I have been using DDG for about a year now, although I had tried using it years ago. It works fine for simple queries( e.g. search name of company rather than typing out url). But I basically have !g programmed into my fingers for everything more complicated. Many times when I don't find the results I am looking for, I subconsciously assume that google would be able to find them. This is in comparison to when I cannot find something on google, I assume the website owner either sucks at SEO or it doesn't exist. I am rooting for DDG, but it is going to be really hard for them to make up the literal cognitive difference in my mindset.
Side note, if they get bought out by a big player, I will feel like my use of them for the last year has been for naught.
Interesting, I actually find that I use !g less and less and when I do I often don't get what I'm looking for either (probably because I'm not searching for the right thing in the first place). On top of that I vastly prefer ddg's very simple and terse output compared to Google's many widgets displaying all kinds of content inline and wasting monitor real estate.
>Side note, if they get bought out by a big player, I will feel like my use of them for the last year has been for naught.
I completely agree and at this point it's my main issue with DDG. I don't think their business model is sustainable, if they ever make it big the pressure to make more money will eventually corrupt their noble goals. After all Do No Evil used to be a thing at Google too and we see how that turned out.
I'd gladly pay a subscription to a good search engine to remove the need for ads and align the business model to the privacy goals, however I'm probably in a small minority here.
> I'd gladly pay a subscription to a good search engine to remove the need for ads and align the business model to the privacy goals, however I'm probably in a small minority here.
I think you're correct about it being a small minority, but I'm definitely there with you.
Even with their affiliate and advertising model (someone else linked it), I'd rather pay money to just have the site ignore all ad determination, affiliate linking, etc if it sees me logged in and my account paid up.
Of course, most people seem to be heavily trained to look for "free" and chastise anything subscription based, no matter how cheap/fair.
I'm not too worried about acquisition. Per the article:
> ...there was little need for the company to raise more money. DuckDuckGo, which had a last known raise of $3 million in 2011, has been profitable since 2014.
Fingers crossed for sure, but there's such a thing as growing too fast for your own good. Github famously stopped being profitable the year after it got a $250M round.
I find that Google is actually losing ground as the all-seeing-eye-reference-objective-truth due to the increasingly tailored searches. I can no longer refer to a search query and expect a peer to see the same results as I do. This social bubble phenomenon, while no doubt convenient, is sometimes a burden, and with their stricter privacy policy DDG actually has some ground to gain here. Using DDG is more like tuning in to good old ether radio instead of browsing through podcasts. I find that comforting, that break from a claustrophobic solipsist trend.
I will say that Google is better when searching for code help (probably because it feels that I'm a programmer) so if my query is likely to have an answer on SO or one of my coding forums, a !g gets appended almost reflexively now.
> I can no longer refer to a search query and expect a peer to see the same results as I do.
It's been decades since you could do that for yourself. It must be something like 20 years ago on Alta Vista that I got burned using search queries as bookmarks and (surprise, surprise) suddenly not being able to find "that page" any more.
Those are two separate issues. Altavista's index certainly got updated over time, so changes in the search results aren't that surprising.
I believe the issue OP is addressing is that even given an identical index, two different users might see to entirely different search results, as their individual search history is factored into the query.
Or user agent, or screen resolution, or Accept-Encoding / Accept-Language headers, or installed fonts, or installed browser plugins detected, or Do Not Track settings.
Yeah I have noticed same problem. Try search something like Trump Twitter page, if you are very liberal bubble Twitter page comes like 4th or 5th result.
I've been using DDG for a few years now. I have the same reflex with !g, but when I'm on a browser that's google by default I quickly find that I also need a way to go the other way and do the equivalent of !ddg...
In other words the queries that google has good results for isn't a superset of the queries that ddg has good results for. It's just a different set.
The bang commands alone are DDG's killer feature for me, and it's why DDG is set as my homepage and default search engine (and probably still would be even if I did have to !g every non-site-specific query).
So recently I got annoyed by DDG's "optimizations" (they are a lot more aggressive in ignoring words in your query than google and unlike google they don't even tell you about it; I know I can use "" to force a term, but !g is much quicker).
I thought I'd give startpage.com a try (proxied google results without tracking), but besides being slow I realized I couldn't live without bangs anymore (and was also missing DDG's rich snippets).
I wish DDG had some kind of bang that tells it that I actually want to search for the query I entered, not some random query they think I might have wanted :/
edit: I should mention that after complaining about it on their subreddit, someone on the team said they are looking into it.
> after complaining about it on their subreddit, someone on the team said they are looking into it.
