really good at documentation lookups like Java or Python docs

I've kind of found the opposite.

Because Google knows I'm a developer when I search for libraries etc. they're usually at the top.

For example, if I search for 'express' (the NodeJS package) on Google their website is at the bottom of the first page (just below my local newspaper's website, Paisley Express).

On DuckDuckGo it's 1 from the bottom of the second page.

Of course just a single example but you can see where I'm coming from.

lettergram• 7 years ago

like it or not, their analytics and their knowledge of you as an individual helps produce better search results for you. Google will always be the better search engine.

I actually disagree. Googles optimizing function is to get you to visit sites with their ads. Because DuckDuckGo doesn’t have an ad network on every website, their optimization function is to get you to come back to search (where their ads are).

I think people have also missed Google slowly manipulating search results to maximize profit. Their motives are not aligned with people looking for information (at least not any more)

robertAngst• 7 years ago

I'm a nerd with pretty mild porn usage and no terrorist habits.

I have 0 reason to not use google. I really don't care if they find out my obsession with electronics and that I have the hots for tall girls.

Out of every company, I'd give Google the nod as most helpful company of my lifetime.

Can someone tell me why I'm wrong?

StevePerkins6• 7 years ago

Because Bing is surprisingly better for porn related searches.

Otherwise... no, I don't think you are. The people who turn out for threads like these are hardly representative. You shouldn't sweat not passing muster with them too much.

matz1• 7 years ago

Nothing wrong with that, if google works for you then just use it.

stjohnswarts5• 7 years ago

Yeah I just tried it again recently and was pretty how much they have improved in the couple of years since I last gave it a shot

lucb1e14• 7 years ago

Going one step further, I removed my websites from the Google index: https://lucb1e.com/?p=post&id=130

If you want to find my stuff, you now have to use DDG or some other search engine. Hopefully we can signal to Google that we are not okay with monopolistic behaviour (that's why I blocked them, not just for being the biggest or monopolist, but for also behaving like it -- see the blog post for details).

appleflaxen2• 7 years ago

that's an awesome idea!

how do you determine which IPs are the google webcrawler, though?

lucb1e14• 7 years ago

I match the user agent string on containing "Google". It seems that Google Chrome only includes "Chrome", so I don't block users this way. Here is an overview of all Google crawlers' user agent strings: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1061943 As you can see, they all include Google (capitalized).

I don't use robots.txt because they say that doesn't stop them from including the site in search results: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6062608 I don't know if returning a HTTP 403 error will, but it seems like it's worth a try.

I also looked into banning IP ranges (that would have been my preferred option), but if I remember correctly they were subject to change and it seems overkill to write a scraper for that page that would then have to generate a config file and reload a service.

luckylion• 7 years ago

No need, you can block them by user agent, they are consistent - or just disallow them in robots.txt.

If you need to make sure it's actually a google bot when a client shows up with the user agent, you can use reverse dns: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/80553

looeee• 7 years ago

I mean, that's great and all. But I actually want people to use my website.

lucb1e14• 7 years ago

So do I, but my livelihood does not depend on it, so I can safely do this and encourage people to use another search engine. Any other search engine. Even if you fall back to Google if you can't find something, at least use another search engine by default. I don't think that's too harsh to ask of a tech audience (which is the audience of my websites).

Of course, if your websites generate income based on people that came from google, I would not expect you to follow suit. As I mentioned in the post, the idea is that there are lots of resources on the web that are not there to turn a profit, but that are still valuable to people. Google is not listening when we use words, so I took action.

citrusui• 7 years ago

From what I recall, Bing also displays AMP pages. Wouldn't you want to block crawls from Bing too?

lucb1e14• 7 years ago

I didn't know that, though Bing is not in enough of a position of power to abuse it. If they suddenly take over the vast majority of search queries from Google, this might become relevant, but that seems unlikely. For now, I'm happy if some competition is reintroduced in the search engine 'market'.

epicide5• 7 years ago

Doesn't this ultimately make the situation worse since now less people will see that page in the first place?

i.e. the only people that will (likely) see it are the ones that are already doing what you want.

lucb1e14• 7 years ago

Would someone who wants to do this use Google? Even if you google for how to block google from your website, you are likely looking to block Google from pages like phpmyadmin, not all of their website. I don't think this blog post would ever be a relevant search result in Google. Maybe if someone saw this comment, tells a friend, and $friend googles it... It just seems like a remote chance.

haunter• 7 years ago

Is the moral basis enough to use an inferior product? So just because Google is "bad" does it make ok to use an inferior product? How does that help me as an end user?

