That's a feature of most browsers location bar. Just assign a letter/string to any bookmark of your liking and voila! No need to depend on DDG and exclamation points for your quick searches.
A few of my favorites include hn for HN's algolia, th for thesaurus, wes for Wikipedia in Spanish and d for... duck duck go.
That is true. but my first search is always duckduckgo. Only if that doesn't tell me straight away to I go for a !bang search. The location bar now is filled with a ddg url so easier to just add ! to the search box of ddg.
And as I switch machines, browsers, profiles, and privacy mode all day long the only ubuiqitous thing is that ddg is the default search engine.
I don't use the !w shortcut as usually whatever/whomever I have searched for is in the info box on ddg's right-hand column and it usually has a wikipedia link if I need to get more detail.
Don't get me wrong, I love his work, but I don't really understand why what he has to say about tech is any more relevant than any other celebrity. It's not like he has some deeper insider knowledge of the subject.
> Sacha Baron Cohen is the well-deserved recipient of ADL’s International Leadership Award, which goes to exceptional individuals who combine professional success with a profound personal commitment to community involvement and to crossing borders and barriers with a message of diversity and equal opportunity.
He gets into the relevant details in his speech at below timestamp [1]:
> "Just imagine what Goebbels [2] could have done with Facebook"
I think the bottom line is he is good at social engineering, and he recognizes the signs of manipulation at scale. Beyond that, he is smart enough to consume the literature.
Note: Video is his award speech from ADL. But has sensitive wording and is NSFW. I found it to be pretty well put together - maybe reaching a bit in parts.
He’s a smart, successful person who has spent some time thinking about it. It’s as useful as anyone else’s opinion. People who are ‘experts’ in these areas also tend to have biases. Nobody that works for any of those companies is going to give you a straight answer.
You don't have to work for one of those companies to be an expect on tech, business and capitalism. But I expect some expertise in those subject to be able to properly evaluate the impact of these company.
The point is, there's a lot of misinformation trying to sway people to one side or the other, and unless you are someone who has spent a lot of time researching the subject, I'll assume you are just parroting some headline that told you "X is bad".
We here on HN know a lot about how Facebook was built, that doesn't tell you shit about its societal effects. Comedians on the other hand, and Sasha Baron Cohen in particular, know a lot about societal effects. Sometimes the jester was the only one clever enough to get away with speaking the truth in the king's presence.
Cohen's comedies were hugely offensive. He starts off by making fun of young lower class people in britain, then gay people, then a specific eastern european country, etc etc.
He would not be successful in the world he now demands, and he is not a social expert hes a 'funny' man who spends his time on business deals and movies.
I'm jewish, I don't want him speaking for me. I'd rather sasha cohen be allowed to make offensive films and everyone else too.
He's no more expert than joe rogan or any other comedian.
He's just the one the ADL decided to use as a mouth piece for censorship, and as a jewish person I don't appreciate their pretending to have my best interests in mind while hurting the basic freedoms and ability for self expression of everyone in the country.
He's not brave and there's no king. he was celebrated for his comments. The things he's saying are only the words of a jester because he's a clown, not because they're wise.
The part you left out was he was calling for censorship... a slippery slope that assists totalitarians in this inverted totalitarian oligarchy. Do not agree at all. Also he claims those places are publishers and not platforms, but there is plenty of debate on that front to be had.
I think SBC's diagnosis is right, but his prescription is wrong. I applaud SBC for calling out the problem (and I agree it is a problem) and for raising awareness, but I think we need to keep shopping for a better solution.
He's effectively making the same arguments that FOSTA-SESTA made (which led to the closing of personals sections of Craigslist among other liability-transferring impacts), but for all of social media. His call was for all internet companies to pre-vet every single user-generated-content before anyone else sees it or be held liable for user-submitted content. It likely does solve the problem, but it swings the pendulum _very_ _far_ in the other direction towards corporate censorship and over-censorship to prevent any possibility of liability.
This is late-stage capitalism in action. Companies in the {social media, advertising, sales} space all have utility functions centered around attacking the weaknesses of the human mind. It just so happens that governments and political parties are in the same industry using the same tactics.
I just don't see SBC's prescription working in a country with a constitutionally mandated Freedom of Speech (where the jurisprudence only disallows speech if it is a direct and specific call to action of violence). And it it does, Newspeak will be the only language supported on the platform.
At the risk of setting fire to and already smouldering dumpster, but Jack's company has a recent chequered history of suspending and banning biological women's and feminist rights accounts for pushing back against MRA's and the extreme end of the TRA movement for disagreeing that biological sex is a spectrum, and pushing back against the idea that protected biological women's spaces should be available to anyone who claims they are a woman but still has a penis attached (e.g. rape centres).
See also the continued attacks on biological women by not banning or suspending accounts that use TERF as a slur or pejorative. And see also the banning of Meghan Murphy and actual intersex person who has objected to the hijacking of intersex people's medical conditions by TRA extremists (Stonewall, sadly and Mermaids) to justify their pseudo-science that biological sex is a spectrum.
Jack knows this stuff well and simply won't stand up in support of biological women's hard fought rights to not have penises in their gradually eroded protected spaces.
This is awesome - happy to see privacy oriented search become more popular. I think DuckDuckGo needs a better name though - Something more ubiquitous. Duck, maybe? Quack?
> IIRC Google used to own duck.com and wouldn't redirect
AIUI duck.com used to be a redirect-- to google.com. Very confusing for actual DDG users. IIRC Google got the domain as part of acquiring On2, some sort of video codec company, at a time when DDG wasn't nearly as popular as it is today.
M$ would like their tired old 1990s business practises back, oh wait they never left. Just like the M$ shorthand which we see less simply becuase we talk about them less.
