I switched back to Google after using DuckDuckGo for a few months. The reason I switched back was because DDG was slow! I found myself waiting for DDG when I was running all of my silly currency conversion search queries, and didn't have the same problem with Google. (I'm located in Europe.)
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To address some of the comments below, the slowness I'm talking about is probably P80-ish. Most queries run fine, but I was noticing throughout the day that some queries would randomly take multiple seconds to resolve. I never timed them, because just re-running the queries would work around the issue, so I suspect it's some backend thing on DDG's side. Google does have similar issues for me, but it feels more like P99-level.
DDG should really have a button that says "Search on Google instead".
That way, people can use DDG and easily fall back onto Google when the result is slow or inadequate. I know about the bang-syntax (!g) but this requires about 6 touch actions on mobile.
You can easily add a button to do that with something like Greasemonkey. I added a script that adds a button to GitHub that shows the file sizes in an extra column when clicked. Adding a button that adds !g to the front of a DDG query and then sends the search request is easier.
"!" I can easily type just with my left hand, "&" requires left & right hand working together. For something, I use as often as bangs on DDG that is simply not acceptable.
In my workplace qwant is the default SE and I'm sorry to say it, but its awful. Maybe if you search in French it will be a bit better.
I'm using DDG and I'm quite happy about it. Very rarely I switch to google and if I do it usualy to search some location specific things like nearest pharmacy.
I’m in Europe as well. Just searched for "200 USD to EUR" on both. DDG felt slightly faster, Google had a white screen for a moment before it loaded which was chiefly what made it seem slower to me. So I’ll allow the possibility that it’s because they do stuff when people have adblockers (Not that Google is even a serious option if you don’t run adblockers). Both of them were almost instant in any way though.
Really? I've just tried it and it was instantaneous. Currency conversion with ddg from firefox title bar in the UK. The result was visible before I had mentally completed pressing enter.
I have a hard time believing this has anything to do with ddg. Im in europe and had been using ddg since the very beginning and cant recall ever having this issue
A big problem for DuckDuckGo image searching — I can only access the image file, but no option to go to the webpage that links the file. Most of the time, the image is stored on a different hosting site. I find myself often using google image search instead, for this reason.
When I click the url of the site, rather then the view file button, I am directed to the site? What os/browser are you using, if you don't mind my asking?
Omg I can’t believe I missed that! iOS/Safari puts it there, but then hides it rather quickly. Embarrassing how much time I could have saved. Thanks buddy!
I used both for a while because of what you say, but past 2 years I actually find that ddg returns a better result MOST of the times which is why its my default now. Also its super fast to double check with google (just add !g), but I find myself doing it less and less
DDG excerpts the top-rated accepted SO answer, which is a huge timesaver for me (when it's accurate) - great when searching for a snippet I never quite remember like `flatten nested list python`. Although I'd imagine it's probably an IP infringement, which is why Google doesn't do it, so maybe it won't last.
> Although I'd imagine it's probably an IP infringement
Content on Stack Overflow is CC BY-SA 4.0. It’s arguable whether DuckDuckGo shows enough information to consist attribution, but this isn’t generally impossible to do.
gaming placement has evolved. its an arms race search is losing.
also google has "evolved" in that it uses close matches for words which probably helps a lot of people. i find it terribly annoying to constantly needing to be quoting words and it still doesnt seem to work that well.
It's almost like mainstream media is what people click on and is <gasp> mainstream. Of course you are doing to have them higher up in the search rankings
You don't necessarily know that, and assuming you are right, having msm at the top is better than having something like Breitbart. Might seem like a bad choice, but the alternatives are not good either
No they intentionally put those sources higher in the results even when there’s more popular content below it. They get extra priority as they’re deemed “authoritative sources.” So if you’re searching something political you’ll get a Washington Consensus result every time pretty literally. If you search names of recent mideast wars, CFR appears to be a preprogrammed result like Wikipedia.
