Let's start using DuckDuckGo more often
Granted that DuckDuckGo.com is quite a childish name, but then so was Google when we first heard about it in early 2000s, wasn't it? I just switched to DDG recently and feel that not only is the interface fast and minimal (like Google used to be in those early days), but even the results seem to be a lot better (at least specific to the programming topic that I search too often). I'm getting a feeling that some day in future, DDG is going to become as big as Google, if not supersede it.
But a search engine's results are only as accurate as the number of users who search and contribute to it, so its my appeal to people to give a chance to DDG and start using it more and more instead of Google.
197 comments
[ 24.2 ms ] story [ 5833 ms ] threadAn obvious example of this is when I search for "Django" (I am primarily a Django developer). DuckDuckGo will return results about the film as the top hits, whereas Google already knows that I mean Django Web Framework and will return those as the top hits.
I appreciate the fact that my searches are anonymous with DDG, but I doubt that it will be able to be "as good" as Google for that reason.
And this was with safe search on.
Let's say everybody stops using Google right now and starts using DDG with its anonymous, proxied queries to Bing. How does this in any way improve search results? You could maybe argue that heavy direct use of bing.com would give Microsoft some useful training data. But none of that changes the fact that Bing's crawlers aren't that good, and neither is its search engine.
It seems to be just lumping results together by language without putting enough weight on location.
Funny thing is, I have just the opposite issue with google. While traveling, it constantly tries to force me to use the local version even if I don't want to (redirecting from google.com etc.) which puts more weight on local results.
I don't think they use IPs to geolocate, so I find myself using yelp (or sometimes tripadvisor/citysearch) for local results.
Maybe a geolocating custom search / instant answer box (that can be opt-in/out) would help. It is one step down the slippery slope of search bubbling/tracking, but maybe that isn't the end of the world -- it could be done by town or something.
While my countries flag was displayed next to the search bar it was set to "All results" in the menu, so I have to explicitly enable the region filter by flipping the switch next to it.
Ideally, the world needs more internet search engines - as of now only Google, Bing, Yandex, Baidu come to my mind. And various initiatives like Cuil, Wikia Search, etc failed or good ones like Exalead (EU sponsored Google competitor, bought by Dasault), Blecko (bought by IBM for Watson) got bought and vanished for general public but are still active for internal company purposes.
And why do we need more web search engines? Because of the filter bubble, censorship and privacy concerns, etc. - it's never good to have to deal with a mono- or duo-poly (which is already reality, as in most countries on 1-2 of them return really good search results, and the others are barely useable for local native language search phrases).
I love the idea of DDG, and I'm delighted on the rare occasion that I get better results than google. But most of the time I get results that are inferior to El Goog. Still, I keep trying.
What if DDG allowed us to manually tell them information about our demographic in a way that wasn't stored on their servers and could be changed at will? If you want convenience, maybe there could be an optional client-side preference detector script that only offered possible configurations.
Don't get me wrong, I like the idea of not using Google, but this seems like a very user hostile way to do it.
I would prefer conscious filtering to this automated (and obscure) filtering that Google et al. utilise. I understand it's not for everyone, but it would suit me far better.
Now if you had an ML algorithm running in your browser that analyzed your preferences and transparently changed your DDG searches from "Django" to "Django web framework", you might get something closer to what you get with Google. Wonder if Firefox could make that happen.
https://duckduckgo.com/?kl=jp-jp&kae=t&kt=g
With cloud save, you pick a password, and have to type that in once on each device.
They don't support bubbling, or user profiling, so you can't dump/restore those.
I think the parent poster was asking for a feature more like "I use LaTeX to document Django. This is all you should know about me. Go."
Put another way, can I fill that form out, create a google search bookmarklet that encodes my responses client-side, and then use it with all google cookies and ad domains blocked?
Also, I switched to ddg years ago, and can't remember one time when I thought that personalizing the results would improve matters.
Every few months, I'll search for something, not find it, and try google. Falling back to google has helped maybe two times out of dozens of searches. In one case google found an old email thread where someone asked my question and got no answer. In the other, I was looking for a specific document with a solution to a Linux issue. I had found it with ddg before. It turns out the solution no longer worked, and was superceded by documents ddg had already returned.
It is unclear that running that test with google as the primary search engine and ddg as the secondary would have different results.
