I Used DuckDuckGo for a Week and Had to Switch Back. Here’s why.

http://notes.brianmayer.com/i-used-duckduckgo-for-a-week-and-had-to-switch-back

by bmmayer1 • 13 years ago

40 49 13 years ago

notes.brianmayer.com

tluyben2• 13 years ago

My wife and me tried it as well; same thing. Two things make DDG unusable for me; much slower than Google and doesn't understand context. I think that sums up the article as well.

vklj• 13 years ago

You can keep DDG as your default search engine, and use the !g bang command to redirect the most difficult queries to Google. You get the best of both worlds (except for some cognitive load when deciding which engine to use).

jeena• 13 years ago

I switched last December and do exactly that and am very happy with that solution.

denzil_correa• 13 years ago

I'm really surprised that the author did not try this option.

gateaumoisi2• 13 years ago

i'm doing that too, ddg have no picture search, right?

aclevernickname2• 13 years ago

unless you count !image, which redirects to GIS.

qwertzlcoatl• 13 years ago

I just type !sp + searchterm into my search bar and it searches via startpage.com, which uses googles search results without my IP address or searches being recorded, no identifying or tracking cookies are used and SSL encryption is set by default.

narozik5• 13 years ago

But this would foil what OP expects from google, a.k.a. to be geolocalized and tracked to be served personalized results.

nodata• 13 years ago

For me the results were simply not as good.

njr123• 13 years ago

DDG doesn't actually have their own search engine though right? They are using Yahoo/Bing on the backend?

pestaa• 13 years ago

DDG does have its own search engine, but it also takes advantage of the dataset Yahoo/Bing collected.

sp332• 13 years ago

They also have a custom blacklist of spam sites that will not show up in search results, even if they are indexed in the Bing dataset.

hartator• 13 years ago

I think google search > duckduckgo, but the request "pride" seems to be a pretty weak point to compare, I would expect definition even if there is someting going on in my city. I would never google "pride" but more "pride weekend in Sfo" or something.

Ultron• 13 years ago

I personally value my privacy and liberty over a few additional nanoseconds of waiting, or what might be not as refined results.

This article isn't insightful or original, only pathetic. The attitude shows you how many in the US are unwilling to make even the tiniest sacrifice to preserve a human right like not having all you information surveyed, recorded and stored for Big Brother to use against you.

Sad.

Drakim• 13 years ago

You seem to be overly focusing on certain parts of the article to make your point. The fact that DDG is terrible at searching for error messages (showing sites experiencing the errors rather than explanations of the errors) is a pretty non-trivial minus for developers.

netmare• 13 years ago

I've never had a problem with technical searches on DDG, since I use bangs to narrow them down (!so, !msdn, !mdn, etc.) Having DDG as the main search engine allows entering these bangs in the address bar just like the browser's search shortcuts. Google has gotten too smart for me lately.

narozik5• 13 years ago

One guy making a point in a blog post doesn't make a fact.

In my own experience, google is now offering poorer results to the point of being useless. I've been using it to search for error message for about 15 years now. While on the other hand duckduckgo very often nails it with a relevant stackoverflow result in instant answer.

I guess ymmv according to how much you're inside the bubble.

I'd like to see something more factual to show how much ddg sucks at fulfilling queries for info to fix error message vs unfiltered google.

lotsofcows• 13 years ago

The odd person - or even every geek on the planet - working around tracking, etc makes bugger all difference to anything. If you wish to complain about an abuse, write to advocacy groups, protest and / or write to your democratically elected representative. Anything else is the equivalent of signing an online petition or changing your Facebook profile picture.

weland• 13 years ago

Earlier this week, I searched for “Pride,” expecting to find out more about Pride Weekend in San Francisco. DuckDuckGo seemed to have no understanding of that context, whereas Google’s first results were exactly what I was looking for.

In the meantime, everyone studying philosophy or psychology in the San Francisco area is probably bashing their head against the wall, because they want to find starting points about the moral implications of pride or its psychological cues.

The Google bubble is a good thing in about, what, 1% of the cases. Don't fall in love with it.

It must be no more than 200-300 ms, but it really makes a difference.

At the risk of being impolite, this has to be the most retarded claim I have ever heard from someone who is doing programming, ever since I heard a colleague of mine revolutionizing virtual memory by thinking how the MMU could instantiate another MMU to avoid stack overflows.