You don't necessarily know that source for CFR is necessarily less popular than Wikipedia: plus CFR is not necessarily Washington consensus. In addition to that it's much better to have informed discussion on a topic rather than some misleading news source.
This year, for a site I knew existed, I had to use a very obscure search engine to find content on that site, for the other search engines it was omitted from the results. This only happened a couple of months ago, before then they listed that site. The site did not violate copyright.
YouTube has drastically increased its censorship this year, with both soft and hard censorship. Things that users found relevant that turned up first in search results are now replaced with MSM videos and people have to put very specific search terms in to get the video to show up in the lists, effectively removing it from most peoples results even if it is the most relevant thing they are looking for. There is altering recommendations. There is the hard censorship where a video doesn't even have to violate TOS or guidelines any more. YT now uses an AI from a very powerful lobby to decide which videos to censor.
This all happened very near to something that was called VoxAdpocalypse. Censorship was increasing the years before that but the sudden increase this year (2019) caught a lot of people by surprise, I think that was quite intentional, ram it through so fast that people didn't have time to react. This was all supported by MSM and the unity among the mainstream media organisations was very noticeable.
Where I live this year the largest ISPs have blocked a lot of sites on the flimsiest of pretense, sites like archive.is , zerohedge.com , and a variety of social sites that say they support free speech.
With the way things are heading, if you have something unorthodox to say, woe be unto you. Just look at what happened to Julian Assange, and CNN calling people don't support him being imprisoned as 'free speech activists', I would almost expect CNN to call them 'free speech extremists' if they could get away with it.
I mostly use DDG but often switch to google whenever DDG does not return 'good' results. Especially on tech topics and literature search Google results are far superior.
Same. A lot of people here are saying they have issues with it, but I find it hard to believe that they gave it a fair chance. Probably just did a handful of searches before giving up on it entirely.
I've been using DDG for a few years now, and very rarely do I find that I need to go to Google.
The problem is that a lot of what I search for isn’t boring and obvious: searching about quantitative finance, stack traces, economics, and some math equations or theorems. Of course there’s the common stuff as well: what movies to watch in a specific genre, video game reviews, etc. But while both ddg and google do a reasonable job on the latter, they both fail hard for the former, ddg more than google though:
ddg has never given me good results for technical topics. Google used to, but I feel like they changed something. Now google just regurgitates the same top sites over and over again, very rarely if ever displaying less popular sources like forums or a professor’s website or papers. In fact a lot of the time, google decides it wants to search for some other thing than I tell it because I must have made a mistake searching for something that not very many other people search for. IMO, the apex of google search was around 2010-2013.
I'm also having a lot more trouble getting good results from Google than I used to. Judicious use of quotes and other search modifiers are becoming a requirement. DDG is almost unusable for these topics. If I'm having to type !g for everything, I might as well stick with Google.
I've never fully understood why Google hasn't provided an advanced search option. Even the most primitive library catalogs have one. Sure, there are a few options you can use, but they're extremely basic.
Is it because it would reveal key parts of the algorithm? Or is it a stance (i.e., a standard Google search ought to be enough for everybody)?.
totally agreed. Most recently for me, I switched from VS Code to GoLand for Go development. Every search I do for learning how to use the ide gets butchered. "goland multiselect" (for example), Google auto-changes to "we searched for golang, did you mean goland?". Sigh. In any case, both search engines think I must want to do something with Grunt with that search, so maybe it is just me who does not know how to use search engines anymore.
Do you get results for goland? I don't have experience with it in particular, but to me it seems Google considers CLion, Rider and IDEA interchangeable.
DDG needs more users to use it to give you better results. I’m afraid it will never become as good as Google if we all decide to not use it until it’s as good as Google.
I’m using DDG for more than a year now. Works well in most cases. Sometimes I have to use !g but that doesn’t stop me to use it.
