I've been using DuckDuckGo for more than a year now and barely use other search engines. It's the default on all the devices that I use.
I am so happy to be a user and be part of their growth as well.
The only thing that could improve it would be searches in other languages, I still don't get a good result when I search in other languages such as Russian, Persian, Arabic, etc..
I’ve also been all-in on DuckDuckGo for over a year now. I feel like it always gives me good results. I only speak English, but better support for other languages would be fantastic for those who can benefit from it.
I mainly search in English as well, but when trying to find local news, books or part of a song lyrics in different language it doesn't perform as other search engines would perform.
Same, very happy using DDG. I hope they're becoming profitable.
The one thing that I have to go back to Google for is when I want to search just one specific site (usually Stack Overflow, I guess). Google has the `site:example.com` feature. I don't think that's possible with DDG.
EDIT: Apparently it does work! Thanks, I'm pretty sure it didn't when I started using DDG. Maybe I'm just an idiot.
That's a good point, thanks for reminding me about bangs. The one issue with them is that they're assigned by DDG (i.e., not free-form). (I don't think there was one for Stack when I started using DDG, and I never thought to check back.)
For me, bangs are the actual killer feature. Because when I set DDG as my default search engine in my browser, I get to use bangs at the address bar.
So for example rather than having to use Wikipedia's or Stack Overflow's search bar to find something, it's just Ctrl+t and "!w <term>" or "!gi <term>".
On Windows this is quite 50-50 -- you're likely holding the mouse anyway. On Unix machines with more keyboard-oriented UI, with say a tiling WM, things like bangs at browser address bar are a godsent. Of course it is nice on mobile too -- direct queries rather than hoppping around using clumsy touchscreen.
There are likely browser extensions for this though, but none of them set DDG as their default search engine -- so just doing that manually also gives you the bangs so in my book DDG wins here ;)
Firefox lets you set up search keywords, which to match the same thing. They used to be hidden away, but more recently they’ve got promoted a bit and are quite easy to set up.
Firefox search keywords are awesome! They can be much shorter than bangs because there's no need to avoid name conflicts with thousands of sites you aren't using. Plus, no exclamation mark, and you can use them for sites at work which aren't publicly visible.
I don't get it, I've been using the native equivalent "forever", aka keywords, you just get to set your own, and don't need to use ! (but you can't put them at the end, which has utility on DDG).
> Same, very happy using DDG. I hope they're becoming profitable.
It's my understanding they are profitable, a large chunk being things like Amazon referrals (nontrackable).
They may not have as many users but they also have much lower overhead since they don't need vast teams of engineers working on new ways of slicing and dicing data.
Only if you are logged into Chrome and sync your browsing history. Even then you still gain the non-privacy benefits like ddg not constructing filter bubbles (at least not to the extend of google)
Nowhere on the page does it say "exploding", OP is exaggerating what is roughly linear growth. I think the title should be edited.
Edit: To be clear, I'm not saying this is not worth posting or should be taken down, just "exploding" does not even remotely describe DDG's traffic. The post was interesting, only OP's fabricated title is inaccurate.
Edit 2: Several comments mention the graph does show daily searches, and is therefore showing exponential growth. My reason for thinking it's cumulative and not daily, is because it says below that the daily record is 29 million searches and that the cumulative number is 22.569 billion. When hovering over the last value in the graph, it shows 22.2 billion.
For the record, the current title is "DuckDuckGo Usage is exploding right now".
The submitted title "DuckDuckGo Usage is exploding right now" is editorializing and is against the HN site guidelines. It should be changed to the actual page title, "DuckDuckGo Traffic".
When hovering over the last value in the graph, I see 22 million. I don't know where you found the next three digits It looks like the plot is lagging the numbers below, for some reason.
If you change the "365 Day Average" above the graph to, say "7 day average" you'll see a recent uptick that does justify the "exploding right now" language.
It went from 23.5 million/day to 27.9 in the last 51 days, which is 134% annualized growth. Something happened around 7 August.
Google's privacy policy change in 2012 is perhaps the closest comparable past event - over two months DDG traffic trebled. Recent stories about Google might be driving this.
I changed my default from Google Search to DDG in February. Surprised by how little I’ve noticed the change, after nearly 20 years using Google.
It feels more like the old Google that wasn’t stuffed with ads, and I find it superior for programming queries (aside from Angular 2+ docs).
I still type in google.com and perform queries there a few times a week. I also turn to Google Images for copyleft photos, as DDG doesn’t seem to support filtering by license yet.
Well, it's pretty small. I'm just multiplying though here the CTR and the CPC and the QPS. I guess they can probably serve DDG from a handful of machines, since they don't own the search stack.
I've switched all my devices to ddg and Firefox. Automatically logging me into Chrome was just emotionally too much, even if it did not send a single extra bit to Google.
I miss the summary responses at the top of search results because they made Google much more of a reference. For example, defining words, quick view of Wikipedia results, etc.
Ditto. I need a Blink engine browser for work though, so I ended up switching to Vivaldi for work needs and I don't know why I didn't switch before this sign in fiasco...
Ddg has a tab for meanings that works similar, it's one more click but I don't know in which conditions it appears. They also show Wikipedia entries on the side with links to both Wikipedia and the official site when there's one which is quite convenient.
But typing "!g" when a search does not return what I want is too clumsy. It requires 7 touch-events on mobile (including focus and space).
Please make that simpler, and I will switch.
(My suggestion would be to have a "!g" button at the bottom of the search results. Perhaps make it optional, depending on user-settings; I don't mind a cookie for just that.)
Why make it Google-specific? What if DDG could suggest from a range of other search engines that might give you better results based on the nature of your query?
>typing "!g" when a search does not return what I want is too clumsy. It requires 7 touch-events on mobile (including focus and space).
Part of the issue is you search differently with Google. Most users treat their keywords as circles in a venn diagram - the top result being the center.
Try being a little more explicit with DDG. Add the year a movie came out, the first and last name of a person + their title if it's a common name, things like that.
Also an aside, "!s" routes through startpage, which proxies a google search for you - much more private but still leveraging the Pagerank algorithm.
