Great to see DDG growing steadily. I've been using it on all of my devices for going on four years and it's proven to be an enjoyable experience. Their extensive collection for !Bangs, in particular, has proven beyond useful for quick and easy searches in a single location.
I switched to HTML DDG for a week and the search results are worse than the normal version. I had to switch back after a week even though I was really enjoying the lightweight experience.
Google search product as become progressively worse each year.
DDG is not much better, I dont believe there is any good search product out there right now, however for technical topics I often find DDG easier to find things from actual manual pages, or Knowledge bases where Google I just get lost of Marketing Blogs trying to sell me something
The ironically exception to this is some time Microsoft own documentation is harder to find on DDG (which is backed by bing) than on google... I think that largly has to do with MS terrible choice to remove technet, and break 50% of their links on the internet.
I've noticed that I've come to rely more and more on the expandable "Similar Questions" entries in Google, which contain text snippets with the answers to those questions and the linked document which is providing this text.
Search engines without it feel pretty static, like what you get is what you see, and in order to improve your search you need to issue a new one.
google seems to go out of its way to exclude results that match exact wording these days, even with quotes. this is incredibly frustrating, especially for technical searches. i halfheartedly switched to ddg a few years ago but it has become much more earnest in the last year. google is now run by committee or something.
I agree. The only thing that irks me with DDG is that it ranks the official python docs too low. I often end up with results from w3school which I don't want to use. And unfortunately I can't remove domains from the search results.
With their privacy focus, does that mean they don't track and keep a list of database queries being made? I'm quite curious to what people may be searching at DDG vs. say Google - it certainly feels like there'd be important societal insights possible with that data. If they do compile it, do they publish this data anywhere?
> 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.
I highly doubt they would every release it, though. Search history, even if aggregated, will undoubtedly contain some level of private data submitted my accident.
Socrates is a mortal and hamsters are mortal, but Socrates is not a hamster. All major are part of all, but being part of all does not mean that you are all major, hence all are not all major. :)
I don't think it's even a rewrite. It looks like algorithmically-generated blogspam. Look at the conspicuously capitalized "DuckDuckGo Mac Version Coming Soon" line, and the flipped header image.
I'm not sure if HN bans whole domains or not, but this seems like one to ban.
I think you're right! The first story on https://en.brinkwire.com, in the "Sports" category, is "The date when the Sun will completely burn out has been revealed – and this is what will occur."
Denial of responsibility!
Brinkwire is a semi-automated aggregator around the global media. All content is freely available on the internet. We have compiled them on one platform for educational purposes only and we add value to them by not copying directly. For each content, the hyperlink to the primary source is provided.
Which seems to be an outright lie so yes, I hope this whole domain can get the banhammer since it's garbage wasting everybody's time.
Pretty sure their results are just forwards of Bing, so not sure the operation is as massive as you might be thinking. DDG still shows ads, they just don't use tracking.
They run ads based on keywords, not the person doing the search. They also earn revenue as an affiliate. (You click an amazon link and make a purchase. They earn a small commish off of it) I've been using duck for awhile now.
They use Bing's ad network (or at least they used to) and don't expose any privacy details about their users, so advertisers can't target you based on demographic or psychographic information.
I presume this is the cause (not entirely) of their advertising campaign they did in London recently. Couldn't find a source only a reddit post[0]. They were on buses, the underground and in train stations.
All over Seattle. Also have been seeing them more and more often online. “Hey we’re following you around the internet to insist that we don’t track you” has been rubbing be the wrong way a lot recently. I stick with Bing.
I used DuckDuckGo yesterday specifically because it doesn't redirect you if it detects you are using Internet Explorer.
I had an underpowered corporate laptop that's MS Edge session was too bloated, but didn't have the ability to add any extensions that would facilitate managing and saving that session. So when it had a BSOD as I was trying to run a heavy application on it simultaneously, I was determined not to run both MS Edge and this heavy app at the same time.
But then, I had to Google something...
Internet Explorer to the rescue! Except if you want to access Google, that is. If you go to it, then you'll be redirected to Microsoft, and then they'll automatically launch MS Edge. Now I have to choose between googling my question, running that damn app, and risking loosing my previous session if the laptop has another BSOD before I click on the "Restore" button.
Out of curiosity, I tried accessing DuckDuckGo in IE. Not only did it work fine, but there was also no silly redirect.
Because Bing makes no promises on privacy, has worse UI/UX, is owned by a generally looked-down-on company when it comes to anything related to privacy or user-choice.
While google generally gives me the best results for specific queries I have grown very very tired of the amount of ads I sometimes see. Recently I hit a search that gave me 5 ads at the top, 3-4 actual results and more ads on the bottom. It was both sad and amazing to see more ads than actual search results.
For my service, DDG traffic[1] is currently 50% of Google's, which is quite impressive. This is not a representative niche of course, but still good to see.
Not only is 50% not representative of the whole it also doesn’t seem to be representative of your own data. Looks like DDG is not even 40% of Google’s traffic according to the link you shared.