I tried it for awhile and had to go back to google. I type in “relevant error message stackoverflow” and NO WHERE in the first three pages of results can I find the same stack overflow post that’s purple from my 20 visits over the last 5 years because I just can’t memorize everything. I google the same thing and it’s top results every time. I don’t understand search so it could easily be personalized results remembering what I looked at but it doesn’t matter. What matters is it just works and DDG didn’t.
- Google's blatant Youtube spam in search results. They no longer keep them in the "video" tab. It's becoming increasingly difficult to keep YouTube out.
- Better UX: no sticky headers, clean output without random stuff injected into your search results, which is especially annoying on mobile.
- Image search actually can be used for image search, i.e. I am not forced to visit pages of images, when I need an image URL.
Basically, DDG looks like Google circa 2005 which is a good thing.
google also has a definite opinion on news, politics and other controversial topics which will get worse and worse during election years or during times of war.
Switched last week. Fed up by how Google gives a 90s-looking wap site when using Firefox for Android. I added an extension that switches my user agent just for google.com to get around it, but instead most results are then AMP links. And opening AMP-links hosted on google in firefox gives you a page that you cannot scroll.
Almost wonder if they're doing it on purpose.
Haven't used ddg long enough to comment on the quality. But at least google for Norwegian results have declined lately. Many results are just machine-translated spam on autogenerated blogs.
For instance, last week I googled "pes anserinus bursitt", and one of the top results is http:// bumyjaki .tk/arrestere/pes-anserinus-bursitt.html (don't open it). The preview is broken Norwegian, and clicking it I get popovers saying I've won stuff, and firefox asks if I want to enable vibration, and I'm instantly redirected to more spam. How the f is that so high, google? And it's prominent on lots of stuff I search.
Yeah Google was getting as bad as Yahoo was in the 90s before I switched. I just think they’re in the phase of trying to suck as much money as possible out of each search.
Sorry to hear about your experiences; I would like to better understand the issues that you're seeing and reproduce them on my end, so that I can file detailed bug reports for the folks working on those features. I would appreciate your help if you're open to that.
First, I compared Firefox on Android with Chrome on Android for a few queries and they seem to get very similar results (but we are likely using different queries). Would you be able to provide some sample queries where Firefox was receiving the results that led you to change its user agent and get different results?
I also visited several AMP pages on Firefox from Google search results (Reddit and BBC) and they were all scrollable, so it's likely that we're looking at different sites as well. Can you tell me which sites' AMP pages were non-scrollable for you?
Regarding the poor results for Norwegian searches: I wasn't getting the problematic URL for this query; will try reproducing this again later. If you have any other search queries for which the Norwegian results are bad (or have been declining in quality over time), if you're able, please share them with me as well: either here, or if you prefer, you can find me on Twitter and LinkedIn.
The article includes some of the reasons why I changed to DDG quite a while ago, but this is pretty odd:
"When you realise that most things you search for online are really boring and obvious, you soon realise you don't really need Google in your life"
How is this an argument to use one search engine over another? Whether it's boring and obvious or not, you're still using a search engine. I stopped using Google because I was tired of landing on sites that seemed to be chosen by Google rather than finding the types of sites that I was looking for. Not that I'm entirely satisfied with DDG, either. I'm very tired of typing in keywords only to have them ignored.
Side rant: I'm so tired of these headlines being phrased as if they're assuming that "we've all been doing this wrong" or "I did this so you should too".
I recently switched from Chrome to FireFox and moved my default search engine to DuckDuckGo. I've been disappointed with both, but am holding out still.
For DuckDuckGo, like others have noted, it is really poor at technical results. I thought Google was bad before, but now I almost always have to switch back. It does seem to "feel" slower than Google, but that could just be FireFox. I've also come to really enjoy two things that Google does: the weather graph where I can easily see the multi-day forecast and easily see precipitation chances _throughout_ the day, and I like that I can watch the day's trends on a given stock.