True. As other users noted, when using DDG you have to be more specific simply because DDG doesn't have as much information about you as Google has.
But ... this also means that a DDG search would work well on Google. So a revert-to-Google button could help people make the transition. I suppose that people will become more and more specific in their queries until at some point they never need to hit that "!g" button anymore.
What you describe is a clear regression to pre-Google days where searching was kind of dark art. DDG really needs to improve its usability and try prioritize the most relevant results without specifying extra keywords. Yes, it is impossible to be level with Google in this game. But DDG can surely do much better than now, without any intrusive tracking. E.g. when I search a restaurant by its name from an IP address in Europe, why do I get results with restaurants in the USA? Or when I search for a name from a university IP address, why instead of the researcher with that name I get the name of a second rate sportsman?
Searching Google is the real dark art these days, especially if you don't use personalized results. I am constantly frustrated by Google straight up ignoring my most important search terms.
At least with DuckDuckGo I know that it's searching for what I told it to, rather than searching for something easier to find, which seems similar to a machine, but completely different to me.
> I am constantly frustrated by Google straight up ignoring my most important search terms.
However, on Google you do get an identifier next to the result that shows whether your term is missing from the page or not which allows for weeding out "unrelated" results relatively quickly. It also has the "must include" link so that you can narrow your searches without having to retype the query.
Doing the same search on DDG just shows some results but it's not clear whether my specific terms are on the page or not.
Same here. I often have to switch to "verbatim" results. I hate their too clever "we guessed what you're really searching for! here you go!" results...
Not analyzing IP addresses to deliver more relevant results seems pretty aligned with that whole "respecting your privacy is our main selling point". I gladly add another word to my queries if that keeps DDG from taking a step towards where google is today.
Also consistency is to be valued. Example: if I say to someone else over the phone to search for "X", then I usually want them to see the exact same search results as I do.
A couple of months back, everybody went ballistic when the EU GDPR declared IP addresses as "personal data". Can't recall any posts/articles that were actually defending this GDPR provision—if you can point us to one, I'd love to read the counter-arguments.
So I believe that there is a consensus that using IP addresses to improve search results would be fair game for DDG. It's also consistent with the DDG promise: "we don't track you".
OTOH, not using them has only marginal effect on user's privacy: (a) DDG doesn't serve ads anyway, and (b) the metadata of user's online activity are still available to three-letter agencies to analyze.
as long as they aren't being stored, it shouldn't matter. You could just read user's IP, use that to filter results, then throw it away
Also IP by itself isn't really that much of a privacy problem. It only becomes a problem when it's used in the process of delinkage of more sensitive information
I find that DDG has as good as Google results, but it "speaks" differently. I was with you, but the more I use DDG the more I find my queries adapting to DDGs style. Now when I end up using Google, by accident on other people's devices, I get bad results because now I am used to searching in a DDG way and not a Google way.
Not the person you replied to, but: Google invests tremendous wealth into guessing what you mean based on what it knows about you and what it knows in general. That's how you can type in a generic word that's also the title of 300 different movies, books, and TV shows, and still get exactly what you expected (usually).
DuckDuckGo is Google before it started down this path. You have to be specific. The more words you provide, the smaller the set of possible answers, and the more likely your answer is at the top.
Google, these days, tends to report the same number of results no matter how specific you get. It used to get smaller the more words you put in. It's a philosophical difference. Google assumes you only have a vague idea of what you're looking for and is increasingly confident it knows best.
DuckDuckGo starts with the same assumption, but trusts you to refine your own query without the help of a global network of patterns acting on data. That doesn't work too well on Google now. You're just as likely to trigger an anti-bot check refining queries as you are to find what you're looking for.
It's for this very reason that I find google annoying when searching for programming solutions - if I'm switching between languages often, it "learns" that I'm focusing on C# problems and always bubbles those to the top, even though I may have been looking for a Typescript solution.
DDG is far from perfect in this case, but at least you can refine the search per website without having to add a keyword to the search. By the way try doing some search for programming languages that choose a poor name for a bit of a laugh (I am looking at you Rust and Go).
I am developing https://jivesearch.com/, which is basically an open source version of DDG. We've got that right underneath the search results. Defaults to !g, !b, !a, and !yt but you can change it to whatever !bangs you want by passing in the b url parameter (eg "https://jivesearch.com/?q=bob+marley&b=w"). Would love your feedback!
I love that they make their traffic numbers available. I have been using ddg and graphing/predicting the next days traffic since March here: https://qunc.co/ddg.
Definitely a different trajectory since late summer.
A while ago I switched to duckduckgo.com for a while until I applied for an ESTA visa and wasn't paying attention. I shouldn't have gone for the top result, I know... On my flight to the US my bank received already three fraudulent creditcard transactions. Banks from my country are very quick though and froze everything. However, it makes me realize personally that ranking algorithms are important, especially if you're in a hurry.
PS: The governmental site is now at rank 1 on duckduckgo.
I think a lot of the people here raving about how great duckduckgo is do not understand that it's just a layer on top of Bing results. You could run Bing (or Google for that matter) in an incognito window and get the same effect.
What I'd like to see is an ad-free search engine that is open-source or subscription-based. DDG doesn't solve any of the fundamental problems with the search ecosystem.
"DuckDuckGo's results are a compilation of "over 400" sources,[45] including Yahoo! Search BOSS; Wikipedia; Wolfram Alpha; Bing; its own Web crawler (the DuckDuckBot); and others.[3][45][46] It also uses data from crowdsourced sites, including Wikipedia, to populate "Zero-click Info" boxes – grey boxes above the results that display topic summaries and related topics.[10]"
> In fact, DuckDuckGo gets its results from over four hundred sources. These include hundreds of vertical sources delivering niche Instant Answers, DuckDuckBot (our crawler) and crowd-sourced sites (like Wikipedia, stored in our answer indexes). We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we also source from a variety of partners, including Oath (formerly Yahoo) and Bing.
So in other words all the traditional link results are from Bing and Yahoo. The other 400 sources and their own crawler are only for things like Instant Answer boxes at the top (which are great btw).
> You could run Bing (or Google for that matter) in an incognito window and get the same effect.
