I’ve been using ddg for a little over 5 years. Those first few years of use I found myself using !g a ton, but I think ddg’s results are actually better now. Not that the search is necessarily better, but I don’t have to wade through a bunch of ads. I know this is a tired position around here but honestly there’s very little I get out of google’s search that I don’t get from ddg.
I'd say I still do the !g thing about 10% of the time. DDG is good for my average search case of "I really just need to get to the wikipedia article but I don't know quite what it's titled", or finding an answer on StackOverflow, but if I'm doing anything that's kind of niche, I end up having to use Google.
I totally agree with you. I have made ddg my default search on browser but many times I end up Googling. It has increased the time to get the final answere to 1.5 times atleast.
I've been using DDG for about three years now and I still use !g a lot, but I really shouldn't. Google practically never finds what I'm looking for if DDG can't.
Agreed. I tried it a few times over the years and found the results to be pretty poor, but I tried again recently and found the results to be good enough to fully switch both my computer and phone to DDG.
Although I'm fully switched over, there are 2 drawbacks:
* Since DDG tracks you less, the results for local searches may be worse. If you're in Boston, TX you'll probably want to search for "boston, tx restaurants" whereas I'm guessing Google could handle "boston restaurants" if your location is in Boston, TX.
* Finding brand new results seems a bit harder. I found this especially true when searching for election results. Searching for, e.g., "nevada election results" was showing me results from 2016 and 2018 on the day of those elections this year. Now the DDG results seem to correctly point to 2020 results.
Yeah I don't like that DDG interface limits you to timeframes of Last Day/Week/Month/Year. There are lots of good reasons to want to search a particular timeframe!
> Google could handle "boston restaurants" if your location is in Boston, TX.
Location is the single biggest implicit factor for Google search results; "restaurants" would probably get you what you are looking for (well, ignoring that it's an overly broad query, and most places have too many restaurants for a simple ranking of them to really be that helpful).
I live in Rochester, MN, and that's how I can say with some certainty that google doesn't do a good job of using your location in their search algorithm. If you just search for something simple like "Rochester library hours", it'll default to Rochester NY. Everybody in my town has learned that we have to use "Rochester MN library hours". I get that the one in NY has ten times more residents than we do, but it's not like we're some backwater here!
I strongly disagree, especially when you have all the Wikipedia / contact / google map embedded into Google search, with one click it can call phone number from a restaurant.
Edit: To add more, it's all those details that makes Google better than other, search engine are not just for searching things it's all about the display and relevance.
it's not a specific case. if I type federer on google I get a list of all his recent matches and live scores so it is easy to follow. A lot of my searches on google are like that. I don't even have to click on any links.
DDG does that too. Most restaurants I search for have a box on the side with phone number and info pulled from Yelp, and a map in whatever provider you want to use.
I don't like that stuff in Google, so I'm fine with DDG not over-doing it. Wikipedia overview is fine, but the many widgets just get in the way IMO. If I want a map I go on maps. If I want reviews I go on a review website.
Like if I type "apple" on Google search the only web result I get is apple.com, everything else is taking with tangentially related widgets: https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=apple
Special points for the IMO completely useless "people also search for" widget.
I tried switching a bunch of times over the years but finally in the last six months or so I've found DDG to be good enough to use full time.
I probably went three or four months without even using the "!g" command. I actually just yesterday ran into some issues and had to use "!g" - for some reason DDG struggled with the concept of "fish shell" and kept bringing me back results about seafood.
It's only good enough when you're in the US, I live in the UK and DDG consistently returns non local results even though the country is set correctly, it's especially annoying given how many US cities are named after their UK counterpart.
Also in the UK. It's noticeable that for many search terms, DDG's top autocomplete suggestion is the term you just typed, with "uk" tacked on the end of it. That suggests that many users in the UK are finding DDG's search results to be too US-centric.
This is _by far_ my biggest issue with DDG. I've been trying to use it for most of my searching and I'm fine with having to append '!g' to ~25% of my searches, it's not ideal, but whatever, I can manage.
Having to append 'uk' to 90% of searches after the first results page is full of useless American shit, for search terms that Google UK handles flawlessly, gets old, very quick.
The results did get better after I discovered that setting a while back. But it's still not close to good enough and I still have to manually stick 'uk' onto a search to find relevant results for most queries.
It's not just US-centric. DDG is just a little bad about local queries in general. With Google, if I'm looking for a local business, or something in the news locally, there's a decent chance I can just search for it and I'll find what I'm looking for. With DDG I need to explicitly tell it the locale I'm interested in.
On top of that I live in a small city that shares a name with a larger city. Google understands this and gives me results for my local, smaller city, but DDG needs to be explicitly told city name, state name.
I agree, I use it as my main search engine as I'm trying to go Google-free at home but finding UK-centric things is annoying. I guess we must just be a much smaller market for them.
Same for Australia. I use DDG exclusively on all devices for a few years now, and overall it works great for me. I probably use !g once or twice a month, if that.
But..
Even though I have the Australia button turned on, it doesn’t seem to do anything. So every time I need something local, I add “site:.au” to the end of the query then it works great again.
That means I should try DDG. I NEVER EVER want local results, and Google always gives me local results. If I'd want local results I would put my country or my city in the search query.
DDG has a toggle to choose whether to prioritize local results or not. Try a search, and then it's prominent enough that I don't think I need to describe its location; you'll find it if you're looking.
I use DDG, I'm not in the US and I never really felt that was an issue. If I'm looking specifically for something local I'd sooner use google maps directly anyway, not just a random web search.
Do you have the UK toggle turned on? Improving local results internationally is a major priority for the team currently - if you find queries where this isn't working well, hitting the feedback button in the bottom right of the screen is a huge help!
That's the reason I much prefer DDG over Google. When I want the news about politics in my country or restaurants in my town, I switch to local results in my language and region with the simple click of a button.
Sometimes I want results from StackOverflow, in English. On Google getting this right was a PITA.
I'm from the UK and have used duckduckgo as my default search engine for about 3 years. It's probably due to my specific searching habits but I have never noticed the issue you have.
Agreed, I've switched my work computer to use it by default and the only place I've noticed it falter is when searching domain-specific niche technical information. Otherwise it works fine, though I still need to switch all my personal computers to it.
DDG is my daily driver and I do not miss Google Search in the slightest. I rarely need to !g and its often futile because Google returns nearly the same results.
However, my favorite feature of DDG is it's native dark theme.
I switched over to DDG a few weeks ago. I slowly regressed to more and more !g usage, and finally switched back to GOOG a couple days ago. Then just an hour ago I searched for "google fiber stadia", because I was curious how well they work together. The main reddit result opened in an amp page (and of course reddit pressured me to install the mobile app). I went back to the results and started scrolling down. I honestly couldn't tell at a glance what was ads, amp, or normal links. I personally feel like I'm in a bit of a no-man's land right now when it comes to search, but I think DDG really has a window of opportunity.
Startpage is a search engine so it doesn't really sleep, hence no need for a bed or any bed-sharing. And we don’t collect or share your personal information.
And yes, we announced last year that System1/Privacy One invested in Startpage. Rest assured, the Startpage founders continue to run the company as before and they have control over the privacy components of Startpage. With this investment, we hope to further expand our privacy features & reach new users. More info on the investment: https://support.startpage.com/index.php?/Knowledgebase/Artic...
Same boat here. Even for technical searches, which ddg is supposed to be good at, I would routinely find the Google results of much more accuracy and quality. Finally switched back.
Luckily, for the things I search, ads are not usually a problem.
I found that searching was more difficult nowadays. Result from Google is becoming worse, filling with content farm and ads. In some sense, that gave opportunity to become a better search engine without any technical improvement, but better marketing.
I don't know if DDG is better or good enough - maybe I'll start using it.
But I do know that google has gone far downhill. and I think that is partially its fault, and also the fault of the internet as a whole. It's just become such an infested ad machine.
Search "phrases" are starting to return more and more useless results. I typed in some phrase as a question and got back a list of news articles about coronavirus. Can't recall what it was but it had nothing to do with coronavirus.