OP's only argument (Google is bad so use DDG) is not really convincing tbh

takeda5• 7 years ago

I guess it depends on someone's morals.

If a company does something you disagree with, but you still support them, because it's inconvenient not to it means you are ok with it.

Sorry for getting politics into it, but I see people complaining about current situation, but also don't want to move their assess to protest, because it is inconvenient to do so. Well duh, if you don't want to put an effort, because it would inconvenience you, then you deserve what you are getting.

stjohnswarts5• 7 years ago

Not inferior. If you don't like it then use google, no one will cry over your decision. Privacy holds a lot of value for a lot of people, if it doesn't for you then that's your choice and no one is telling you to start taking it seriously, that is a personal issue, tbh

topherPedersen• 7 years ago

I launched BuckBuckMoose.org recently so I could start using DuckDuckGo more often. The idea with BuckBuckMoose is that you can search DuckDuckGo without fear of missing out on Google. How it works is you simply enter your search query, and then a two split screen windows pop up with Google search results on the left and DuckDuckGo results on the right. If you want to try it out as your default search engine you can use Tom Schuster's "Add Custom Search Engine" extension for Firefox to add it (BuckBuckMoose) as your default search engine. (I don't actually expect anyone else to use it). Anyway, having used this tool daily for the past few months I feel that I'm somewhat of an expert* on DuckDuckGo's search results. One interesting thing I've noticed is how similar their results are. It's almost as if Bing is trying to mimic Google's results on purpose? It's a little odd. The results are pretty good tho. However, I have noticed that Google is always a little bit faster.

octosphere4• 7 years ago

Hmm, I went to http://buckbuckmoose.org and noticed no TLS. Perhaps it doesn't need crypto because the popups themselves utilize crypto.

mistermann• 7 years ago

If I'm logged into google do I get my customized search results? Would be nice to have a choice on this behavior (actually, would be interesting to have an iframe for each mode to see the difference in results).

imiric• 7 years ago

Have you tried Searx[0]?

It returns results from the major search engines (and can be customized for more) while attempting to maintain privacy as much as possible. I'm not sure how effective it actually is from a privacy standpoint, but being able to see aggregate results in a single, clean UI has been a big productivity boost for me. I've been running a self-hosted instance for a few months now and haven't had major complaints.

[0] https://github.com/asciimoo/searx

viach• 7 years ago

Do you know that DDG is just a sophisticated proxy to another search engine under the hood, which probably has even lower standards for privacy than Google and using DDG you indirectly support it?

StevePerkins6• 7 years ago

Well, yeah... hence the point of a proxy.

FabHK7• 7 years ago

1. Yes, and that proxying provides value (privacy)

2. There's more to it, such as the bangs, keyboard-based result selection, etc.

toncontact2• 7 years ago

Let’s start using DuckDuckGo all the time.

fareesh2• 7 years ago

For the uninitiated, !bang is a pretty great feature:

https://duckduckgo.com/bang

toncontact2• 7 years ago

What are your most used bangs? Mine is !gi.

lucb1e14• 7 years ago

Am I the only one who really doesn't like having to prefix that symbol and never types bangs? I type faster than most other tech people but putting my whole left hand on the left side of the keyboard to press Shift with my pinky and 1 with my ring finger is more trouble than adding a keyword for the search in Firefox (http://kb.mozillazine.org/Using_keyword_searches). Especially because I type the G, Y, and W (google, google-images, youtube, wikipedia... the thing you use this for) with my left hand as well.