That is incorrect information. Generally speaking, incognito windows limit the retention of information on your computer; they do not prevent others from collecting information about you. As a simple example, Google and Bing still could track you by your IP address.
From DuckDuckGo:[0]
Think “Incognito” mode blocks Google from watching what you’re doing? Think again. Private browsing modes are marketed to make you think that if it's not in your device’s browser history, it never happened. Sadly, that couldn't be further from the truth.[1]
Or just read their article, "Is Private Browsing Really Private?"[1]
DDG is a most important project! But I like GCHQ Cyberchef for this kind of thing, but also the node REPL or browser tools console REPL are good. Nice to have everything in one spot versus different tools based on search input.
I have been using DDG on my laptop for a while, now. These are some great examples of what it can do that I never knew! Thanks for sharing. That said, I have regularly made use of !g when the results were absolutely horrid. Often, it is when I am looking for something frustratingly specific that is named frustratly generic. So while I understand DDG's results, Google (scarily) understands me and gives me exactly what I want even for those only-a-geek moments.
I have a colleague who uses DDG but they frequently have to use !g to find relevant stack-overflow answers. It's not clear whether DDG is simply ranking them lower than they ought to be or if it's just google's personalisation algorithm understanding which SO answers are relevant to our job / stack.
Is there a way to verify that a search result set is “unpersonalized?” I wouldn’t put it past Google to be able to track you even into an incognito window.
Even the most paranoid don't think it's profitable for Google to track you through Tor, even if they've found some exploitable weakness. Try your search via Tor. Browser fingerprinting will get them little distinguishing information beyond what they get knowing you're coming from a Tor exit node.
DDG has a specific SO bang, so going via google is a clue that your colleague may be poor at basic searching and not understand the tools which they use.
If valid criticism is rude, we're all doomed here on HN. The parents point is valid. If you don't like it, that's fine, but rude it was not. Google doesn't know anything more than DDG, so you're just plain old wrong on that argument.
Those are neat but basically intercept traffic to websites that could easily do that sort of thing. Maybe a Hacker News user made a color picker as a side project. It would be monopolistic behavior when done by major companies.
On the one hand I see the issue too, but on the other hand, it is very useful, and it looks like those tools are some kind of open source collaboration:
I don't know who controls the contributions and decides what is going to be included in the final result, but so far it looks just fine to me. After all, they still present the normal search results below the tool.
> It would be monopolistic behavior when done by major companies
Right. And when done by non-monopolies, we call it "competition".
What if I made a color picker that competes with your other HN-person-color-picker? How does that work? If my color picker gets a search engine feature, am I unfairly intercepting traffic from DDG?
Google also has a calculator and a color picker. If you want to be mad at someone taking traffic that would be Google since they have 1000x the volume of ddg.
!hn for hacker news
!a for amazon
!w for wikipedia
!imdb for imdb
!reddit for reddit
!wa is the best for calculations and other weird stuff (ex: type in a date and find out what day of the week it was)
Well, if your browser's set search engine is DDG, !bangs can be used in the address bar. They're just shortcuts to other search engines. For example, if you wanted to search for Matt Damon on IMDB, you'd just type "!imdb matt damon" in your address bar and it'll forward the "matt damon" query to IMDB's search.
Too bad usually the general search engines are smarter than individual sites' search engines, I don't get how it's really useful than not having the bang.
> typing "!imdb matt damon" will simply forward you to the following link
In Safari, typing "imdb matt damon" and hitting the down arrow before enter gives me the same result. Do other browsers not have site search built-in? It will also pick up search fields on any site you browse you instead of requiring it to be added to some central repository.
And I use Spotlight for calculator and unit/currency conversions. Seems wasteful to roundtrip that kind of stuff online.
I don't think Firefox on Android supports this. On Desktop it's quite useful for when you want to search a site you don't have a shortcut for. Guessing the shortcut has usually worked for me.
Also, when your search didn't give you what you were looking for, you can just prepend e.g. !g to search on Google, which for me is slightly faster than to copy the query, go to the address bar, enter "g" and then paste.
Android Firefox supports both keywords for bookmarks (with %s substitution in URL) and bang searches on DDG from the address bar. I'm happy to discover this today :D
Yes, and it sends the data to ddg, but they have tons of keywords ready to use. I usually set my most used keywords directly and let ddg take care of the rest, best of both worlds.
I'm going to say no, because the black hole will be more dense than a neutron star, where chemical energy (and, more generally, chemistry) can't exist because protons and electrons fuse into neutrons.
The energy still exists, presumably, but claiming that's relevant would be like claiming a cheese at the top of a hill (potentially about to be rolled) has more calories.
In a previous life, I spent a lot of time backpacking, and half-jokingly made a point of stopping to eat/drink before bigger climbs. More fuel in the furnace, and less to haul up in the pack.
In that context, the cheese at the top of the hill really does have more calories or value or something along those lines.
The currency conversion seems to have improved. It used to require the currency and number in a specific order with specific spaces to work. Now it works with any order and spacing.
If you like DDG's bang commands, you might want to check out Riot.im - it supports autocomplete for DDG searches and bang commands (and as far as I'm aware is the only IM client to do so)
Why? Because some high powered adversary is spying and decrypting all your internet traffic to find a passphrase you may or may not use in its entirety?
> Show HN: QR codes - my mini project | Hacker News
> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2378735
> Mar 28, 2011 - Hello HN! Check out and comment on one of my
mini projects: http://coderqr.com. It's a website for the QR-uninitiated crowd to quickly make QR ...
The irony is that currently both google and ddg show this very thread as the top result for that search. DDG also happens to include a qr code for “hello hn”.
Im always pleasantly surprised when I do a search expecting to have to click a site to get the answer, only to have ddg show me the results(a lot of time with a nice widget)
I switched to it on Firefox mobile, works well enough for day to day stuff IMO. And if you need to quickly do a Google search you can use the !g bang operator as a prefix and it will redirect to google.