More and more often it will drop words out of my search; import words. I can't help but suspect it's because it has more ads to show me without the most contextually important bits of my search.
Half the first pages are ads. The next few pages may be shopping results even though I'm not searching for something to buy.
Something.. Happened on mobile. The search results now have a bunch of BS "sections" before the actual search results section! WUT.
Seems to be getting harder and harder to craft the right searches to get good results. I miss the days when people would write articles with headlines of "<topic> sucks". Was so much easier to find counter opinions to stuff :/
I tried DDG half a year ago when I also switched back to Firefox, but didn't like the results at the time, so I switched to Startpage. Then for the past couple weeks, Startpage has been having technical issues, so I tried out DDG again. And it's nice. Like I don't even think about it. I'm actually impressed
Hi! Startpage person here. Sorry to hear you've been experiencing issues with Startpage. You can always reach out to us via social or our support page: https://support.startpage.com/index.php?/Tickets/Submit/Rend.... It helps us let our team know of any issues that may affect users at large.
FYI: We're rolling out new privacy features this year. We hope you'll give us another chance. Thanks!
There's also Qwant. I've been using it a for a while on PC and found it to be not bad. On Android I kept running into no results a few times, I don't know what that was about.
Switched 6 months ago on all devices, I actually prefer the experience, I have discovered a bunch of really interesting small independent websites and blogs through it too (wasn't that the original idea of the internet!?).
Once or twice a week I need !g to search for a programming specific query. There's still some improvement needed when searching for all the weird characters we use in software.
This is true. Unfortunately DDG is flatly not interested in offering paginated results, if this 2 year old post by the staff member 'moollaza' on Reddit still applies.
My post there as 'the_minion_in_red' details how turning off "Auto-Load" works inconsistently depending on how you scroll, anyway - a behaviour which I see is still present and incorrect today.
And the 'lite' and 'html' views I suggest for the benefit of another poster, I don't much like because they're doing something to make the address bar URL not change so I can't easily bookmark a search.
I’ve been using DDG exclusively for years. People talk about how hard it is to switch, but I’ve never had any trouble getting exactly the results I’m searching for. I sometimes wonder what makes google search results so amazing, but not enough to risk it.
The quality of my Google results plummeted when I blocked and opted out of as much tracking as I could. I'm not really happy with Google or DDG results at this point.
It doesn't help that search engines have been progressively hiding more and more functionality. Just last night I was trying to search for results within a window of "published after 18 months ago" but couldn't figure out how to do it. It was probably just another search away from finding the answer, but why are search UIs removing/hiding their best Advanced Search features?
Guess it depends on domain. I've changed the default in Firefox a few weeks ago and find that for "regular" searching DDG is enough that I don't go to Google.
But for specialized searches I frequently reach for the Google override, and sure enough Google has significantly better results. Like searching specific, weird errors messages and such.
That’s the thing. The vast majority of my searches are development/coding related. I always find what I’m looking for in the first few returns. I sometimes wonder if I’d get even better results on google?
To people who use DuckDuckGo: how do you deal with its inability to answer simple queries with factual answers? Things like “distance from Los Angeles to New York”, “Joe Biden age”, “knives out cast”, “capital of South Africa”, etc. The time it takes to click a result on DuckDuckGo and navigate to the answer is so much longer than just getting the answer at the top of the results page, as google (and even bing) provide. This is the main reason I can’t use DuckDuckGo, as much as I’d like to
I use my search engine to direct me to a source. I do not expect it to be the source. That is just how my brain sees the purpose of the engine.
I can, however, understand why anyone would like it to provide you with instant factual and reliable information! That would be a godsend.
I do not trust the instant answers most of the time. I like seeing forum answers and comments, finding age in wikipedia and stumbling upon more information, and generally getting lost in the web.
Either it appears as part of the first result or one of the top results have it. This is the case for all of your queries, and the result to select is obvious - normally wikipedia or imdb.
This is arguably harder (+1 click and page load).
However for capital of south africa this is arguably more correct. My google test shows no distinction between the capitals, whereas the wiki page does.
Of course the wiki page is accessible on google as well.
I'm wary of cases when these facts are incorrect. Google declares them while trying to hide the source. This was very important recently when a friend googled for caucus winners and recieved an incorrect fact at the top of Google, something that would have rang alarm bells when seen on its candidate affiliated source page
That seems like more of what WolframAlpha caters to. Personally, I don't like assuming an engine has interpreted what I'm looking for correctly - I'd prefer to maintain some of the load of personally understanding the source of information and it's context. So here is what I do:
>> distance from Los Angeles to New York
!m los angeles to new york
>> Joe Biden age
!w joe biden
>> knives out cast
!imdb knives out
>> capital of South Africa
!w South Africa
And that last one is a really good example of why I don't want to trust an engine to interpret what I'm looking for, because Wolfram Alpha just tells you Pretoria, and if I hadn't spent a large part of my life there I wouldn't know that's probably not what people are looking for. Economically? They probably want to know that Johannesburg is the largest city. Just like how people are sometimes surprised when they learn that New York City and Los Angeles are not state capitals, even though they're really important cities. Politically? Well the roles of the government is split between 3 cities and that's not a simple thing for an engine to comprehend. And I didn't even know Bloemfontein held that kind of status until I just read it on Wikipedia. Neither I, a former citizen of the country, nor WolframAlpha, was aware of that.
Google and Bing both list all three capitals of South Africa. They also write out how they've interpreted your query so you can tell if they're giving you the answer to the right question.
Color me impressed by them, then - but it's still not the kind of thing I entirely trust to an engine. Even though in this specific example we're discussing in detail, it's doing the right thing. Hard to know when it's not. The "explanation" of how it was interpreted isn't much.
I'm also biased by the fact that I'm constantly delighted by the random things I learn by consulting Wikipedia about virtually every topic I encounter.
Switched to DDG 3 years back! Only to check if Google lists anything different, checked it rarely. DDG is very GOOD imho. Since, you see organic results mostly based on the ranking rather than preference to mobile sites, AMP & advertisers, it feels refreshing and good.
I think I've figured out what is happening when people tell me that DuckDuckGo's results "aren't good enough".
What's really happening is that they've been trained to search a certain way to using Google and because DDG doesn't have all the historical data of your searches on their platform they can't fill in the gaps as well.
After a couple days using DDG I found the right vocabulary to get good local results and which bangs to use to get results from the sites that I want. It's a more effective tool if you learn how to use it.
This is the trick. Google got good at letting people search using 'natural' language. DDG is just a bit different. In some ways, I think it's better because my results are more specific in a lot of cases. I look up a lot of academic stuff where Google has the tendency to feed me a lot of garbage that DDG doesn't.
...For certain values of "people", sometimes. I sure don't, it is imprecise, more failure prone and generally gives worse results.
This reminds me of telcos trying to get in to content. "Humans appear to value short audiovisual bursts of stimulation. We shall conquer all by providing all the memes!" And then they knife Tumblr.
It isn't that "people" "want" one search method over another. The search grammar is not why they're there.
It depends on how you look at it. I want to be specific in my searches, which is why I often use quotes, things like `site:somedomain.com`, etc.
That said, that means that DDG is not for everyone. If people want to use Google because they prefer NLP, that's fine, but Google users who trash DDG because it's not smart like Google are totally dismissive of DDG's utility or why people choose it. DDG users on HN, on the other hand, at least seem to understand why people choose to use Google, and I don't think any appreciable number of them expect a large portion of the market to shift towards DDG. In fact, I don't think they believe that DDG is necessarily better. A lot of users, such as myself, use DDG because the UI is a little simpler and because they don't want Google to dominate their life, the compromise being a more stupid but still useful search engine.
Not everyone wants NLP. I dislike NLP and think that it's turning out to be a joke in a lot of ways. When I use natural language with Google, it often doesn't understand my intent, and it even ignores obvious keywords. This is true for pretty much every service or device I've used that has NLP. I don't want it. If others find it useful, that's great, and they should use Google in that case. I don't want it, and that doesn't mean that my chosen tools are "worse".