Bangs are recommended almost every time ddg comes up, and I see people like my brother using them, so it seems like nobody else minds and the choice of symbol will never change. Am I alone in thinking it's one of the worst possible prefix characters?

grimgrin2• 7 years ago

That’s an odd complaint when I first read it

Maybe it relates to hand pain and stuff

You could use right shift, also, though that’d be tricky for my brain

lelf• 7 years ago

You can surely think of a better choice

,⟨prefix⟩ for example

epicide5• 7 years ago

putting my whole left hand on the left side of the keyboard to press Shift with my pinky and 1 with my ring finger

Try using your right pinky to press shift when typing a bang.

If you want to just use one hand, try holding shift with pinky and hitting 1 with your middle finger. Slightly less stretching.

yubiox• 7 years ago

I hate having to use a prefix at all. I set up my own custom search in chrome that points to my app that does specialized searches based on the first letter and then defaults to a regular DDG query. For example, e foo searches ebay for foo, a foo searches amazon, m 123 main searches maps.

abedef• 7 years ago

I had similar thoughts, and was pleased to find that the `!` prefix allows you to place the bang anywhere in the query so I tend to slip it in at the end (which feels more natural to me).

phatfish• 7 years ago

I have used it as a default for at least 2 years. I'd estimate drop back to Google for 20-25% of specific "subject matter" searches, mostly around technology. Probably a bit less than that for general searches.

Most of the time I run the same search on Google the results are very similar for the top hits. But Google does seem to produce helpful results that are not exactly what I searched for more often.

DDG also skews heavily to US results which is a pain. Any Amazon links are always to .com and not the regional site. Just a general understanding of region specific results seems to be missing, and I end up qualifying searches with the country or town.

bpfrh• 7 years ago

I switched to DDG about half a year ago. What I really like is that for me I can switch location bias on and off. Sometimes I want region specific results, but most of the time not, so I actually get better results on DDG.

weinzierl• 7 years ago

DDG also skews heavily to US results which is a pain.

DDG also skews heavily to US results which is one reason I find DDG useful.

I have been largely using DDG for years. What finally drove me away from Google completely is that you cannot get search results that are untainted by localization anymore. Whenever I search for programming related topics or the subjects typically discussed on HN I always get a some confusing local results no matter what language and region settings I use. https://google.com/ncr which did a good job for years doesn't seem to work anymore.

Really the only reason to refer to Google nowadays is if I deliberately search local places, organizations and businesses - this is where Google is unbeaten in my opinion. Even local news and events isn't usually worth the g! switch. These two might be good in the US but here in Germany all search engines are equally bad at it.

lucb1e14• 7 years ago

DDG skews very heavily towards your country setting indeed, and the default is indeed the USA, but Google is even worse. On DDG the locale selector is a switch displayed on every search results page. For Google, you have to use a VPN for the same effect.

I'm a Dutchman living in Germany speaking English at home and at work, so I switch between languages quite a lot: Dutch when I want to know local things (e.g. European laws, or recipes with ingredients that stores here actually carry), German when I need to know something like filing taxes or when trash is being picked up (I don't speak German yet, so I only do this when necessary), and English for everything else. Trying to do that on Google is nearly impossible. It somewhat picks up on the language of your query (certainly better than DDG picks up on that), but for English queries I'll still get a few German results, even after I click the "Change to English?" prompt (and I have to click every time, since I do not store cookies for Google). Like, thanks for this German forum thread when looking for an error message after I already set it to English... In DDG you can just flip a switch.

FabHK7• 7 years ago

This. At least DDG gives you the option (prominently) to quickly and easily "nationalise" a query, if you want to, and doesn't try to impose its guess on you.

I've often found it annoyingly hard to get Google products back to a language I understand while traveling (no, the "append `&hl=en` to the URL" trick doesn't always work...)

utopcell3• 7 years ago

The problem with falling back only 20% to 25% of the time is that you don't know what you've missed. By going to Google you already realize it is a better engine. What is the tangible gain of this self-sabotaging ?

reitanqild2• 7 years ago

What is the tangible gain of this self-sabotaging ?

Is it self sabotaging to not drive a Mercedes (or Audi or Tesla or what you think is best).

Or is it a choice you made to go down a notch in quality to gain something else?

Edit: besides I originally moved because I was really annoyed that Google couldn't respect my searches, so I didn't feel I lost much.