For FireFox, I have had it stop being able to log into _any_ site on mobile for Android, so I had to re-install it. A few times a week, the browser completely locks up in Mac. I can drag the window, but I cannot interact with any tabs. I have to kill it and restore. It feels slower much of the time. Also, on mobile, it is more finicky on clicking. Example, on HN on mobile, I have to zoom to click the collapse/expand and up/downvotes. I did not have to do that in Chrome. I do like that it is more privacy focused and I like the scrolling tabs compared to Chrome's continually smaller and smaller tabs.
I'll keep with it on both fronts, but it has felt like a step backward for the most part.
For firefox on Mac they made an important milestone three weeks ago in that performance got increased while power consumption was reduced. Are you using the latest version?
If mobile means Android you should give Firefox Preview a shot, a whole new experience.
I know DuckDuckGo have acquired the domain duck.com. Occasionally after an unfruitful Google search I would think, maybe I should give DDG a try. Since duck.com is easier to type than duckduckgo.com, I would visit duck.com. But duck.com would direct me to a stupid landing page that asks me to “Add DuckDuckGo to ...” or “Install DuckDuckGo” on iOS. There’s a teeny tiny “or try a private search first” line at the very bottom where I can click to reveal the search box. What the hell? The landing page makes me 300% more likely to just leave, instead of adding or installing it.
(Btw, almost every time I land on Quora, that post by DDG CEO shows up as promoted. Kinda tired by now.)
Edit: To be fair to them, I noticed only just now that the box could be dismissed with a close button or clicking anywhere outside, so clicking on “or try a private search first” isn’t the only way. However, in my defense, the close button blends pretty well into the image, and being able to click outside is unclear since unlike modals elsewhere, there’s absolutely nothing behind.
I still fail to see why they have to hide the search box.
I switched to DuckDuckGo in my browsers, so now I just type search terms in the address bar. When I need non-personalized Google results I add "!s" at the end and DDG redirects me to Startpage. When I need personalized results I use "!g" instead. There are other operators (like !w for Wikipedia search), and you can add bang commands at the beginning like this: "s! search term" - or end like this: "search term !s"
It might be because I’ve already used DuckDuckGo on my browser and have turned off those things in the settings, but duck.com just redirects me to a clean DDG homepage.
Maybe it’s controlled by a cookie. On my tablet now so can’t verify, but I definitely still get that landing page even after using the site for quite some times (I didn’t look into settings).
It’s simply strange that they would try to coerce a first time visitor to install their app, and hide the search box behind some fine print.
Edit: Wow, this one downvoted to negative. Guess I pissed off a few true believers. You may argue why the point doesn’t stand, instead of just downvoting, or, say, giving me a helpful and condescending primer on switching search engine.
Anyway, I don’t harbor ill feelings toward DDG. I’m pointing this out because I think the dark pattern here will genuinely hurt adoption, even if to a minuscule extent.
I still fail to understand why they cannot see why stopping people from doing what they surely came to the site for is a bad idea. The sizes of the things should be swapped: big search bar, tiny button on the bottom to install it in your favorite browser. But that’d just be their normal website…
On their main site, start.duckduckgo.com will get rid of any of the "first time user" popups. They added it specifically to address the user concern of "I block cookies" users, who had no way to permanently turn off the messages.
I checked with start.duck.com and s.duck.com, and neither of them redirect properly. Seems like a semi-obvious oversight. If the popup is genuinely necessary, it would be nice to have a quick way to avoid it.
That is an excellent and highly relevant gripe. I've submitted it to the DDG subreddit, which appears to be the principle mechanism for reaching DDG these days.
DuckDuckGo is a little less powerful for some types of searches. Its date filter doesn't let you specify custom dates, the autocorrect behavior is some sort of bug (https://help.duckduckgo.com/results/autocorrect/), local businesses get lost amongst many others, etc. For example searching with "+goats" finds the author's movie, but the default search and the suggested correction of quoting goats don't: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=film+leonardo+dicaprio+%2Bgoats+sc...
OTOH searching on Google doesn't find the scene for me either; I suspect it only succeeded for the author because Google knew he'd seen that movie.
