One thing I hate about ddg is that the search results are quite inaccurate sometimes, especially what you are looking for is relatively uncommon/obscure. I hope to see a change in the future.
I think it depends on what you’re looking for. Google just removes keywords if it can’t find what you’re looking for, but rather unintelligently it will frequently removes the most important word.
In those cases I prefer DDGs inaccurate results.
For the past few years I noticed that if DuckDuckGo can’t find anything relevant, then neither can Google.
Interesting. For me, DDG is more aggressive than Google about changing my search terms. They both do it, but DDG more frequently asks forgiveness rather than permission.
I've been using DDG as my default search engine now for over a year and 95% of the time it's great. It's main failure in my hands it trying to find obscure scientific literature or bleeding edge/just published scientific literature. Anyone else have this problem? I assume it's because the goog has goog scholar and so spent years building a massive scientific journal article database. What I don't get is the lack of same-day/week search results for an exact scientific article title with DDG.
Search results seem to have worsened around a year ago. Nowadays, when I can't find what I want, I often end up on google, which then frequently does find it. A bit annoying.
I have been using duckduckgo for over a year, and it works pretty well. One frustration is the mapping. Apple maps is really awful. I end up switching to osm/bing if I need to look something up on a map.
Mapping services are all a work in progress. Even Google Maps has been giving some strange responses lately. Say, a location deep in south west Germany shows up as Denmark on GMaps: https://twitter.com/geolytica/status/1300544359004336129
I've been using start page for the past few years as a default, but find myself typing in google.com->tab to search a lot of my day. The difference between pasting in a random golang compiler error into startpage vs google trained me to google all of my software issues.
The biggest non-technical hurdle at this point is google maps. The ability to type in an address and get a map with directions and nearby businesses has been pounded into my brain and when I use DDG or startpage with an address I generally end up sighing and pasting it into google.
I've been using DDG as default for over a year. First I search on DDG and if I don't like the result I go on Google. It's in my muscle memory so I sometimes don't even notice which service I am looking at.
DDG is the default search engine I use on the desktop and in iOS Safari for more than a year. I'm glad to see them growing and hope their privacy centric approach becomes dominant across the web, but the reality is that their search results can be quite poor except for simple queries. I used to use bing in the past and I don't recall having as many frustrations. I hope DDG are able to invest more in this area as they grow, because for most consumers the compromise in search quality may not be worth the privacy gains
I've been using DDG for a long time and it really seems like the results have gotten less accurate and informative in the last year or so. For a while I was very satisfied and typically could find what I was looking for, even in the arena of obscure technical knowledge.
I'll keep using it because at this point my brain is wired to !g when I can't find something, and the benefits outweigh the lack of results, but I do hope they can improve and continue to grow.
I love the idea of DDG, but after using it for about a year, I realized that I'm redoing most of my searches with !g. DDG seems to be quite bad at searches that are in my native language and somehow also often doesn't find good results for programming related queries.
I ended up switching back to Google. It was painful from a privacy standpoint, but what good is privacy if I don't get useful search results.
I have a similar experience, though I stayed on DDG. It's a bit funny, but I built a habit to use !s. This means, I use DDG to use StartPage, which in turn uses Google.
Was this recent? I had the same experience but recently tried again and found that DDG was now about as good as Google. When I do try !g because DDG failed to find something then usually Google doesn't find it either.
Sadly I think that the way that DDG caught up was that Google got worse because of SEO spam, while only DDG got a little better.
I use DDG now for over a year and similar to you I most of the time use !g. However I still stick to DDG because of all the other bangs i constantly use such as: !w, !yt, !godoc, !yc and more.
I've been using DDG since early 2010s and what you say was very true back then its much less so now.
I still occasionally use !g but its way less of a factor than it once was.
Maybe give startpage a shot. They use Google results but it adds a privacy layer inbetween, and have the added privacy benefit of not being US-based compared to DDG.
I liked Startpage, but a significant investor is US-based firm System1, which is, at least partially, an advertising / tracking company.
They say they won't change privacy policies etc., but we've often seen that such words don't mean anything a few years down the road, so I'm a bit skeptical.
Or better than StartPage, try Runnaroo. Organic results are also derived from Google.
Search quality is subjective, but in this case I mean better because it respects your search terms, quotes work for phrases, and organic results are enhanced with additional data sources like Stack Overflow [0].
1. Server rendered ads. They were there, you must have just missed them (it's on the SERP under the search bar). I don't have the search volume for context based ads (and none of the the available search ad networks are suitable), so the ads are just direct ads that display in rotation for a predetermined amount of time and do zero tracking (i.e. pay X and the ad is displayed for Y amount of time, win win for all).
2. Affiliate links. There is only one today, but I am testing it out to see if they are worth it.
3. Direct user monetization programs (i.e. Web Monetization protocol through Coil and the Brave publisher program). We are actually the first (and maybe still the only) search engine to integrate Web Monetization [0].
Sounds interesting but your privacy policy and website lacks all information on who's actually running it and processing the data, which unfortunately makes it a non-starter for me (and is a violation of the GDPR).
My experience has been the exact opposite. As soon as I need to look up something very specific or niche DDG does not deliver and that's when I need it the most.
Google's index is 4x bigger (I can't recall the specific numbers but it was mentioned in a recent competition report in the UK)- I'd expect Google to be better at returning long tail stuff where perhaps Bing (and thus DDG) simply don't have the depth of documents to return.
/edit here's the quote/source
"We found that Google’s index is larger than that of Bing in terms of number of pages in the index. Based on submissions from these parties, Google’s index contains around [500 -600 billion] pages and Microsoft’s index contains around [100- 200 billion] pages."
DDG is more willing to stick a stackoverflow answer at the top, which is usually what I want. When the issue becomes more language-specific or obscure then I have to resort to !g.
Indeed, I find that for my native language (Dutch) DDG is quite bad and no match for Google. I find that for simple, mainstream programming queries DDG is also fine, but if it's a little out of that mainstream, it doesn't produce anything. It seems to have a bias toward big corporate sites (eg microsoft docs) which isn't always helpful, perhaps that is due to a bias in Bing (from which it sources search results)?
I think the hardest part for me is that I am so locked into Google Drive and Gmail at this point that getting off of them seems to be a nearly Herculean feat.
My business runs on gdrive with over 1 TB of stuff on it currently, I’ve been on Gmail for over 10 years, I just don’t even know where to begin. I feel like if I actually want to reap the benefits of leaving chrome, not using Google search, etc. then I need to get out of their ecosystem entirely or it’s not really worth it.