Sadly lately DDG has been copying Googles bad habit of fuzzing my searches to death.

neltnerb• 7 years ago

By a huge margin the most frequent time I drop back to Google is because they have unit conversions built in. So I can send duckduckgo a query like "!g speed of light / 400nm in terahertz" and I get the calculated unit-correct answer immediately.

It's basically replaced my TI-89 for years, I hate doing calculations with units by hand and it's super error prone to not include them in the calculations.

For everything else, duckduckgo has consistently provided a suitable result to answer my question for 90%+ of stuff, no worse than Google. It's super rare for me to check if Google has better results for normal things. I see them as a different ordering rather than superior ordering, so I think of Google more as an alternative than a fallback. They clearly both interpret whether a site is a good match using different algorithms but I don't know I'd say one is strictly superior.

divbzero• 7 years ago

DuckDuckGo does do unit conversions “100 JPY in EUR” [1] and unit-less calculations “2^32 - 1” [2].

[1] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=100+JPY+in+EUR

[2] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=2%5E32-1

But like you I drop back for unit-aware calculations. For those an alternative to Google is Wolfram Alpha “!wa speed of light / 400nm in terahertz” [3] which also allows for symbolic computation “!wa integral of 2x” [4].

[3] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=!wa+speed+of+light+%2F+400nm+in+te...

[4] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=!wa+integral+of+2x

juusto• 7 years ago

So I can send duckduckgo a query like "!g speed of light / 400nm in terahertz" and I get the calculated unit-correct answer immediately.

sheesh...

Made me feel super dumb for googling "10kg in pounds"

majewsky• 7 years ago

So I can send duckduckgo a query like "!g speed of light / 400nm in terahertz" and I get the calculated unit-correct answer immediately.

You can use the command-line program units(1) to do this, available on all Unices. (The preinstalled version on macOS is horribly outdated though, so you might have to look for a newer version in Homebrew.)

  $ units --verbose
  Currency exchange rates from FloatRates (USD base) on 2019-02-20 
  3070 units, 109 prefixes, 109 nonlinear units

  You have: c / 400 nm
  You want: terahertz
        c / 400 nm = 749.4811449999999695137376 terahertz
        c / 400 nm = (1 / 0.001334256380792608193130988) terahertz

The only drawback is that getting up-to-date currency exchange rates requires running an extra program, units_cur.

cfarm• 7 years ago

Is there any quantitative data that you can get to show how "good" the results are vs google?

dontbenebby3• 7 years ago

I'd estimate drop back to Google for 20-25% of specific "subject matter" searches

Why not use the Startpage bang? (!s)

hjek2• 7 years ago

DDG is just a proxy for Bing. Yes, let's degoogle our lives, but why not start using a free/libre metasearch engine (like Searx[0]), while you're at it?

[0] https://asciimoo.github.io/searx/

kitotik2• 7 years ago

Citation needed.

They use Bing Ads, but I’m not sure if their actual search results are just proxied Bing results.

akvadrako3• 7 years ago

They are not exclusively Bing, but mostly. I think Wikipedia has the details.

epicide5• 7 years ago

They seem to even let you turn ads off in the settings.

hjek2• 7 years ago

I think nowadays they mix in some results from other search engines, but it started out as just Bing results. Doesn't change the point about it being just a proprietary interface to other proprietary search engines.

We do use results from Bing. Our zero-click info and some other stuff we do, however, uses results from all over.[0]

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20180910181021/https://duck.co/f...

Normal_gaussian• 7 years ago

I've been using DDG for a year on my desktop, 6 mo. on phone and laptop, 1 mo. at work.

I don't get the people that are claiming worse results from DDG than google - the only thing I can think is that we write our searches differently. But that seems a long shot.

thebigspacefuck• 7 years ago

I've never noticed an issue with it except for things where Google has a specific app for the results, like Google Maps, flights, or reviews. Yelp and Apple Maps are no contest for Google Maps. I can type !g but that's not intuitive to most users. I'm also not sure I get as much benefit since I'm using Google for those things anyway.

cpv• 7 years ago

Aside from DDG, can anyone say anything about other available alternatives, like startpage.com, lite.qwant.com or searchencrypt.com?

linuxlizard• 7 years ago

I switched to DDG a few months ago. I've found it to meet my needs quite well.

omerh• 7 years ago

My default search engine for more than a year. Mobile and desktop, rarely I use !g bang.