DDG's index of web pages seems bigger. The index isn't as up-to-date on popular sites, but many obscure sites (e.g. my blog) show up in DDG and not in Google. But then Google indexes more PDFs.
What I find interesting is that DDG ranks our site: https://VisualSitemaps.com 2x higher than Google when searching for “visual sitemap generator”...and of course sans ads.
Am I alone in that I don't speak of using a search engine as strictly binary behavior? Sure, I have long avoided using Google for the bulk of my search queries. I use Bing, DuckDuckGo, and others at times. But I still use Google for some queries, especially when I want information from the past 24 hours (limiting the search to updates from today), since it seems Google's indexers run more frequently.
So when people say they wholly moved from search engine A to B, I am suspicious. And when the counter-argument is, "but the problem is A is better than B on query X," I think, "of course, and you might keep using A for X, while using B for other things."
This isn't (yet?) your operating system or where you live. It's just a web site you are selecting in the moment to provide a service. You can use a different web site for much the same service the very next moment.
I personally just have bookmarks set up so that "b [query]" is a bing search, "d [query]" is a DDG search, and "g [query]" is a Google search. Further, "m [query]" searches MDN, "s [query]" searches SO, etc.
I’ve been using DDG on all my devices for work and for personal use for almost a year now. I’ve searched for error messages songs and tons of other stuff. Initially I was having trouble getting results. There seemed to be a whole skill to writing good search queries that had atrophied in me during the Google era. I’ve had to pay more attention to quotes and change queries sometimes but it’s never been impossible to find the information i’m looking for. And it’s nice to be free of the all-seeing eye of Google. DDG may not give perfect results initially but it’s good enough for me.
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To address some of the comments below, the slowness I'm talking about is probably P80-ish. Most queries run fine, but I was noticing throughout the day that some queries would randomly take multiple seconds to resolve. I never timed them, because just re-running the queries would work around the issue, so I suspect it's some backend thing on DDG's side. Google does have similar issues for me, but it feels more like P99-level.
The results take the same time to appear, but Google feels faster than DDG.
That way, people can use DDG and easily fall back onto Google when the result is slow or inadequate. I know about the bang-syntax (!g) but this requires about 6 touch actions on mobile.
Just give me a button I can hit whenever I want Google's result instead, and I'll gladly switch to DDG.
"!" I can easily type just with my left hand, "&" requires left & right hand working together. For something, I use as often as bangs on DDG that is simply not acceptable.
I'm using DDG and I'm quite happy about it. Very rarely I switch to google and if I do it usualy to search some location specific things like nearest pharmacy.
Though I have hear the opposite from others. Not sure what's up with that.
Content on Stack Overflow is CC BY-SA 4.0. It’s arguable whether DuckDuckGo shows enough information to consist attribution, but this isn’t generally impossible to do.
DDG results are meoicre.
It's weird when you can say internet search has devolved.
also google has "evolved" in that it uses close matches for words which probably helps a lot of people. i find it terribly annoying to constantly needing to be quoting words and it still doesnt seem to work that well.
This year, for a site I knew existed, I had to use a very obscure search engine to find content on that site, for the other search engines it was omitted from the results. This only happened a couple of months ago, before then they listed that site. The site did not violate copyright.
YouTube has drastically increased its censorship this year, with both soft and hard censorship. Things that users found relevant that turned up first in search results are now replaced with MSM videos and people have to put very specific search terms in to get the video to show up in the lists, effectively removing it from most peoples results even if it is the most relevant thing they are looking for. There is altering recommendations. There is the hard censorship where a video doesn't even have to violate TOS or guidelines any more. YT now uses an AI from a very powerful lobby to decide which videos to censor.
This all happened very near to something that was called VoxAdpocalypse. Censorship was increasing the years before that but the sudden increase this year (2019) caught a lot of people by surprise, I think that was quite intentional, ram it through so fast that people didn't have time to react. This was all supported by MSM and the unity among the mainstream media organisations was very noticeable.