I have the opposite: I'm in Canada and from France, but if I search for anything in French on ANY google (.com/.ca/.fr) I get Quebec stuff, whereas if I put the "France" filter on DDG I do get actual results for France. It has become one of the most convenient things for me when trying to find some news in each country (similarly, selecting "Canada" when searching in English or French for Canada or Quebec).
Oh I didn’t know about that, thanks. I tried researching a few covid things around the world and google gave me nothing but Canadian results. Even with -canada and the country name. Infuriating.
This has been coming up a lot in this thread and seems to be one of those bug vs feature situations.
- Google sees you are speaking French and that you are located in Canada so they assume you want results from Quebec.
- DDG sees you selected France, so you get French results.
Google uses context/history/etc whereas DDG ignores all of that. From a privacy perspective DDG's less localized default results are a feature, and in your situation they are actually better results, but there are people in this thread who have run into issues where DDG just assumes US for any queries in English, or where switching location gives bad results for programing stuff.
It's interesting seeing people's different reactions to this.
It is a difference in features indeed, and I believe the region settings can also be found when using google - they're just 2-3 clicks away in a menu and force you to reload, where DDG has them right on the homepage.
Basically Google assumes that I want stuff that is tied to my region regardless of who I am or what I do to hide/block any history tracking or browser fingerprinting. That has its own logic, and really for the average en-US user that works well enough anyway.
The user expectation becomes a bit different if you're British living in the US or Australia, or if you're Spanish living in Argentina, or if you're French living in Canada, etc. Or if you need to find help about a product that isn't dominated by the US, a programming language that isn't developed in English first, etc etc. Probably not the bulk of the requests from Google's perspective, I guess.
Now I use DDG and DDG only for 80-90% of queries. It can even be better, since I can switch location and it doesn't have one page of commercial results before anything useful, like Google does!
I’d agree it’s fair if we actually knew what all the gleaned from our searches and what they did with it. That’s sort of the crux of the problem. We aren’t fully consenting/aware of what is being harvested and where it’s going.
I tend to use the Firefox Search Box to access multiple search engines. Some may consider that a more convenient than using !bangs. DDG is one of the many options I have set-up but I can go straight to others from there.
Of course it is. Using !g, Google knows that on one computer I use I have never agreed to the Google 'Before you continue'. Isn't agreeing to that, agreeing to be tracked?
I wish there was a search engine that dedicated the first X results to Stack Exchange and Reddit.
Neither DDG or Google are very good at that, but those sites are consistently the best and most honest results.
On Google many searches give mostly affiliate blogspam articles unless I append "reddit" or "forum" or "stack" to the search, at which point I get great results.
You can kind of do this yourself on Google. Add `site:stackoverflow.com OR site:reddit.com OR site:stackexchange.com` to your default search engine. Then if you don't find something you link on the first page remove them.
It isn't as automatic as you are asking for but that is probably more than you can really expect for what seems like a very niche desire.
I hate that about Google. Clearly they know that they're serving us ads. Even adding forum etc works worse now than it did 10 years ago. Why is it getting harder and harder to find real information even when we tell google where to look for it?
What I hate about Google is that they say that they need our information to "improve our experience", yet we can't even tell them what sites we prefer, or which should be omitted, in/from our search results.
I use ddg as my entry point for any search, using bangs to Wikipedia, start page as a google alternative, Reddit, images.
Google results are sometimes better but most of the time, I find search results heavily biased towards “social platforms”, commercial and otherwise SEO’d resources. Old content is just hard to find, whether it is a prominent news paper article, a niche personal website, etc.
I don’t know how this search engines rank their results today, but I would pay for a way to filter out « big names » out of the search results and explore this long tail set by published date, etc.
Use cases are very different between « searching » and « researching ». I want a research engine :)
I have tried to use DDG several times, but Google is just better. For instance, if you search 'Serena Williams' on Google you see her recent US Open results nicely presented. Similarly, if you search for GOOG (on Chromium-based browsers [1]) you get a stock chart. The point is, Google saves me time due to the domain-specific customization they've done.
The bigger issue for me is that if DDG becomes popular, they might chart a path similar to Google in terms of privacy. It's another ad supported search engine after all.
[1]: They show dumber results on Firefox and should be in anti-trust territory, but that's a different discussion.
RE: [1] They show the exact same page for me both on Firefox and Chrome when I search for GOOG. I use Firefox as my main browser, and am logged in to my Google account on Chrome.
Google shows a less powerful search interface on Firefox for Android. If you change the user agent to Chrome, Google then shows the same interface it shows to Chrome.
This has been such a noticeable problem that a Firefox add-on (Google Search Fixer) was created to fix it:
Sorry I forgot to mention I was talking about FF Android, as commoner mentioned. I use it as my main browser and many Google sites downgrade the experience; merely changing the user agent gives me the same result as Google Chrome. I don't particularly like doing that since it reduces FF Android user count in Analytics.
DuckDuckGo "instant answer" infrastructure used to be open-source and community-contributed until a few years back. (But to be fair, searching for GOOG on DDG still gives you a little blurb about stock prices)
Even if DDG starts invading privacy it will still be better than google. Google has access a lot of my data already.
It is better multiple companies have parts of my data than one company that knows where I am , who I meet , what I search , use , and even say in my house
I really hope they focus on non english searches as primary focus. Google has pretty much stopped innovating in non English, non Latin script search quality and it will be much easier to target that market. It may not immediately drive revenue, but it will build enough search market share for DDG to become dominant player in non-English speaking geographies.
Apparently I am a grandma searcher because DDG does fine, if I occasionally make a trip to the second serp. That's searching for programming errors etc as well.
Actually I found a few years ago that DDG suddenly got really good at programming searches. I still use it for most queries and have better results than most HN comments, but I'd say I use !g the least at work.
DDG is the default search engine in my browser. Unfortunately it doesn't always retrieve the results I'm looking for. But I insist on typing my terms before I fallback to Google. This way, DDG will know that I searched but wasn't impressed with the result. If they are not collecting this level of analytics, they should definitely do so. I'm willing to opt-in.
I absolutely cannot stand the quality of DuckDuckGo results, programming related or not. I use !g on almost any general search query out of a conditioned lack of faith in the ability of DDG to surface anything useful. The name is childish and doesn’t inspire confidence either.
People I encounter that argue the results are “not that bad” are 9/10 times ideological purists, or otherwise misguided, that’s purely my personal experience though.
That said, after a few months of frustration I switched my search engine back to Google earlier this year and almost immediately switched it back to DDG the second I needed a bang operator.