You can literally compensate for the time you need to make 100 queries by getting to your office 30 seconds earlier.

relix• 13 years ago

The article is titled "I used ... and switched back" not, "why you shouldn't use DDG". It's by definition subjective, and if this person found better results 99% of the time, then that's a good reason to switch back. Those students studying philosophy might like DDG better, and that's perfectly fine.

200-300ms is a difference that you can feel. This is not about losing that time, this is about waiting for your results a little bit longer which adds friction and annoyance. If you can't understand that then I hope you're not in charge of any user-facing interfaces. It's the reason sites use CDN's and cache pregenerated pages, it's the reason why DNS systems have edges distributed all over the world, it's the reason why Github improved reaction time from 1 sec down to 300ms in their latest update, etc...

narozik5• 13 years ago

It is usually more about perceived speed and feels than actual speed. And giving the user a quicker feel is a user experience improvement.

But feeling quick to display results is worthless if you have to make 5 queries to find your results, if you actually find it, and in my experience google rarely offers what I'm looking for in the first few searches.

It was not that way until they removed some and modified others search operators from their engine.

tytso• 13 years ago

Using context is quite different from people not seeing alternate points of view. If someone is interested in LGBT issues, it's more likely that the "Pride Weekend" is what they might be interested in, especially if the search originated in San Francisco.

If someone is mostly interested in philosophy or psychology, that, and they see articles which they are mostly interested, the fact that "Pride Weekend" might be a bit lower down in the ten natural search results doesn't mean that some abstract "alternate point of view" has been excluded from their world view.

I suspect people use the term "Google Bubble" mostly as an abstract FUD, as opposed to anything that they can definitively point to. This kind of context-aware searching is something they can "point with alarm" about, but it's actually a good thing, not a bad thing.

danmaz74• 13 years ago

The Google bubble is a good thing in about, what, 1% of the cases. Don't fall in love with it.

You may not like it, but if Google is creating that bubble you can be sure that they have the numbers to prove that users generally like it this say.

nemoniac• 13 years ago

Call it extra cognitive load if you like but I find that DDG makes me think more about my searches and direct them using !bangs. I feel better about this than blindly letting Google take me where it wants.

mst• 13 years ago

Generally I use ddg.gg for "I want <specific thing>" and google for "I want a brute force grep of the internet".

My usage split is about "best tool for the job" rather than privacy though, since I don't really mind google knowing what error messages I'm pasting from a console.

bmmayer12• 13 years ago

It's really about preference. A lot of people still use emacs even though it takes more effort than other options.

greglindahl• 13 years ago

You'd be hard-pressed to find an emacs user who agreed that it took more effort than other options. Which is a good illustration of why we have more than one editor: different people have different affinities to various editors and IDEs.

In theory that sort of thing ought to be true for search, too. For example, blekko (new UI as of 3 weeks ago) focuses on clustering results. Here's what it does for pride: https://blekko.com/#?q=pride That gives you the answer you wanted, without personalization, and gives other people the answer they wanted, too.

pasbesoin• 13 years ago

It's purely anecdotal -- and occasional -- but I've felt less and less ability to (easily) control my search results in Google by (simply) adjusting my search term.

I add some keywords (would that I could still use + for its original purpose), but the top results continue to be filled with worthless, often spammy crap. Pages and pages of crap.

Your comment is encouragement to give DDG another go, and to take time to familiarize myself with its !

kryten2• 13 years ago

Google Keeps Up with Timely Search Queries

...by tracking you.

you can't win every time.

gateaumoisi2• 13 years ago

you can by using this: https://github.com/broncowdd/googol

it parses google results on the server it is hosted on, and generate a page you can use without being tracked.

test it here: http://googlof.com/

kryten2• 13 years ago

Why bother with the hoop jumping?

glomph• 13 years ago

But then it wouldn't return the results he wanted for Pride.

bmmayer12• 13 years ago

Local context doesn't require personal tracking, just geolocation information. It doesn't need a dossier on me to know I am searching from San Francisco.

pvdm• 13 years ago

Author is allowed his opinion and choices. I am staying with DDG because I value privacy more.

kingsidharth• 13 years ago

You're allowed to state the obvious. I will still write this comment.

orim• 13 years ago

I tried DuckDuckGo but didn't like the search results either. I'have had the exact same problems with the coding error searches the author had. The results were mostly useless. Then I tried startpage.com and never went back.

gkya2• 13 years ago

Living in Turkey, I can tell that Google returns way better search results to my queries about local stuff. DuckDuckGo in the other hand, has a lot of search tooling (goodies) and returns more relevant stuff when I search something more general or technical. My search engine defaults to DuckDuckGo, with the exception of local queries, which I dispatch to Google.

narozik5• 13 years ago

I concur that duckduckgo has still room for improvement in the local search area. It has already improved since I switched but I still find myself having trouble finding some local relevant results.

