4 Weeks with DuckDuckGo

http://www.mahdiyusuf.com/post/22483556686/four-weeks-with-duckduckgo

by b14ck • 14 years ago

91 121 14 years ago

SeanDav• 14 years ago

I find Googles' invasion of privacy a big turn off. I have long since stopped using Facebook for exactly this reason. I am not quite at the point with Google where I say I don't trust them, unlike Facebook. I regularly check out DuckDuckGo but its search results are not quite there yet for me, in comparison to Google. At this stage the gap is narrowing, both as a result of my increasing concerns over the invasion of privacy from Google and the increasing quality of DuckDuckGo.

It is only a matter of time before I say goodbye to Google forever....

googletron2• 14 years ago

I also found that to be true; but Google results are very much superior in my opinion for time being.

But I am not sure what privacy concerns people have, that being said I am not too worried about that sort of thing.

SpaceDragon• 14 years ago

Google's invasion of privacy will only get worse, as it becomes increasingly difficult to get off their teat.

"Do no evil" will soon become a rediculously bitter irony. Just wait.

Teapot3• 14 years ago

New user motto, 'Use no evil.'

msfd2• 14 years ago

Actually, if you like DuckDuckGo but sometimes want google search results, you can use Startpage, which provide the same results that google, but "privately" (like scroogle).

You just have to add the iBang !sp in DDG.

RegEx• 14 years ago

I use google mostly for "How to do x in y framework", and I can get a good response 75% of the time, and that goes up to about 85% with some better phrasing. I tried ddg for a week, but I used g! so much that I felt a bit silly.

rhizome• 14 years ago

I've found that you can get that extra 10% of relevance by including the year in your query.

loverobots2• 14 years ago

Google is better only with ads turned off. Otherwise DDG and Bing beat Google's ads anytime. Try surfing Google without an ad blocker to see what I'm talking about, they've gone way over what's acceptable.

Either way I go the extra mile to give the underdog a chance.

jarcoal• 14 years ago

Google has gone so far over the line with ads it's ridiculous. I didn't even realize it until recently when I disabled my ad blocker for a moment.

I'm amazed Googlers can look at that every day at work and not feel like their company has lost it's way.

Just checked it now with ad blocker off on my 13" macbook air screen. The organic results are barely above the fold... barely. Offensive.

prezjordan• 14 years ago

Care to post a screenshot? I just disabled AdBlock and looks legitimately the same.

comex• 14 years ago

I don't use AdBlock and I haven't consciously noticed an ad in a long time. In fact, I'm having a hard time finding queries with an ad at the top at all.

bob_kelso2• 14 years ago

I tried DDG for little more than a week about a year a go and it made me realize how much I use the search suggestion feature in Chrome. The lack of that feature using DDG really annoyed me. Often I don't know the exact spelling of the thing I'm looking for or the best way to phrase my question (English being my third language), and the suggestions I get in chrome just by typing a few letters in the address bar is really great. And often times I'm just looking for how to spell a word and with the suggestions I don't even have to leave the page I'm on.

cemerick• 14 years ago

You might like:

http://ddgg.nfriedly.com/

Adds in a browser search engine option that targets duckduckgo, but uses google for autocomplete/suggestions.

bob_kelso2• 14 years ago

Wow, thank you for pointing this out to me. I think it's time I give DDG a second chance.

antidoh3• 14 years ago

Just installed it. Works well.

karl_hungus• 14 years ago

And there's no good reason not to do the encrypted install.

martingordon• 14 years ago

The DDG + Google Suggest Plugin would be of interest to you: http://ddgg.nfriedly.com/

It gives you suggestions from Google but runs the search on DDG.

SpeakMouthWords• 14 years ago

The writer appears to be the wrong audience of !bang. As a physics student, I find !w tremendously helpful. Image searching is also much faster since it all can be done in the search bar rather than requiring the mouse. !wa for wolfram alpha is again great. It's far better for sites in which there is no better alternative than using their search bar, rather than the type of usage the article seemed to employ.

googletron2• 14 years ago

Thats only because the search for wikipedia is good; but for example !python isn't as great. It is nice for convenience but relying on site's internal search is kind of a cop out, albeit smart for their purposes.