Bangs are a superpower, a game changer, and by far the best UX for mobile search I’ve seen so far. I bang everything and everyone, bang bang.
Googling with site:x.com doesn’t even come close. More characters, Google determines the sorting and mixes in marketing copy results with the UGC I’m looking for, “exact quotes” no longer work, forced AMP results for e.g. Reddit etc.
DDG as a search engine is utter crap and I’ve little patience left to hear otherwise, but as a way of turning iOS Safari into a sort of meta search engine it’s invaluable and I genuinely cannot stop recommending it to other “power users”.
Gram gram is sticking with google though, and the second Safari replicates bangs I’m outta here.
bing's not a good example here - everyone took the piss out of its name when it was released (and it still said in mocking tones), and it isn't all that popular as a search engine either.
The name google was name chosen after Googol (https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Googol) to reflect the amount of webpages that in the founder intentions they were about to index.
Apparently when they registered the name the officer/employee was not familiar with the concept and just wrote down the name as they thought it was written: Google.
> People I encounter that argue the results are “not that bad” are 9/10 times ideological purists, or otherwise misguided, that’s purely my personal experience though
I find DDG searches to generally be fine and I'm definitely not an ideological purist. Not exactly sure how I might be misguided either.
Sometimes I need to use !g if I'm looking for something very specific, but >95% of the time DDG is fine.
One area where DDG is _much_ worse is when it comes to localized results.
Say I want to find some hedge trimmers, and I search for "hekksaks" in DDG. Then I get some random videos, links to norwegian-to-english dictionaries and assorted useless pages.
If I turn the "Norway" slider on, sure I get decent enough results. But DDG remembers this, so when I later search for some programming related stuff it's awful again.
So I need to constantly flip that localized results option on and off, which is super annoying.
In comparison, Google shows great results without having toggle some option.
Interesting example. And I can replicate it pretty much exactly as you describe.
Two things comes to mind —
1. Would you consider this an “edge case”? Searching for things you want to buy in one language, but researching programming topics in another language?
2. Is the difference in experiences not essentially the result of Google’s data collection practices? Both specifically data about you and your search patterns and data in aggregate that DDG (presumably) does not collect on purpose.
IP address at a minimum gives you a coarse location anyway so this isn’t even DDG going out of their way to collect personalization information to provide a better result. Alternatively maybe they view any personalization data as a slippery slope and avoid it wholesale.
"We also save searches, but again, not in a personally identifiable way, as we do not store IP addresses or unique User agent strings. We use aggregate, non-personal search data to improve things like misspellings."
So it sounds like they use the slippery slope argument.
There are several classes of things where I would primarily want local results for. If I'm searching for a grocery store ("matbutikk") I want grocery stores near me, not some instagram account named "Matbutikk" or some random grocery store in Spain.
Similarly there are several classes of things where I want international results, typically technical stuff.
I think DDG could improve a lot without any privacy issues. Since localized results are often decent enough, the main issue seems to be that it needs to prioritize local results automatically.
Are you search for a common product brand name, or using words in the primary language where you are from (geo-ip)? Well then prioritize localized results.
What I meant by "edge case" though was not necessarily the search term itself. It was selecting "Norway" localization for one search, and then deselecting for another. Of course I have no real insight here, but I would bet the large majority of people who toggle that option intend to keep it for all searches as opposed to just some.
E.g. searching for "matbutikk" with the Norway localization on DDG gives me different results (no Instagram account at least, but I can't really judge outside of that, hah).
There is a region parameter you can use for the search query, e.g. the query `hekksaks r:no` will set the Norway slider. It does not permanently set the region (fortunately, as there seems to be no way of specifying “no region.”)
Still this is much more effort compared to Google.
Edit: see here for some docs, but note that the list of regions they refer to is not correct
Funny I usually find that googlers are ideological voids that are misguided, thats just my personal experience though.
Maybe you got too accustomed to a search engine that knows everything about you?
> The name is childish and doesn’t inspire confidence either.
Funny I feel the same way about google and its branding, it almost feels like it is marketed to toddlers and intellectually bankrupt liberals and "minorities"...
You're probably using modern Google-fu if you're anything like I was when I first tried DDG. To get the best results you have to go back to your 2005-10 search skillset I've found.
It's more a plain keyword/phrase search than asking it questions
> People I encounter that argue the results are “not that bad” are 9/10 times ideological purists, or otherwise misguided, that’s purely my personal experience though.
I agree. That is your personal experience. Which is, of course, the whole point of using Google. You share everything in your life with them, and let them monetize your information any way they see fit, and in return they'll provide you with better search results.
I haven't used Google as my main search engine, or email provider, or anything else in ages. I'll take DDG search results over Google any day.
I use DDG and I usually have a pretty ok time without swapping back to google, or when I do I frequently don't have a better time (although much of the time I do!). Also for programming, DDG has a really nice stack overflow custom result.
But yes 1000% bangs are worth everything. Even if DDG weren't a search engine, bangs would be enough for me to use it as a meta engine. I still use a lot of google products so they're also super intuitive - g! is google, and if I guess I can usually get the google service I want: gm! maps, gn! news, gi! images (unfortunately gs! is shopping, not scholar which is gsc!).
And the thing about bangs is that I bet google won't implement them in such an easy way, since they wouldn't want to have unpredictable behavior for non-power users (and would never think of redirecting users before the search page)
Bangs are an absolute game changer, and they're muscle memory now so I end up throwing them into google accidentally. Some of my other common ones are a! amazon, w! wikipedia, yt! youtube, i! DDG images, and n! DDG news.
In fact they are way better if the result I want isn’t the topmost one because DDG displays far more results than what Google does on a page.
While I definitely believe in not having all my information with Google I’m pretty sure that’s not driving my decision because I have switched away from DDG in the past where it wasn’t meeting my needs.
Before I bought a robotic vacuum cleaner, I read lots of reviews from people saying it wasn't as good as vacuuming manually. It misses areas, it has a hard time in corners, it takes forever. I bought it anyway. The simple fact is it doesn't matter how much worse it is than vacuuming, because I'm not vacuuming.
I kind of feel that way about DuckDuckGo. Instead of lazyness, I guess you'd call it ideological purity. I don't care how much worse DuckDuckGo is than Google. It doesn't matter. The simple fact is the privacy implications of Google make it a deal breaker, so I'll use any alternative no matter how much worse it is.
In my mind they're not even competing services. Just like comparing a robotic vacuum to manual vacuuming. It's like saying "What's better, a square or the color yellow?" It doesn't compute.