Where I live this year the largest ISPs have blocked a lot of sites on the flimsiest of pretense, sites like archive.is , zerohedge.com , and a variety of social sites that say they support free speech.
With the way things are heading, if you have something unorthodox to say, woe be unto you. Just look at what happened to Julian Assange, and CNN calling people don't support him being imprisoned as 'free speech activists', I would almost expect CNN to call them 'free speech extremists' if they could get away with it.
I've been using DDG for a few years now, and very rarely do I find that I need to go to Google.
Except that I eventually realized the frequency at which I had to add a !g in front of the query was above 50%.
I really wish I could use ddg as my default search engine. It's just not feasible.
That said, I do 99% or my searching on DDG.
ddg has never given me good results for technical topics. Google used to, but I feel like they changed something. Now google just regurgitates the same top sites over and over again, very rarely if ever displaying less popular sources like forums or a professor’s website or papers. In fact a lot of the time, google decides it wants to search for some other thing than I tell it because I must have made a mistake searching for something that not very many other people search for. IMO, the apex of google search was around 2010-2013.
At least they’ve added « Must Include » options sometimes.
Is it because it would reveal key parts of the algorithm? Or is it a stance (i.e., a standard Google search ought to be enough for everybody)?.
https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/di5rn3/startpage_i...
That ddg doesn’t have a similar option makes it unusable. I suppose I could write a wrapper that puts every word in quotes...
I’m using DDG for more than a year now. Works well in most cases. Sometimes I have to use !g but that doesn’t stop me to use it.
It also sounds like maybe you should search your browser's history instead, if you're looking for previously visited pages.
- Google's blatant Youtube spam in search results. They no longer keep them in the "video" tab. It's becoming increasingly difficult to keep YouTube out.
- Better UX: no sticky headers, clean output without random stuff injected into your search results, which is especially annoying on mobile.
- Image search actually can be used for image search, i.e. I am not forced to visit pages of images, when I need an image URL.
Basically, DDG looks like Google circa 2005 which is a good thing.
I think they lost a copyright lawsuit over that one.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/02/internet-rages-after...
Almost wonder if they're doing it on purpose.
Haven't used ddg long enough to comment on the quality. But at least google for Norwegian results have declined lately. Many results are just machine-translated spam on autogenerated blogs.
For instance, last week I googled "pes anserinus bursitt", and one of the top results is http:// bumyjaki .tk/arrestere/pes-anserinus-bursitt.html (don't open it). The preview is broken Norwegian, and clicking it I get popovers saying I've won stuff, and firefox asks if I want to enable vibration, and I'm instantly redirected to more spam. How the f is that so high, google? And it's prominent on lots of stuff I search.
I am an engineer on Google Search.
Sorry to hear about your experiences; I would like to better understand the issues that you're seeing and reproduce them on my end, so that I can file detailed bug reports for the folks working on those features. I would appreciate your help if you're open to that.
First, I compared Firefox on Android with Chrome on Android for a few queries and they seem to get very similar results (but we are likely using different queries). Would you be able to provide some sample queries where Firefox was receiving the results that led you to change its user agent and get different results?
I also visited several AMP pages on Firefox from Google search results (Reddit and BBC) and they were all scrollable, so it's likely that we're looking at different sites as well. Can you tell me which sites' AMP pages were non-scrollable for you?
Regarding the poor results for Norwegian searches: I wasn't getting the problematic URL for this query; will try reproducing this again later. If you have any other search queries for which the Norwegian results are bad (or have been declining in quality over time), if you're able, please share them with me as well: either here, or if you prefer, you can find me on Twitter and LinkedIn.
Thanks in advance!
"When you realise that most things you search for online are really boring and obvious, you soon realise you don't really need Google in your life"
How is this an argument to use one search engine over another? Whether it's boring and obvious or not, you're still using a search engine. I stopped using Google because I was tired of landing on sites that seemed to be chosen by Google rather than finding the types of sites that I was looking for. Not that I'm entirely satisfied with DDG, either. I'm very tired of typing in keywords only to have them ignored.