It's reputation they fully earned. You can write "Microsoft" in full whenever you like if you prefer too. I think it's pretty reasonable to casually express contempt at every opportunity for any business that puts money vastly further ahead of ethics than they need to. You can disgaree with that if you like too.
Facebrick is the new M$. What do we have for Goog? "do no evil" with strickeout for more money? $GOOG?
As somebody hailing from an area that used to be under occupation by the Nazis and thus having heard multiple first-hand accounts of how it transpired I assure you that's not how actual Nazi collaborators operated.
Please don't dilute the meaning behind this expression.
Searching google nowadays feels like searching an ad database. For me it isn't even a matter of privacy but about exclusion of 90% of the web out there. Bing is not bad either, nor is yandex. What else is there?
Remember when google was like this? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8JT9QWA-eY
I have mixed feelings about this. If you recommend DuckDuckGo, Qwant, Ecosia you're essentially recommending Bing. Each of them have to show bing ads, forward the users' IPs as per Bing's terms of service (to fight ad fraud etc). Similarly, if you recommend StartPage, you're recommending Google. Same drill with ads.
I like DuckDuckGo. But unless they build their own search - I think the fundamental problem has not been tackled. There is no good, independent, private search alternative.
[Edit]
I am not trying to single out DDG. There are a few replies that either demand for proof (rightfully) or suggest Bing is used only sometimes. I do not have conclusive proof, but have worked on search. Here's a couple of things for the curious:
1. Try to run this test: If you query "what is my ip" in duckduckgo (DDG), or any of the other ones I mentioned, you will notice in the description of one of the top results this IP: 207.46.13.147. It's a BingBot IP [0]. It's a good enough test to spot where results are coming from.
2. Open two browser windows side by side with DDG and Bing. Turn on results for the country you are in in DDG. Look attentively. Try image search.
It is clear that DDG does some re-ranking based on its own, but it's very often the same results.
I'd rather 100 people know 1% about me than 1 person know 100% about me. Even if the only thing duckduckgo did was spread knowledge about me thinner, it would have value. Google already has most of my email (because most people I send emails to use gmail) and my youtube viewing history. Giving them my general search history as well isn't something I'm keen on.
Duckduckgo isn't perfect but they're better than google. If I knew of something better than duckduckgo, I'd use that instead. But I'm not going to let perfect be the enemy of good.
Try to run this test. If you query "what is my ip" in duckduckgo, or any of the other ones I mentioned, you will notice in the description of one of the top results this IP: 207.46.13.147. It's a BingBot IP [0]. It's a good enough test to spot where results are coming from.
Building even a mediocre search engine involves a gigantic index in >40 languages that is constantly refreshed, plus image and video indexes, porn, spam, malware filters, complex ranking, freshness, originality algorithms, constant quality analysis and continuous maintenance and improvements for the infrastructure. They are not transparent about breakdown of queries or details of their deals with Bing and Yandex. They try really hard to create an illusion that it is a real search engine, but seems like it is basically smoke and mirrors.
It's not mentioned on their site, or their wikipedia entry, or anywhere else I could find, and the results were different when I tried a few searches in them both just now.
Are they "Using Bing" in the same sense they "Use Wikipedia" to put info boxes on the results page sometimes?
"Uses" is a weird word here. Because some people are suggesting that DDG is a reskin of Bing. But if we look at what DDG says[0], they talk about it the same way they talk about Stack Overflow. No one is crazy enough to say that DDG is a reskin of SO. What they are actually saying is that they are aggregating results. Which I don't understand why that would be a bad thing.
Money quoute right here: "We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we also source from a variety of partners, including Verizon Media (formerly Yahoo) and Bing."
SO and the other 400 sources are only used for instant boxes and other widgets. The real organic search results are all from Bing.
> 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 Verizon Media (formerly Yahoo) and Bing.
I'm not sure where you're getting
> The real organic search results are all from Bing.
> 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 Verizon Media (formerly Yahoo) and Bing.
"We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we also source from a variety of partners, including Verizon Media (formerly Yahoo) and Bing"
That doesn't suggest anything that the OP is saying. Google does similar things. We wouldn't say that searching DDG is like searching Stack Overflow. Or it is like searching Yelp.
There's a difference between getting results from sites that contain content (Wikipedia, Stack Overflow, Yelp) and sites that are pure search engines (Bing).
I don't care if it's EU or not, but is the index real or kind of half-fake? (like "yes, we have an index, but it's 10MBs big...")
I started using Qwant ~2 months ago and it isn't bad: the snippets that are shown in the search results often don't contain the search terms that I used but the links were so far good - but I did mostly lookups for e.g. functions and other reference data - the few times that I challenged it with exact searches its results were similar to the ones of Google, meaning that it didn't return the websites that contained such exact sequences of characters.
I would like to know too.
I read someone on social media alleging they also used Bing behind the scenes, without attribution, but I haven’t researched further.
By searching some random words like "when to buy fruitcakes" (without double quotes) I get almost the same listing in Qwant as in Bing. The results are a bit too similar... .
No knowledge, but at least for my searches it has a definite edge against ddg. (I am European.) What I especially like is that in many cases qwant returns nothing if there is no exact match of my query (typically I made a typo.) I kind of like the feeling that the engine tries to search what I tell it to search, not what it thinks I want to search.
I like to be able to search things I have no idea how to spell. It's pretty easy to make a guess at spelling words and I want to at least have a suggestion below when something is wrong.
> What I especially like is that in many cases qwant returns nothing if there is no exact match of my query
I agree - I admit of having been surprised the first time that it returned "nothing" but in the end I did like the feeling of knowing that it did search what I wanted to search.