I'd be lying if I said I never use !g. I do, when I don't find what I'm looking for and feel like I should. Half the time, I don't find what I wanted on Google either. I always hesitate though, thinking "Do I want Google to log this about me?" I rarely hesitate when searching with DuckDuckGo. There's a certain comfort and peace of mind that is worth any drop in the quality of search results.
Give this person a cookie, for exhibiting sheer resolve, something that's becoming all too rare in the manipulated, instant-gratification culture we're heading deep into.
It's not resolve. It's experience. At a young age, you think through short timelines. Crises don't happen. At an old age, once you've been through a few crises, wars, pandemics, law suits, and whatnot, you start calculating expected outcomes a bit differently.
I use DuckDuckGo not out of resolve, but because I used the Internet in the nineties, and saw how data I put out then came back in some cases a decade or two later in counter-intuitive ways.
1) Interacting in online forums, pre-search engine, where such discussions where considered more-or-less ephemeral, and only available to a closed group of "Internet users" wasn't super-public. All of that is now archived and indexed. If you search for me, you'll find it.
2) Giving my data to super-credible companies, pre-spam. Wouldn't you know it? A few went out of business, and my data was neatly packaged up and resold to the highest bidder. One was an enterprise database company.
3) Personal web page ended up on archive.org, before anyone really knew others were grabbing/indexing/archiving things. It had more of the feel of your front yard. Yes, someone could take a photo, but it wasn't common.
4) The whole Yahoo thing. My emails become property of some data broker who now mines them for marketing and sales.
I obviously won't talk about more personal ones. And no one will talk about litigations. But those sorts of things happen too.
The things I worry about now are the really sophisticated fingerprinting mechanisms, where your typing patterns, your vocabulary, your linguistic quirks, etc. become biometric identifiers. I'm not sure how all that data will be archived, integrated, and combined 25 years from now.
History suggests Google won't be Google forever, though.
Oh, and let's not forget what happened with data, Jewish people, WWII, and Germany. That's beyond my timescale, but these things happen.
agree. Mostly I stick with DDG, but, especially for nitche queries, if I don't like the DDG results I give it a try again with !g. And as you say, 1/2 the time it doesn't give better results (but, 1/2 it does)
Sidenote, i am with you fully - and you may be interested in `!s` - Startpage. I know very little about them, so please - do your own research, but supposedly they straight use Google, so your results are basically Google without giving your info "directly" to Google.
Of course the question arises, should you trust them? No idea, please - do your own research, maybe let me know hah. But i basically never touch Google these days, as i use DDG for all my searches and !s for any fallbacks.
If Duck Duck Go is free, doesn't it fundamentally have the same business model as Google. I don't understand how there can be no privacy implications, and search is free. At some point, something has to give for DDG to be profitable-- it is a business, after all. There is no way to measure if they're living up to privacy claims, either.
Insightful. When DDG hits critical mass and investors expect greater returns, or if they ever go public, there will be immense pressure to collect/store user data. It's too valuable to pass up.
Privacy is the reason they're growing at all, it's their competitive advantage. I think even investors are smart enough to not kill the chicken that lays golden eggs.
Why are you concerned about search engine privacy but also happy to have a robotic vacuum that likely sells maps of and data about your home (such as Roomba does)? Seems to invalidate your point about convenience over purity a little bit.
I have an older Roomba from before they did mapping and before they had internet connectivity. I would never buy an appliance that required an internet connection.
I switched back to Google this week after a few months of having ddg as the default. It's actually fine most of the time but when it's not you end up wasting time before you figure out that Google has answers.
I had some frustrating errors to figure out with junit5 the other day. Literally any search I did landed me to the wrong pages because it ignored parts of my query. Searching for the error is where Google seems to do a better job somehow. Ddg will just ignore the parts it does not understand, which tend to be the most significant parts of the query. Unfortunately, this something I do a lot and I need that to work reliably.
!g was pretty much the only bang I used with ddg. On mobile, don't really do a lot of searches. Besides, I have an Android phone so you are kind of stuck with Google unless you really customize everyhting.
I am also using ddg, but I also use !g on 9/10 searches.
Spending that much more time on figuring something out due to the missing or incorrect search results is simply a price too high for me.
I would love it if it was just as good as google, but it simply isnt right now.
It's like comparing a car to a bicycle. I like bicycles, but when going cross country, it simply does not work.
I use DDG, I don't think I've ever used !g directly, but have used google a few times if I'm on a borrowed computer for instance, I'm shocked how bad the results are in google compared with DDG.
I agree that bangs are a killer feature of DDG, but I often see the problem of results quality brought up and I have to speak up about it.
Google's search results are good because they're spying on you and they already know what you want. DDG does not do this, so you have to be more specific. If you would search Google for "django", you should search DDG for "django python" or "django framework". This is not DDG being wrong, this is you needing to relearn your habits.
I searched for Django on DDG. It alternates between results for the framework, Django (1966), and Django Unchained, getting less specific as it goes down until it shows a result for a restaurant in Des Moines, Iowa at the bottom of the first page. It keeps adding more range in as I click to new results. This is much better than how Google shows page after page of the same thing.
Google assumes it got it right and you just haven't found the right site for it even if you're 100 results pages and 20 "we think you're a bot" captchas deep. DDG is not so arrogant and tries different things once it's obvious you didn't find what you were looking for or are looking for serendipity.
Since this topic keeps coming up, I wish people would save and share with us these supposed failed DDG queries. I wouldn't say that DDG's results are better than the Google of 10 years ago, but I rarely have problems finding what I want. I don't understand how anyone can go as far as to say that DDG is "crap".
I don't understand how anyone who isn't only looking up error strings can say Google results are not crap? For normal human things, DDG seems a little worse than earlier Google and Google seems a lot worse. Or maybe people like sifting through the SEO drivle and vaporous landing pages Google has motivated everyone to create?
Both DDG and Google seem to have regressed to only surfacing lots of blog spam in response to my technical queries, perhaps with a few useful StackOverflow discussions.
That's my experience, although I still prefer DDG's results and design over Google's.
I think it may not so much be a regression in their algorithms, but that there's just more blog spam than ever. There's a reason I'm hearing the phrase "blogging is dead", and I believe it's because advertising and social media have incentivized more bullshit blogs than ever to pop up. I've come across tons of "blogs" that are really just listing products from Amazon but don't actually do any real analysis on them or tell you which ones are better than the others. In order to get an idea of what products people actually like, you've got to do either `site:reddit.com/r/<subreddit>` or search on YouTube.