Yes,there was a time when results were not good enough,these days I only use google if my query isn't direct or if a I need to search for individuals(due to how little they care about privacy,searching email addresses anf names is still ideal in google)
Ddg also has 'bangs'. For example !whois looks up a whois record,!b searches it in bing and !translate translates via google translate. They havr many more :-)
Search "go vs rust" and set the filter to the "past month" in both Google and DuckDuckGo. I can go on and on, but this is just a simple evidence of how inferior DuckDuckGo is. Also DuckDuckGo is incapable of indexing client-side rendered HTML which has become increasingly important over the past few years.
EDIT: I would like to hear any logical response from those who downvote me
you actually do not provide evidence for this. Mainly because google's searching is subjective. Your result for "go vs rust" might be entirely different from mine on google. mind you i don't actively use DDG, but them being privacy first, i assume they do not apply your prefence to search results this way.
Duckduckgo seems very useful to getting out of the specific bubble google has created for in relation to your search history.
I did, I listed 1 big evidence (the lack of indexing client-side rendered HTML), and also a simple example "rust vs go" that came to my mind. Take another example that I just tried, search "classical music only" in both engines and see the difference, this is a very popular youtube channel and has a website but nothing is shown in DDG for me.
As much as I want to join you guys against the big fat lazy monopolist called Google, I can't just make myself blind and claim that DDG is anywhere near to Google when it comes to accuracy or sophistication. If you really appreciate privacy, why not try something like Startpage instead of hyping another for-profit company?
> I can't just make myself blind and claim that DDG is anywhere near to Google when it comes to accuracy or sophistication.
You don't have to, that's what !g is for. I start all my searched at DDG, and if I'm not seeing the results I want, I use !g. Somewhere around 80%-90% never require a redirect to Google for additional results, and that's a a number I can live with.
I've been using DuckDuckGo as my primary search engine for almost a year now. I still need to resort to !g for about 1/3 of my queries, which is less than it used to be, so the quality is definitely improving.
One weird thing that I noticed is that every so often when I'm in a Google SERP (e.g. in a friend's phone) and I'm not fully satisfied with the results, I add in !g, only to realize that makes no sense. So I wonder if there's a subset of queries that DDG produces better results for, or if Google's search quality is declining.
If anyone from DDG is reading this: Please add the ability to (voluntarily) personalize search results via a cookie, just like you do for the interface theme. Something like "Programming Language: JavaScript". That way ambiguous queries (e.g "array reverse") can be associated with the specific context without having to type it every time (e.g. "array reverse js")
That's not necessarily true. They could use a classifier to figure out the subject of the query (e.g. programming, cooking, travel) and then modify the query sent to Bing or whatever backend they use. Bonus points if they actually expose this on the UI, in a way that allows you to remove the personalization
They already do something like this because if you search "array reverse" or any programming question then you get a Q/A tab with stackoverflow almost always at the top.
They wouldn't be monitoring. You'd explicitly tell them what personalizations you want, and that would be stored in your machine via a cookie that you can delete at will (just like the color scheme/font)
It could either be a power user setting hidden away (like color scheme currently is), or it could be exposed on the SERP interface via a prompt: "Set JavaScript as your default programming language?" "Set vegan as your default diet?" etc
I do agree with the comment on needing a way to specify a topic, however, in my experience of 4-5 years on DDG, I have nothing but grief with Google search. It tries too much to guess what I am looking for on the internet and ends up being unhelpful and frustrating.
Thanks for the reminder, just realized that iOS on Safari offers DuckDuckGo as a search engine option, and that !sp can be used to proxy Google searches via Safari.
20 years ago Google Search was met with similar enthusiasm. I like DDG, but I don't see any reason why they would not pursue profits increase path once they become No 1 search engine.
I have recently switched to Firefox, and have been using DDG now for some time both on desktop and mobile.
In my experience Firefox + DDG is a viable alternative to Chrome + Google Search.
Occasionally I still need to go for google, but for about 98% of the time I'd say DDG is a no-op drop-in replacement for Google. I highly recommend this browser & search engine combo - DDG is great now, and Firefox is now decent again after a while in the wilderness.
Firefox also has some neat extensions like Google Container [1] that sandboxes all google cookies so you can still login to Gmail etc, but the cookies are not available for tracking elsewhere (e.g. analytics). I've recommended this add-on a lot recently - I've got no connection to it, just a satisfied user.
For me it's mostly that the ads are getting too good. Like, I look at raincoats on some site, then that site's raincoat ads follow me around for the next two weeks. I'm trying to be frugal and not buy more stuff that I don't need, but the ads actually get to me after a while. Adblock helps, but sometimes I have to turn it off for my work (web development).
I think there are a ton of very well-spoken arguments for why everyone, yes even those who "do nothing wrong," should care about privacy, and I would encourage you to look at those. Mostly because the people who publicly speak about this are much more eloquent than I, and have thought much more on the topic.
That said, I think it boils down to this: we all want privacy, but digital privacy is a hard problem because we are not "wired" to understand it. Humans are not good at interacting with systems with perfect memory, huge computational power, and extremely insightful statistical modeling capabilities.
This affects us differently than interacting with a person. Now, a machine can categorize you automatically based on political beliefs, religious beliefs, friend networks, conversational style, etc. This can be used to target you for (arguably unethical) influence via surgically targeted propaganda, or to retroactively mark you as a dissident in a tyrannical regime based on a comment you made off-hand years before the regime took power.
Left unchecked, these invasive tracking systems could be used for a myriad of unethical purposes. And even if you "do nothing wrong," it's important to remember that in most legal systems, it's very difficult to lead a normal life and never break any laws. Add to that the very, very long records these systems are capable of keeping on you, and I think it's clear why many people, myself included, wish to minimize our presence on platforms such as Google.
I think it’s worth while, even just to prevent our privacy from continuing to erode.
Also, who knows what changes in the future? Maybe something you do online today seems harmless but gets you in trouble in 20+ years.
Some people do have things they want to keep private. If only those people care about privacy, then they eventually stick out like a sore thumb and that’s not fair. It’s not always bad or malicious. Diseases, traumatic experiences, conditions, things you should be able to get help with or information on without Google or some other company profiling you.
I find this to be the most compelling argument, because it cleanly positions privacy advocacy as a charitable rather than selfish act.
I believe that individual privacy as a social norm is a prerequisite to free speech, that free speech is a prerequisite to democracy, and that democracy is a prerequisite to fairness in the world.