> which is why I often use quotes, things like `site:somedomain.com`, etc.
this might be true for technical people that don't need accessibility. Nowadays people prefer to use natural language to search, with many people using voice search, either because of preference, or because they need to
I think it is fine to say that DDG targets a different userbase and that the tech community is far more comfortable thinking about computer interfaces and keyword search. But that's not the conversation that people always have about DDG. The conversation is always "why does anybody use Google anymore" and "DDG is a replacement".
A lot of DDG fans on HN blame the user or social conditioning and use that as a crutch. It’s BS.
You need to provide clear examples of the differences in order to really make this argument to someone who might switch.
What specifically are the differences? The last time this topic came up someone told me I was a total noob because I didn’t know how to use search and that was basically the extent of it.
I generally agree that people made excuses for DDG when it was clearly worse and unusable, but today it’s good enough to use instead (I think it’s better).
I’d try it again if you haven’t for a while. Maybe your needs are different than mine, but since we’re both on HN there’s probably pretty good overlap.
Small thing, but I really like how DDG results are primarily links to websites and I can see a bunch of links on the first page without scrolling. I think with google the last search I did had 3?
I suspect the article is right about google being better about low intent searches (and just generally bad search queries from regular people which probably make up the vast majority of users), but I don’t care about that. I think DDG is probably better for more technical users.
I have tried it recently and my co-founder and I are literally building a new search experience because we are deeply unsatisfied with the current ones.
Yup there is (alpha.whize.co) the question mark at the top links to a blog post with our broader goals though we've refined them a bit since that post.
I'll warn you though, the alpha has a really limited index (github results) but was meant to showcase how we think we'll initially prioritize results and gauge people's interest versus this is the final version because as you can imagine crawling the larger internet is a bigger task and if no one was interested we weren't going to do it.
That said we did have a healthy amount of people try it out (over 2000) and are still seeing people use it now over a month out so we've been full steam ahead on our generic crawler, plus a few social media specific crawlers and we expect to have our beta available mid May.
It's tuned towards discovery, so if you search a topic you'll get results for smaller, new repos that do something around that topic. We deliberately hard downranked common repos but it's also 2 months out of date now since that was to test the waters and we didnt set up recrawling at the time. That said we shared your concerns and have changed things up with how we are approaching it for the beta
So we didn't pick specific repos, but we crafted a function based on some metrics we we're using from Github that had a sharp drop off after a certain point and basically -any- super common or well known repo would be down ranked based on those metrics.
I can appreciate your thought on that but we're not necessarily geared towards the most common per se (though this might be me misunderstanding what you mean) as we have experienced multiple times the most common result being wrong or outdated and the way things are now it takes a long time for those to slide out of the rankings.
We've been asking around for a while now to flesh out what our actual thought is and the description for the problem we're solving right now is "information staleness", you search for something and it leads you to a reddit post but that's outdated by 5 years and then you wind up actually having to do a deep dive and it turns out there was actually a more accurate post from a year ago but it just hasn't crept up to the top yet because everything references the 5 year old post.
With our alpha we actually think we went too much in the other direction we focused on it all being super super new but the reality is there is nuance between different topics for what timeframe information decays in, if that makes sense, and now we're for the beta trying to strike a better balance.
Right, it makes sense. What I end up doing a lot of times, is manually filtering by "last year". It's good to give preference to more recent results. Thanks for the explanation
I’ve always had the opposite experience with DDG. Technical queries gave just garbage results, where as I got meaningful hits on google each time. </anecdote>
Agreed. Each time I see something about DDG on HN I try to switch and it never lasts. I don't like the results on DDG and as much as I'd like to move away from Google they've got search on lock.
I don’t fully buy the whole “need to move away from google” part. Yes privacy, yes ads, yes SEO gaming, yes monotechopocolpyse. But the reality is they don’t sell my data, they’ve been a good steward of my search queries over the years (and have tools to clear my history or log me out and not save them), and their product is still the best over two-ish decades.
If you’re going to convince me to move away from them, you gotta 10x it, not give me a poor clone with ! tools to force me to compensate for a not great search engine. Give me a fundamentally different experience that actually innovates in this space. I’d love to see the competition, but somehow it hasn’t materialized in all these years.
> If you’re going to convince me to move away from them, you gotta 10x it,
The fact that you don't start all your searches in Google is sufficient reason. You could always jump to Google if DDG has bad results, but for many searches you don't need to leave Google traces.
Why is that sufficient reason? I'm not particularly concerned about Google having my search history. As I've said before, they've been good stewards with it over 20 years.
<anecdote>This thread made me change to DDG (again). A few minutes later gimp was crashing on me, so I did the lazy thing: C&P some of the error into the search engine.
DDG results are utterly useless, while google gives three highly relevant results solving my issue within a few seconds. Happens all the time. DDG: I want, I just can't.
PS: And I'm not a person searching for anything gimp all the time, my browser history shows three prior "how to x in" gimp searches over the last year. Adding to that this is google.com not logged-in in a Firefox container solely for google searches where storage is scrapped somewhat regularly.
</anecdote>
DDG used to have issues with responsiveness on their page. Years later I tried it again and it actually feels right. A lot of work has gone into performance optimization and it has sucked me in.
It might be more effective if you try it yourself. Google something you normally google, then repeat the search with &pws=0 at the end of the query string.
Considering the base idea isn't that DDG's search is better, but that their privacy is better, it's kinda the opposite. The people not using DDG would have to provide clear examples. (Or just say that they don't care enough about Google's privacy issues to switch.)
I agree. I’ve been in the DDG camp for a little while, but I finally had to switch back to google as my primary search engine on my laptop - fixing searches was taking too much time. That’s after two or three months of using DDG and Bing exclusively
Google gives me bad results. It ignores some of the words in my queries, and the context boxes are generally spammy and irrelevant. Even if the correct information is somewhere in the results page, I bounce before I can find it.
From what I can tell from the article, this might be because I type too much stuff into the search bar, and because Google’s manually curated semantic web stuff is not relevant to me.
However, I’m really not sure why I can’t use Google anymore. It was better when I switched away, so I definitely used to be able to use it (I didn’t log in back then either).
Ddg is fine, and more respectful to its users. I don’t have a practical reason to figure out what the problem is.
I think, on reflection, the issue is that typing “harry potter sport” and clicking on the wikipedia article at the very top of the page (above the first ad) is a much lower cognitive burden than the Google way, where I guess people are trained to type “harry potter” and then skim an entire page of ads, search results and noise to find the word “Quidditch” (which doesn’t appear, I just checked).
If I google harry potter sport, it presents the Wikipedia article in a context box, then the same article in a differently formatted context box, an ad, and then a third link to the same article at the top of the organic results.
Duck duck go displays the same link twice (once in a big context box). This seems better, though arguably not great.
A Google search for me produces the word "Quidditch" in a box along with a link to the Wikipedia page for Quidditch and the first paragraph of that article. The box appears at the very top of the results. I'm not sure how a search result for that query could be much more useful.
I can confirm that I also see this, both in my regular Firefox instance where I do everything and in an incognito Chrome window. Specifically, I get, in order from top to bottom, with only trivial differences between those two cases:
A box with "Quidditch" in big letters, a picture and a brief description.
Some "People also ask:" with questions that do seem to be reasonably relevant.
The Wikipedia page about Quidditch.
Some video links, all relevant.
Some images, all relevant.
Another Wikipedia page about Quidditch.
A page about the "Department of Magical Games and Sports" from some Harry-Potter-specific wiki.
Same wiki's "games and sports" category.
"Beyond Quidditch: games and pastimes in the wizarding world" from www.wizardingworld.com.
NPR article about real-world quidditch games.
Quora question about other sports in Harry Potter.
Related searches: a bunch of Harry Potter things which seem pretty relevant.
Related search: "Quidditch teams".
A bunch of "Searches related to harry potter sport" which mostly also seem relevant.
So ... the organization of the page is a little weird in places, but this seems like an excellent set of search results for that query. The DDG results are also perfectly fine, though they feel slightly worse than the Google ones to me.