> Each of [Bing’s search partners] have to show bing ads, forward the users' IPs as per Bing's terms of service (to fight ad fraud etc).
But DuckDuckGo says:
> [W]e never share any personal information with any of our partners. The way it works is when we call a partner for information, it is proxied through our servers so it stays completely anonymous. That is, any call to a partner looks to the partner as it is from us and not the user itself, and no user personal information is passed in that process (e.g. their IP address). That way we can build our search result pages using these 100s of partner sources, while still keeping them completely anonymous to you.
> I like DuckDuckGo. But unless they build their own search - I think the fundamental problem has not been tackled. There is no good, independent, private search alternative.
There isn't going to be, because it's really hard and expensive to do that. I don't see how any startup could even begin to compete with their own search engine.
The barrier to entry is extremely high: Bing probably would not have survived long enough to be profitable if it had been a startup. Microsoft put a lot of money into building it.
Subscriptions and micropayments would not be a solution for DDG because too few people would be willing to pay. Ad revenue is the only model that has sustained search engines in the long term.
Respectfully, I think you are definitely overestimating the cost of building a search engine. Do you have experience in search specifically? Asking in good faith here.
I think you're absolutely right that it's not trivial, but it isn't a completely unsolvable problem only addressable by the major spyware corporations like Facebook, Google, etc. I think you could build a decent search engine in about 6-18 months if all living expenses were paid and you could just lock yourself into your apartment with no distractions, with maybe a team of 1-3 other extremely talented engineers.
It's not so much the difficulty, though yes it is hard, but it's generally extremely difficult to raise capital as a late entrant into an established industry. Unless there's something disruptive. That said, it doesn't take that much capital to build a new search engine with today's computing infrastructure so a few have tried over the past 5-10 years but none were as good as Google (a minimal benchmark). They found a lot of initial interest then died out quickly (sorry I'm forgetting the names, maybe Powerset, Blekko and another). Without doing any "heavy lifting" and also thus not requiring much capital, these so-called "private" search engines have gotten some traction.
You will need data on relevant results for a broad swath of queries to fine tune your ranking models against, and will need to spend millions on infrastructure just to crawl and store an index of the entire web.
> Try to run this test: If you query "what is my ip" in duckduckgo (DDG)
I tried that, and did not see 207.* anywhere on the page. It displayed my IP address above the results list, and then a list of reasonable results for that query, without any IP addresses listed in any of the descriptions.
A duopoly will be marginally better at implementing user-friendly features like privacy than a monopoly, because there is at least nominal competition.
However I think we need to start asking deeper questions - why is it that concentration is so prevalent in the software industry?
Software is often said to have "natural" monopoly characteristics, but are those characteristics really a product of "nature" in the way that say the laws of physics are, or are they a product of IP laws and the regulatory choices made by the government?
I feel it’s because of network effects as well as inability to steal IP easily.
Network effects purely because once you have enough mass of people on board, you can easily attract more people and it is easy enough to distinguish yourself from your competitors that it deters people from switching and/or even being able to make a comparison.
Second you can’t easily steal IP. Anker making a next generation charger will have to face copycats who went to their OEM and were sold the design or the product itself from the backdoor. It’s simply difficult to keep things under wraps when it has a physical + human component. Not so easy in software. To substitute Instagram you’ll probably [0] have to write everything from scratch. Computers when configured correctly will not exactly sell your work from the back door.
[0] I mean source code is still stolen but it’s still marginally harder to use source code than just selling the stolen designs. Plus stealing source code works only once because the victim will then clamp down harder and then continue to innovate it’s way out of the mess.
Yes, you're basically right...but the problem isn't building your own search engine, it's in getting search ads privately as well as just being transparent and honest about how your service works -- none of which is true for DuckDuckGo sadly. Their business model is built on sending your personal data to bing when you click on ads on their search results page which link to Bing (moreover they say they never send your IP or personal information to a third-party, but presenting an ad on your search results without disclosing that the ad links to Bing may not "legally" violate that clause but it does in spirit). Ads are also localized so even if they aren't sending your IP address (which according to Bing they are supposed to be doing, but in their terms they claim not to), they're sending your location data. DuckDuckGo further refuses to clarify what data they do send (i.e. how accurate the location data is, what is it even) to retrieve search ads. They aren't transparent about how they work and their business model is fundamentally built on non-private search ads from Bing. It's not "true privacy" nor sincere to say you're not saving any user-related data when you're sending a lot of it to firms like Bing who do save it. The only search engines close to being truly private are epicsearch.in (part of the Epic Privacy Browser) and maybe some small, interesting efforts like private.sh, neither of which have search ads.
* Dealing with a proprietary cloud service is never going to offer privacy. If you want to be confident you have privacy, you need to use public, community efforts which you can become part.
* DuckDuckGo could be saying "We have a client from Kyrgyzstan, please give us an ad". Bing could be saying: Here is the heading, the body, and the URL. DDG could be dumping that in the page. Your privacy is not compromised.
* DuckDuckGo could be saying "We have a client from Kyrgyzstan and a client from Brazil and a client from Texas searching for 'plastic sponge bathtub' or 'green sponge bathtub' or 'green sponge beach'" in response to a search for "green sponge beach" from a Brazilian. Bing could be responding with several answers. DuckDuckGo would then send the relevant answer to the client.
* If you click on an ad, you have no privacy, end of story.
There are basically 4 search engines left in the whole world - Baidu (China), Yandex (Russia, recently officially with KGB management), Google and Bing. That is all, full stop. Everyone else is a fancy GUI for on them. Google has more than 90% market share and each of the rest has like 1-3%. Building new engine is prohibitively costly and hard. So the lesser evil is Bing, by simple elimination.