Advocating for your own privacy is worthwhile if only to provide herd immunity for others less privileged than you, and to send a message about how you wish others would act; to demonstrate popular demand, and to lead by example.
Would you feel comfortable posting your last 100 searches here? What about on a list next to your front door?
Even though you are "not doing anything wrong", perhaps you did a search on that funny looking rash you noticed the other day, or that trivial programming question you needed to look up the answer to.
For me, it is about keeping control of my information. And the best way to control it, is for it not to be collected.
You might want to search for a new job without it influencing searches that may be visible to a current employer.
You may want to search for health topics without it becoming associated at life insurers on the ad network.
You may want your teens to be able to search bullying and sexuality without Facebook or Google tagging those to their profiles, in perpetuity, or worse advertising and retargeting the topics to them.
Who decides if you do nothing wrong? Think about that seriously - who decides what is right and wrong?
Also - if those 'powers that be' decide you have done nothing wrong now, what about in perpetuity? What if in 5 or 20 years who or what you are itself is simply deemed wrong?
These arguments aren't fictional. Being gay and Jewish are just two unchangeable traits that have seen persecution in living memory. Let alone countless others.
Perhaps the Rohingya would be a very recent example.
Be cautious that your own sense of 'right and wrong' in the here and now doesn't cloud the reality that you are beholden to those with actual power to agree with your behaviours and traits - and that those powers can (and will) change over time.
Google has no business keeping a record of each and every one of your searches, tied to your account, but they do it anyway, and they are increasing the tracking by combining the gmail and browser login.
You may start searching for divorce lawyers at some point, and your spouse might stumble upon that.
These search histories could also be obtained with a subpoena, for reasons totally unrelated to you.
Chrome can no longer be safely used to login to google sites. Just because you don't care about privacy now doesn't mean that you won't later.
Do you lock your doors at night? Use curtains or shades on your windows?
Even if you do nothing wrong, would allow streaming cameras and hot mics in your house? How about leaving the door open to allow anyone on Earth to freely enter/exit your property?
Would you want an advertiser to recommend your porn to your love interests? Coworkers? "Popular in your social circle: bukkake MILFs!" We're not quite there yet, but we're close.
So yeah, DDG is basically unusable for me, at least for these types of use cases. I get the privacy benefits but IMO if a search engine is failing at its core job then everything else is pointless.
Yeah I mostly try to use DDG but I find that if my query has any implicit grammar (eg phrased as a question, or contains verbs) and not just independent search terms, then Google will get it and DDG won't find it at all.
Lots of !g and I don't try to use it on mobile yet.
I'm confused. When I run your DDG query, the first result is the github page, and the second result is the docs. So same top two as Google, but flipped. I find that acceptable. Maybe one of us is in some A/B bucket?
Very interesting. I see almost what bgaluszka sees, but the first two results flipped. I know they basically blend a couple search engine's results together, so they must experiment with different combinations.
This is where !g comes in handy. In my experience how you search ddg is a bit different from how you search google and it may require some time to get used to but for me what ddg offers is far more interesting than what google does e.g. consistent results, privacy, ability to forward my search request to other search engines.
I tried the query several times and got a few slightly different results, at one point getting something similar (but not identical) to enraged_camel's results. Most of the time it shows me what everyone else is reporting, but "consistent" might not be a good description here.
This is the reason I've somewhat recently switched to Searx - I've not had to run any !g searches, as I did when I was using DDG, but my privacy remains intact.
> In my experience Firefox + DDG is a viable alternative to Chrome + Google Search.
Yup, Firefox is better than Chrome (especially with tree style tabs on the side) and DDG isn't really as good as Google so, when you average things out, these are comparable combinations.
The results aren't all that sub-par. For technical questions specifically, they're actually (anecdotally) much better. And the favicons besides the results are a godsend.
The only thing I use Google for these days is when looking for something like a company in my area. Because of all its knowledge, Google knows I probably want the "Radio City" in my country, not the one from Toronto or whatever. But those cases are rare predictable, so I prefix it with !gsi without even thinking about it.
However on a search engine like DDG I now search without worrying of being tracked.
For example I’m researching obesity and diabetes. Do I want Google to know that? Do I want them to infer my potential illnesses from my searches? Hell no and I don’t care how good their search results are.
In my experience DDG is poor when the query is vague. But adding a word or two to make the query more specific helps DDG give results that are as good or better. You eventually get used to it.
Also fun fact but I deleted my entire history from my Google account, going back 15 years or so. Immediately afterwards Google’ search started giving me visibly worse search results.
So Google is being smart by doing your profile based on your history. That seems great at first but when you realize they’ve got more than a decade of data on you and that they know every problem you’ve had (like in my case, they know that my son was born prematurely for example, or that I used to smoke and many other personal issues I can’t share), it should freak you out.
People not worrying about this are either very young and thus don’t have baggage or haven’t thought this through.
I have a very similar experience. Switched to using Nightly with DDG, and I'm in IT so I search quite frequently. The browser is super fast, and container tabs are amazing. I'm able to find nearly everything I need, and only use Google as a last resort.
I like being able to contribute to a good project (by using Nightly I believe you submit some telemetry, a small contribution).
392 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 292 ms ] threadI am so happy to be a user and be part of their growth as well.
The only thing that could improve it would be searches in other languages, I still don't get a good result when I search in other languages such as Russian, Persian, Arabic, etc..
Thank you DuckDuckGo for the great service <3
The one thing that I have to go back to Google for is when I want to search just one specific site (usually Stack Overflow, I guess). Google has the `site:example.com` feature. I don't think that's possible with DDG.
EDIT: Apparently it does work! Thanks, I'm pretty sure it didn't when I started using DDG. Maybe I'm just an idiot.
So for example rather than having to use Wikipedia's or Stack Overflow's search bar to find something, it's just Ctrl+t and "!w <term>" or "!gi <term>".
On Windows this is quite 50-50 -- you're likely holding the mouse anyway. On Unix machines with more keyboard-oriented UI, with say a tiling WM, things like bangs at browser address bar are a godsent. Of course it is nice on mobile too -- direct queries rather than hoppping around using clumsy touchscreen.