Anecdotally, for every feature I’ve wanted of DDG, I’ve found an old post where someone on their team says they’re looking into it. For some I’ve found multiple posts, going back over a decade! Always the same “looking into it”.
I use DDG, but I put them in the category of companies too afraid to say “no, we won’t do that feature” or “we like that idea, but it’s low priority so we don’t know if we’ll ever get to it”. Whichever features they have, I use; the features they promise, I ignore.
Bangs are truly amazing, my only disagreement would be in that I use !sp instead of !g as a fallback since they have a better privacy record. Other favourites include !m and !osm, but I should probably read up on even more of them.
Had no idea about these DDG bang features, although admittedly I've barely used DDG. Usually use startpage if I'm not using Google. I imagine to there also might be a chrome extension that does a similar thing to the DDG bang features, or are these just DDG-only search indexes?
They're just quick redirects to specific sites' searches, which work wherever DuckDuckGo would otherwise return search results. They make it really quick to search specific sites, or even to go directly to specific pages on some sites (without remembering the URL's exact syntax).
Try searching for “!w search engine”: DDG sends you straight to Wikipedia, which sends you directly to the relevant article. (Search “!bang” for more info about bangs.) When DuckDuckGo is your default search engine you can do this straight from your browser's address bar or OS's search field. It's very nice.
(I have no affiliation with DuckDuckGo; I just really like this feature.)
There are certainly Chrome extensions, but I don't (usually) use Chrome. And sure, there are Firefox extensions, but if I'm using some oddball like Lynx or Dillo or Netsurf, it's nice for such functionality to just be part of my search engine (which works on all of those browsers).
My experience with DDG was the same when I used for a few month a while back. They definitely didn't exceed Google. When I try them once and a while, they still don't.
But thing is, Google itself seems worse and worse to me. It seems to try harder and harder to decide what I want and only give me that - if X is associated with something topical, only topical links appear. And DDG and Bing follow this problem.
I suspect that the eternal problem will be that of context.
Back when Google started out, they bet the farm on the idea that more links pointing to a document meant that said document was informative.
These days though, i wonder if what we are looking for is more hair. That what we are looking for depends on a context that can't be properly included in the search terms used.
On top of this "naive" metrics like link counts are no longer a viable measure for what to elevate to the top of the search results.
Google has been personalizing search results, and going way beyond just "link counts", for a while now.
e.g: When I type "pandas" or "kafka", I get the Python library and the streaming framework. I don't get cute black and white animals and a depressed novelist (what the average person would expect).
Sometimes Google doesn't personalize search results enough for me. I do some academic stuff in $FIELD, and sometimes (can't think of an example off the top of my head, sorry) the keywords for a $FIELD-related search happen to namespace-collide with something completely unrelated that I don't even think of until I try to Google the keywords and get a faceful of crap about vacations to Disneyworld or divorce lawyers or caring for your pet lizard.
Google search for Kafka consistently gives me Apache Kafka first. It frequently then gives me some clothing retailer I've never heard of in second place (but not always -- at least one time, this was totally absent), with no indication that it's a "sponsored" result or anything. The Wikipedia entry for Franz Kafka is in third place; everything else is Apache-related.
DDG gives me a decent mix of results about both Apache and Franz (not only the Wikipedia entry, a variety of books/articles/etc as well).
but the frequency of reputable backlinks are perfectly suitable variable to rank a website's importance and relevance, and Google obvious knows how to discern garbage backlinks vs legitimate ones.
For instance, a certain startup I worked for in the past used a military blog seemingly belonging to a web of Eastern European entities to link to our company website and the CEO advertised it on linkedin....it was pretty fucking embarassing tbh but it was oviously for gaining SEO juice. It worked for a while but now when I search for the same keyword I don't see it in the SERPs.
You are primarily going to get responses from people on threads like this who like and use DDG regularly. Selection bias. If you didn't find DDG useful, you wouldn't be using it, and probably don't have much commentary to add.
I don't see them truly competing with big budget search engines, but it's probably easy enough to make decent money from keyword ads and if you can sell the brand, you can get enough users to cover a smaller machine footprint and R&D budget that's orders of magnitude smaller.
The results are probably not awful (I don't use it). Result quality gets exponentially more difficult as you try to push that boundary, so you can probably get 80% of the quality there with 1% of the investment. The results may be good enough for plenty of folks, but I highly doubt they will ever be better than the big budget search engines.
> The results may be good enough for plenty of folks, but I highly doubt they will ever be better than the big budget search engines.
On the other hand, that is not the criteria for them to be successful, because they are already better on a different metric: Privacy.