I have this same problem. I use the same "subject sub-subject (...) specific query" tactic I've been using since forever and Google search has been becoming less effective for me over the years. I switched to DDG a couple of years ago I think, and it's better for handling that sort of thing.
Is there a search engine out there that respects quotes, and, or, case-insensitive when asked for, etc? In some ways I miss the days of altavista and similar search engines which had "advanced" tabs you could use to craft your query as closely as needed to find that one web page you know has what you need to find that you stumbled upon years ago.
The only time I use what the author refers to as "low intent searches" is when I've just heard a term or phrase I don't understand and don't know enough about it to ask specifically for something.
What's going on is those of us who have been using the Web since Google was brand new (or earlier...remember AltaVista?) expect a search engine to find text on web pages.
What the average user in the post-smartphone world expects a search engine to do is deliver an answer to a question. These are basically incompatible, and it seems like a progressively smaller circle of the Web is being surfaced by Google these days, as they focus heavily on popularity and novelty.
I switched for about a month... for most general searches ddg was as good or better... when searching for development terms as a programmer, I found that the ddg results were often worthless to me. The context that google has associated to you specifically adds value to the results.
Since most of my searches were for technical libraries, components, etc, I found myself searching again with !g more than half the time... after the month was up, I switched back. There are a LOT of things I like about ddg though.
It would be nice if DDG offered search roles, that could prioritize certain associated terms together for someone that is say a programmer, engineer, social media person, etc. This could be opt-in to maybe a dozen categories to skew results on one way or another, but not tied to a person per-se.
I use DDG for 2 years already, and I'm a developer, I've never experienced ur problem, and I do search for technical stuff all the time. I dont see how DDG can fail to show u a documentation or library result, especially if you know what u are looking for
I've said this before, but I really don't get any useful results from Google at all anymore. I have to prefix Reddit for every search to at least try to get a vaguely human answer to a question.
Of course Reddit is still gamed and has plenty of other issues, but far less than Google at this point.
> A lot of DDG fans on HN blame the user or social conditioning and use that as a crutch. It’s BS.
That's no more or less BS than people saying that "DDG results are shit". I don't see anything wrong with trying to guess why DDG doesn't work well for some people, even if the conclusion happens to offend someone's personal choices.
An example of a difference: I live in Bristol. If I search for things like "car mechanic bristol", DDG comes up with lots of results from Bristol, Tennessee. It's not that DDG is worse than Google, it's just that DDG isn't tailoring the results to what it knows about me. The solution is to be more specific: "car mechanic bristol uk", for example, does the job.
I have exactly the same issue with it in Wellington, NZ.
Even with "New Zealand" turned on at the top, it gives me quite a few results for things in Wellington, Florida.
If I don't specify "Wellington" or "NZ" in the search terms, results are even worse, even with "New Zealand" turned on: I get results from Australia, Dubai, even the UK for various search terms. (and some of the TLDs are things like "com.au" or ".co.uk" so it should be trivial to filter those out.)
Google's not perfect in this regard, but it's an order of magnitude better in my experience for localised queries, even with both in Incognito/Private mode.
> If I search for things like "car mechanic bristol", DDG comes up with lots of results from Bristol, Tennessee. It's not that DDG is worse than Google, it's just that DDG isn't tailoring the results to what it knows about me.
If I wanted a car mechanic in San Francisco, I would usually search for "car mechanic 94105" rather than "car mechanic san francisco". Regardless of search engine.
Do postal codes not work to refer to particular areas of the UK?
The Bristol postcode is the letters 'BS' followed by a one or two digit number, so it's not particularly good for finding a service provider in a large area.
UK postcodes are somewhat more useful when you want to narrow a search to a small area, especially for small towns and London districts where the number is a useful identifier and the area itself might have multiple or non-unique names
> it's not particularly good for finding a service provider in a large area.
Unless I'm misunderstanding something, this doesn't make much sense.
For example, running a search for "car mechanic 94105" doesn't restrict your results to car mechanics that are located inside the 94105 zip code. It restricts your results to car mechanics that are near the 94105 zip code, where "near" is a fuzzy term. I just ran this search myself, from outside San Francisco, and there's just a single result in the 94105 area. But there are plenty shown in 94107, 94103, 94102, 94111... (primarily 94107).
The zip code is a cheap, easy, and unambiguous way to tell the search engine what you want. It's on the search engine to decide how to respond.
> For example, running a search for "car mechanic 94105" doesn't restrict your results to car mechanics that are located inside the 94105 zip code
I am seeing literally that issue with both Google and DuckDuckGo so maybe that depends on the region. My search results, both logged-in and in a private window, are limited to car mechanic websites that mention the zip code. The Google Maps search is not limited, but it's not very good in general, so I usually avoid it. DuckDuckGo finds practically no results in the map view (Apple Maps).
> The zip code is a cheap, easy, and unambiguous way to tell the search engine what you want. It's on the search engine to decide how to respond.
So is "car mechanic bristol uk". The parent's entire point is that DuckDuckGo doesn't consider context for natural language searches and claiming that everyone else is searching wrong is completely missing the point.
Lithuania, Slovakia and Indonesia also have 94105 as a valid post code.
Post codes are not particularly human friendly (though British ones like N1C 4AG are a bit better than just numbers; it's easy to see the N, N1, N1C prefixes in that).
> A lot of DDG fans on HN blame the user or social conditioning and use that as a crutch.
The tools are different, though, so searching the same way on DDG and Google will lead to different outcomes. This is no different than adapting you speech when speaking to an infant or speaking to an adult. [1]
For example, I use DDG as my primary search tool, and I have a habit of using "keywords", rather than natural language, when I search DDG. (This may be an outdated habit from my long exposure to search tools.) With modern Google though, I find that if I follow my habit and use keywords, my search results are poor. I have better results using natural language. As others have noted, I have better results when searching Google when I don't know what the thing I'm looking for is called, or when I'm looking for esoteric content (like code samples.)
[1] I'm not saying that switching is easy or even ideal, I'm just underscoring that different tools are... different. ;-) And "knowing" how to use search well is kinda hard these days, as everything keeps evolving, and we're all busy doing other things.
I have a hard time believing there's actually much google-specific adaption going on for anyone except the biggest HN nerd.
My girlfriend types whole sentences into it. People in this thread have search examples like "harry potter sport". I look at my google search history and it's just generic search strings that DDG has no excuse to struggle.
Having to "tweak your language" just sounds like a cop-out to me. And I think people really just mean you have to add more context to DDG queries because it's easily confused. Like how "elm list" gives great results in google and bad results in DDG.
Let's say there's a new can opener in the drawer [1], it's the same size and shape as a can opener but because it's not what you're used to you try to use it in the normal orientation and it doesn't work.
Even though the tool can open cans, rounds off the sharp edges and requires less grip force you reply with: a lot of OXO folks blame the user or social conditioning. It's BS.
Is that a reasonable response?
I'd argue that it isn't.
But to answer your question I use more precise language for what I'm looking for, specifying the city and state I want results from, specifying the type of thing that I want.
A lot of my searches are !bangs,
!godoc - for searching Go packages
!gems - for searching ruby gems
!sx - for getting only stack overflow results
!w - for jumping to a Wikipedia article
!gh - for searching github
Funnily enough I just got an example of this from a friend who is trying DDG this week.
Her example query that did better on Google than DDG:
> why did robinhood go down feb 29 2020
What I would search for the same question that does better on DDG:
> robinhood down
She's 24 and I'm 29 so it's possible that difference is real, people who are younger may be tailoring searches in a way that benefits Google (in which case they may not benefit as much from DDG or really would have to change behavior).
Google is better at dealing with topics that are trending and providing data right on the SERP without having to click through. If I want to look up the latest Corona Virus stats, I'd do so on google. As the article states, things like Google's stock panel are just superior to other options.
But DDG is better at historical searches. It's like they try to 'understand' you less and want to provide you with all possible things you could be looking for. Like Google used to do and like I prefer. I've looked up old articles I had read and wanted to reference when writing an article. On Google and they just don't come up. No matter what I do: use the date tool, use quotes, etc, it's like Google thinks it's too old/irrelevant for me, so no matter what I search, it won't give it to me. But on DDG, they are there and will come up with the right set of keywords.