Tyr422• 14 years ago

Ok, !python, in particular, sucks. So don't ! the python. Everything else is a plus though. !hoogle is awesome.

reledi• 14 years ago

You can manage your search engines in Chrome to get the same !bang effect. Slightly better in my opinion, because you don't have to type the awkward '!' and you don't have to go to a website just to search another website.

For example, if I have the URL http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%s tied to the 'wa' keyword, I can now search Wolfram Alpha from the address bar by typing 'wa'.

Locke1689• 14 years ago

The best thing is you can even configure Chrome to do the same thing for local files. My Racket repository is always in ~/code/racket. The "rkg" keyword (for racket-git) is set to file:///home/andy/code/racket/doc/search/index.html?q=%s, which allows me to easily search all of the latest racket Git docs in Chrome in just three letters + Tab.

w1ntermute• 14 years ago

You can set up this sort of thing at the browser level to work directly with the site of interest (Wikipedia in your case):

http://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/Smart%20keywords

You can set up the same sort of thing in Chrome by going to Settings -> Manage search engines, then editing the middle column to have just one or two letters of your choice.

Keyword bookmarking is also very useful: http://lifehacker.com/196779/hack-attack-firefox-and-the-art...

In fact, at this point, the number of times I have to manually type in a URL (when using my own computer) is probably fewer than 10 per day. I've never understood why people make such a big deal about !bang when instead you can search the sites directly with a keyword search, plus you're not limited to those DDG supports.

protolif2• 14 years ago

I think the bubble trend is dangerous. For a while, I was comfortable with Google knowing so much about me. But since they're using that data to decide what I need to know, I decided that it was time to ween myself off their services, including Business Gmail.

zobzu• 14 years ago

What I find interesting, if not sad (sorry), is that it was clear, obvious, simple, like a punch the face that Google would use the data.

Yet you and billion others decided to be comfortable with it. Today the trend is clearly changing and privacy starts to become important. People not getting/losing jobs over it and other such problems certainly don't help.

But still. Faith in humanity certainly doesn't fare very well these days ;-)

protolif2• 14 years ago

You're right. They were bound to use that data. I just assumed that it was for serving up more targeted averts. I'm not against making money. I just don't want to see what happened with newspaper and TV happen to the internet.

rjsamson• 14 years ago

I really want to love DuckDuckGo, and will usually give it a try for a day or two every couple weeks - but Google is just a superior product.

cormacrelf• 14 years ago

I think speed is a pretty big issue, too. I can't bring myself to use DDG for really quick searches, for URLs I can't remember etc. because it's just not fast enough. DDG makes me wait between 5 and 10 seconds before I see anything, whereas Google is almost instant.

13rules• 14 years ago

The fact that DuckDuckGo is even being compared to Google shows how much they have accomplished already ... it also shows that domain names do not matter AT ALL.

notatoad• 14 years ago

i don't think it shows that domain names don't matter. it just shows that DDG is good enough to overcome their terrible name. who knows where they'd be with a better name.

petercooper• 14 years ago

Google had the same problem. I recall showing Google off to people (when it wasn't a household name) and they'd comment on what a stupid name it was and how they wouldn't remember it.

Similar "stupid!" name outrages occurred over Vista, Xbox, Wii, iPad.. but they got absorbed into pop culture anyway and no longer seem weird. C'est la vie :-)

aggronn• 14 years ago

to be fair, i think HN is pretty much the only place that the comparison is being made, and most of the support comes from DDG's support for 'hackers' and because a lot of people here really don't like google and microsoft.

suking• 14 years ago

Bingo, 99.99999% of people on the street would not know what DDG is - maybe even a higher % outside of SV.

xpose2000• 14 years ago

Search quality is more important than privacy, and Google is better at most of my searches.

Also, Google crawls and index's new content within 1-3 minutes. DDG takes 10+ minutes.

rapind2• 14 years ago

I have to disagree with you there. Google may reach a point where I'm no longer comfortable sharing my information with them. If that happens then I'll be switching immediately. I don't think it's a foregone conclusion yet though.

hammersend3• 14 years ago

I would expect that the more a search engine knows about me the more relevant my results will be. I have yet to see a compelling argument why that isn't the case. Since I use a search engine for the sole purpose of getting the result I'm looking for as quickly as possible, I am more than happy to make the trade off.

boyter2• 14 years ago

I have to ask, what sort of things are you searching for that you require it to be indexed in 3 minutes?