I find that 90% of my queries are just "who is that person?" or "what is that thing?". Those queries can be answered by DDG just as well as Google. So I'm not giving up anything, but gaining privacy. More importantly, I'm (subtly) sending a signal to the market that I find privacy is important.
Even on the 10% of queries that are complex, DDG does "good enough". I sometimes wonder if Google has the results sorted better, but I'll gladly waste a few minutes here and there in exchange for privacy.
You could do both privacy and good search results without using DDG: startpage.com
You can also have at least as good privacy (better in my opinion) and better search results (again, in my opinion) with other search engines: qwant.com
What is it those two examples doesn't have that DDG does have? The evangelist feel of DDG really turns me off and I'm sure it scares many off from ever looking at it. It is a bit like listening to Apple fans talking about Steve 'The Juice' Jobs.
Contrary to the seemingly popular belief, that their success was due to their algorithm, I used them because of their uncluttered and simple design.
That's why I used Altavista before that. Google kept things very simple while other sites loaded on the bloat and garbage.
I don't remember ever feeling like what I found with Google couldn't be found with Altavista or lycos. But a lot of the other companies tried to prematurely monetize to an excessive degree.
I remember google having equivalent or even inferior results to yahoo search for quite a while, especially in niche topics like sports and music. The differences in algorithms just didn’t matter much for average case queries.
I think the difference in algorithms matters even less now, and that google’s modern advantage is not in ranking algorithms but in automated display of structured data, like sports league results, filmography for an actor, etc., and work around knowledge graph methods to automate that stuff.
Early google was unequivocally only differentiated by branding and sparse design.
I actually postulate it was due to their ability to parse queries in an effective way, combined with the speed (and sure, probably design) of results [1]. From what I recall at the time, and even to this day, Google does a better job of determine exact match vs question (and finding subject matter) based results.
I was quite young at the time but made the same transition for the same reasons.
I think the vast majority of users don't consciously evaluate search engines for accuracy. And most non-technical users just assume that if they cant find it through X, its probably not there.
I don't think they are comparable. DuckDuckGo federate the results of other search engines (e.g. Bing) and add its own sauce on top of it. There is a limit to what it can do.
Google invested in the fundamental from the start and they pushed the limit of what search engines can do.
When I was in my first role as an IT manager, I set the policy that all machines had their default page set to google.com away from Yahoo, because yahoo was an ugly mess.
Google was clean and simple. This was the only reason. I made the edict to set it to google and so some people said "you should go work for google since you like them so much" - man I wish I had tried to do so then.
Google was clearly better at the beginning. I remember those days, and how Yahoo! put a bunch of other search engines at the bottom of its own results (Altavista, Excite, Lycos, etc). So it was easy to compare. When Google showed up, it was pretty obvious the game was over.
AltaVista had support for boolean operators; I and many other techies became very practiced in composing complex queries. It was my favorite search engine.
Then Google showed up, and Google had PageRank. Boom, the top result for any simple query was what you wanted.
The vast majority of my searches are resolved by:
1) Wikipedia
2) Maps
3) Stack Overflow.
I don’t see why I should sacrifice my privacy for google to provide me with a single interface for these few sites, especially when DDG does it without mining all my info.
I have the same muscle memory, but I don't think it's a bad thing. Basically I only use !g when normal DDG doesn't give me what I'm looking for, and half the time !g doesn't have it either. The only thing I can't abandon is !gmaps.
And I'm just discovering a bunch of other ! commands that make DDG significantly more useful that Google (eg !esen).
If anybody is curious for the distribution of used searches between ddg/!g, I came up with this rough estimate for firefox:
sqlite3 ~/.mozilla/firefox/*default*/places.sqlite "select substr(p.url,9,14) as search_backend,count(1) from moz_places p where p.url like 'https://duckduckgo%' or p.url like 'https://%.google.%/search%' group by search_backend;"
I fall back to google every 11th query, not counting maps searches.
I don't think it's a bad thing either. It gives DDG a very clear signal so that they can improve: "you are not giving me the results I want for these queries". For most other search engines people just switch.
One thing that consistently blows my mind is how readily an external search engine creates a better index, with more relevant recall, by scraping the published static pages of Wikipedia, such that it outperforms Wikipedia's own search,
Wikipedia should be able to search itself better than any external entity, but cannot. Wikipedia, in effect, is blind to its own data, and can deliver less insight into it's own content than multiple external Search entities.
If I use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search for anything, I get weaker results, than if I use search engines to locate wikipedia articles according to the same input string.
Search isn't easy and I would fully expect a company that specializes in search to provide better search results than an entity that simply has search as a feature to their main product. Since Wikipedia provides all of their pages for indexing, unlike Facebook for example, a good search experience would be an MVP for any competent search company.