Also, dns are 1.1.1.1 / 1.1.0.0 Browsers are ff and safari. Email is ProtonMail.

anoncake2• 7 years ago

The fact that Google tends to ignore half the query does make that choice easier.

akvadrako3• 7 years ago

DDG also ignores half the query, so that's a weird thing to say. At least Google has verbatim mode.

anoncake2• 7 years ago

It does, but boycotting a search engine that returns garbage in favor of another search engine that returns garbage is easier than if the former actually worked properly.

lkj• 7 years ago

- "python remove from list": Google has the Python docs on the first page. DDG does not.

- "site:news.ycombinator.com rms_returns duckduckgo": At first the DDG results looked better but multiple results had no mention of "rms_returns" at all.

- "archlinux dmesg audit": Both nice.

- "lange nacht der museen berlin": Wow, unexpectedly relevant results on DDG, did they improve their local results?

I think I should indeed try again. Previous times it was full of spam for local results.

rms_returns• 7 years ago

For your first query, DDG returns StackOverflow link which I think could be even more important for those searching about how to remove an item from python list.

FabHK7• 7 years ago

Thanks for providing examples, I'm always baffled by those that claim that Google results are so much better.

- "python remove from list": DDG returns the stack overflow answer (mentioning `del`). If I wanted the docs, I'd put in the !py3 bang, which uses the python 3 documentation search.

- "site:news.ycombinator.com rms_returns duckduckgo": yeah, DDG is fuzzing the search terms annoyingly, though I've heard that complaint about google as well? I've had more luck adding a plus, "site:news.ycombinator.com +rms_returns duckduckgo"

stjohnswarts5• 7 years ago

lol well I just search and duckduckgo has almost nothing -but- python (the language) links about removing from a list. Are you sure you didn't make a typo? I suppose it is possible duckduckgo saw your search comment and "fixed" it, but I have my doubts. If you wanted site specific stuff add site:python.org

hi41• 7 years ago

There are some queries that governments would be very interested in knowing who did it. As an example could be the query how to make bomb. Does DuckDuckGo hand over this information to government agencies? Information such as ip address, user if etc?

stjohnswarts5• 7 years ago

they don't keep logs so it's impossible for them to turn over your search history and ip address

tlack• 7 years ago

I've been working on a search engine as well. It's screen shot based. That's how frustrated I am using Goog!

Very buggy and can't take much load, but check it out: https://glorp.co/Search/Hacker%20News

temp• 7 years ago

If it offered results that even began to resemble relevance, I would, but Google's the only one covering my country's market with good results.

0xcde4c3db• 7 years ago

I use DDG regularly. It's fine for casual "was that company's domain a .net or .com" kinds of searches, but it struggles for more specific or obscure content. My biggest problem with it is that the "advanced" operators are extremely buggy. Quotes and minus sometimes seem to be treated more as suggestions than requirements. Other times they return no results when omitting them returns results that should match. Sometimes a term with a minus is instead treated like there's no minus, i.e. ranking results with that word higher. This seems to have gotten worse over time. I don't have examples for this because the behavior is not consistent at all. The "inurl" and "intitle" operators exist but seem to only work for a single word/instance (e.g. "functional intitle:Haskell" works as expected but "functional intitle:Haskell intitle:reactive" returns a bunch of results without either of those words in the title).

WarOnPrivacy• 7 years ago

"My biggest problem with it is that the "advanced" operators are extremely buggy. Quotes and minus sometimes seem to be treated more as suggestions than requirements. Other times they return no results when omitting them returns results that should match. Sometimes a term with a minus is instead treated like there's no minus, i.e. ranking results with that word higher. This seems to have gotten worse over time."

This is the exact explanation of why I moved away from Google.

My searching trends toward very specific terms. >2 years ago, Google started ignoring my boolean operands. It became increasingly difficult to craft a boolean search that Google would actually respect.