The only thing i can think of is news which i generally get via twitter links these days.

gee_totes• 14 years ago

And in that case, you can use !twitter to go directly from twitter via DDG

Legion2• 14 years ago

I love DuckDuckGo, even if a good half of my searches end up beginning with !g.

Love the bang syntax for site-specific searching. I have set up my browser before to do this, but now it's far more convenient to just set my browser's default engine to DDG and !bang syntax search.

yuriyg• 14 years ago

Google has provided this for years with the "site:" feature (e.g. search for "lists site:python.org"). In addition, Google uses its own results, since as the article correctly mentions "most site’s internal search engines suck".

Legion2• 14 years ago

> Google has provided this for years with the "site:" feature

Which is something completely different, and is also something present in DuckDuckGo.

democracy• 14 years ago

"site:" query in Google searches Google index and filters results by domain name, while DDG actually delegates to the actual site and uses the site's search engine, which very rarely is of an acceptable quality.

lotux• 14 years ago

I like DDG and I'm using it for more than 6 months, and will never go back to google.

rmATinnovafy• 14 years ago

I've been using ddg as my default choice for about 7 months now.

They have really improved in the last 3-4 months. The results related to programming are better than googles (imo).

ek• 14 years ago

I was discussing this with a colleague recently and I figured I'd mention it on HN the next time DuckDuckGo came up.

I feel somewhat silly saying this, but DuckDuckGo is not that great of a name. I love the engine, and have gotten some great results from the few times I have used it, but I really, really wish it were not named DuckDuckGo. It seems tacky to me and it's hard to say. There's a support article that encourages users to "duck it". No thanks. I swear I would become a regular user of this product if it were named something more professional.

I know tech products often have whimsical names, and it's usually positive or at least tolerable, but something about "DuckDuckGo" rubs me the wrong way.

lhnn• 14 years ago

Really? You're not going to use the product because of its naming.

I understand possible apprehension at bragging about it and proselytizing, but whatever.

I do think it's hard to sell to non-techies, though.

waterlesscloud• 14 years ago

Name it something more professional like Google or Yahoo or Bing.

coderdude• 14 years ago

This same comment is often thrown up here in response to DDG's main criticism. Maybe it will work this time? Probably not because all of those names are better search engine names than DuckDuckGo.

I hope he just changes the name. No one will be upset by this move.

Here are my reasons for not liking the name:

- 3 is too many syllables (for a search engine name, which I think should roll off the tongue quickly)

- Difficult to use as a verb

- It sounds like a Japanese game show :)

zanny2• 14 years ago

Google is just misspelled 10^10. I don't see how that is "professional" more than google just built its brand out of thin air.

I can definitely give credit to Google for inventing the word though. So few people try making companies without their names having some second meaning besides "my company".

samirahmed• 14 years ago

10^100 I believe

handzhiev• 14 years ago

It's easy to say google however. Yahoo and Bing are easy too. Compare this to spelling "duckduckgo" especially for non-English speakers.

strangetimes• 14 years ago

The name is too long.

perigrin4• 14 years ago

I've just taken to telling people that "I asked a duck."

sleepyhead• 14 years ago

"Just duck it"

jerom3• 14 years ago

I rather wished that DuckDuckGo embraced more of their whimsical side, and due to their name having 2 ducks, added a second duck to their branding scheme.

edanm4• 14 years ago

I have to agree. I know it's stupid, I know it's childish, I know that as a techie I really should know better than to judge a search engine by its name.

But every single time the topic of DuckDuckGo comes up, I find myself thinking that it's a bad name. And I'm not the only one - every time this topic comes up, at least one other person mentions the name thing.

I'm not saying this to be mean, and I'm definitely not saying this because I think I'm "right". I'm only saying this because I truly believe that changing DuckDuckGo's name would make it more popular, and it deserves to be popular.

officemonkey4• 14 years ago

Google had a funny name in 2000. And Yahoo! had a funny name in 1994. I'm sure once they get some cash they'll buy ddg.com from Donoho Design Group LLC and that'll be the end of it.

ph33r• 14 years ago

Last week I was searching for a: Sabian 18" HHX Chinese cymbal. I was considering buying one for my kit and wanted to see some reviews, video samples, prices etc.