I actually do one better: I use the Feedback link at the bottom of the bogus search results to formally tell DDG about my bad experience. After having done that for years with no improved outcome, it sure does feel like spitting into the wind, but it also has a higher probability of change than just swearing at my monitor
I wish people would save and share with us these supposed failed DDG queries
Maybe people who are unhappy with DDG results are just extraordinarily technical, but in the absence of a regex powered search engine, the least DDG could do is honor my quotes and index GitHub issues and major Linux mailing lists (I have some sympathy for not finding that mailing list entry since it is only hours old, but I know for certain that GitHub offers a firehose stream of events that will proactively tell DDG of changes, no crawling required)
Even if the search results are bad that 10/10 I have to use !g .I will still want to use ddg just so that they have the data on search strings which perform poorly and can improve their systems.
Also I actually find lot lesser clutter on DDG because SEO folks pretty much optimize for Google, no amp or other google policies to game .
Do they track this? I vaguely recall a similar comment in the past where the founder or someone else clarified that they don't keep track of which queries get banged.
According to their privacy page they do save search strings without PII information for product improvement. I guess that includes !bang searches. The 2B searches a month should logically include bangs too.
Bangs are a superpower, a game changer, and by far the best UX for mobile search I’ve seen so far.
I feel like we're aiming pretty low if the best UX you've seen so far requires 3 taps to input ! followed by one or more taps to input the rest of the operator plus a space, all before you can begin typing your query.
Wouldn't a better system be a grid of icons to choose from, with the ability to rearrange them as you see fit, like the icons on your phone's home screen? That would be much faster than DDG's keyboard dance on mobile.
Maybe you should try America's Got Talent show since you like ! She bangs all the time. You might end up like the poor Chinese guy or whatever nationality he is, and become famous. Google use to be good back in the day when what you typed, returned what you typed. Now its sad that you can take 2 different computers or phones on the same network and search the same topic and the end result is 2 totally different outcomes from what you searched. That's the current google. You should never have to use special characters to do a deep search for something of topic. I want something that returns the exact words I type to find specific information that's in context of what I search for. Not she bangs all the time.
As someone who doesn't actively use google and mostly uses DDG, I find google's results worse precisely because google hasn't personalized their results for me. So without the personalization, the google results based on my search query seem worse than DDG.
I've been pleased with Searx[1] compared to DDG or Google, given that it aggregates search results from multiple search engines. You can self-host it or use one of the public instances[2].
I'm going to go against the grain here. For me, Duck Duck Go's results tend to be better than Google's results. For searches that are even just moderately complicated, Google has a tendency of giving me results that contain none of the search terms I give it, making me wade through pages of junk that I didn't actually search for. DDG makes better assumptions in that regard. And when I don't get the exact results immediately in DDG, rather than just slap a !g at the end, I have the audacity to actually refine my search by adding additional search terms and get what I want.
(Disclosure: I live in the US, so it's possible Google is far better at search in other countries/languages than DDG)
Google is highly tuned for the user. More so if you are actually logged in without account, so what you are seeing has almost no incidence on what kind of results other people are seeing.
If it works for you, more power to you. Otherwise assuming 65 millions of people use anything by ideology is a huge ask. For some Google's results didn't just cut it, and they had to try something else.
I don't understand the needs for !bang's, I've had bookmark keywords in Firefox a decade. I simply type "a something" in the URL bar and it looks up "something" on Amazon etc. yt/d/g/t/w for youtube/duckduckgo/google/twitter/wikipedia etc. What do DDG's bangs offer over this.
1.1. Far more websites. Reddit, Flicr, Youtube, hell Yahoo, GMaps, Youtube, HN... Google Scholar, Semantic Scholar, DBLP... pretty much all the places I would want to search on are available.
2. Cross browser. I use Chrome on my phone, and FF on my laptop. Safari, when the battery is below 30% and I'm not near a power outlet. Setting default search engine as DDG brings me the bangs across all these places.
I see this kind of comment pop up every time DuckDuckGo is brought up. It makes me wonder what the disconnect is.
My speculation is that it's all in how you search. When I first started using Google, I learned how to craft my search precisely to get the exact results I needed. More keywords, filtering based on the site(s) that I might want, etc. Years later, this influences how I search considerably.
In contrast, most people I know who use Google tend to use much looser terminology and Google gets it roughly correct regardless. When searching for more obscure information I can generally outperform them but otherwise they're getting 90% of the way there
As a result my searches on DuckDuckGo haven't given me any worse results than Google would give me. If anything, they've gotten better (even setting aside bangs)
Part of the issue for me is that what I’ve learned from searching with google for so long might not translate to DDG very well.
A real-world example from work recently is the query “vertical flexbox animation css”. In DDG, 0/5 of the top results are about animations and flexbox. They are just generic flexbox documentation. If I search the same phrase with google, 4/5 of the top results are about animations and flexbox. And I would think that CSS is a relatively popular technology compared to some things I could be thinking about!
This happens to me with so many queries throughout the day, that I often end up using !g whenever I have a technical-ish query because the top results are usually a lot more relevant.
Maybe you are right, and I just need to phrase that better, but most permutations of that string don’t return much clearer results.
I've been using DDG for almost a year now, and as time goes on, I'm less and less confident about the results. Not enough to make me go back to Google, but I'm definitely quicker to try Google these days.
The exact quotes issue is absolutely infuriating, especially when I'm trying to find some very specific, obscure technical issue. I know what I'm looking for DDG. Either give it to me, or tell me you don't have anything. It'll save me some time.
I use DDG for everything but searching for code and programming issues. Google seems to have much better results for code related searches, but for everything else, DDG does well enough.
DDG has been good enough for me for years (2013 or so I switched), but I fear that pressure will be increasing for Weinberg to sell to some online giant who offers billions for that kind of traffic.
Every few months I read on HN how much more accurate DDG searches are than they used to be, I try it for a day, I get frustrated, and I return to Google.
There's no benefit to !g if you use it for 4 out of 5 searches.
I think part of it has to do with the “style” people use to search. I’ve found searching DDG with how I searched google in 2010 to work well. Modern “magic” google searches don’t work as well, it’s more throwing key words together.
281 comments
[ 21.7 ms ] story [ 5325 ms ] threadIn those cases I prefer DDGs inaccurate results.
For the past few years I noticed that if DuckDuckGo can’t find anything relevant, then neither can Google.
DDG: You meant this.
Google: Did you mean this?
https://www.semanticscholar.org
The DuckDuckGo bangs for Semantic Scholar are !s2, !semantic, and !smsc.