There are likely browser extensions for this though, but none of them set DDG as their default search engine -- so just doing that manually also gives you the bangs so in my book DDG wins here ;)
It's my understanding they are profitable, a large chunk being things like Amazon referrals (nontrackable).
They may not have as many users but they also have much lower overhead since they don't need vast teams of engineers working on new ways of slicing and dicing data.
Edit: To be clear, I'm not saying this is not worth posting or should be taken down, just "exploding" does not even remotely describe DDG's traffic. The post was interesting, only OP's fabricated title is inaccurate.
Edit 2: Several comments mention the graph does show daily searches, and is therefore showing exponential growth. My reason for thinking it's cumulative and not daily, is because it says below that the daily record is 29 million searches and that the cumulative number is 22.569 billion. When hovering over the last value in the graph, it shows 22.2 billion.
For the record, the current title is "DuckDuckGo Usage is exploding right now".
The submitted title "DuckDuckGo Usage is exploding right now" is editorializing and is against the HN site guidelines. It should be changed to the actual page title, "DuckDuckGo Traffic".
ETA: I emailed the mods.
It went from 23.5 million/day to 27.9 in the last 51 days, which is 134% annualized growth. Something happened around 7 August.
Google's privacy policy change in 2012 is perhaps the closest comparable past event - over two months DDG traffic trebled. Recent stories about Google might be driving this.
It feels more like the old Google that wasn’t stuffed with ads, and I find it superior for programming queries (aside from Angular 2+ docs).
I still type in google.com and perform queries there a few times a week. I also turn to Google Images for copyleft photos, as DDG doesn’t seem to support filtering by license yet.
I miss the summary responses at the top of search results because they made Google much more of a reference. For example, defining words, quick view of Wikipedia results, etc.
I do still use maps, for now.
(Satellite data + reviews are lacking, but if you're like me and look up cities you see named in the news it gets the job done)
and for usage like you mention it's also way faster than !gm
I want to make the switch.
But typing "!g" when a search does not return what I want is too clumsy. It requires 7 touch-events on mobile (including focus and space).
Please make that simpler, and I will switch.
(My suggestion would be to have a "!g" button at the bottom of the search results. Perhaps make it optional, depending on user-settings; I don't mind a cookie for just that.)
Part of the issue is you search differently with Google. Most users treat their keywords as circles in a venn diagram - the top result being the center.
Try being a little more explicit with DDG. Add the year a movie came out, the first and last name of a person + their title if it's a common name, things like that.
Also an aside, "!s" routes through startpage, which proxies a google search for you - much more private but still leveraging the Pagerank algorithm.
But ... this also means that a DDG search would work well on Google. So a revert-to-Google button could help people make the transition. I suppose that people will become more and more specific in their queries until at some point they never need to hit that "!g" button anymore.
At least with DuckDuckGo I know that it's searching for what I told it to, rather than searching for something easier to find, which seems similar to a machine, but completely different to me.
However, on Google you do get an identifier next to the result that shows whether your term is missing from the page or not which allows for weeding out "unrelated" results relatively quickly. It also has the "must include" link so that you can narrow your searches without having to retype the query.
Doing the same search on DDG just shows some results but it's not clear whether my specific terms are on the page or not.
Dog Cat
Will return results for Dog OR Cat
To force to AND one has to quote every word, thus:
"Dog" "Cat"
Which is tedious especially on mobile.
I don't know why they think people would want to default to OR.
So I believe that there is a consensus that using IP addresses to improve search results would be fair game for DDG. It's also consistent with the DDG promise: "we don't track you".
OTOH, not using them has only marginal effect on user's privacy: (a) DDG doesn't serve ads anyway, and (b) the metadata of user's online activity are still available to three-letter agencies to analyze.
Also IP by itself isn't really that much of a privacy problem. It only becomes a problem when it's used in the process of delinkage of more sensitive information
Bringing all the result pretending everyone lives in US sounds like a crappy strategy.
DuckDuckGo is Google before it started down this path. You have to be specific. The more words you provide, the smaller the set of possible answers, and the more likely your answer is at the top.
Google, these days, tends to report the same number of results no matter how specific you get. It used to get smaller the more words you put in. It's a philosophical difference. Google assumes you only have a vague idea of what you're looking for and is increasingly confident it knows best.
DuckDuckGo starts with the same assumption, but trusts you to refine your own query without the help of a global network of patterns acting on data. That doesn't work too well on Google now. You're just as likely to trigger an anti-bot check refining queries as you are to find what you're looking for.
Definitely a different trajectory since late summer.
PS: The governmental site is now at rank 1 on duckduckgo.
There is really no place to run, the internet is a dangerous place.
What I'd like to see is an ad-free search engine that is open-source or subscription-based. DDG doesn't solve any of the fundamental problems with the search ecosystem.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DuckDuckGo#Overview - https://duck.co/help/results/sources
> In fact, DuckDuckGo gets its results from over four hundred sources. These include hundreds of vertical sources delivering niche Instant Answers, DuckDuckBot (our crawler) and crowd-sourced sites (like Wikipedia, stored in our answer indexes). We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we also source from a variety of partners, including Oath (formerly Yahoo) and Bing.
So in other words all the traditional link results are from Bing and Yahoo. The other 400 sources and their own crawler are only for things like Instant Answer boxes at the top (which are great btw).
That is incorrect information. Generally speaking, incognito windows limit the retention of information on your computer; they do not prevent others from collecting information about you. As a simple example, Google and Bing still could track you by your IP address.
From DuckDuckGo:[0]
Think “Incognito” mode blocks Google from watching what you’re doing? Think again. Private browsing modes are marketed to make you think that if it's not in your device’s browser history, it never happened. Sadly, that couldn't be further from the truth.[1]
Or just read their article, "Is Private Browsing Really Private?"[1]
[0] https://spreadprivacy.com/privacy-simplified/
[1] https://spreadprivacy.com/is-private-browsing-really-private...
In case y'all didn't know, DDG does some neat things like this:
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=beautify+json&t=h_&ia=answer
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=qr+hello+hn&atb=v123-2__&ia=answer
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=url+unescape+Hello%2520HN&atb=v123...
