Inside DuckDuckGo, Google's Tiniest, Fiercest Competitor

http://www.fastcolabs.com/3026698/inside-duckduckgo-googles-tiniest-fiercest-competitor

by mparramon • 12 years ago

38 21 12 years ago

valarauca12• 12 years ago

To any readers. I highly suggest you try DuckDuckGo, especially for tech related/documentation searches.

The !{language} searches are incredibly powerful. Taking you to the language's documentation repo, and displaying results only there. Which I find hugely help for learning new languages.

I've switched over completely for my day to day searches. Google offers next to nothing I can't get with DuckDuckGo.

ausjke3• 12 years ago

I use it occasionally, what does !{language} search mean?

tomclancy• 12 years ago

Google it

duggieawesome• 12 years ago

Say you want to refer to the JavaScript docs, you can type:

"!javascript function" and it will take you immediately to the documentation.

polymatter• 12 years ago

!java means limit search to Java documentation

!scala means limit search to Scala documentation

!golang means limit search to Go documentation

!cpp means limit search to C++ documentation

etc.

see (https://duckduckgo.com/bang.html) for more.

ufo• 12 years ago

"[language] bla bla !so" is also pretty neat. It searches Stackoverflow and filters by language tag.

jstalin• 12 years ago

I've been using DDG since the early days. At first, it wasn't very good, but I've gotten to the point where I don't use any other search engine anymore. And it keeps getting better at serving up relevant links.

breitling• 12 years ago

I know a lot of people here love DDG, but my experience hasn't been the same. I have tried many times to switch over to DDG, but the quality of search results just isn't the same as google. It's like google just knows what I'm looking for.

Everyone loves a good underdog story; I would love to see DDG catch up and be equivalent to Google search.

at-fates-hands• 12 years ago

You think this has anything to do with all the data they probably have on you in order to serve you what you're looking for?

Not being sarcastic at all. I wonder if this one untold benefit of all the data collection they do.

Volundr• 12 years ago

In my case I know it often is. For example if I search for Rust on DDG, I get the rust-lang.org as result 7. Scrolling down I don't see any more results related to the language until well down the page (and still few of them).

Google: rust-lang.org is my second result and most of the page is taken by libraries, the Wikipedia page, etc. Something tells me that's not what most people see.

That said I have noticed on occasion when I break from my usual search patterns, DDG has actually given me better results than Google.

I still have DDG as my default search engine because being able to do !hoogle, !ruby, !clojure, etc is freaking awesome.

robert_tweed• 12 years ago

Same here. However, I've also noticed Google starting to suck more and more over the last year or two. The latest trend is that it will blatantly ignore whatever search terms you enter, if any of the individual terms happen to be related to something that's currently popular. It will assume "you must have meant that". And I don't mean when it spots a typo and suggests "did you mean...".

Their index for a long time has not particularly cared whether a page contains the specific words you entered, so much as subject relevancy. However recently it's got very aggressive about deciding what it thinks you meant, and ignoring most of what you actually typed. This probably works for a large proportion of searches where people don't really know what they are looking for anyway, but it's really bad when you are trying to locate very specific information, especially anything technical. It's very much like a return to the bad old days of spammy, highly irrelevant results, avoiding which is the whole reason we all switched to Google in the first place.

What makes it worse is the gradual erosion of advanced search features, like the ability to quote an exact word or phrase to filter out results that don't contain it. The fact that Google can't handle special characters is a pain too, and makes searching for anything Clojure-related nearly impossible. And recently, their dropping of the extremely useful discussion search feature. If DDG introduce a similar discussion search feature, I will most likely switch a large proportion of my searches to them just for that, because it was a great way to filter out spammy results, when searching for things like product reviews and obscure technical things like error messages.

Nowadays whenever I run into a search that just isn't giving satisfactory results on Google, I'll give DDG and Bing a try. Unfortunately they tend to be equally bad, for different reasons. It's a shame that DDG simply cannot yet compete with the scale and quality of Google's index, because the general ethos at DDG to build search tools that actually work, is much closer to what Google was doing 10 years ago, before their focus started to shift in other directions.

davidy123• 12 years ago

there's a new (and expanding) option; Search tools ; Verbatim.

alan_cx• 12 years ago

Yeah, I keep trying to settle on DDG, but every time I get frustrated with the results and end up back on google.

I remember back when google first appeared, I used it and never turned back. Its was immediatly clearly superior to everything else, and not problematic to stick with it. I never felt like I was making do with an inferior engine, hoping it would improve. Sadly, DDG has never, in my experience, achieved that. Given that, I think its asking too much for users similar to me to keep going back to DDG to see if its improved. In the end, that is too much effort. Its a waste of my time when I have things I need to do. Users need to see an immediate gain, or reason to stick. Just sticking it to google and/or supporting the underdog isn't enough when we need useful, relevant search results.

I suppose what people like me are looking for is a google that's not google. But its the whole google thing, all the snooping, data retention, privacy busting techniques, and what not, which enables such great results. I guess there is a cost to everything.

I am glad that the likes of DDG are out there, but for now, for me, they are just an interesting side show. Hopefully at some point in the future they will provide a comprehensive viable alternative for google.

austinl• 12 years ago

This article has been posted three times before. It's interesting to see how opinions change over time.

10 months ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7270973)

9 months ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7397794)

3 months ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8263296)

ShannonSofield• 12 years ago

I'm a big DDG fan, but I'd hardly call them a Google competitor when they process .008 (4M/500M) queries that G does per day.

That said, their search operators are getting really powerful.

ausjke3• 12 years ago

I used duckduckgo when visiting China where google.com is blocked, its own baidu.com is useless for searching technical content, most developers need use vpn to visit google.com for development, but VPN is not a safe bet since the GFW keeps evolving and many VPN can not cope with that for daily reliable usage.

duckduckgo can do well in that market, better than bing.com and yahoo.com in most cases from my experience, but not enough comparing to google.com.

Inside DuckDuckGo, Google's Tiniest, Fiercest Competitor

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