You can't include Baidu in the list and say Google has 90% market share. Saying Baidu has 1-3% without specifying "in the USA" is misleading. They've got a billion users in China.
I met Jack a number of years ago. He did not strike me as someone interested in stifling free speech. Although he was incredibly successful, even then, his values seemed to be high above those of most mortals. One of these values that he explicitly mentioned was free speech. Additionally, while discussing our accomplishments, he stated that he had an IQ of 155. My own is 160, which is above his, but he nonetheless seemed almost as intelligent as me, which I am certainly not used to.
DuckDuckGo is still not ready to be my daily driver.
Here's my last significant Google search: "monaco IndentAction.Indent"
The documentation I was looking for[0] was the:
- 1st hit on Google[1]
- 17th hit on DDG[2]
but to be fair I didn't find it within the first 10 (!) pages of Bing[3], so at least it's better than Bing. And I work for MSFT. I submitted feedback to DDG & Bing, hopefully it helps.
For me, this is one of the things where I’m simply more explicit in what I’m looking for. So I would append api to the terms (as I’m looking for an api doc) and indeed this pushed the site you wanted to #1.
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey rapes and kills 3 boys 14Jan2019, see page 35+...
South Bend, Indiana mayor and political up and comer Peter Buttgieg rapes & kills five boys in Buffalo on January 14, 2019. Buttgieg makes a child eat his own feces at one point. Gov. Andrew Cuomo & NYC Mayor Bill DeBlasio present also to kick off a "rape party". Complete uncut audio of it all here.
\\Peter Buttgieg is raping boys through 9pm, starting around 6:25pm. Download the video, turn the volume all the way up and put head phones on. Note: there is not much to see in the video, the audio is picked up from another [illegal surveillance] system. See page 35 in the PDF below. He identifies himself on page 32 around 3:31pm+.
\\Excerpts of the dialogue:
1826 Gigi Hadid: Buttgieg just killed his first kid.
1827 ?: He's standing there in shock.
1827 Peter Buttgieg: I feel soulless right now, maybe I'm better off that way.
1827 Sean? Porter: Buttgieg's actually laughing about it...
1827 Donald Reeves: Can I ask you a question? Would it be too much to ask to not be laughing at the fact you just killed your first kid?
1843 Gigi Hadid: The first time DeBlasio fucked a kid...
1844 ?: Retarded observation after what just happened to that kid.
1847 Gigi Hadid: Buttgieg is dancing around [celebrating] he killed his first kid.
1903 Donald Reeves: There's not gonna be anymore of that disgusting shit! Buttgieg made him [the boy] eat his own shit.
1905 Peter Buttgieg: What's the deal Christopher?
1905 Christopher Porter: That's Buttgieg, he wants to know if that kid is still alive.
\\Governor Andrew Cuomo, Mayor Peter Buttgieg, NYC Mayor Bill DeBlasio, along with billionaires Henry Porter and Corey Hogan are together kicking off a "rape party" starting around 3:15 pm in Buffalo, NY on Januray 14th, 2019. 100+ deaths from the rapes over next two days. Full audio here.
\\Each channel has different system users of varying importance, and one may be easier to hear than another. This is explained in better detail in the PDF. These events were excerpts from this 101 page PDF . It keeps getting censored, but with en...
I was very impressed listening to Weinberg on The Angel Philospher podcast recently, and have been very happy with DDG as my default engine for about a year. And yet it was only yesterday that I realised that (for a certain section of the web) adverts on DDG are playing to a self selected audience - basically it's like running banner ads on HN.
Honest question: how do you people even cope with the crap results?
I'm a StartPage user, but decided to try DDG for some time after the System1 debacle [1]. The Swedish localized search results are downright unusable compared to StartPage/Google. I'm really trying to give it a chance, but I keep reaching for SP in every other search.
It's not just you. I sincerely believe in DDG's mission, but the sad truth is I just can't find what I want with it. Unfortunately there seems to be no good way to use Startpage with Safari either.
I too use DDG first and I'm just willing to suffer a bit 'till I use Google. Using DDG first at least keeps Google honest and they are only a click away on Firefox.
The thing that's saddest is not only are DDG results not as smart but they also seem dumbed-down in the fashion of Google - ie, too much "your search" --> "what we imagine you really want" --> "here's our curated list of things like this (and screw your actual keywords)"
I honestly can always find what I want with DDG or I can’t find it in DDG or Google. If I end up searching Google it’s essentially the same results, but it also depends how you search.
I’m either searching for something straight forward and Wikipedia (or some other obvious site) suffices or its so niche that neither Google or DDG work.
I also wrote my own search engine that works well for my niche topics (better than either IMO). Mostly for discovering interesting aspect though.
Completely honest answer, not trying to be dismissive -- DuckDuckGo gives me fine results for most of my queries. I don't reach for Google that much unless I'm doing a deep dive into a problem that's hard to search in general, in which case I often find I'm aggregating results from multiple search engines.
I find Google better at some results -- occasionally Google "gets" what I'm trying to search for better than DuckDuckGo does and zeroes in more specifically on the topic. Sometimes I find that DuckDuckGo does the same. I particularly think that DuckDuckGo's smart cards are just (to me) obviously better than Google's. DuckDuckGo's news is really bad for me, I guess -- I pretty much always use Google News for current events.
This comes up pretty much every time that DuckDuckGo comes up, and I have seen it come up so often, that when I step back and try to come up with a semi-impartial reading of which engine is better, the only conclusion I can reach is that a lot of people have different opinions about how a search engine should react when they search. I think different search results are an acquired taste, and there just isn't an objective right or wrong answer to which engine is better.