I uaed google the last 3 years on my desktop while I used DDG on my phone, so I have a pretty good feeling about the differences. I started using duckduckgo because I accidentally set the default search engine to it and thought: OK I might as well use that for a while.
The question you ask is hard to answer because the differences depend on the thing you are searching for. My feeling: for searching code stuff google is a tad better, while for everyday stuff duckduckgo seems to display more relevant results.
It is definitly worth trying, just to notice the subtle things google does sometimes.
Trained in what way? I type a couple words(misspelled) on Google and it magically returns me exactly what I need. Typing special keywords back in the day sucked.
I've been a DDG booster for a while. Their search results are usually good enough. Except after longer use I've found two major issues that eventually forced me back to Google:
1. I can Image Search the most basic of terms and literally get "No Results Found" once or twice a day. Sometimes I'll get like... 8 photos.
2. I will weirdly get the Wikipedia link for a relevant query, but the British or Spanish or some other version often isn't even in English. And I do have "Canada" toggled on.
3. You can't search for "older than" results. For example, if you want news reports about Ukrainian corruption, but only from before 2015, you're out of luck on ddg, have fun reading about Trump.
I find DDG works for most purposes but I sometimes have to use !s to get meaningful results; even with very specific search terms such as a part number. These days I rarely find a need to use !g but it does happen a few times a week.
Please teach me how to use DDG, as I’m clearly missing something. I’m happy to switch to a service that provides better results in exchange for a bit more effort in constructing search queries, but the results I get for that effort really do need to be better.
The only specific advise I’ve ever seen is “use !g if you don’t get good results the first time”, which really isn’t encouraging.
Today I was trying to find info about Corpus Christi - a Polish film that won some awards lately. DDG gives me information about a place in Texas, including stuff from the local newspaper and attractions. I'm searching from a Poland IP btw. Anyway, the actual film was at the very end of the first page of results for me.
It certainly feels like it priotises things weirdly.
Google Maps has a similar issue though: plenty of US placenames are just stolen from European places and oftentimes I'll be trying to get directions to a nearby town and instead it'll navigate to someplace in Alabama instead. Strangely enough, not where I want to go...
Did you include the word "film" in your search? Otherwise there's no reasonable expectation for it to show up. It's like searching for "Philadelphia" and expecting the movie to show up and not the city.
"Corpus Christi film" also works, results look relevant, but knowledge graph shows the old 2014 Venezuelan movie. This is where Google is way superior, it showed me average score on imdb and even local showtimes.
I imagine that if you were searching from a Polish IP, Google would infer that you meant the movie, not the city. For anyone in the United States, however, I'd expect the city to be the more common search.
Corpus Christi is the name of a major Christian festival and is a holiday in many countries with a large catholic population, including Poland. The city in Texas and the movie are named after it.
Wait a second. You can't use a privacy themed search engine and expect them to lookup your ip, figure out what city you are in. The entire point of using ddg is to avoid this.
I do not use DDG for map queries. Google Maps is still light years ahead of anyone else for maps. For non-map queries, DDG is now well ahead of Google except for long tail stuff, for example: technical error messages.
I currently also use Google Maps for map queries.. But I use it through DuckDuckGo, with !gm. I actually find this a better experience than navigating to Google Maps before entering my query.
For me part of the problem is that DDG feels slow to index new results. Trying to search for anything that’s happened in the last week almost always is a swing and a miss for me.
It’s a stark contrast to google, where the results seem more or less live, including updated auto complete for things that have happened recently.
And that doesn’t seem like an issue at all related to privacy, it’s just a problem space that DDG doesn’t seem to handle well.
Ironically Google changing how it responds to my search queries, and me finally figuring out that's why my google experience has degraded, is what actually made me switch to DDG as my primary search engine.
I use DDG on a daily basis, being my default search engine for the past two years.
However I don't agree — many of my searches have awful results on DDG compared with Google and I often find no words to make it better.
Local searches are an obvious candidate, DDG is awful for my native language, giving me results in Spanish (I'm Romanian).
But lately I'm noticing programming-related results being worse on DDG as well. I'm not sure why because they used to be similar, but now some of the results DDG is giving me (for very specific search terms) are really, really bad, many times DDG ignoring my keywords and giving me something else entirely.
It's fine for now, I prefer the privacy, but they'd better improve and fast.
My experience with DDG has been exactly the same, not just with programming- and, in my case, math-related search terms but also when I look for personal websites of people in academia. On Google, it's usually the first search result but it often isn't even among the first 10 in DDG.
I think you inadvertently hit the nail on the head here, in that DuckDuckGo requires you to know its incantations, and Google has gotten really good at not having you to know any incantations at all. I can even obliterate the spelling of words and it often knows what i'm looking for.
Now, with that said, if your target is power searchers (like myself) I think you have a better argument, because Google often lacks in some of these areas (like being able to filter by a specific grouping of sorts, like if I want a "dev focused" search, not just filtering by a specific site, DDG has some methodology here that I haven't been able to easily surface with Google)
But there are cases where I've noticed DDG falling behind, like indexing newer content, or being able to filter by time accurately.
> Google has gotten really good at not having you to know any incantations at all.
I disagree -- the decline of the quality of Google's search appears to have begun when it started trying to second-guess what I'm searching for, and has continued to decline ever since.
I'm using DDG but I have to "!g" a lot. The English language results are quite good but the German results are often not what I'm looking for.
I'm assuming this will improve with time so I'm not too worried but DDG search results can still be improved a lot (imo). That being said, I'm not switching back anytime soon. Pretty happy so far.
I've made a promise to myself to start paying attention to this when I do searches, but so far that promise has gone unfulfilled.
If I had to hazard a guess, I'd say that I think I see quite a few SEO hackers pop up on the first page, to the point that it's sometimes difficult to find anything meaty.
I'll try to keep an eye on it this week so the next time DDG comes up I can contribute something substantial (and substantiated).
I never log in to Google’s services in the browser[1]; clear my cookies on browser close; use several other blocking methods for privacy; and have been using DDG as my main search engine for years.
Yet, I’ve used `!g` more in the last months than ever before. In my usage, DDG’s results are getting noticeably worse. It’s unlikely I’ve forgotten “how to use it”.
[1]: I only log in to a Google account for Gmail, and always on an app.
On the other hand, when people say you need to learn how to search DDG, they basically mean you need to add more context to your search because DDG is easily confused and categorically worse.
Having to "retrain" yourself to use DDG is the most romantic way to say "it's a worse tool so you need to give it more context."
Like the author, I switched over when the google ad thing happened, and for the same reason. But instead of DDG, I decided to try out ecosia ( https://www.ecosia.org ) which is a wrapper over Bing. But they'll take all the ad revenue and use it to plant trees. So I get decent search results (bing isn't quite as good as google, but it's pretty decent for what I need) and also get to save the earth a little bit.
I use DDG as my main search engine - for most things it works just fine, when I can't find what I'm looking for I go to google. I find it hilarious that the image search function works a lot like Google used to in the past - I'm constantly looking for reference when drawing and more often than not if you type something innocuous like "man with hand in front of face" you'll end up with a first page full of porn in DDG whereas it's all SFW in Google, even with all restrictions off. Luckily DDG offers a nudity filter which works pretty well - even if it still fails to catch the odd gore picture.
I don't know. I am using DDG from outside the U.S. but with English as the primary search language. The Google's localized results are just an order of magnitude better. I end up re-doing almost 10-20% of my searches in Google after being dissapointed with DDG results. Most of the time Google results are sadly superior.
And don't get me even started in searching in my native language (Finnish). DDG is close to useless there, since it can not parse the different, obscure word forms we use (although I type word X in form A, I want my searches to include results in of word X in semantically related forms B and C). Google did not initially parse Finnish very well, but it eventually became amzingly good something like a decade ago.
For the same reason I find DDG very useful when I don’t want localized results, which is hard to get with Google. I currently live in Spain and Google returns mostly Spanish results, even on unrelated queries like programming or a device review.