DuckDuckGo: The top three results were American Ebay search results (I live in Canada), a drum shop in Memphis (15 hour drive), and various other online stores like discountdrumequipment.info... looks legit.

Google: The first page of results had links to the official Sabian product pages, Youtube videos of people playing it, and the most impressive thing was a 3 day old Kijiji ad (still popular in Canada) with the exact cymbal I wanted for a good price in a city just 45 minutes from me. I responded to the ad, drove the 45 minutes, and purchased it.

DuckDuckGo's stance on user privacy is admirable, but Google is going to be my primary search engine for a very long time with results like that... it's accuracy still impresses me.

hrktb• 14 years ago

These are good points, though I think ddg really shines in it's focus on the query, and not trying to be too clever.

Google tends to put too much weight on regional proximity and browser language settings, sacrificing the relevance to the query. I guess their approach works for a majority of people and queries, but there are so many times it just feels wrong.

E.g. on a simple query : http://imgur.com/ezKUm (I am located in France, so french results come first. the two windows are in incognito mode for fairness, it's worse when logged in)

samstave• 14 years ago

Back in 1998/9 I was Director of IT of a tech company in the valley. IT, as always, was resposible for deploying all corp machines with the std image.

I was following what was happening in the valley at the time - and everyone used Yahoo!.

I went through and replaced all browser homes with the new and scrappy Google.com as the main search page.

I deployed this on all new machines as well, and I educated users on why this new, minimal site was better.

They ALL started using Google from that point on (~400 employees)

---

This is the same thing that needs to happen here.

Get an IT manager to set the default page to DDG and educate the users.

(CAVEAT! -- users are far more informed now than then, back then people hardly understood the internet's potential, let alone WTF a search co was -- so telling the avg user "google is bad, DDG good" will be more challenging than then...)

zanny2• 14 years ago

The problem is that Google came out and destroyed everyone in terms of search results relevance. Duck Duck Go won't steal the market until it does search better. The average joe that will cause the shift doesn't care if Google is tracing their history to target ads at them, and doesn't realize that information snooping is a slippery slope.

Teapot3• 14 years ago

While i'm a big fan of privacy. I think DDG's biggest advantage over G is the lack of bubble. Which gives users better Results.

Us techier people knows that it's a more complicated, but there's no need to bother users with grey areas. "I upgraded the Search Engine for everyone, it's a bit better now"

Google changes so much these days that most users wont notice it's not G anymore.

stanislav0• 14 years ago

"I certainly don’t mind a search engine using my previous search history to help me find better content."

I actually do. This, in fact, is a form of control over the information you get. Since I do not like that, I stick with DDG despite all the inconveniences.

Google should give people a way to opt out of the bubble.

Bikepump2• 14 years ago

> Google should give people a way to opt out of the bubble.

Just sign out and clear your cookie every so often, or use an incognito window.

mst• 14 years ago

It's simple.

For brute force 'rgrep /internet' google has the scale and the technology to be way ahead of everybody else. But when I already know roughly what I want will exist, I apply duckduckgo.com, because they're less raw processing and more intelligently automated quasi-curation.

cwp• 14 years ago

Agreed. I use DDG as my default search engine, because most of the time my searches are for the form "find me the web site for X" where X is a thing in the world. I fall back to Google when DDG doesn't give me the result I need (rare, but it happens) and when I need to learn about a concept. For those amorphous "tell me about X" queries, Google is unmatched.

pirateking• 14 years ago

A pretty balanced review of the two search engines. I have had DuckDuckGo as my main search engine for almost a year now. I still find myself using the google bang (g!) for a significant percentage of searches. However, I don't find typing the extra 3 characters in my search query to be enough of a chore to warrant switching back to Google as default engine. From experience, I usually have a strong premonition when a particular query will be more appropriate for Google to handle, so I don't waste time hitting DuckDuckGo first.

mwill• 14 years ago

I tried using ddg as my default search in chrome but had to switch back pretty quickly, not because of search relevance, but because of speed. For me every ddg search takes roughly 2-5 seconds to show results, as opposed to Googles <1 second.

I tend to do many searches in quick succession, so it sort of breaks my train of thought.