So it's a little like if someone was recommending eating vegetables, and you asked, "but what do you do about the crap taste of spinach?" You have a real problem in that I want to help you find foods you like, but at the same time, I'm not trying to "solve" the way spinach tastes. I don't agree that spinach is "wrong", it's just not what you want.
From that point of view, having multiple, diverse search engines is good, and we'd all be served better by using multiple search engines. I don't want DuckDuckGo to just be a Google clone; part of the reason I use it is because of their different results. I do want it to improve and get better, but I disagree that morphing into Google 2.0 will accomplish that for me.
If you like Google's style of search results, then what you really need is a trustworthy replacement for Startpage. You need Google but without the tracking -- and DuckDuckGo isn't just Google without the tracking. I think you're justified in telling anyone who says, "just use DuckDuckGo" to shove off, since DuckDuckGo isn't solving your problem. But I don't agree that DuckDuckGo has bad results, it has a different flavor than you're used to.
> I'm a StartPage user, but decided to try DDG for some time after the System1 debacle
I haven't kept up with the most recent news, but I assume OP would still be using SP if they could trust it not to track them. What they need is a StartPage equivalent that they still trust.
I use DDG as my main search engine and I agree localised results are subpar ( I'm Brazilian ). I end up resorting to the !g bang most of the time but since these kinds of searches are a just small subset of my queries, it doesn't bother me that much.
Because they aren’t crap for me the vast majority of the time. I often hear about local results, but flipping the "Germany" switch gives me great German results.
There are 2 cases when I need to use !g, both of them are when there aren’t many results:
1. Rare error, simply not in their index
2. Ambiguous term and I need to force a part of the query to appear. Because DDG thinks it’s perfectly fine to ignore the user sometimes and show you completely unrelated things even if you tried your best to tell them what you are looking for and it’s in their index.
Sadly recently google started doing that as well. Not as bad as DDG, the first few results are still an answer to my query, but then they decide to spam the results with useless sites that don’t have the term.
Maybe it's just my searches, but I'm able to pretty consistently find what I'm looking for with DDG, and the number of times that Google has helped in those situations is basically nil. I think it's a really subjective thing, and it may take a while for DDG to work as well for all users as it currently does for some.
What does that mean? I guess https://duckduckgo.com/app is a browser, and a browser extension? The app is a relatively better browser than DDG search is a search engine?
I believe I tried it a week or so after it launched. Although, I still stand by my point that Firefox Mobile offers the privacy-oriented approach of the DDG app and so much more via addons that it's pretty hard to justify using the DDG app unless the phone is really low-end enough that Firefox chugs on it
I did try DDG and Startpage a few years ago but ultimately gave up because the results were not good.
I gave another try to DDG since about 3 weeks and so far the results are pretty good. Not only they got better on the last few years, but for me Google got worse at the same time.
Almost everytime I search in Google nowadays, I have to reformulate my search 2~3 times to get decent results. I often need to add double quotes, ask for reddit or specify the language. Google today just tries too much to read my mind, guess what I want and make interpretations instead of just doing what I asked. Because of this huge waste of time, I became frustrated over time.
Also, I am French, use English very often (including at work) and live in Japan, so the explicit region filter of DDG is really a bless compared to the obscure and almost always wrong way Google handles this.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 338 ms ] threadSurprised to find lately that a lot of my searches only return relevant results in a twitter search.
The bang commands are super useful.
A few of my favorites include hn for HN's algolia, th for thesaurus, wes for Wikipedia in Spanish and d for... duck duck go.
And as I switch machines, browsers, profiles, and privacy mode all day long the only ubuiqitous thing is that ddg is the default search engine.
I don't use the !w shortcut as usually whatever/whomever I have searched for is in the info box on ddg's right-hand column and it usually has a wikipedia link if I need to get more detail.
I'm glad I was relieved of hating @jack at least momentarily. :')
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/11/21/sacha-baron-cohen-rips-on-fa...
> Sacha Baron Cohen is the well-deserved recipient of ADL’s International Leadership Award, which goes to exceptional individuals who combine professional success with a profound personal commitment to community involvement and to crossing borders and barriers with a message of diversity and equal opportunity.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymaWq5yZIYM
“I hate this guy because some guy told me to, and I trust that guy because someone else I trust told me to.”
> "Just imagine what Goebbels [2] could have done with Facebook"
I think the bottom line is he is good at social engineering, and he recognizes the signs of manipulation at scale. Beyond that, he is smart enough to consume the literature.
Note: Video is his award speech from ADL. But has sensitive wording and is NSFW. I found it to be pretty well put together - maybe reaching a bit in parts.
[1] - https://youtu.be/ymaWq5yZIYM?t=247
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Goebbels
Brands pay a lot of money for influencer endorsements.
Think of his as one and you will see the marketing value of this as it relates to people who want to see privacy issues advanced.
The point is, there's a lot of misinformation trying to sway people to one side or the other, and unless you are someone who has spent a lot of time researching the subject, I'll assume you are just parroting some headline that told you "X is bad".
Who cares what this guy has to say about Facebook? Why does his opinion matters more than mine or yours? I bet he knows even less.
He would not be successful in the world he now demands, and he is not a social expert hes a 'funny' man who spends his time on business deals and movies.
I'm jewish, I don't want him speaking for me. I'd rather sasha cohen be allowed to make offensive films and everyone else too.
He's no more expert than joe rogan or any other comedian.
He's just the one the ADL decided to use as a mouth piece for censorship, and as a jewish person I don't appreciate their pretending to have my best interests in mind while hurting the basic freedoms and ability for self expression of everyone in the country.