I finally bailed 6 months ago. By that time, using a minus sign often returned nothing but the results I was trying to avoid.

owlrobot• 7 years ago

I would but one of the biggest problems I have with it is how I can't look up info. in certain areas like Reddit which I use a lot because it only gives one link even if I include the word "reddit".

epicide5• 7 years ago

I just did a search for "switch reddit" and got at least 5 different subreddits. Maybe I misunderstood what you meant?

Also, while it makes you dependent on the reddit search, there's the "!r" search shortcut.

gpm• 7 years ago

I use "site:reddit.com" all the time on ddg, no problems whatsoever with the results.

akvadrako3• 7 years ago

I can't stand DDG because it doesn't have a verbatim mode; I end up having to wrap every word in quotes.

akarki15• 7 years ago

"You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain"

100% sure any Google alternative is going to be equally "morally bad" if not worse once it gets even 1% of Google's traffic.

spookybones• 7 years ago

I've been using DuckDuckGo for about a year now. I must admit, when doing research, I often g! the search as well to see what I'm missing out on, especially with images. I also don't know why they don't offer a year parameter for the advance time search. It's a pretty good engine nonetheless. I use wikipedia a lot, so w! proves useful.

FabHK7• 7 years ago

And, btw, !wxx, where xx is the two letter ISO language code (!wde, !wes, !wla...).

herodotus• 7 years ago

My biggest beef with ddg is that they do not localize my searches. If I search for "Ferry Schedule" for example, I want the nearest Ferry, not San Francisco. My tech related searches are probably fine on DDG, but my personal life searches (movies, transit, theatre, music, events.....) should all use the best available location information.

truculent• 7 years ago

I used to feel this too, but once I started getting back into the habit of stating the location I'm interested in in the search it became a non-issue

jplayer01• 7 years ago

DDG's search results seem consistently terrible whenever I try to use it for an extended period of time. It's fine for really basic searches, but anything more specialized or niche is terrible (considering my interests, that's all of my searches). I mostly use Startpage nowadays instead, which seems to give me good enough results most of the time.

Timucin2• 7 years ago

I believe having privacy puts the user at disadvantage since DDG doesn't keep your history or track who you are. i.e. Google knows definitely knows I am a developer and shows the tech related things first even when I search for super generic words. That's why people think DDG doesn't do a good job but I think it does if you can be more specific.

Yet I agree it's not better than or equal to Google when it comes to image search. I guess Google is doing a better job on classifying images.

mosselman• 7 years ago

I believe privacy, to me as a user, is a huge advantage. I have been using DuckDuckGo for years now and I when I run into something I can’t find on it, which happens sporadically, I use !s to jump to anonymous google results on start page and it turns out I can’t find it with google either. So either DuckDuckGo has gotten better or I have gotten better at telling it what I want, or both. Either way, I don’t feel that privacy puts me at a disadvantage.

dontbenebby3• 7 years ago

I believe having privacy puts the user at disadvantage since DDG doesn't keep your history or track who you are. i.e. Google knows definitely knows I am a developer and shows the tech related things first

One way to compensate is to be very specific.

Ex: "python programing language string slice" not just "python slice".

Most people have (without consciously thinking about it) learned to treat search terms as labels on a venn diagram with the center being the search results.

To get the most out of DDG search like it's 1999 - be specific and use operators

https://help.duckduckgo.com/results/syntax/

neurobashing• 7 years ago

I've been using DDG exclusively for a few years now. I don't want to get into anything personal, but just what the heck are you searching for, my man?

I hear this complaint from time to time and it just baffles me. I mean one day I forgot how to spell "guillotine", typed in "french beheading thing", and it was on the first page somewhere.

jaggirs• 7 years ago

That query is essentially a textbook example, not hard at all.

everdev• 7 years ago

DDG uses a combination of Bing, Yahoo and Yandex results. From what I can tell they don't index SPA sites very well:

https://www.reddit.com/r/duckduckgo/comments/90ypqz/ddg_craw...

A comment from July 2018:

We get our results from various sources, mostly Bing, Yahoo and Yandex (more info: https://duck.co/help/results/sources ) so if/when they introduce support for SPAs, we should get that too. I don't know what their plans are for this, however.