DuckDukGo bangs syntax is simply fantastic even if i mostly always use theses 4 : !w , !m, !g, !gi
Privacy by default, google when you need, it's my default since 2 years.
https://duckduckgo.com/bang?c=Tech&q=django
I make all kinds of search queries but I only use privacy centric search engines when required for my particular concerns. In my opinion, the best way to stay anonymous is by disguising yourself as normal. Today's browser are capable of switching search engines with the use of a single letter before the search query to make use of a particular search engine. And one can easily visit Firefox search engine database to include it in their list.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/search/?atype=4
I haven't use DuckDuckGo's bang features, so I really don't understand what are they trying to achieve other than proxying the search result which I already satisfactorily achieve by having multiple Firefox profile with different proxies.
I think this is never ending quest of integrating new search engines in DuckDuckGo. But it will never match the native use. For example, take Wolfram Alpha or TinEye(Reverse Image Search).
Bottom line is that there are million ways to stay anonymous while using native search engines instead of routing it through third party services.
Started using Beaker Browser as my main browser, DDG as my search, and am working on moving the rest of my life off google (read: gmail).
Also have been messing with doing more work on a raspi tablet rigged with a bluetooth keyboard/trackpad combo.
For 'easy' searches it's equivalent to Google.
For 'hard' searches it's nearly stricter better than Google, because if DuckDuckGo doesn't find something I also look at the Google results (append !g to the search), and they often come up with very different subsets of the internet.
To me it no longer has anything to do with privacy or not liking Google, it's just that DuckDuckGo has the better product for putting into your search bar.
Edit: grammar.
The results for a general search usually are good enough, so don't I even bother to use Google directly.
Maybe it improved since you used it?
You can put intentionally crappy results under a google logo, and google results under any other logo, and most people will say the crappy "google" results are better.
You need the crappy results to be reasonable -- for example, strip out half of Google's top ten.
Are there not privacy concerns about this for DDG?
>Yet they do store a cookie by default - this cookie is called "user_segment" and is valid for 1 month after it is first set.[1]
They have removed it but this kind of behaviour doesn't exactly raise trust. Also they are based in US so 'privacy' is just PR.
I would recommend to use startpage.
[1]https://archive.is/qntuk [2]https://8ch.net/tech/ddg.html
Google did not become huge because of the search engine alone. AFAICT two things, based on related technologies, made Google oodles of money: AdWords and SERP ads. (AdWords used to be so unobtrusive I never tried to block them.)
I don't know how DDG currently pays its bills. They do feature unobtrusive and clearly marked ads on their SERP, too.
I'm not sure if ads can be reasonable without precise targeting, that is, tracking, tacit privacy invasion of various sorts, etc. Poorly targeted ads are disliked both by users ("dumb!") and advertisers ("poor conversion, money wasted").
The only other option I can see for a private company is to sell a subscription. Pay n USD / mo for no-tracking, no-strings-attached search.
The question is, of course, the value of n. It may turn out to be uncomfortably high for many users, just because advertisers value their eyeball rather highly.
You can already opt out of ads on some Google services, e.g. YouTube: try closing a few ads, or visit google.com/contributor when it (re-)opens. You can opt out of personalized ads, too. While many of us still won't trust all these measures, for many these would feel adequate.
I wish DDG all the luck. But being and staying an alternative, privacy-respecting search engine, even a low-profile one, isn't going to be easy.
I beg to differ. What it is, is advertising that makes me install an adblocker.
OTOH what are you looking for may have a context. That same car dealership's ads may vary greatly in content (and click-through rate) if it is known that the person looking at the screen is a recent graduate, or has a family with three kids, or is a single at his 40s. It's hard to sell a family wagon to a recent graduate, but it costs the same to show an ad with a "wrong" car on it. This kind of precise targeting is what advertisers are ready to pay a premium for.
On that note, any good alternatives to G-Suite that aren't necessarily Microsoft O365 (though I'm not against migrating to that either). A straightforward email migration is a big plus, documents not such a big deal.
Thanks for the answer
Also, of course, note that if you have a mail message under two Gmail labels, and use IMAP to copy your folders, you'll probably end up with two copies of that message.
Migrating out of Gmail, FWIW, is still a pain because they are so nonstandard now.
But I never had an issue with the dates on the emails.
Well, no, they don't even have their own search engine.
> a search engine's results are only as accurate as the number of users who search and contribute to it
That makes no sense. Anyway, we don't use DDG because its results are shitty.
Really? I've never heard this, do you have anymore information about it?
https://duck.co/forum/comment/27893
Edit, that's about 5 years old. The current page on Wikipedia provides a more recent explanation.
"DuckDuckGo's results are a compilation of "about 50" sources,[42] including Yahoo! Search BOSS; Wikipedia; Wolfram Alpha; Bing; its own Web crawler, the DuckDuckBot; and others."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DuckDuckGo#Overview
http://www.searchenginepeople.com/blog/10-meta-search-engine...