DDG is great for anything that has many results. Obscure errors? They decide to ignore half your query and show you pages of completely unrelated results. Even when there is no result, I wouldn’t know with DDG. For normal searches I never need !g, for obscure problems I always do because DDG (or maybe Bing? I don’t know how the integration exactly works) for some arcane reason deliberately breaks their own search.
489 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 271 ms ] threadAlthough I'm fully switched over, there are 2 drawbacks:
* Since DDG tracks you less, the results for local searches may be worse. If you're in Boston, TX you'll probably want to search for "boston, tx restaurants" whereas I'm guessing Google could handle "boston restaurants" if your location is in Boston, TX.
* Finding brand new results seems a bit harder. I found this especially true when searching for election results. Searching for, e.g., "nevada election results" was showing me results from 2016 and 2018 on the day of those elections this year. Now the DDG results seem to correctly point to 2020 results.
Location is the single biggest implicit factor for Google search results; "restaurants" would probably get you what you are looking for (well, ignoring that it's an overly broad query, and most places have too many restaurants for a simple ranking of them to really be that helpful).
Edit: To add more, it's all those details that makes Google better than other, search engine are not just for searching things it's all about the display and relevance.
I still find that you're using a very specific use case of a search engine to completely dismiss not using a different search engine.
Like if I type "apple" on Google search the only web result I get is apple.com, everything else is taking with tangentially related widgets: https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=apple
Special points for the IMO completely useless "people also search for" widget.
DDG tones it down a lot more: https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=apple&ia=web
Here without scrolling I can see potentially useful links to iCloud, Apple TV, Apple's support etc...
Back when I first used Google its main selling point was that it was lean and clean and with decent results. DDG is like that for me these days.
I probably went three or four months without even using the "!g" command. I actually just yesterday ran into some issues and had to use "!g" - for some reason DDG struggled with the concept of "fish shell" and kept bringing me back results about seafood.
Having to append 'uk' to 90% of searches after the first results page is full of useless American shit, for search terms that Google UK handles flawlessly, gets old, very quick.
On top of that I live in a small city that shares a name with a larger city. Google understands this and gives me results for my local, smaller city, but DDG needs to be explicitly told city name, state name.
For daily use, it's fine, but it's awful for local results or anything that requires a map or directions.
But..
Even though I have the Australia button turned on, it doesn’t seem to do anything. So every time I need something local, I add “site:.au” to the end of the query then it works great again.
Sometimes I want results from StackOverflow, in English. On Google getting this right was a PITA.
However, my favorite feature of DDG is it's native dark theme.
Just FYI: We don’t collect or share your personal information. The Startpage founders continue to run the company as before and they have control over the privacy components of Startpage. With this investment, we hope to further expand our privacy features & reach new users. You may have already seen some of these new initiatives taking place. 1) Unfiltered News Tab launched in November: https://www.startpage.com/blog/product-updates/launching-unp... 2) Privacy Please! Newsletter launched in last month: https://www.startpage.com/blog/company-updates/welcome-priva... 3) We're pushing out more info via our blog & social than before, giving greater insight into how we make money (https://www.startpage.com/blog/privacy-awareness/advertising...) and how we keep your search private (https://www.startpage.com/blog/privacy-awareness/how-does-st...)
Recommended read: "Detailed tests of search engines: Google, Startpage, Bing, DuckDuckGo, metaGer, Ecosia, Swisscows, Searx, Qwant, Yandex, and Mojeek" [1]
[1] https://libretechtips.gitlab.io/detailed-tests-of-search-eng...
There are more options than these two.
And yes, we announced last year that System1/Privacy One invested in Startpage. Rest assured, the Startpage founders continue to run the company as before and they have control over the privacy components of Startpage. With this investment, we hope to further expand our privacy features & reach new users. More info on the investment: https://support.startpage.com/index.php?/Knowledgebase/Artic...
Luckily, for the things I search, ads are not usually a problem.
But I do know that google has gone far downhill. and I think that is partially its fault, and also the fault of the internet as a whole. It's just become such an infested ad machine.
More and more often it will drop words out of my search; import words. I can't help but suspect it's because it has more ads to show me without the most contextually important bits of my search.
Half the first pages are ads. The next few pages may be shopping results even though I'm not searching for something to buy.
Something.. Happened on mobile. The search results now have a bunch of BS "sections" before the actual search results section! WUT.
Seems to be getting harder and harder to craft the right searches to get good results. I miss the days when people would write articles with headlines of "<topic> sucks". Was so much easier to find counter opinions to stuff :/
FYI: We're rolling out new privacy features this year. We hope you'll give us another chance. Thanks!
Once or twice a week I need !g to search for a programming specific query. There's still some improvement needed when searching for all the weird characters we use in software.
DuckDuckGo is using the infamous "More Results", essentially infinite scroll. Until that changes Im not using DuckDuckGo.
https://old.reddit.com/r/duckduckgo/comments/757gde/how_to_m...
My post there as 'the_minion_in_red' details how turning off "Auto-Load" works inconsistently depending on how you scroll, anyway - a behaviour which I see is still present and incorrect today.
And the 'lite' and 'html' views I suggest for the benefit of another poster, I don't much like because they're doing something to make the address bar URL not change so I can't easily bookmark a search.
It doesn't help that search engines have been progressively hiding more and more functionality. Just last night I was trying to search for results within a window of "published after 18 months ago" but couldn't figure out how to do it. It was probably just another search away from finding the answer, but why are search UIs removing/hiding their best Advanced Search features?
But for specialized searches I frequently reach for the Google override, and sure enough Google has significantly better results. Like searching specific, weird errors messages and such.
I can, however, understand why anyone would like it to provide you with instant factual and reliable information! That would be a godsend.
I do not trust the instant answers most of the time. I like seeing forum answers and comments, finding age in wikipedia and stumbling upon more information, and generally getting lost in the web.
This is arguably harder (+1 click and page load).
However for capital of south africa this is arguably more correct. My google test shows no distinction between the capitals, whereas the wiki page does.
Of course the wiki page is accessible on google as well.
I'm wary of cases when these facts are incorrect. Google declares them while trying to hide the source. This was very important recently when a friend googled for caucus winners and recieved an incorrect fact at the top of Google, something that would have rang alarm bells when seen on its candidate affiliated source page
"joe biden !w"
"Los Angeles to New York !wa"
"knives out !w"
"south africa !w"
"ddg bangs !hn"
>> distance from Los Angeles to New York
!m los angeles to new york
>> Joe Biden age
!w joe biden
>> knives out cast
!imdb knives out
>> capital of South Africa
!w South Africa
And that last one is a really good example of why I don't want to trust an engine to interpret what I'm looking for, because Wolfram Alpha just tells you Pretoria, and if I hadn't spent a large part of my life there I wouldn't know that's probably not what people are looking for. Economically? They probably want to know that Johannesburg is the largest city. Just like how people are sometimes surprised when they learn that New York City and Los Angeles are not state capitals, even though they're really important cities. Politically? Well the roles of the government is split between 3 cities and that's not a simple thing for an engine to comprehend. And I didn't even know Bloemfontein held that kind of status until I just read it on Wikipedia. Neither I, a former citizen of the country, nor WolframAlpha, was aware of that.
I'm also biased by the fact that I'm constantly delighted by the random things I learn by consulting Wikipedia about virtually every topic I encounter.
What's really happening is that they've been trained to search a certain way to using Google and because DDG doesn't have all the historical data of your searches on their platform they can't fill in the gaps as well.
After a couple days using DDG I found the right vocabulary to get good local results and which bangs to use to get results from the sites that I want. It's a more effective tool if you learn how to use it.
I have DDG as main engine for the phone and unless it’s Wikipedia level question, I have to use g!
So... its worse. People want to use natural language.
I somehow doubt that changed.
Edit: Well I be darned, turns out it was their bread and butter:
https://econsultancy.com/the-state-of-natural-language-conve...
This reminds me of telcos trying to get in to content. "Humans appear to value short audiovisual bursts of stimulation. We shall conquer all by providing all the memes!" And then they knife Tumblr.
It isn't that "people" "want" one search method over another. The search grammar is not why they're there.