FabHK7• 7 years ago

These sorts of posts make me feel a bit stupid - I use search engines other than DDG less than once a week. Are my searches so banal and obvious? Do I not encounter tricky technical problems?

However, in the rare cases that I do switch to Startpage (!s), I get "better" results only sometimes. Conversely, on Google I miss the bangs, the capability to scroll through the results using up/down cursor key (and enter to go to a result), the simple way to specify country specific results (I don't care about Moscow, Idaho and its 23000 inhabitants very much, sorry).

gatherhunterer• 7 years ago

As an example of this that can be demonstrated right now (and potential insight into why this is the case), search for "HTTPS tutorial" in DuckDuckGo[1].

This search is expected to return results that provide a tutorial on the implementation or usage of the HTTPS protocol. The first three results seem decent enough, then things get weird. What follows on the first two pages or so are (in order) tutorials for: Ubuntu, PARCC, HTTP (relevant), VPN, React, R (language), Windows 10, Shiny (related to R?), Matplotlib, scratch.mit, AutoHotKey, Quickbooks, Node.js, Java, Python and Kubernetes. As far as returning results for HTTPS tutorials DuckDuckGo has seemingly not done very well. Many of these results are related to software so one would expect these sites to have well-executed SEO. It looks to me like DuckDuckGo has confused the "https://" in the URL for an indicator of content related to HTTPS. But does Google's search algorithm do any better?

Try the same search in Google[2] and it seems to have similar problems: if you go several pages deep the results still do not acknowledge that "https" is missing from the actual content of the result. But the fact that Google is used more frequently has allowed relevant results to bubble up to the top because people click on them. Only one result on the first page does not pertain to HTTP, HTTPS or SSL. Google's advantage seems to disappear after the first page and that makes sense because anything beyond the first page of Google search is rarely clicked.

I don't see DuckDuckGo's problem as being one of how it searches but rather its lack of usage. Maybe if we use it and talk it up to people we can work our way towards a powerful search engine that respects privacy. I could put up my own search engine and try to do better but I would be a decade behind DuckDuckGo's name recognition and that much farther from solving the actual problem.

1. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=https+tutorial&t=ffab&atb=v144-1&i...

2. https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=https+t...

makecheck• 7 years ago

It’s still my default but results are becoming noticeably worse. For instance, I used to be able to search for uncommon names and have them surface; now DDG seems to try really hard to assume I meant some dictionary word (frankly, a search engine clearly ignoring your actual search term becomes useless really quickly).

A critical feature though is that “g!” to Google will never return AMP pages; as long as that’s true I will always start from DDG.

frosted-flakes• 7 years ago

Searching an esoteric error message with lots of search terms never returns anything relevant on DDG, so that's usually when I add the !g.

A critical feature though is that “g!” to Google will never return AMP pages;

Why is that?

FabHK7• 7 years ago

DDG seems to try really hard to assume I meant some dictionary word (frankly, a search engine clearly ignoring your actual search term becomes useless really quickly)

I wonder whether that's due to users using mobile more and more, where typos are much more frequent. It is very annoying indeed, and coaxing it with quotes and/or plusses doesn't seem to yield consistent results.

rmtech• 7 years ago

Anecdotally I tried DuckDuckGo and found it really irritating. It is just a bad search engine and seems to not be very good at finding what you need unless what you need is something very common.

Surprisingly, Google seems to listen to what you actually type.

ddffre• 7 years ago

I started using it recently, but it doesn't feel as comfortable as google for me.

PorterDuff• 7 years ago

I've been using startpage lately and seem to prefer it to DDG, but they both can give inferior search.

At the risk of being repetitious, I think what I'd like is a completely private search engine that uses only a self-curated list of websites. A year or two of googling and using the good results from that would probably fix me for some time. As usual, switch to google if the results aren't good.