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=crontab+0+0+*+*+*+%2Fbin%2Fsh&atb=...
Surprisingly, I find the only substantial signal personalization uses is on your current location, and on results you have clicked before.
Search for 'pizza' for example, and the results will be all companies that are in your country, even if you search on Google.com.
I don't know about you, but this is pretty rude.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=colorpicker
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=calculator
I just hope the search result quality will improve over time as right now, I still use !g for about 10% of my searches.
Color picker is a native element of most browsers.
Calculator is a CompSci 101 project.
If you're counting on either for traffic, you need a better business model.
https://duck.co/ia/view/color_picker
I don't know who controls the contributions and decides what is going to be included in the final result, but so far it looks just fine to me. After all, they still present the normal search results below the tool.
Right. And when done by non-monopolies, we call it "competition".
What if I made a color picker that competes with your other HN-person-color-picker? How does that work? If my color picker gets a search engine feature, am I unfairly intercepting traffic from DDG?
It's nice to protect the little guy but in this case.. it's just too much.
JepZ posted this link above https://github.com/duckduckgo/zeroclickinfo-goodies/tree/mas...
It has a filter for the goodies along with other good stuff.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=10+cad+in+usd&atb=v123-2__&ia=curr...
And generate passphrases:
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=7+word+passphrase&atb=v123-2__&ia=...
My killer app is the bang commands: https://duckduckgo.com/bang
!hn for hacker news !a for amazon !w for wikipedia !imdb for imdb !reddit for reddit !wa is the best for calculations and other weird stuff (ex: type in a date and find out what day of the week it was)
Tip for non-English speakers
!wen for English wikipedia if your default language is something else.
More specifically, typing "!imdb matt damon" will simply forward you to the following link: https://www.imdb.com/find?s=all&q=matt%20damon
----
More examples:
!a soap => https://www.amazon.com/s/?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywo...
!hn duckduckgo => https://hn.algolia.com/?query=duckduckgo&type=story&dateRang...
In Safari, typing "imdb matt damon" and hitting the down arrow before enter gives me the same result. Do other browsers not have site search built-in? It will also pick up search fields on any site you browse you instead of requiring it to be added to some central repository.
And I use Spotlight for calculator and unit/currency conversions. Seems wasteful to roundtrip that kind of stuff online.
Also, when your search didn't give you what you were looking for, you can just prepend e.g. !g to search on Google, which for me is slightly faster than to copy the query, go to the address bar, enter "g" and then paste.
https://www.google.com/search?q=10+cad+to+usd
Not seeing any passphrase generation though.
= 2.4*10^54 Cal
The energy still exists, presumably, but claiming that's relevant would be like claiming a cheese at the top of a hill (potentially about to be rolled) has more calories.
In that context, the cheese at the top of the hill really does have more calories or value or something along those lines.
/ddg <query> to try it out
You need to worry about where the produced password is stored, how random it is and you can't prove any of it.
Generally, you can't just decrypt your traffic... there are other attack vectors.
We’re not storing these generated phrases anywhere.
It can be useful for low risk scenarios.
(Ex: setting up a new netflix passphrase to share with a new partner)
https://github.com/duckduckgo/zeroclickinfo-goodies/tree/mas...
To use them you can take a look at the file and search for the term 'triggers' which should give you a hint.
Edit: Goodies seem to be just one category. The other categories can be found here: https://duck.co/ia
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=figlet+doh+Hi+HN&t=h_&ia=answer
cats filetype:pdf PDFs about cats. Supported file types: pdf, doc(x), xls(x), ppt(x), html
Being able to write "tengo hambre en ingles" in Google and have it give me back an translation box I could interact with is awesome.
I imagine they could use Bing translation or something?
> Show HN: QR codes - my mini project | Hacker News > https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2378735 > Mar 28, 2011 - Hello HN! Check out and comment on one of my mini projects: http://coderqr.com. It's a website for the QR-uninitiated crowd to quickly make QR ...
Ddg also has 'bangs'. For example !whois looks up a whois record,!b searches it in bing and !translate translates via google translate. They havr many more :-)
EDIT: I would like to hear any logical response from those who downvote me
Duckduckgo seems very useful to getting out of the specific bubble google has created for in relation to your search history.
(ps, i did not downvote you btw).
I did, I listed 1 big evidence (the lack of indexing client-side rendered HTML), and also a simple example "rust vs go" that came to my mind. Take another example that I just tried, search "classical music only" in both engines and see the difference, this is a very popular youtube channel and has a website but nothing is shown in DDG for me.
As much as I want to join you guys against the big fat lazy monopolist called Google, I can't just make myself blind and claim that DDG is anywhere near to Google when it comes to accuracy or sophistication. If you really appreciate privacy, why not try something like Startpage instead of hyping another for-profit company?
You don't have to, that's what !g is for. I start all my searched at DDG, and if I'm not seeing the results I want, I use !g. Somewhere around 80%-90% never require a redirect to Google for additional results, and that's a a number I can live with.
One weird thing that I noticed is that every so often when I'm in a Google SERP (e.g. in a friend's phone) and I'm not fully satisfied with the results, I add in !g, only to realize that makes no sense. So I wonder if there's a subset of queries that DDG produces better results for, or if Google's search quality is declining.
If anyone from DDG is reading this: Please add the ability to (voluntarily) personalize search results via a cookie, just like you do for the interface theme. Something like "Programming Language: JavaScript". That way ambiguous queries (e.g "array reverse") can be associated with the specific context without having to type it every time (e.g. "array reverse js")
"array reverse [JavaScript x]"
"camping sites [Near Lake Tahoe x]"
What is the personal, private information they could be monitoring for, that would allow them to rewrite better than Bing ?
It could either be a power user setting hidden away (like color scheme currently is), or it could be exposed on the SERP interface via a prompt: "Set JavaScript as your default programming language?" "Set vegan as your default diet?" etc
It might be short-sighted to look for the same signs with DDG. We might have to look out for a different class / type of threat.
However, I wish the search engine space evolves into a more diverse set of competing companies.
In my experience Firefox + DDG is a viable alternative to Chrome + Google Search.