I suspect this has more to do with my internet connection/location than ddg, but for now it still makes it frustrating to use day to day.

vph• 14 years ago

In terms of privacy, before you embrace DuckDuckGo as a "good guy" and Google as a "bad guy", please be aware of a more-or-less universal truth: you are a good guy, until you become big.

After all, Google's motto is "don't be evil". I think it's a bit naive to compare DuckDuckGo to Google at this point in time, where they have different statuses.

comechao• 14 years ago

Yes, we can compare. Doesn't matter if Google is old and DDG is young. It does not change the fact that people have a need for good privacy terms and in this case, privacy is THE feature that DDG is offering.

Bikepump2• 14 years ago

But to follow up on his point, if DDG were ever to become Google's size they would have little choice but to abandon their privacy approach as well... it's just not possible to make a profitable search engine with competitive quality without machine learning algorithms that use user data.

mrschwabe• 14 years ago

"most site’s internal search engines suck, returning results that are somewhat hit or miss. "

If I want to find a movie, I type !imdb Avengers

If I want to find a recipe, I type !allrecipes pizza

If I want to play music right now I type !grooveshark AC-DC Thunderstruck

If you know where to look use bangs. If you think Google does a better job, there's a bang for that too type !g

res0nat0r• 14 years ago

I think all of those !bang searches above work just as efficiently as is (minus the bang of course) for me in Google. I'm not switching to some new search engine anytime soon.

goggles99• 14 years ago

Bangs? is that like using "site" in Google?

Using Google:

If I want to find a movie, I type site:imdb.com Avengers

If I want to find a recipe, I type site:allrecipes.com pizza

If I want to play music right now I type site:grooveshark.com AC-DC Thunderstruck

EvilTerran• 14 years ago

googling "site:imdb.com ..." uses google's index, restricted to imdb.com; DDGing "!imdb ..." uses imdb's internal search.

I almost never bother with sites' internal searches, as google's "site:" feature almost invariably works better, so I wouldn't be inclined to use DDG's site-search bang-lines myself. YMMV, I guess it depends on how good the site in question's internal search functionality is.

antidoh3• 14 years ago

One of my favorite things about DDG is the bang, and my absolute favorite bang (when I use one) is !g. Because the URL for the resulting page is just the search, without all the cruft.

  !g googol
  https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&q=googol

  direct via google:
  http://www.google.com/#hl=en&gs_nf=1&cp=6&gs_id=36&xhr=t&q=googol&pf=p&sclient=psy-ab&oq=googol&aq=0&aqi=h1g-s1g2g-s1&aql=&gs_l=&pbx=1&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_qf.,cf.osb&fp=aa8b317ec80710f&biw=1036&bih=663

Whenever I want to send a google search to someone, I do it via DDG. Although I usually send DDG searches, to help promote DDG.

tonfa5• 14 years ago

Just configure a keyword for your browser, you also get a clean url.

sc0ttbeardsley• 14 years ago

This appears to be a direct ripoff of open shortcuts from yahoo search.

http://search.yahoo.com/osc/help

antidoh3• 14 years ago

Good thing they didn't patent it, so others can use it.

exim• 14 years ago

For me, just couple of queries was enough to see that results were bad.

asselinpaul• 14 years ago

I also use DuckDuckGo on a daily basis and it's great. Far better than google in my opinion. And how, with DuckDuckHack, it will only get better...

losvedir• 14 years ago

I've spent approximately the last 4 weeks with DDG, as well, and I haven't decided yet if I want to keep it as my primary search engine.

For the most part it works well, although, I periodically g! just to make sure I'm not missing something important.

The thing is, I don't particularly mind Google building up a profile of me, keeping track of my browsing, email, and prior searches. I mind them doing it to show me ads.

I strive to avoid needless purchases and prefer to keep as few items as possible (I've whittled my wardrobe down to couple pairs of pants and about a week's worth of shirts, undies, socks). I want to keep a simple, regular grocery list of bread, chicken, etc, and so avoid the coupons lest I be enticed to buy a fancy cereal or something. I know that Google constantly inundating me with products more and more relevant to my interests will lead to a life of higher spending.

DuckDuckGo is better in that regard (usually only one ad in the results) so I'm happy. But if I could pay a yearly ad-free fee to Google I'd do it in a heartbeat.

4 Weeks with DuckDuckGo

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