Side rant: I'm so tired of these headlines being phrased as if they're assuming that "we've all been doing this wrong" or "I did this so you should too".
* Languages other than English
* Regional search
not everybody is living in the USA. DDG simply does not work good enough in a global world!
For DuckDuckGo, like others have noted, it is really poor at technical results. I thought Google was bad before, but now I almost always have to switch back. It does seem to "feel" slower than Google, but that could just be FireFox. I've also come to really enjoy two things that Google does: the weather graph where I can easily see the multi-day forecast and easily see precipitation chances _throughout_ the day, and I like that I can watch the day's trends on a given stock.
For FireFox, I have had it stop being able to log into _any_ site on mobile for Android, so I had to re-install it. A few times a week, the browser completely locks up in Mac. I can drag the window, but I cannot interact with any tabs. I have to kill it and restore. It feels slower much of the time. Also, on mobile, it is more finicky on clicking. Example, on HN on mobile, I have to zoom to click the collapse/expand and up/downvotes. I did not have to do that in Chrome. I do like that it is more privacy focused and I like the scrolling tabs compared to Chrome's continually smaller and smaller tabs.
I'll keep with it on both fronts, but it has felt like a step backward for the most part.
If mobile means Android you should give Firefox Preview a shot, a whole new experience.
I know DuckDuckGo have acquired the domain duck.com. Occasionally after an unfruitful Google search I would think, maybe I should give DDG a try. Since duck.com is easier to type than duckduckgo.com, I would visit duck.com. But duck.com would direct me to a stupid landing page that asks me to “Add DuckDuckGo to ...” or “Install DuckDuckGo” on iOS. There’s a teeny tiny “or try a private search first” line at the very bottom where I can click to reveal the search box. What the hell? The landing page makes me 300% more likely to just leave, instead of adding or installing it.
You can try it yourself: https://duck.com
(Btw, almost every time I land on Quora, that post by DDG CEO shows up as promoted. Kinda tired by now.)
Edit: To be fair to them, I noticed only just now that the box could be dismissed with a close button or clicking anywhere outside, so clicking on “or try a private search first” isn’t the only way. However, in my defense, the close button blends pretty well into the image, and being able to click outside is unclear since unlike modals elsewhere, there’s absolutely nothing behind.
I still fail to see why they have to hide the search box.
It’s simply strange that they would try to coerce a first time visitor to install their app, and hide the search box behind some fine print.
Edit: Wow, this one downvoted to negative. Guess I pissed off a few true believers. You may argue why the point doesn’t stand, instead of just downvoting, or, say, giving me a helpful and condescending primer on switching search engine.
Anyway, I don’t harbor ill feelings toward DDG. I’m pointing this out because I think the dark pattern here will genuinely hurt adoption, even if to a minuscule extent.
I checked with start.duck.com and s.duck.com, and neither of them redirect properly. Seems like a semi-obvious oversight. If the popup is genuinely necessary, it would be nice to have a quick way to avoid it.
https://old.reddit.com/r/duckduckgo/comments/e14lht/the_duck...?
My native language’s alphabet is Cyrillic and whenever I search for anything, I always get results in Russian, even though I’m not from Russia.
DDG's index of web pages seems bigger. The index isn't as up-to-date on popular sites, but many obscure sites (e.g. my blog) show up in DDG and not in Google. But then Google indexes more PDFs.
So when people say they wholly moved from search engine A to B, I am suspicious. And when the counter-argument is, "but the problem is A is better than B on query X," I think, "of course, and you might keep using A for X, while using B for other things."
This isn't (yet?) your operating system or where you live. It's just a web site you are selecting in the moment to provide a service. You can use a different web site for much the same service the very next moment.
I personally just have bookmarks set up so that "b [query]" is a bing search, "d [query]" is a DDG search, and "g [query]" is a Google search. Further, "m [query]" searches MDN, "s [query]" searches SO, etc.