Not sure how marketable it is, though. Google is pretty dominant. Most companies already running their stuff through it.
Here. I just found the link to one of the blogs I follow for search. Looks like DuckDuckGo is increasing its use of Yahoo for a big partnership:
http://arnoldit.com/wordpress/2016/12/13/duckduckgo-makes-se...
> Anyway, we don't use DDG because its results are shitty.
These kind of comments are a bit unnecessary, especially on Hacker News, I believe.
At least, the OP could have elaborated on why does he thinks this way so that everyone could understand why DDG's results are "shitty".
Unfortunately, no one can know what the OP thinks. As a result, it is hurting the work of others without any feedback so that they can improve themselves (i.e. DDG team) and serves little purpose (no explanations on the why) except expressing a frustration.
At least, that's my opinion. Let's be elegant in how do we relate to others. Feel free to disagree with me, but I think this kind of behavior is what creates a more toxic environment in our fields.
1. I type search terms in text form into Google in an attempt to get a list of results that meet my needs. It virtually always gives me high-quality results I need in top few hits. High-quality means the results help me find what I'm looking for or better understand what my search terms describe. I do this into DuckDuckGo, it often provides low-quality results. Low-quality means the results were not relevant to the text I typed in, they were barely relevant to the text I typed in, or they were relevant but had less utility than results from Google.
2. I do exploratory search with Google by typing in words I think are related to the topic I'm trying to understand. It often gives me high-quality results in the top. If I do it with DuckDuckGo, it gives me low-quality results about as often as high-quality results. I see few patterns in the input that would let me accurately gauge whether inserting specific terms into DuckDuckGo instead of Google would produce as many relevant results I could utilize. This makes me unable to know if use of DuckDuckGo will have as high utility for the time and effort invested vs using Google's service. So, as I default on privacy, I had to try inputting the search terms into DuckDuckGo first with expectation it would often not meet my goals, mentally track what it succeed or failed on, and slowly gain instincts on what search terms to skip DuckDuckGo on in favor of Google to be more time-effective. As a Google user, I didn't have this problem that forced me to profile the search engine to gauge when it was capable of performing a search with high-quality results.
That, in detail, is why I had a poor, user experience with the search service provided by DuckDuckGo. Of course, explained constructively & in detail, it just looks like I think readers on Hacker News are idiots. Even my grandmother knows what a "shitty," "terrible," or "bad" search engine is. Such terms are how laypeople universally describe search functionality that fails to turn their queries into actionable information. They also short-hand what's common knowledge to save time. Describing your search experience in detail to such people will even sound condescending. So, instead I just usually say it's a a hit and miss search engine with result being them nodding their head in understanding. The other commenter apparently thought so, too, condensing it to one word and I still knew what it meant.
What search terms are you using? Ideally, could you provide some searches that perform poorly on ddg, but well if you prepend g! to the term (which runs an anonymized google search)?
If the difference always comes down to google search personalization (so you can't provide a search others can repeat), that would also be interesting to know.
Here is the only query I ran in 2016 (so far) where ddg's results convinced me to use google, and then I found my answer on google:
drmSetMaster permission denied
The correct answer is to install xorg-server-legacy, and edit Xwrapper. I was looking for the now incorrect answer about setting some X binary setuid root. Both search engines provide lots of very out-of-date results, so I filtered ddg on setuid about half way through my search there.
Calling this query a "win" for google is questionable, but it is their top performer for me in the last year. Also the page with the answer does contain the string setuid.
Don't even remember. It was mostly technology, history, academic papers, games, movies, and so on. I'm someone whose good at working around search engines but has a bad memory. I'm unfortunately not a good test case for the input as I get good at unconsciously working around problems to make a better baseline. I did have to regularly switch over to Google, though.
"but well if you prepend g! to the term (which runs an anonymized google search)?"
I didn't know about that feature at all. Thanks for telling me. I was going to run search through DDG and Google next time I have trouble to document the difference. Now, I'm considering doing DDG, DDG w/ Google option, and Google itself to see what the per-user customizations bring vs anonymized Google.
"If the difference always comes down to google search personalization"
I didn't think about that angle with Google. Surprised I overlooked it. I don't think it was affecting my search as a lot of it should have a large number of searchers. The esoteric stuff definitely got better results in Google over DDG's default, esp CompSci papers. Before I had Search Link Fix, I would type them into DDGo to get an actual, non-Google link to the PDF. This usually worked but some papers didn't exist in DDG at all. Even though they probably should've indexed the site (eg a university). So, it was clearly a deficiency. Other times, it was an obscure site that's been around a while but maybe low traffic dropped it out of a cache or something. Google had it since they store pages & have been for long time. (shrug)
So, maybe I can collect these into a little pile of files to drop on the team for their debugging.