He's not brave and there's no king. he was celebrated for his comments. The things he's saying are only the words of a jester because he's a clown, not because they're wise.
He's effectively making the same arguments that FOSTA-SESTA made (which led to the closing of personals sections of Craigslist among other liability-transferring impacts), but for all of social media. His call was for all internet companies to pre-vet every single user-generated-content before anyone else sees it or be held liable for user-submitted content. It likely does solve the problem, but it swings the pendulum _very_ _far_ in the other direction towards corporate censorship and over-censorship to prevent any possibility of liability.
This is late-stage capitalism in action. Companies in the {social media, advertising, sales} space all have utility functions centered around attacking the weaknesses of the human mind. It just so happens that governments and political parties are in the same industry using the same tactics.
I just don't see SBC's prescription working in a country with a constitutionally mandated Freedom of Speech (where the jurisprudence only disallows speech if it is a direct and specific call to action of violence). And it it does, Newspeak will be the only language supported on the platform.
See also the continued attacks on biological women by not banning or suspending accounts that use TERF as a slur or pejorative. And see also the banning of Meghan Murphy and actual intersex person who has objected to the hijacking of intersex people's medical conditions by TRA extremists (Stonewall, sadly and Mermaids) to justify their pseudo-science that biological sex is a spectrum.
Jack knows this stuff well and simply won't stand up in support of biological women's hard fought rights to not have penises in their gradually eroded protected spaces.
Sorry dang, had to answer the question.
AIUI duck.com used to be a redirect-- to google.com. Very confusing for actual DDG users. IIRC Google got the domain as part of acquiring On2, some sort of video codec company, at a time when DDG wasn't nearly as popular as it is today.
Hello, 1990's Slashdot called and would like its tired old '$' satire back.
It's reputation they fully earned. You can write "Microsoft" in full whenever you like if you prefer too. I think it's pretty reasonable to casually express contempt at every opportunity for any business that puts money vastly further ahead of ethics than they need to. You can disgaree with that if you like too.
Facebrick is the new M$. What do we have for Goog? "do no evil" with strickeout for more money? $GOOG?
1. "fix incorrect mayonese".
2. "fix incorrect lazagna"
and compare with:
1. "fix incorrect mayonnaise".
2. "fix incorrect lasagna"
Please don't dilute the meaning behind this expression.
I like DuckDuckGo. But unless they build their own search - I think the fundamental problem has not been tackled. There is no good, independent, private search alternative.
[Edit] I am not trying to single out DDG. There are a few replies that either demand for proof (rightfully) or suggest Bing is used only sometimes. I do not have conclusive proof, but have worked on search. Here's a couple of things for the curious:
1. Try to run this test: If you query "what is my ip" in duckduckgo (DDG), or any of the other ones I mentioned, you will notice in the description of one of the top results this IP: 207.46.13.147. It's a BingBot IP [0]. It's a good enough test to spot where results are coming from.
2. Open two browser windows side by side with DDG and Bing. Turn on results for the country you are in in DDG. Look attentively. Try image search.
It is clear that DDG does some re-ranking based on its own, but it's very often the same results.
[0] https://whatismyipaddress.com/ip/207.46.13.147
I don't know a great deal about their infrastructure and would love to learn more about it.
https://www.wired.co.uk/article/duckduckgo-anonymous-privacy
Duckduckgo isn't perfect but they're better than google. If I knew of something better than duckduckgo, I'd use that instead. But I'm not going to let perfect be the enemy of good.
IIUC, they have built their own search, but use Bing(among others) for paid ads.
If this is the case, it seems that it’s the business model that needs innovation and not the search engine itself.
[0] https://whatismyipaddress.com/ip/207.46.13.147
It's not mentioned on their site, or their wikipedia entry, or anywhere else I could find, and the results were different when I tried a few searches in them both just now.
Are they "Using Bing" in the same sense they "Use Wikipedia" to put info boxes on the results page sometimes?
As of October 2019, Yahoo! Search is once again “powered by Bing”[2].
To me, results are as crap as Bing's.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/duckduckgo/comments/6uaibg/comment/...
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Search
[0] https://help.duckduckgo.com/results/sources/
SO and the other 400 sources are only used for instant boxes and other widgets. The real organic search results are all from Bing.
> 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 Verizon Media (formerly Yahoo) and Bing.
I'm not sure where you're getting
> The real organic search results are all from Bing.
That paragraph __DOES NOT__ say that
> more traditional links in the search results
It's super obvious to me what that refers to - the actual search results. The rest is just fluff.
> 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 Verizon Media (formerly Yahoo) and Bing.
https://help.duckduckgo.com/results/sources/
The results are very similar but not identical to using yahoo or bing.
https://help.duckduckgo.com/results/sources/
> it would be wrong to say "Google does similar things"
This does not follow.
It also isn't what I was suggesting, but it would surprise me if Google didn't look at what Bing and Yahoo were doing (and DDG).
Seems doubtful since that would be contrary to DDG's main marketing message and their reason for even existing.
The ToS you are referring to is for companies without custom deals in place.
You can read DuckDuckGo's privacy policy here: https://duckduckgo.com/privacy
It's the only EU-based search engine with its own indexing engine ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qwant )
I don't care if it's EU or not, but is the index real or kind of half-fake? (like "yes, we have an index, but it's 10MBs big...")
I started using Qwant ~2 months ago and it isn't bad: the snippets that are shown in the search results often don't contain the search terms that I used but the links were so far good - but I did mostly lookups for e.g. functions and other reference data - the few times that I challenged it with exact searches its results were similar to the ones of Google, meaning that it didn't return the websites that contained such exact sequences of characters.