Let's call it "around 50%". :-) This is just one day from one site. I didn't calculate in detail, but was surprised that it was as high as that around most sites (some docs sites, control panel, etc)
"How many Google searches per day? Google doesn't share its search volume data. However, it's estimated Google processes approximately 63,000 search queries every second, translating to 5.6 billion searches per day and approximately 2 trillion global searches per year."
I’ve been using ddg for years now, ddg (and bing) long passed the good enough threshold for search where I don’t ever feel like something wasn’t found, and I always get a good enough answer for what I was looking for.
It’s possible for other search engines to be technically better, to find more results, or surface the most relevant pages earlier, but it doesn’t matter to me in practice.
I went to set DDG on all my devices a few months ago because it was the "right" thing to do but expecting to get inferior results and needing to use the g bang a lot, surprisingly it turns out I never had to use it. Ordinary search has changed with the siloization of the internet: twitter, subreddits, stackow, github, official pages, all the big silos are easy to find and offer superior internal discovery, the fact that google might (or not) be better at ranking the long tail is losing relevance fast.
I find image search to be almost entirely useless but the normal search is generally sufficient. The last time I used DDG the geographic results were frustratingly inconsistent. I’d get restaurants in different countries and whatnot.
Actually when you are searching for something to print (like coloring pages) DDG is much more useful as you can actually open the image as an image. Google seems to have stopped doing that.
I agree, and probably I may buy more coloring books if it weren’t for ddg. Although we have many and still my daughter wants a specific one with a unicorn and a princess and spends a lot of time picking one. The alternative to this is “take on from you coloring books you already have.” So I guess nobody is really losing anything in this case, except me, I pay for the toner in the printer as well as for the coloring books ;)
Whatever you think the Internet was built for doesn’t matter. Copyright exists and some people want to retain their rights to share an image without people just wholesale scraping it without even visiting the website.
This antisocial behaviour of walking in and taking whatever isn’t bolted down leads to an unfortunate arms race of watermarks, other technologies, and crappy laws that attempt to stop consumers from disrespecting the rights of producers.
Whether intended or not, Google at least makes you visit the website before taking the images. (Which is contrary to all the times google does this for its own benefit.)
The number of people who produce desirable content are drastically outnumbered by the number of consumers, so I’m very guarded about any rhetoric that fixates on consumer rights at the cost of producer rights. Naturally they don’t get an equal voice.
It's been my experience that Google has heavily deranked or outright delisted the long tail anyway. Almost all results are either major media sites, reddit, github, similar large sites, or blogspam. Older sites are often outright delisted, newer sites usually just have some sort of huge deranking penalty that often makes their results unfindable, unless you are able to search for an exact quote on that site. It's really bizarre, there are a TON of extremely valuable content-rich niche sites out there that are far better than, for example, the Wikipedia treatment of their subject, but Google search hates them.
I am actually quite puzzled by what they choose to index now or not - for example, you'll find that a lot - but not all - of HN comment pages are not indexed or delisted.
So it really doesn't seem surprising to me that Google search can fairly easily be beaten nowadays.
EDIT: Well, in my quest for an example of a delisted HN comment page, which I have run into before, I found something even more curious: a page that does appear in the index if I search by title, but not if I search by some of the page contents (eg site:news.ycombinator.com my username and the word 'eliding') reflected in the Google cached version of the webpage.
EDIT2: I checked on DDG and searching on site:news.ycombinator.com for amezarak eliding does turn up the comment that Google can't find.
I switched to DDG after I got tired of Google’s too results being curated content.
I just want to see what matches my search, not what Alphabet wants me to see.
I switched to DDG even though the search results are not as good as Google's.
And not for privacy reasons either.
The reason I switched is that it has become too cumbersome to get english results from Google.
In the past I went to google.com/ncr and was good to go.
Nowadays I 1) go to google.com/ncr then 2) Need click away their cookie banner and 3) have to go to google.com/ncr again.
If I only go to google.com/ncr and click away the cookie banner, I still get results based on my location. For example, when I google "tradingview nasdaq", I want www.tradingview.com/symbols/NASDAQ-NDX/ - I don't want <localizedsubdomain>.tradingview.com/symbols/NASDAQ-NDX/
With DDG, I just go to duck.com and I am good to go.
So if anyone from Google reads this - this is the reason you lost me.
Google is insanely moronical nowadays. I use YouTube's English interface (do they have localized interfaces?), watching videos in the language of the country where I currently reside. After a while I noticed the titles were in English although the people were talking in the local language. I figured out YouTube was auto-translating them... is there a setting to disable this? Nope.
A while ago it was doing the reverse, translating all video titles to the local (where I live) language. I was watching American gaming content but the titles were in a different language. Fuck you very much, YouTube.
Every time I see DDG results in Bulgarian when I search in Russian I first get annoyed at how uncomplicated its search logic is (don't you see where my request is coming from?), but then I am kinda relieved it doesn't try to use anything except my own search keywords.