"so I filtered ddg on setuid about half way through my search there."
Worst-case scenario. It's happened to me on occasion when a common term, esp reported in any news outlet, flooded my results with garbage. Eliminate it hoping to filter the noise. Usually works but this time the signal went out with the noise. I'm not so harsh on search engines with things like that since people in support forums drop all kinds of jargon that may or may not be related during discussion of a specific problem. I think that causes the bad results.
Out of curiosity, though, I ran your example. Your example is weird. They get the same top result with next best on one being a StackOverflow answer while another looks at StackExchange. I don't know what you were trying to do where I can't gauge the effectiveness of the answer. Here's a pastebin with the top 5 results I'm getting as of today:
http://pastebin.com/c9VGrT87
Did one or both have the answer?
http://pastebin.com/j3v1NfYw
Ddg does not. I strongly prefer the ddg behavior. To each their own.
It is the equivalent to me replying to you with:
"You don't know why the comment sucks because you also suck."
Instead of pointing you to this wonderful Paul Graham article:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=149052
While these are all true, we're on a message board, not debating in Ancient Greece. I am very sympathetic to calls to improve comment quality, but on the other hand it's unrealistic to expect someone to perform a deep technical analysis of why Google is better... in a message board comment.
Yet, the original comment was sensible just because of two things:
1. Everyone on the Internet that uses a search engine knows what a good or bad one is. It has one purpose: turn your query into information you can use. If people say it doesn't or it's "shitty," then it's not doing it's job as a search engine effectively. All we really need to know.
2. The more specific information is better directed at the DuckDuckGo support or development teams to help them improve their alogrithms. Posting piles of data in Hacker News comments would only seem useful for the use-case I described above, people studying effectiveness of search engines via terms + results (better done elsewhere), or people reverse engineering DuckDuckGo's algorithm. I don't see why we'd expect people to produce or post that data as it's a lot of work and screen space.
2) There is at least one ddg developer here (not me), and HN is generally a good source of constructive feedback for startups. Maybe the original commenter's query string would help ddg or a competitor improve their product.
I am sure there is a presentation bias. I am sure that there are plenty of cases where a user cannot tell if a set of results are good or bad for a specific query. I am sure some users have trouble communicating why they think a specific result is good or bad.
However can people tell the general quality of a search engine? Absolutely. Google's simple aesthetics certainly helped them, but they didn't become the top search engine by luck and aesthetics alone. AltaVista, Yahoo, Lycos, Excite were all junk compared to Google, even the first version. It was very obvious.
The research I'm citing is from the late 00's. At this point in the game, differences in search relevance are in the measurement noise.
2. DDG has contact info. I maintain that it's better to send data directly to them if one is troubleshooting it or helping them improve the product. Hoping a random employee is on same tech forum is a stretch despite it happening here more often than average. So, if we all did search data, we'd post it on a dedicated forum they host after we email them about the project.
Like you, I find it often gets me good results on programming or tech topics. Among other things.
I think the search engine space is very ripe for a startup, but duckduckgo isn't it IMHO.
Would you? Most search engines' growth, including Google, was fueled by advertising revenue. Obviously that part of the equation isn't really an option for DDG.
I wonder if they would be better off as a non-profit, like Wikipedia. I would donate to them.
Google search has been "good enough" for years, and so has the competition.
Multiple companies have burnt billions proving that search relevance will not convert users on its own.
If you want to crush Google, you need some compelling reason for people to switch (voice? privacy?), or you need to maintain good relevance until Google screws up badly enough. Maybe they will fire half the search team during an economic downturn in the 2020's, for example. At that point, you can use cash reserves to poach most of the top 10% of the remaining team.
The problem with long games like this is that you might screw up or lose focus before Google does. This happened at Yahoo.
Switching industry sectors, Microsoft had tons of negative press about 8, 8.1 and then 10's force upgrade/privacy debacle. With a mediocre or better hardware launch, Apple probably would have cleaned up. Instead, Apple's MacOS lines happened to falter in the same years as Windows did. Now, Windows devices are earning lukewarm to positive comparisons against Apple devices.
This is false, as has already been pointed out.
If by 'shitty' you mean it has areas for improvement then yes I agree; as does your tact.
Search engines are such an important tool that I would be more than willing to pay $10 a month for a good quality one with strong commitment to privacy and maybe additional premium features.
[0]: https://www.startpage.com/