To me this is still an improvement over google always directing me to a localized version of their search and forcing me to tricks to get the global google web search.

And if ddg fails short, I can bang to another search engine or use the address bar to try my search elsewhere.

gkya2• 13 years ago

Personally, I have a whole lot of search engines I use with the Chrom(e|ium) omnibar: tra\t for google translate, !m\t for linux.die.net/man/ !g for google, !w\t for wikipedia and !d for duckduckgo. If I do not use any 'bangs', the search is dispatched to DDG. (\t for tab)

Even though I do not consider google harmful or hostile, centralizing all my access to info in one search provider sounds like a bad idea.

narozik5• 13 years ago

Reading this my first reaction is to ask how much OP has been paid by google to write this piece of stupid, to me this looks like a mix of infomercial and fanboyism.

The title is misleading makes us think he had no other choice but to go back to google but when reading the article the reasons invoked are personal preferences preferences and comfort sprinkled with laziness.

Google feels faster by a small fraction of a second to OP, he asks to be geolocalized and profiled so he can skip a couple keywords in his query and his unreasonable expectations be met by google.

Here's an advice try searching for "pride weekend san francisco" instead of "pride" when you're looking for info about the pride weekend in san francisco. Try searching stackoverflow when you want stackoverflow results (though in my experience ddg almost always features a relevant stackoverflow result and link in ddg instant answer)

And this supposedly is worth renouncing privacy and being profiled and tracked across the internet and mined to oblivion ?

I'm not saying duckduckgo is perfect and will fulfill your every need but what telling the world youhad to switch back to google because ddg didn't fulfill personal expectation of it being google is dumb, really.

arh68• 13 years ago

I switched to DDG recently, have noticed no lag, enjoy the !g and !yt shortcuts (one less thing I have to set my browser up to do), and I really like how it puts Wikipedia at the top. But that's not why I switched: I don't want my web search queries to change my Suggested YouTube Videos. I noticed this recently with Google (since I'm always signed in). Sometimes a search is just a search, though, and it's almost like Google's slowly erasing that memory from reality.

quadrangle• 13 years ago

DDG has !sp too for StartPage to get Google sans tracking

dasil003• 13 years ago

Given how non-trival search is and the relative resources and histories of the two providers in question, it's sort of amazing these are the worst comparison points the author could come up with.

johansch• 13 years ago

Microsoft (the source of most of the results in the case of DDG) is not exactly poor.

pcvarmint• 13 years ago

I've used StartPage for years, and it doesn't seem to have been affected by the recent NSA leaks. It is also as powerful as Google without the ads, since it's based on Google (I'm surprised Google hasn't successfully blocked it). I had seen DDG, but never took it as seriously as StartPage, whose PR director Katherine Albrecht is a privacy expert and long-time advocate against loyalty cards and RFIDs.

WayneDB• 13 years ago

Thanks for mentioning this. I may switch to it.

lightscalar• 13 years ago

The past tense of verbification of DuckDuckGo should probably be 'DuckDuckWent', right?

aclevernickname2• 13 years ago

Google does not offer a Tor Hidden Service, but DDG does [1]. Not only can google not see my search query (unless I use !g instead of !sp), but not even my ISP knows what I'm looking for. There is a bit of lag for searches (5 whole seconds maybe), but those of us used to the way Tor works, this is not much of a problem at all.

There's also a Firefox Search Add-on [2], for those interested. I combine it with Foobar [3] for a more seamless and chrome-like interface.

[1] http://3g2upl4pq6kufc4m.onion/

[2] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/duckduckgo-to...

[3] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/foobar/

I Used DuckDuckGo for a Week and Had to Switch Back. Here’s why.

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