That's a good point. Put another way, were I to run a local copy of a wikipedia mirror, right here in my own bedroom, I'd be putting myself eye-to-eye with any wikipedia employee or volunteer. I'd have the same tools in my hands, as they do. I'd be one person, a PHP script hosted by an apache process, and the wikipedia data set.
But, contrast that to Facebook, and the concept becomes more interesting. Facebook's search utilities are similarly unsatisfying, despite the massive resources of the company. This is probably not a blind spot, but more about the level of quality provided, for free-tier, unprivileged user utilities. Advertisers probably gain better reach, but perhaps without knowing exactly who they reach. Facebook's search tool can't be used to discern the capabilities or qualities of one or more of the indices Facebook uses to negotiate the landscape of their data.
I disagree, I think Wikipedia is akin to a collective blog where people just dump information to. Indexing is hard enough that it becomes a full-time job to do it well, and that takes time and money.
Search is so hard that external search is necessary for many websites to exist outside of a void. If we expect blogs to have their own searching functionality, we end up with a collection of disjoint webs, and that would basically kill the web as we know it.
This seems typical of many built-in searches. It's halfway how things are indexed but also how things are presented: one of the worst offenders is ruby's documentation, where it's extremely cumbersome to get the latest version of a given item[0]. And that's a trivial search query.
The only thing that annoys me about DDG is that I have to use !wen for Wikipedia searches. !w will return localized search on Wikipedia, and I almost never want the Danish wikipedia.
I guess this is based on the Accept-Language header of your browser (which you can control), not guessed from your IP (which is a terrible thing to do): since my OS is in English even though I'm in France, I get to have the English wikipedia with !w and use !wfr for local stuff. In fact I did not know about the behaviour you describe because of that.
I was in the same boat with !gi but DDG image search is increasingly relevant, and is not infested by Pinterest results. DDG increasingly feels like home the way Google Search did years ago.
I started out doing that, but I've found myself using !g less and less recently. There are two main things I find myself needing it for: Location based queries, Google will always prioritize UK based results, and often London based results for me. The other is technical searches, I'm not sure how much this is due to Google having better search algorithms for this, or just that it has the data to know that I'm a programmer, but it it's more likely to know that I'm talking about coding with a term like Python or Ruby which could mean something else.
I hope DDG can keep improving, and I do feel like it's a worthy alternative now. I do wonder how they can keep making money with no advertising or paid services, but if they were to be bought out by a big player, I think they would quickly lose much of their user base.
> There are two main things I find myself needing it for: Location based queries, Google will always prioritize UK based results, and often London based results for me.
As I'm German, that's actually where DDG has the advantage over Google. Most of my searches are in English, but sometimes I want to search for something here, with DDG that's just a single press of a button and I get German results. With Google I'd have to do multiple clicks.
You can also force Googles language using the query parameter "hl". E.g. www.google.de/?hl=en returns English queries. That parameter is preserved through multiple querries, so you can use this in a bookmark and have multiple google language versions just a click away.
Not as handy as the DDG location switch, but still a sometimes useful hack.
There's a little toggle switch below the search box on DDG that will let you flip localized searches on/off. I use it when I need local results. It's a step extra of cause, but it is nice being able to quickly tell the search engine whether or not you want local result.
I find DDG does a better job with low-to-mid difficulty tech queries because it displays the top stack overflow answer at the top of the results which is often what I want. But you're right, really obscure tech questions usually involve a !g.
Especially images. Google freaking removed the ability to go straight to an image without going to the page. Google has also repeatedly violated user rights, computing isn't all about pragmatism. Of course, I'm a gplv3/gnu kind of user so I'm the outlier.
Google will also show you results targeted only for you. In comparison different IP address/accounts using the same search string in DDG will always get the same result. This can lead to a bias which might not be optimal.
Also they have advertisements, but unlike Google they are not targeted to you, hence making them less competitive for advertisers. Hopefully, this will not prevent them from growing in the future.
I have been using DDG for about 2 years. While I also have !g programmed into my fingers, I notice that most of the time Google don't give me the result I want / expect so I have actually stopped doing that lately.
In fact, many, many times DDG gives me better results than Google.
My personal rule of thumb is that if I look for a reference manual or an official website vanilla DDG is the way to go. If I'm looking for really fresh contents like news or latest QA !g gives better results.
Guess it's logical because even if the search algorithm of DDG is pretty neat, they can't compete yet with Google army of crawlers that probably use every idle computing power of their massive cloud.