That said, that means that DDG is not for everyone. If people want to use Google because they prefer NLP, that's fine, but Google users who trash DDG because it's not smart like Google are totally dismissive of DDG's utility or why people choose it. DDG users on HN, on the other hand, at least seem to understand why people choose to use Google, and I don't think any appreciable number of them expect a large portion of the market to shift towards DDG. In fact, I don't think they believe that DDG is necessarily better. A lot of users, such as myself, use DDG because the UI is a little simpler and because they don't want Google to dominate their life, the compromise being a more stupid but still useful search engine.
Not everyone wants NLP. I dislike NLP and think that it's turning out to be a joke in a lot of ways. When I use natural language with Google, it often doesn't understand my intent, and it even ignores obvious keywords. This is true for pretty much every service or device I've used that has NLP. I don't want it. If others find it useful, that's great, and they should use Google in that case. I don't want it, and that doesn't mean that my chosen tools are "worse".
this might be true for technical people that don't need accessibility. Nowadays people prefer to use natural language to search, with many people using voice search, either because of preference, or because they need to
You need to provide clear examples of the differences in order to really make this argument to someone who might switch.
What specifically are the differences? The last time this topic came up someone told me I was a total noob because I didn’t know how to use search and that was basically the extent of it.
I generally agree that people made excuses for DDG when it was clearly worse and unusable, but today it’s good enough to use instead (I think it’s better).
I’d try it again if you haven’t for a while. Maybe your needs are different than mine, but since we’re both on HN there’s probably pretty good overlap.
Small thing, but I really like how DDG results are primarily links to websites and I can see a bunch of links on the first page without scrolling. I think with google the last search I did had 3?
I suspect the article is right about google being better about low intent searches (and just generally bad search queries from regular people which probably make up the vast majority of users), but I don’t care about that. I think DDG is probably better for more technical users.
I'll warn you though, the alpha has a really limited index (github results) but was meant to showcase how we think we'll initially prioritize results and gauge people's interest versus this is the final version because as you can imagine crawling the larger internet is a bigger task and if no one was interested we weren't going to do it.
That said we did have a healthy amount of people try it out (over 2000) and are still seeing people use it now over a month out so we've been full steam ahead on our generic crawler, plus a few social media specific crawlers and we expect to have our beta available mid May.
Wasn't google criticized here on HN for downranking specific results? If I'm looking for something, probably I'm looking for the most common, I think
I can appreciate your thought on that but we're not necessarily geared towards the most common per se (though this might be me misunderstanding what you mean) as we have experienced multiple times the most common result being wrong or outdated and the way things are now it takes a long time for those to slide out of the rankings.
We've been asking around for a while now to flesh out what our actual thought is and the description for the problem we're solving right now is "information staleness", you search for something and it leads you to a reddit post but that's outdated by 5 years and then you wind up actually having to do a deep dive and it turns out there was actually a more accurate post from a year ago but it just hasn't crept up to the top yet because everything references the 5 year old post.
With our alpha we actually think we went too much in the other direction we focused on it all being super super new but the reality is there is nuance between different topics for what timeframe information decays in, if that makes sense, and now we're for the beta trying to strike a better balance.
If you’re going to convince me to move away from them, you gotta 10x it, not give me a poor clone with ! tools to force me to compensate for a not great search engine. Give me a fundamentally different experience that actually innovates in this space. I’d love to see the competition, but somehow it hasn’t materialized in all these years.
The fact that you don't start all your searches in Google is sufficient reason. You could always jump to Google if DDG has bad results, but for many searches you don't need to leave Google traces.
This is the result of my fist search switching to DDG: https://i.imgur.com/05LxLDv.png
DDG results are utterly useless, while google gives three highly relevant results solving my issue within a few seconds. Happens all the time. DDG: I want, I just can't.
PS: And I'm not a person searching for anything gimp all the time, my browser history shows three prior "how to x in" gimp searches over the last year. Adding to that this is google.com not logged-in in a Firefox container solely for google searches where storage is scrapped somewhat regularly. </anecdote>
Nope, I don't. I don't care what search engine you like. I do want to see Google knocked down several pegs, but fan rants aren't going to do that.
I just keep using DDG as it gets better while Google gets worse and sometimes think a little about the variety of the human experience.
From what I can tell from the article, this might be because I type too much stuff into the search bar, and because Google’s manually curated semantic web stuff is not relevant to me.
However, I’m really not sure why I can’t use Google anymore. It was better when I switched away, so I definitely used to be able to use it (I didn’t log in back then either).
Ddg is fine, and more respectful to its users. I don’t have a practical reason to figure out what the problem is.
If I google harry potter sport, it presents the Wikipedia article in a context box, then the same article in a differently formatted context box, an ad, and then a third link to the same article at the top of the organic results.
Duck duck go displays the same link twice (once in a big context box). This seems better, though arguably not great.
A box with "Quidditch" in big letters, a picture and a brief description.
Some "People also ask:" with questions that do seem to be reasonably relevant.
The Wikipedia page about Quidditch.
Some video links, all relevant.
Some images, all relevant.
Another Wikipedia page about Quidditch.
A page about the "Department of Magical Games and Sports" from some Harry-Potter-specific wiki.
Same wiki's "games and sports" category.
"Beyond Quidditch: games and pastimes in the wizarding world" from www.wizardingworld.com.
NPR article about real-world quidditch games.
Quora question about other sports in Harry Potter.
Related searches: a bunch of Harry Potter things which seem pretty relevant.
Related search: "Quidditch teams".
A bunch of "Searches related to harry potter sport" which mostly also seem relevant.
So ... the organization of the page is a little weird in places, but this seems like an excellent set of search results for that query. The DDG results are also perfectly fine, though they feel slightly worse than the Google ones to me.
Is there a search engine out there that respects quotes, and, or, case-insensitive when asked for, etc? In some ways I miss the days of altavista and similar search engines which had "advanced" tabs you could use to craft your query as closely as needed to find that one web page you know has what you need to find that you stumbled upon years ago.
The only time I use what the author refers to as "low intent searches" is when I've just heard a term or phrase I don't understand and don't know enough about it to ask specifically for something.
What the average user in the post-smartphone world expects a search engine to do is deliver an answer to a question. These are basically incompatible, and it seems like a progressively smaller circle of the Web is being surfaced by Google these days, as they focus heavily on popularity and novelty.
Maybe you intended to say this, then I'm really curious about your perspective?
This is the problem I've been having with DDG, where it will aggressively rewrite my search into something completely unrelated
Since most of my searches were for technical libraries, components, etc, I found myself searching again with !g more than half the time... after the month was up, I switched back. There are a LOT of things I like about ddg though.
It would be nice if DDG offered search roles, that could prioritize certain associated terms together for someone that is say a programmer, engineer, social media person, etc. This could be opt-in to maybe a dozen categories to skew results on one way or another, but not tied to a person per-se.
Also, a shorter domain name would help.
I'm surprised your browser doesn't just search from the "awesome bar", making navigating to the domain a non-event
However, the answer to your question is ddg.gg (unknown if that's short enough, but it's only 3 keys to press)
Of course Reddit is still gamed and has plenty of other issues, but far less than Google at this point.
That's no more or less BS than people saying that "DDG results are shit". I don't see anything wrong with trying to guess why DDG doesn't work well for some people, even if the conclusion happens to offend someone's personal choices.
https://imgur.com/6ydSWAF
Even with "New Zealand" turned on at the top, it gives me quite a few results for things in Wellington, Florida.
If I don't specify "Wellington" or "NZ" in the search terms, results are even worse, even with "New Zealand" turned on: I get results from Australia, Dubai, even the UK for various search terms. (and some of the TLDs are things like "com.au" or ".co.uk" so it should be trivial to filter those out.)
Google's not perfect in this regard, but it's an order of magnitude better in my experience for localised queries, even with both in Incognito/Private mode.
If I wanted a car mechanic in San Francisco, I would usually search for "car mechanic 94105" rather than "car mechanic san francisco". Regardless of search engine.
Do postal codes not work to refer to particular areas of the UK?