By searching some random words like "when to buy fruitcakes" (without double quotes) I get almost the same listing in Qwant as in Bing. The results are a bit too similar... .
I agree - I admit of having been surprised the first time that it returned "nothing" but in the end I did like the feeling of knowing that it did search what I wanted to search.
> Each of [Bing’s search partners] have to show bing ads, forward the users' IPs as per Bing's terms of service (to fight ad fraud etc).
But DuckDuckGo says:
> [W]e never share any personal information with any of our partners. The way it works is when we call a partner for information, it is proxied through our servers so it stays completely anonymous. That is, any call to a partner looks to the partner as it is from us and not the user itself, and no user personal information is passed in that process (e.g. their IP address). That way we can build our search result pages using these 100s of partner sources, while still keeping them completely anonymous to you.
https://help.duckduckgo.com/results/sources/
There isn't going to be, because it's really hard and expensive to do that. I don't see how any startup could even begin to compete with their own search engine.
The barrier to entry is extremely high: Bing probably would not have survived long enough to be profitable if it had been a startup. Microsoft put a lot of money into building it.
Subscriptions and micropayments would not be a solution for DDG because too few people would be willing to pay. Ad revenue is the only model that has sustained search engines in the long term.
I think you're absolutely right that it's not trivial, but it isn't a completely unsolvable problem only addressable by the major spyware corporations like Facebook, Google, etc. I think you could build a decent search engine in about 6-18 months if all living expenses were paid and you could just lock yourself into your apartment with no distractions, with maybe a team of 1-3 other extremely talented engineers.
I tried that, and did not see 207.* anywhere on the page. It displayed my IP address above the results list, and then a list of reasonable results for that query, without any IP addresses listed in any of the descriptions.
https://i.imgur.com/HbhvISk.png
This means DuckDuckGo uses Bing for its results. But it doesn't mean DuckDuckGo is forwarding your IP to Bing.
However I think we need to start asking deeper questions - why is it that concentration is so prevalent in the software industry?
Software is often said to have "natural" monopoly characteristics, but are those characteristics really a product of "nature" in the way that say the laws of physics are, or are they a product of IP laws and the regulatory choices made by the government?
Network effects purely because once you have enough mass of people on board, you can easily attract more people and it is easy enough to distinguish yourself from your competitors that it deters people from switching and/or even being able to make a comparison.
Second you can’t easily steal IP. Anker making a next generation charger will have to face copycats who went to their OEM and were sold the design or the product itself from the backdoor. It’s simply difficult to keep things under wraps when it has a physical + human component. Not so easy in software. To substitute Instagram you’ll probably [0] have to write everything from scratch. Computers when configured correctly will not exactly sell your work from the back door.
[0] I mean source code is still stolen but it’s still marginally harder to use source code than just selling the stolen designs. Plus stealing source code works only once because the victim will then clamp down harder and then continue to innovate it’s way out of the mess.
* DuckDuckGo could be saying "We have a client from Kyrgyzstan, please give us an ad". Bing could be saying: Here is the heading, the body, and the URL. DDG could be dumping that in the page. Your privacy is not compromised.
* DuckDuckGo could be saying "We have a client from Kyrgyzstan and a client from Brazil and a client from Texas searching for 'plastic sponge bathtub' or 'green sponge bathtub' or 'green sponge beach'" in response to a search for "green sponge beach" from a Brazilian. Bing could be responding with several answers. DuckDuckGo would then send the relevant answer to the client.
* If you click on an ad, you have no privacy, end of story.
<https://duckduckgo.com/lite>
Are they really competitors?
Here's my last significant Google search: "monaco IndentAction.Indent"
The documentation I was looking for[0] was the:
- 1st hit on Google[1]
- 17th hit on DDG[2]
but to be fair I didn't find it within the first 10 (!) pages of Bing[3], so at least it's better than Bing. And I work for MSFT. I submitted feedback to DDG & Bing, hopefully it helps.
[0] https://microsoft.github.io/monaco-editor/api/enums/monaco.l...
[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=monaco+IndentAction.Indent&o...
[2] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=monaco+IndentAction.Indent&t=h_&ia...
[3] https://www.bing.com/search?q=%2bmonaco+IndentAction.Indent&...
South Bend, Indiana mayor and political up and comer Peter Buttgieg rapes & kills five boys in Buffalo on January 14, 2019. Buttgieg makes a child eat his own feces at one point. Gov. Andrew Cuomo & NYC Mayor Bill DeBlasio present also to kick off a "rape party". Complete uncut audio of it all here.
\\Peter Buttgieg is raping boys through 9pm, starting around 6:25pm. Download the video, turn the volume all the way up and put head phones on. Note: there is not much to see in the video, the audio is picked up from another [illegal surveillance] system. See page 35 in the PDF below. He identifies himself on page 32 around 3:31pm+.
\\Excerpts of the dialogue:
1826 Gigi Hadid: Buttgieg just killed his first kid.
1827 ?: He's standing there in shock.
1827 Peter Buttgieg: I feel soulless right now, maybe I'm better off that way.
1827 Sean? Porter: Buttgieg's actually laughing about it...
1827 Donald Reeves: Can I ask you a question? Would it be too much to ask to not be laughing at the fact you just killed your first kid?
1843 Gigi Hadid: The first time DeBlasio fucked a kid...
1844 ?: Retarded observation after what just happened to that kid.
1847 Gigi Hadid: Buttgieg is dancing around [celebrating] he killed his first kid.
1903 Donald Reeves: There's not gonna be anymore of that disgusting shit! Buttgieg made him [the boy] eat his own shit.
1905 Peter Buttgieg: What's the deal Christopher?
1905 Christopher Porter: That's Buttgieg, he wants to know if that kid is still alive.
Video links below:
14JanCh3_1800-1 900_redo.avi
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1R_gL3dDbmb0Rc5XtStHGPOlE_YK...