The key for me is making the query _slightly_ more descriptive. It's a good thing that it's not tracking me, so it's fair enough that I should type a bit more so that it knows I mean Ruby the language and not the gemstone.
Have been using DDG for several years. Initially, I did !google a lot, not I maybe do it once a month, and even then the result is not always better. For most of my daily queries DDG is completely on par.
I’m wary of using DuckDuckGoog, and have stopped doing so.
Its maintainer stopped using it, and when it recently broke he started recommending a random fork from a user with no open-source presence that hasn’t made any update since. As for the live version, it’s now working thanks to some other random twitter user. The whole transition was a rush job.
I’m not saying those people aren’t trustworthy. What I am saying is that we don’t know, because the maintainer of DuckDuckGoog did not care enough to make sure the project would be left in good hands.
FWIW I'm the random twitter user (https://twitter.com/m_held + https://github.com/mheld) and use duckduckgoog myself, so when it went down all of a sudden I thought I'd just continue running it for folks. Will probably ask to transfer the repo at some point
I'm actually surprised how often I search in ddg and think , wow maybe google has better results? then I do !g and find that Google's results are worse! Then I hit the back button and browse ddg results.
I had the same experience. I'm using Google once a day at most. I can't remember the last time it helped me find something that ddg didn't. It can be harder to scroll into the later results with Google, which makes a big difference in my experience with it.
I’ve been using ddg for a few years and it really has come a long way. When I first started I would !g all the time. These days I almost exclusively use ddg searches. I find their results to be just as relevant as google.
I use a metasearch engine (searx) for precisely this reason. It aggregates results from any number of search engines, sending request to them in a very generic, non-identifying form, then displays them all on one page with a tag next to it to indicate where the source of the result came from. You can host Searx yourself or use a public instance, but using the public instance means you trust the operator to not log/filter results/inject ads(I don't know if folks do, but it would be possible) or do other nefarious things. It's pretty easy to host it yourself..
> Many times when I don't find the results I am looking for, I subconsciously assume that google would be able to find them.
I've also been using DDG as a main search engine for a while and feel the similarly. Even more, for some queries I subconsciously assume that DDG won't find the result I want and resort to Google before I even search. Examples of such queries are complex programming questions etc.
I've used DDG as my main search site for a few years now. Every once in a while when I don't find what I want, I try !g and lately I find that Google didn't find anything usefully better. So now using !g is more like a last resort before giving up rather than an expectation that it will really help.
> I basically have !g programmed into my fingers for everything more complicated
This might be more energy than you're willing to expend, but just in case you were not already aware: there is a feedback icon in the bottom-left(!!!) corner of the page through which you can let them know about your bad experience. My interest in doing that is that in my life it is unreasonable to expect change without letting the other party know of your discontent.
I gravely wish it was just a one button sad-face, but at least it exists. I also would have previously guessed they could have used the presence of `!g` as a proxy for the sad-face, but that's certainly not true if users are preemptively `!g` based on an assumption about the results instead of trying the search first.
I've been using DDG for around six months now, largely because I love their keyboard shortcuts. Weirdly there doesn't seem to be a shortcut to help insert bang commands.
I've been using this greasemonkey script[1] as a workaround, but I'd love to have an official solution.
Google search results are getting increasingly more terrible. If this trend keeps up, Google will be a barely viable search engine in a couple years. Google's interests are too conflicted now, rigging their search results to benefit their own alphabet companies. The result is search results biased to Google's own walled garden... And it's Very noticeable
It really depends on what you're searching for, but I don't think it's a problem. I think DDG is way better than Google for lots of things, but it's fine if it's not better at everything since a Google search is just a g! away.
You might want to try Bing as well. Sometimes it can surprise you, although I haven't used it as extensively as the others.
When I first started using DDG, I had the same response, but I have found that my use of "!g" has steadily diminished over time, without making any conscious effort.
> But I basically have !g programmed into my fingers for everything more complicated.
On mobile, typing "!g" takes 7 actions (including the focus, space and enter). DDG should make a button for it, below the search results, so you can easily revert to Google if you didn't find what you were looking for.
Honestly, without this button, I doubt if I will ever start using DDG much.
Why would DDG include a button to a competing search engine, considering they already have !g? It’s implicitly saying that, “our search results aren’t that great, here’s a direct button to search Google for the same thing.”
I think you misunderstand. What DDG would be saying is: "Here are our results; in case you didn't find what you were looking for, here's a button that will give you Google's results".
Having this button will make me use DDG more, not less.
Side note, if they get bought out by a big player, I will feel like my use of them for the last year has been for naught.