UK postcodes are somewhat more useful when you want to narrow a search to a small area, especially for small towns and London districts where the number is a useful identifier and the area itself might have multiple or non-unique names
Unless I'm misunderstanding something, this doesn't make much sense.
For example, running a search for "car mechanic 94105" doesn't restrict your results to car mechanics that are located inside the 94105 zip code. It restricts your results to car mechanics that are near the 94105 zip code, where "near" is a fuzzy term. I just ran this search myself, from outside San Francisco, and there's just a single result in the 94105 area. But there are plenty shown in 94107, 94103, 94102, 94111... (primarily 94107).
The zip code is a cheap, easy, and unambiguous way to tell the search engine what you want. It's on the search engine to decide how to respond.
I am seeing literally that issue with both Google and DuckDuckGo so maybe that depends on the region. My search results, both logged-in and in a private window, are limited to car mechanic websites that mention the zip code. The Google Maps search is not limited, but it's not very good in general, so I usually avoid it. DuckDuckGo finds practically no results in the map view (Apple Maps).
> The zip code is a cheap, easy, and unambiguous way to tell the search engine what you want. It's on the search engine to decide how to respond.
So is "car mechanic bristol uk". The parent's entire point is that DuckDuckGo doesn't consider context for natural language searches and claiming that everyone else is searching wrong is completely missing the point.
Post codes are not particularly human friendly (though British ones like N1C 4AG are a bit better than just numbers; it's easy to see the N, N1, N1C prefixes in that).
The tools are different, though, so searching the same way on DDG and Google will lead to different outcomes. This is no different than adapting you speech when speaking to an infant or speaking to an adult. [1]
For example, I use DDG as my primary search tool, and I have a habit of using "keywords", rather than natural language, when I search DDG. (This may be an outdated habit from my long exposure to search tools.) With modern Google though, I find that if I follow my habit and use keywords, my search results are poor. I have better results using natural language. As others have noted, I have better results when searching Google when I don't know what the thing I'm looking for is called, or when I'm looking for esoteric content (like code samples.)
[1] I'm not saying that switching is easy or even ideal, I'm just underscoring that different tools are... different. ;-) And "knowing" how to use search well is kinda hard these days, as everything keeps evolving, and we're all busy doing other things.
My girlfriend types whole sentences into it. People in this thread have search examples like "harry potter sport". I look at my google search history and it's just generic search strings that DDG has no excuse to struggle.
Having to "tweak your language" just sounds like a cop-out to me. And I think people really just mean you have to add more context to DDG queries because it's easily confused. Like how "elm list" gives great results in google and bad results in DDG.
Totally agree. But even Google is nowhere near perfection here, so we’re left with the same two strategies we all use when searching:
* try over and over * continually tweak queries
It’s especially easy to forget that we often actually search multiple times, because we do it so quickly that it’s an ingrained habit.
Even though the tool can open cans, rounds off the sharp edges and requires less grip force you reply with: a lot of OXO folks blame the user or social conditioning. It's BS.
Is that a reasonable response?
I'd argue that it isn't.
But to answer your question I use more precise language for what I'm looking for, specifying the city and state I want results from, specifying the type of thing that I want.
A lot of my searches are !bangs,
!godoc - for searching Go packages !gems - for searching ruby gems !sx - for getting only stack overflow results !w - for jumping to a Wikipedia article !gh - for searching github
- [1] https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000079XW2?tag=duckduckgo-ffab-20&...
Her example query that did better on Google than DDG:
> why did robinhood go down feb 29 2020
What I would search for the same question that does better on DDG:
> robinhood down
She's 24 and I'm 29 so it's possible that difference is real, people who are younger may be tailoring searches in a way that benefits Google (in which case they may not benefit as much from DDG or really would have to change behavior).
Google is better at dealing with topics that are trending and providing data right on the SERP without having to click through. If I want to look up the latest Corona Virus stats, I'd do so on google. As the article states, things like Google's stock panel are just superior to other options.
But DDG is better at historical searches. It's like they try to 'understand' you less and want to provide you with all possible things you could be looking for. Like Google used to do and like I prefer. I've looked up old articles I had read and wanted to reference when writing an article. On Google and they just don't come up. No matter what I do: use the date tool, use quotes, etc, it's like Google thinks it's too old/irrelevant for me, so no matter what I search, it won't give it to me. But on DDG, they are there and will come up with the right set of keywords.
The question you ask is hard to answer because the differences depend on the thing you are searching for. My feeling: for searching code stuff google is a tad better, while for everyday stuff duckduckgo seems to display more relevant results.
It is definitly worth trying, just to notice the subtle things google does sometimes.
1. I can Image Search the most basic of terms and literally get "No Results Found" once or twice a day. Sometimes I'll get like... 8 photos.
2. I will weirdly get the Wikipedia link for a relevant query, but the British or Spanish or some other version often isn't even in English. And I do have "Canada" toggled on.
There's only one regular English version of the Wikipedia, unless you're refering to the Galic one, which would be a little odd (https://ga.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pr%C3%ADomhleathanach).
https://sco.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoover_Dam
At first I thought either I was going crazy or the article had been vandalized. But then I figured out that DDG hadn't taken me to the English result.
The only specific advise I’ve ever seen is “use !g if you don’t get good results the first time”, which really isn’t encouraging.
It certainly feels like it priotises things weirdly.
Google Maps has a similar issue though: plenty of US placenames are just stolen from European places and oftentimes I'll be trying to get directions to a nearby town and instead it'll navigate to someplace in Alabama instead. Strangely enough, not where I want to go...
"Corpus Christi polish film" is good enough. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Corpus+Christi+polish+film&t=ffab&...
"Corpus Christi film" also works, results look relevant, but knowledge graph shows the old 2014 Venezuelan movie. This is where Google is way superior, it showed me average score on imdb and even local showtimes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feast_of_Corpus_Christi
DDG gave me 4 results, none anywhere near me.
Do you have a suggestion for how I could have been more effective?
try "fish tacos !yelp"
It’s a stark contrast to google, where the results seem more or less live, including updated auto complete for things that have happened recently.
And that doesn’t seem like an issue at all related to privacy, it’s just a problem space that DDG doesn’t seem to handle well.
However I don't agree — many of my searches have awful results on DDG compared with Google and I often find no words to make it better.
Local searches are an obvious candidate, DDG is awful for my native language, giving me results in Spanish (I'm Romanian).
But lately I'm noticing programming-related results being worse on DDG as well. I'm not sure why because they used to be similar, but now some of the results DDG is giving me (for very specific search terms) are really, really bad, many times DDG ignoring my keywords and giving me something else entirely.
It's fine for now, I prefer the privacy, but they'd better improve and fast.
Now, with that said, if your target is power searchers (like myself) I think you have a better argument, because Google often lacks in some of these areas (like being able to filter by a specific grouping of sorts, like if I want a "dev focused" search, not just filtering by a specific site, DDG has some methodology here that I haven't been able to easily surface with Google)
But there are cases where I've noticed DDG falling behind, like indexing newer content, or being able to filter by time accurately.
I disagree -- the decline of the quality of Google's search appears to have begun when it started trying to second-guess what I'm searching for, and has continued to decline ever since.
FWIW I use uBlock Origin and Privacy Badger.
If I had to hazard a guess, I'd say that I think I see quite a few SEO hackers pop up on the first page, to the point that it's sometimes difficult to find anything meaty.
I'll try to keep an eye on it this week so the next time DDG comes up I can contribute something substantial (and substantiated).
Yet, I’ve used `!g` more in the last months than ever before. In my usage, DDG’s results are getting noticeably worse. It’s unlikely I’ve forgotten “how to use it”.
[1]: I only log in to a Google account for Gmail, and always on an app.
Having to "retrain" yourself to use DDG is the most romantic way to say "it's a worse tool so you need to give it more context."
And don't get me even started in searching in my native language (Finnish). DDG is close to useless there, since it can not parse the different, obscure word forms we use (although I type word X in form A, I want my searches to include results in of word X in semantically related forms B and C). Google did not initially parse Finnish very well, but it eventually became amzingly good something like a decade ago.