14JanCh3_1900-2100.avi
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1niNx_msEeisZkotJLacqAk2atsE...
14JanCh4_1800-1902.avi
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ewfY3sl2Z7Tq3yxMAG4l9xEiNRu...
14JanCh4_1902-2000avi
https://drive.google.com/file/d/17P8AaMtTAtS15N3OFP6HnqO6y7i...
14JanCh4_2000-2100.avi
https://drive.google.com/file/d/193Cwj7v6ZLR0dqY9pRMEtG8Fhd8...
See PDF for ch2.
14JanCh3_1500-1557.avihttps://drive.google.com/file/d/1XuQpqGMMSZsTxPeG4Rf7gmPFYl8...
14JanCh4_1500-1619.avi
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1mXG7L3dqCyuLvt9pTp3XLPXZIJa...
See pdf for ch2.
\\Each channel has different system users of varying importance, and one may be easier to hear than another. This is explained in better detail in the PDF. These events were excerpts from this 101 page PDF . It keeps getting censored, but with en...
Weirdly you seem to have to go through BingYahoo - https://www.shivarweb.com/9242/how-to-advertise-on-duckduckg...
I'm a StartPage user, but decided to try DDG for some time after the System1 debacle [1]. The Swedish localized search results are downright unusable compared to StartPage/Google. I'm really trying to give it a chance, but I keep reaching for SP in every other search.
[1] https://reclaimthenet.org/startpage-buyout-ad-tech-company/
The thing that's saddest is not only are DDG results not as smart but they also seem dumbed-down in the fashion of Google - ie, too much "your search" --> "what we imagine you really want" --> "here's our curated list of things like this (and screw your actual keywords)"
Eg, Reddit, forums, stack overflow (sometimes), YouTube, etc
I’m either searching for something straight forward and Wikipedia (or some other obvious site) suffices or its so niche that neither Google or DDG work.
I also wrote my own search engine that works well for my niche topics (better than either IMO). Mostly for discovering interesting aspect though.
My guess is that you more frequently search for things in the fallback category compared to users that find DDG's results to be non-crap.
Swedish non-localizes search almost certainly falls in that category.
The bang operator is pretty amazing once you get used to it. It gives you control over what you're searching for again.
I use !w (Wikipedia) !yt (YouTube) !d (dictionary) !rhyme (rhyming dictionary) and !gsc (Google scholar) regularly.
I find Google better at some results -- occasionally Google "gets" what I'm trying to search for better than DuckDuckGo does and zeroes in more specifically on the topic. Sometimes I find that DuckDuckGo does the same. I particularly think that DuckDuckGo's smart cards are just (to me) obviously better than Google's. DuckDuckGo's news is really bad for me, I guess -- I pretty much always use Google News for current events.
This comes up pretty much every time that DuckDuckGo comes up, and I have seen it come up so often, that when I step back and try to come up with a semi-impartial reading of which engine is better, the only conclusion I can reach is that a lot of people have different opinions about how a search engine should react when they search. I think different search results are an acquired taste, and there just isn't an objective right or wrong answer to which engine is better.
So it's a little like if someone was recommending eating vegetables, and you asked, "but what do you do about the crap taste of spinach?" You have a real problem in that I want to help you find foods you like, but at the same time, I'm not trying to "solve" the way spinach tastes. I don't agree that spinach is "wrong", it's just not what you want.
From that point of view, having multiple, diverse search engines is good, and we'd all be served better by using multiple search engines. I don't want DuckDuckGo to just be a Google clone; part of the reason I use it is because of their different results. I do want it to improve and get better, but I disagree that morphing into Google 2.0 will accomplish that for me.
If you like Google's style of search results, then what you really need is a trustworthy replacement for Startpage. You need Google but without the tracking -- and DuckDuckGo isn't just Google without the tracking. I think you're justified in telling anyone who says, "just use DuckDuckGo" to shove off, since DuckDuckGo isn't solving your problem. But I don't agree that DuckDuckGo has bad results, it has a different flavor than you're used to.
I haven't kept up with the most recent news, but I assume OP would still be using SP if they could trust it not to track them. What they need is a StartPage equivalent that they still trust.
There are 2 cases when I need to use !g, both of them are when there aren’t many results:
1. Rare error, simply not in their index
2. Ambiguous term and I need to force a part of the query to appear. Because DDG thinks it’s perfectly fine to ignore the user sometimes and show you completely unrelated things even if you tried your best to tell them what you are looking for and it’s in their index.
Sadly recently google started doing that as well. Not as bad as DDG, the first few results are still an answer to my query, but then they decide to spam the results with useless sites that don’t have the term.
edit: formatting
I applaud these moves.
What does that mean? I guess https://duckduckgo.com/app is a browser, and a browser extension? The app is a relatively better browser than DDG search is a search engine?
Honestly, IDK why anyone would not just use Firefox Mobile. It's got addons support too
I gave another try to DDG since about 3 weeks and so far the results are pretty good. Not only they got better on the last few years, but for me Google got worse at the same time.
Almost everytime I search in Google nowadays, I have to reformulate my search 2~3 times to get decent results. I often need to add double quotes, ask for reddit or specify the language. Google today just tries too much to read my mind, guess what I want and make interpretations instead of just doing what I asked. Because of this huge waste of time, I became frustrated over time.
Also, I am French, use English very often (including at work) and live in Japan, so the explicit region filter of DDG is really a bless compared to the obscure and almost always wrong way Google handles this.