Occasionally I still need to go for google, but for about 98% of the time I'd say DDG is a no-op drop-in replacement for Google. I highly recommend this browser & search engine combo - DDG is great now, and Firefox is now decent again after a while in the wilderness.
Firefox also has some neat extensions like Google Container [1] that sandboxes all google cookies so you can still login to Gmail etc, but the cookies are not available for tracking elsewhere (e.g. analytics). I've recommended this add-on a lot recently - I've got no connection to it, just a satisfied user.
1 - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/google-contai...
Should I switch if I do nothing wrong? I stopped downloading illegal videos and my porn is tame.
What bad things can google do to me if I'm a user that doesnt care about privacy for myself?
That said, I think it boils down to this: we all want privacy, but digital privacy is a hard problem because we are not "wired" to understand it. Humans are not good at interacting with systems with perfect memory, huge computational power, and extremely insightful statistical modeling capabilities.
This affects us differently than interacting with a person. Now, a machine can categorize you automatically based on political beliefs, religious beliefs, friend networks, conversational style, etc. This can be used to target you for (arguably unethical) influence via surgically targeted propaganda, or to retroactively mark you as a dissident in a tyrannical regime based on a comment you made off-hand years before the regime took power.
Left unchecked, these invasive tracking systems could be used for a myriad of unethical purposes. And even if you "do nothing wrong," it's important to remember that in most legal systems, it's very difficult to lead a normal life and never break any laws. Add to that the very, very long records these systems are capable of keeping on you, and I think it's clear why many people, myself included, wish to minimize our presence on platforms such as Google.
Also, who knows what changes in the future? Maybe something you do online today seems harmless but gets you in trouble in 20+ years.
Some people do have things they want to keep private. If only those people care about privacy, then they eventually stick out like a sore thumb and that’s not fair. It’s not always bad or malicious. Diseases, traumatic experiences, conditions, things you should be able to get help with or information on without Google or some other company profiling you.
I believe that individual privacy as a social norm is a prerequisite to free speech, that free speech is a prerequisite to democracy, and that democracy is a prerequisite to fairness in the world.
Advocating for your own privacy is worthwhile if only to provide herd immunity for others less privileged than you, and to send a message about how you wish others would act; to demonstrate popular demand, and to lead by example.
Even though you are "not doing anything wrong", perhaps you did a search on that funny looking rash you noticed the other day, or that trivial programming question you needed to look up the answer to.
For me, it is about keeping control of my information. And the best way to control it, is for it not to be collected.
You might want to search for a new job without it influencing searches that may be visible to a current employer.
You may want to search for health topics without it becoming associated at life insurers on the ad network.
You may want your teens to be able to search bullying and sexuality without Facebook or Google tagging those to their profiles, in perpetuity, or worse advertising and retargeting the topics to them.
Who decides if you do nothing wrong? Think about that seriously - who decides what is right and wrong?
Also - if those 'powers that be' decide you have done nothing wrong now, what about in perpetuity? What if in 5 or 20 years who or what you are itself is simply deemed wrong?
These arguments aren't fictional. Being gay and Jewish are just two unchangeable traits that have seen persecution in living memory. Let alone countless others.
Perhaps the Rohingya would be a very recent example.
Be cautious that your own sense of 'right and wrong' in the here and now doesn't cloud the reality that you are beholden to those with actual power to agree with your behaviours and traits - and that those powers can (and will) change over time.
Do you still close the bathroom door, even if you are not doing anything wrong in there?
That's privacy.
You may start searching for divorce lawyers at some point, and your spouse might stumble upon that.
These search histories could also be obtained with a subpoena, for reasons totally unrelated to you.
Chrome can no longer be safely used to login to google sites. Just because you don't care about privacy now doesn't mean that you won't later.
Even if you do nothing wrong, would allow streaming cameras and hot mics in your house? How about leaving the door open to allow anyone on Earth to freely enter/exit your property?
For example, when I want to search for the documentation for the Ecto library in Elixir, I search for "elixir ecto" on Google:
https://www.google.com/search?q=elixir+ecto
Top result is what I want. Second result is the Github page. Third result is the wiki on Github.
Perfect.
This is what I get for the same search result on DDG:
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=ecto+elixir
Totally irrelevant results. Why isn't DDG able to deduce what I'm actually searching for?
Even when I search explicitly for "elixir ecto docs" I still don't get the results I want:
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=ecto+elixir+docs&ia=web
So yeah, DDG is basically unusable for me, at least for these types of use cases. I get the privacy benefits but IMO if a search engine is failing at its core job then everything else is pointless.
Lots of !g and I don't try to use it on mobile yet.
Both on computer and iPhone.
I expanded the boxes in the top right, but it seems clear it gives the "correct" results for me.
I wonder why the results are so different.
How is that “consistent”?
"elixir ecto" on a public Searx instance: https://www.searx.me/?q=elixir%20ecto
Searx is much more liberating, I can do searches multiple searches in one - and also do code search on github, gitlab etc.
Yup, Firefox is better than Chrome (especially with tree style tabs on the side) and DDG isn't really as good as Google so, when you average things out, these are comparable combinations.
I'd rather use a bad browser and find what I need on Google, than use a good browser and get sub-par search results.
However on a search engine like DDG I now search without worrying of being tracked.
For example I’m researching obesity and diabetes. Do I want Google to know that? Do I want them to infer my potential illnesses from my searches? Hell no and I don’t care how good their search results are.
In my experience DDG is poor when the query is vague. But adding a word or two to make the query more specific helps DDG give results that are as good or better. You eventually get used to it.
Also fun fact but I deleted my entire history from my Google account, going back 15 years or so. Immediately afterwards Google’ search started giving me visibly worse search results.
So Google is being smart by doing your profile based on your history. That seems great at first but when you realize they’ve got more than a decade of data on you and that they know every problem you’ve had (like in my case, they know that my son was born prematurely for example, or that I used to smoke and many other personal issues I can’t share), it should freak you out.
People not worrying about this are either very young and thus don’t have baggage or haven’t thought this through.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account...
The concept is: create additional Named containers, and assign domains to always load in X named container
I like being able to contribute to a good project (by using Nightly I believe you submit some telemetry, a small contribution).