(For example the parallel universes like wibbly wobbly world, and the non-existent village of Basingstoke)
They have bangs setup for all sorts of things.
https://duckduckgo.com/bang
But there is no way around maps for me - at least for driving - for outdoor stuff I generally use Locus Map on my phone
!g maps
!g <obscure programming error>
I still recommend it to everyone though.
There's also !osm for OpenStreetMaps.
!yt
!cache
!maps
The have a searchable list for every bang they support. https://duckduckgo.com/bang
This is exactly me - I moved back to google for search when I realised I was subconsciously adding `g!` to every single search
I'll keep using it because at this point my brain is wired to !g when I can't find something, and the benefits outweigh the lack of results, but I do hope they can improve and continue to grow.
I ended up switching back to Google. It was painful from a privacy standpoint, but what good is privacy if I don't get useful search results.
Sadly I think that the way that DDG caught up was that Google got worse because of SEO spam, while only DDG got a little better.
If you ask Google a question you get better results than if you carefully select some search terms.
You can find them all here: https://duckduckgo.com/bang?
They say they won't change privacy policies etc., but we've often seen that such words don't mean anything a few years down the road, so I'm a bit skeptical.
Search quality is subjective, but in this case I mean better because it respects your search terms, quotes work for phrases, and organic results are enhanced with additional data sources like Stack Overflow [0].
I am the creator of Runnaroo.
[0] https://www.runnaroo.com/search?term=react.js
1. Server rendered ads. They were there, you must have just missed them (it's on the SERP under the search bar). I don't have the search volume for context based ads (and none of the the available search ad networks are suitable), so the ads are just direct ads that display in rotation for a predetermined amount of time and do zero tracking (i.e. pay X and the ad is displayed for Y amount of time, win win for all).
2. Affiliate links. There is only one today, but I am testing it out to see if they are worth it.
3. Direct user monetization programs (i.e. Web Monetization protocol through Coil and the Brave publisher program). We are actually the first (and maybe still the only) search engine to integrate Web Monetization [0].
[0] https://webmonetization.org/
/edit here's the quote/source
"We found that Google’s index is larger than that of Bing in terms of number of pages in the index. Based on submissions from these parties, Google’s index contains around [500 -600 billion] pages and Microsoft’s index contains around [100- 200 billion] pages."
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5efb1db6e90e0...
A lot of sites try to game their Google rankings. It's possible DDG is less subject to that.
I have to use !g for programming.
Just say Estonian so people don't have to figure out what you're talking about.
My business runs on gdrive with over 1 TB of stuff on it currently, I’ve been on Gmail for over 10 years, I just don’t even know where to begin. I feel like if I actually want to reap the benefits of leaving chrome, not using Google search, etc. then I need to get out of their ecosystem entirely or it’s not really worth it.
- Google sees you are speaking French and that you are located in Canada so they assume you want results from Quebec.
- DDG sees you selected France, so you get French results.
Google uses context/history/etc whereas DDG ignores all of that. From a privacy perspective DDG's less localized default results are a feature, and in your situation they are actually better results, but there are people in this thread who have run into issues where DDG just assumes US for any queries in English, or where switching location gives bad results for programing stuff.
It's interesting seeing people's different reactions to this.
Basically Google assumes that I want stuff that is tied to my region regardless of who I am or what I do to hide/block any history tracking or browser fingerprinting. That has its own logic, and really for the average en-US user that works well enough anyway.
The user expectation becomes a bit different if you're British living in the US or Australia, or if you're Spanish living in Argentina, or if you're French living in Canada, etc. Or if you need to find help about a product that isn't dominated by the US, a programming language that isn't developed in English first, etc etc. Probably not the bulk of the requests from Google's perspective, I guess.
Now I use DDG and DDG only for 80-90% of queries. It can even be better, since I can switch location and it doesn't have one page of commercial results before anything useful, like Google does!
Which is exactly what I do. I trade them some of my privacy and data in exchange for the best search results available (in my opinion).
It’s a fair trade for me.
If you care about your privacy a lot then this in-depth independent review should be interesting. https://digdeeper.neocities.org/ghost/search.html
Full disclosure: I'm CEO of Mojeek
Neither DDG or Google are very good at that, but those sites are consistently the best and most honest results.
On Google many searches give mostly affiliate blogspam articles unless I append "reddit" or "forum" or "stack" to the search, at which point I get great results.
It isn't as automatic as you are asking for but that is probably more than you can really expect for what seems like a very niche desire.
Bangs: https://duckduckgo.com/bang
Bang search: !bang <site description>
The bang hacks are convenient though.
Google results are sometimes better but most of the time, I find search results heavily biased towards “social platforms”, commercial and otherwise SEO’d resources. Old content is just hard to find, whether it is a prominent news paper article, a niche personal website, etc.
I don’t know how this search engines rank their results today, but I would pay for a way to filter out « big names » out of the search results and explore this long tail set by published date, etc.
Use cases are very different between « searching » and « researching ». I want a research engine :)
The bigger issue for me is that if DDG becomes popular, they might chart a path similar to Google in terms of privacy. It's another ad supported search engine after all.
[1]: They show dumber results on Firefox and should be in anti-trust territory, but that's a different discussion.
This has been such a noticeable problem that a Firefox add-on (Google Search Fixer) was created to fix it:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/google-search...
Google Search Fixer is currently available on Firefox Nightly for Android.
https://github.com/duckduckgo/duckduckgo
It is better multiple companies have parts of my data than one company that knows where I am , who I meet , what I search , use , and even say in my house
Image search on DDG is awful though.
People I encounter that argue the results are “not that bad” are 9/10 times ideological purists, or otherwise misguided, that’s purely my personal experience though.
That said, after a few months of frustration I switched my search engine back to Google earlier this year and almost immediately switched it back to DDG the second I needed a bang operator.
Bangs are a superpower, a game changer, and by far the best UX for mobile search I’ve seen so far. I bang everything and everyone, bang bang.
Googling with site:x.com doesn’t even come close. More characters, Google determines the sorting and mixes in marketing copy results with the UGC I’m looking for, “exact quotes” no longer work, forced AMP results for e.g. Reddit etc.
DDG as a search engine is utter crap and I’ve little patience left to hear otherwise, but as a way of turning iOS Safari into a sort of meta search engine it’s invaluable and I genuinely cannot stop recommending it to other “power users”.
Gram gram is sticking with google though, and the second Safari replicates bangs I’m outta here.
Good point. Not like "Google" or "Bing".
The name google was name chosen after Googol (https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Googol) to reflect the amount of webpages that in the founder intentions they were about to index.