Getting rid of the cruft would be a nice thing.

jypepin• 7 years ago

The main thing that made me go back to google is the smart results they offer. I search enough for things like "champions league", "PSG vs Inter", "Warriors", "US Open" expecting the smart result at the top (the little widget that embeds the info I want). Switching to DDG I missed that too much and decided to go back to google.

jraby3• 7 years ago

But you can always just add a !g and still get the smart results.

moneytide1• 7 years ago

The privacy aspect isn't necessarily what draws me in, but rather the simple arrow key search result parsing. Google used to have it but I cannot get it to work anymore. Allows me to very quickly skim many results using arrow down -> enter -> Alt+left -> repeat.

Also the ! command is amazing, no more wasted seconds on the homepages of youtube, amazon, ebay (!yt, !a, !e). Now if only we can add arrow key selection to those sites :)

AriaMinaei• 7 years ago

I've had a very different experience. In most queries, I see better or equal results in DDG compared to Google, especially since DDG digs up less SEO heavy pages. But occasionally for certain queries, Google returns better results then DDG. I use the !g clause perhaps once a day.

utopcell3• 7 years ago

I find it mind-boggling that privacy-conscious folks go for DDG. This is a company that hides in their FAQ that their results are also backed by Yandex [1], and the first thing they ask you to do when you go to their home page is install a Chrome extension, giving them full access to your machine, let alone your searches.

[1] https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/so...

newscracker• 7 years ago

I have degoogled myself heavily and don’t use anything other than Maps once in a while, but DDG is not the best answer as a replacement for people who just want to get things done. Instead of telling people to use DDG alone, it’s better to tell people to use DDG, Searx, and others so that there’s choice and freedom.

I use DDG as my primary search engine, but the quality of search results and the rate of improvement leave much to be desired. So I tend to go to !s (search in startpage) or !g (search on Google). DDG would have to improve by leaps and bounds if it has to be the only search engine that I have to use (or rather, the only search engine who’s direct results I have to use).

Apart from poorer search results, instant answers aren’t great either. DDG has currency conversions as well as stock quotes as instant answers. But both these are so highly hit or miss that I end up going to some other site anyway. For currency conversion, depending on where you put the currency symbol or code (as a prefix or suffix) or if you don’t leave a space between the currency and the numerical value, you may or may not get instant answers. For stock quotes, there are many symbols where, if you just type the symbol, you wouldn’t get instant answers. You’d have to type “<stock symbol> stock”. For some stocks just typing the stock symbol is enough.

sizzle• 7 years ago

DDG loads painfully slow on Android chrome browser compared to Google search for me. Does anyone know if this is deliberate on Google part? Is there a way to speed up DDG search? I'm using a vpn ad blocker, I wonder if it's something in my host file...

HeadsUpHigh• 7 years ago

Works fine on me. Might be device specific.

szatkus• 7 years ago

I use Duck on my desktop for about a year, I think. I noticed that Google got worse during that period to the point I switched default engine on my phone to DDG.

The only drawback I see that DDG sometimes returns strange results for local searches. Even with Poland switch. For example if I typed some restaurant's name I most likely would get some restaurant in Warsaw with the same or similar name.

helph67• 7 years ago

I have been using DDG instead of Google but recently became aware of StartPage https://www.startpage.com/ They state they pay Google for their searches but don't track you.

klingonopera• 7 years ago

I've been on DDG since about November/December last year.

I thought I'd probably change back to the Gman within a few days, but I still use it.

And I only today found out about "!g" (I was literally typing "google.com/search?q=terms" into my address bar everytime).

Averaging about 1 in 5 searches I need to go to Google to get my results. Mostly stuff regarding popularity and currentness, like memes e.g., or (admittingly bad and lazy) natural language queries where Google also has an edge.

tagawa• 7 years ago

I seriously don't know what kind of usage DuckDuckGo has right now

Still growing, thankfully. We make our search traffic public here:

https://duckduckgo.com/traffic

quickthrower2• 7 years ago

I’ve started the process:

* move google analytics to stat counter. Might consider their no cookie option.

* moved email to domain based plus zoho. Keeping web inbox zeroed so I’m not to dependent on web mail or zoho

* did a google takeout so I access to old emails of my acc gets shut down.

* Firefox/safari for home browsers

* duck duck go default SE

* ublock origin

In the other direction:

* using material design for a new side project!

Let's start using DuckDuckGo more often

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