Apparently when they registered the name the officer/employee was not familiar with the concept and just wrote down the name as they thought it was written: Google.
edit: source: https://www.webcitation.org/68ubHzYs7?url=http://graphics.st...
Gone are the days of search engine names that inspired confidence, like Altavista and Lycos... or AskJeeves.
Also the runners up, Bing.
I find DDG searches to generally be fine and I'm definitely not an ideological purist. Not exactly sure how I might be misguided either.
Sometimes I need to use !g if I'm looking for something very specific, but >95% of the time DDG is fine.
Say I want to find some hedge trimmers, and I search for "hekksaks" in DDG. Then I get some random videos, links to norwegian-to-english dictionaries and assorted useless pages.
If I turn the "Norway" slider on, sure I get decent enough results. But DDG remembers this, so when I later search for some programming related stuff it's awful again.
So I need to constantly flip that localized results option on and off, which is super annoying.
In comparison, Google shows great results without having toggle some option.
Two things comes to mind —
1. Would you consider this an “edge case”? Searching for things you want to buy in one language, but researching programming topics in another language?
2. Is the difference in experiences not essentially the result of Google’s data collection practices? Both specifically data about you and your search patterns and data in aggregate that DDG (presumably) does not collect on purpose.
"We also save searches, but again, not in a personally identifiable way, as we do not store IP addresses or unique User agent strings. We use aggregate, non-personal search data to improve things like misspellings."
So it sounds like they use the slippery slope argument.
[0] https://duckduckgo.com/privacy
There are several classes of things where I would primarily want local results for. If I'm searching for a grocery store ("matbutikk") I want grocery stores near me, not some instagram account named "Matbutikk" or some random grocery store in Spain.
Similarly there are several classes of things where I want international results, typically technical stuff.
I think DDG could improve a lot without any privacy issues. Since localized results are often decent enough, the main issue seems to be that it needs to prioritize local results automatically.
Are you search for a common product brand name, or using words in the primary language where you are from (geo-ip)? Well then prioritize localized results.
What I meant by "edge case" though was not necessarily the search term itself. It was selecting "Norway" localization for one search, and then deselecting for another. Of course I have no real insight here, but I would bet the large majority of people who toggle that option intend to keep it for all searches as opposed to just some.
E.g. searching for "matbutikk" with the Norway localization on DDG gives me different results (no Instagram account at least, but I can't really judge outside of that, hah).
There is a region parameter you can use for the search query, e.g. the query `hekksaks r:no` will set the Norway slider. It does not permanently set the region (fortunately, as there seems to be no way of specifying “no region.”)
Still this is much more effort compared to Google.
Edit: see here for some docs, but note that the list of regions they refer to is not correct
https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/settings/r...
1. Perform the modified search (hekksaks r:no)
2. Create a new bookmark from the search result page
3. Ctrl+shift+B -> edit bookmark
4. Replace the search term but not the custom logic with `%s` (in this case produces https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%s+r%3Ano&ia=web)
5. Type your desired bang into the "keyword" field (!n for example)
You can now use !n <any search term> to search for r:no <any search term>, and add/remove/edit filters from the bang as you see fit.
I get around this by adding the country/city/language/neighborhood to my search query and it works just fine for me.
Maybe you got too accustomed to a search engine that knows everything about you?
> The name is childish and doesn’t inspire confidence either.
Funny I feel the same way about google and its branding, it almost feels like it is marketed to toddlers and intellectually bankrupt liberals and "minorities"...
It's more a plain keyword/phrase search than asking it questions
I agree. That is your personal experience. Which is, of course, the whole point of using Google. You share everything in your life with them, and let them monetize your information any way they see fit, and in return they'll provide you with better search results.
I haven't used Google as my main search engine, or email provider, or anything else in ages. I'll take DDG search results over Google any day.
But yes 1000% bangs are worth everything. Even if DDG weren't a search engine, bangs would be enough for me to use it as a meta engine. I still use a lot of google products so they're also super intuitive - g! is google, and if I guess I can usually get the google service I want: gm! maps, gn! news, gi! images (unfortunately gs! is shopping, not scholar which is gsc!).
And the thing about bangs is that I bet google won't implement them in such an easy way, since they wouldn't want to have unpredictable behavior for non-power users (and would never think of redirecting users before the search page)
Bangs are an absolute game changer, and they're muscle memory now so I end up throwing them into google accidentally. Some of my other common ones are a! amazon, w! wikipedia, yt! youtube, i! DDG images, and n! DDG news.
it might simply redirect your !-searches to DDG, I don’t know. but I find it pretty useful.
In fact they are way better if the result I want isn’t the topmost one because DDG displays far more results than what Google does on a page.
While I definitely believe in not having all my information with Google I’m pretty sure that’s not driving my decision because I have switched away from DDG in the past where it wasn’t meeting my needs.
I kind of feel that way about DuckDuckGo. Instead of lazyness, I guess you'd call it ideological purity. I don't care how much worse DuckDuckGo is than Google. It doesn't matter. The simple fact is the privacy implications of Google make it a deal breaker, so I'll use any alternative no matter how much worse it is.
In my mind they're not even competing services. Just like comparing a robotic vacuum to manual vacuuming. It's like saying "What's better, a square or the color yellow?" It doesn't compute.
I'd be lying if I said I never use !g. I do, when I don't find what I'm looking for and feel like I should. Half the time, I don't find what I wanted on Google either. I always hesitate though, thinking "Do I want Google to log this about me?" I rarely hesitate when searching with DuckDuckGo. There's a certain comfort and peace of mind that is worth any drop in the quality of search results.
I use DuckDuckGo not out of resolve, but because I used the Internet in the nineties, and saw how data I put out then came back in some cases a decade or two later in counter-intuitive ways.
2) Giving my data to super-credible companies, pre-spam. Wouldn't you know it? A few went out of business, and my data was neatly packaged up and resold to the highest bidder. One was an enterprise database company.
3) Personal web page ended up on archive.org, before anyone really knew others were grabbing/indexing/archiving things. It had more of the feel of your front yard. Yes, someone could take a photo, but it wasn't common.
4) The whole Yahoo thing. My emails become property of some data broker who now mines them for marketing and sales.
I obviously won't talk about more personal ones. And no one will talk about litigations. But those sorts of things happen too.
The things I worry about now are the really sophisticated fingerprinting mechanisms, where your typing patterns, your vocabulary, your linguistic quirks, etc. become biometric identifiers. I'm not sure how all that data will be archived, integrated, and combined 25 years from now.
History suggests Google won't be Google forever, though.
Oh, and let's not forget what happened with data, Jewish people, WWII, and Germany. That's beyond my timescale, but these things happen.
For my username it is here: https://news.ycombinator.com/favorites?id=fsflover&comments=...
Hmmm, that one got to me.
Of course the question arises, should you trust them? No idea, please - do your own research, maybe let me know hah. But i basically never touch Google these days, as i use DDG for all my searches and !s for any fallbacks.
Irrespective of Startpage's motives, using them provides a layer of indirection between me and Google associating every search with a Google account.
Startpage is now owned by an advertising company (reddit.com)
182 points by rahuldottech 10 months ago | 82 comments
I have no clue how trivial this is. But I'd assume it is, in which case you're only really "safe" if you open it up and inspect it yourself I guess.
I had some frustrating errors to figure out with junit5 the other day. Literally any search I did landed me to the wrong pages because it ignored parts of my query. Searching for the error is where Google seems to do a better job somehow. Ddg will just ignore the parts it does not understand, which tend to be the most significant parts of the query. Unfortunately, this something I do a lot and I need that to work reliably.
!g was pretty much the only bang I used with ddg. On mobile, don't really do a lot of searches. Besides, I have an Android phone so you are kind of stuck with Google unless you really customize everyhting.
It's like comparing a car to a bicycle. I like bicycles, but when going cross country, it simply does not work.
I use !gm a lot though.
The !g is so habitual that I find myself typing it on Google too now
DDG is also very slow
Google's search results are good because they're spying on you and they already know what you want. DDG does not do this, so you have to be more specific. If you would search Google for "django", you should search DDG for "django python" or "django framework". This is not DDG being wrong, this is you needing to relearn your habits.
Google assumes it got it right and you just haven't found the right site for it even if you're 100 results pages and 20 "we think you're a bot" captchas deep. DDG is not so arrogant and tries different things once it's obvious you didn't find what you were looking for or are looking for serendipity.
I think it may not so much be a regression in their algorithms, but that there's just more blog spam than ever. There's a reason I'm hearing the phrase "blogging is dead", and I believe it's because advertising and social media have incentivized more bullshit blogs than ever to pop up. I've come across tons of "blogs" that are really just listing products from Amazon but don't actually do any real analysis on them or tell you which ones are better than the others. In order to get an idea of what products people actually like, you've got to do either `site:reddit.com/r/<subreddit>` or search on YouTube.
I wish people would save and share with us these supposed failed DDG queries
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22docker%22%20%22unable%20to%20fi...
Contrast that with the !g of the same query
And after grinding on search permutations this was what I was looking for: https://github.com/portainer/portainer/issues/4319#issuecomm...
Or this would have been fine, too: https://www.mail-archive.com/debian-bugs-dist@lists.debian.o...
Maybe people who are unhappy with DDG results are just extraordinarily technical, but in the absence of a regex powered search engine, the least DDG could do is honor my quotes and index GitHub issues and major Linux mailing lists (I have some sympathy for not finding that mailing list entry since it is only hours old, but I know for certain that GitHub offers a firehose stream of events that will proactively tell DDG of changes, no crawling required)
Also I actually find lot lesser clutter on DDG because SEO folks pretty much optimize for Google, no amp or other google policies to game .
I feel like we're aiming pretty low if the best UX you've seen so far requires 3 taps to input ! followed by one or more taps to input the rest of the operator plus a space, all before you can begin typing your query.
Wouldn't a better system be a grid of icons to choose from, with the ability to rearrange them as you see fit, like the icons on your phone's home screen? That would be much faster than DDG's keyboard dance on mobile.
The names of recent IPOs and direct listings: Unity, Sumo Logic, Asana, Jfrog, Snowflake, Amwell, Ant Financial.
25 years ago we had "Google" and "Yahoo".
[1] https://github.com/searx/searx
[2] https://searx.space/
(Disclosure: I live in the US, so it's possible Google is far better at search in other countries/languages than DDG)
Alfred provides similar functionality on OSX, allowing you to create a key sequence shortcut for any search engine that can parse URL params.
If it works for you, more power to you. Otherwise assuming 65 millions of people use anything by ideology is a huge ask. For some Google's results didn't just cut it, and they had to try something else.
1.1. Far more websites. Reddit, Flicr, Youtube, hell Yahoo, GMaps, Youtube, HN... Google Scholar, Semantic Scholar, DBLP... pretty much all the places I would want to search on are available.
2. Cross browser. I use Chrome on my phone, and FF on my laptop. Safari, when the battery is below 30% and I'm not near a power outlet. Setting default search engine as DDG brings me the bangs across all these places.
Moreover, some of the bangs suck. Like for example !hn. I’d rather search HN via Google, with my own keyword, because that Angolia engine is crap.
Want to save urls in archive.org? You can add a keyword. Want to search a private list on Twitter? Add a keyword.
DDG bangs can’t do what your browser can. Also, for privacy purposes, sending your Google searches to DDG first is stupid.
On iOS btw, Safari doesn’t do custom search keywords, but Firefox does, and it can sync your keywords across devices.
My speculation is that it's all in how you search. When I first started using Google, I learned how to craft my search precisely to get the exact results I needed. More keywords, filtering based on the site(s) that I might want, etc. Years later, this influences how I search considerably.
In contrast, most people I know who use Google tend to use much looser terminology and Google gets it roughly correct regardless. When searching for more obscure information I can generally outperform them but otherwise they're getting 90% of the way there
As a result my searches on DuckDuckGo haven't given me any worse results than Google would give me. If anything, they've gotten better (even setting aside bangs)
A real-world example from work recently is the query “vertical flexbox animation css”. In DDG, 0/5 of the top results are about animations and flexbox. They are just generic flexbox documentation. If I search the same phrase with google, 4/5 of the top results are about animations and flexbox. And I would think that CSS is a relatively popular technology compared to some things I could be thinking about!
This happens to me with so many queries throughout the day, that I often end up using !g whenever I have a technical-ish query because the top results are usually a lot more relevant.
Maybe you are right, and I just need to phrase that better, but most permutations of that string don’t return much clearer results.
I do like being able to search the web with regex.
The exact quotes issue is absolutely infuriating, especially when I'm trying to find some very specific, obscure technical issue. I know what I'm looking for DDG. Either give it to me, or tell me you don't have anything. It'll save me some time.
Other than that, I agree with what you said. Bangs are extremely useful, and are the primary reason why I stick to DDG as well!
There's no benefit to !g if you use it for 4 out of 5 searches.