The quality of Google results has dropped substantially in the last week (adding to already poor results). Today I literally couldn't find anything I looked for apart from getting spam and malware dens masqueraded as legitimate sites. DuckDuckGo got me all I needed.
Google has become very much unusable...
For programming, I still rely on google as my navigational engine, although a search engine that indexed a couple dozen sizes would probably suffice for me.
102 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 84.9 ms ] threadI do still pull out a !g for weird software related searches that DDG seems to interpret wrong or only return a few foreign language results for.
DDG is not much better, I dont believe there is any good search product out there right now, however for technical topics I often find DDG easier to find things from actual manual pages, or Knowledge bases where Google I just get lost of Marketing Blogs trying to sell me something
The ironically exception to this is some time Microsoft own documentation is harder to find on DDG (which is backed by bing) than on google... I think that largly has to do with MS terrible choice to remove technet, and break 50% of their links on the internet.
Search engines without it feel pretty static, like what you get is what you see, and in order to improve your search you need to issue a new one.
There is a workaround to blacklist certain results using an extension in conjunction with a script for it.
"https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&tbs=li:1"
> 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.
It's not clear how long they keep these searches.
[0] https://duckduckgo.com/privacy#s4
I try to use these two and only fall back to google in rare occasions these days.
Gets really annoying if you use a browser that doesn't save cookies
I'm not sure if HN bans whole domains or not, but this seems like one to ban.
But more directly, their about-us page (https://en.brinkwire.com/about-us/) states:
Which seems to be an outright lie so yes, I hope this whole domain can get the banhammer since it's garbage wasting everybody's time.https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/so...
[1] https://duckduckgo.com/settings
They use Bing's ad network (or at least they used to) and don't expose any privacy details about their users, so advertisers can't target you based on demographic or psychographic information.
Most of the returned results (gstatcounter) don't include DDG.
Any other city recently get them as well?
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/duckduckgo/comments/qyss8g/spotted_...
I had an underpowered corporate laptop that's MS Edge session was too bloated, but didn't have the ability to add any extensions that would facilitate managing and saving that session. So when it had a BSOD as I was trying to run a heavy application on it simultaneously, I was determined not to run both MS Edge and this heavy app at the same time.
But then, I had to Google something...
Internet Explorer to the rescue! Except if you want to access Google, that is. If you go to it, then you'll be redirected to Microsoft, and then they'll automatically launch MS Edge. Now I have to choose between googling my question, running that damn app, and risking loosing my previous session if the laptop has another BSOD before I click on the "Restore" button.
Out of curiosity, I tried accessing DuckDuckGo in IE. Not only did it work fine, but there was also no silly redirect.
https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/so...
1: https://twitter.com/borg_base/status/1474807112282906627
"How many Google searches per day? Google doesn't share its search volume data. However, it's estimated Google processes approximately 63,000 search queries every second, translating to 5.6 billion searches per day and approximately 2 trillion global searches per year."
It’s possible for other search engines to be technically better, to find more results, or surface the most relevant pages earlier, but it doesn’t matter to me in practice.
Except the internet was built to let us leech content from eachother.
If there would have been a capitalistic mindset behind it, I guess they would have started with taking your credit card number back in 1960.
This antisocial behaviour of walking in and taking whatever isn’t bolted down leads to an unfortunate arms race of watermarks, other technologies, and crappy laws that attempt to stop consumers from disrespecting the rights of producers.
Whether intended or not, Google at least makes you visit the website before taking the images. (Which is contrary to all the times google does this for its own benefit.)
The number of people who produce desirable content are drastically outnumbered by the number of consumers, so I’m very guarded about any rhetoric that fixates on consumer rights at the cost of producer rights. Naturally they don’t get an equal voice.
I am actually quite puzzled by what they choose to index now or not - for example, you'll find that a lot - but not all - of HN comment pages are not indexed or delisted.
So it really doesn't seem surprising to me that Google search can fairly easily be beaten nowadays.
EDIT: Well, in my quest for an example of a delisted HN comment page, which I have run into before, I found something even more curious: a page that does appear in the index if I search by title, but not if I search by some of the page contents (eg site:news.ycombinator.com my username and the word 'eliding') reflected in the Google cached version of the webpage.
EDIT2: I checked on DDG and searching on site:news.ycombinator.com for amezarak eliding does turn up the comment that Google can't find.
And not for privacy reasons either.
The reason I switched is that it has become too cumbersome to get english results from Google.
In the past I went to google.com/ncr and was good to go.
Nowadays I 1) go to google.com/ncr then 2) Need click away their cookie banner and 3) have to go to google.com/ncr again.
If I only go to google.com/ncr and click away the cookie banner, I still get results based on my location. For example, when I google "tradingview nasdaq", I want www.tradingview.com/symbols/NASDAQ-NDX/ - I don't want <localizedsubdomain>.tradingview.com/symbols/NASDAQ-NDX/
With DDG, I just go to duck.com and I am good to go.
So if anyone from Google reads this - this is the reason you lost me.
A while ago it was doing the reverse, translating all video titles to the local (where I live) language. I was watching American gaming content but the titles were in a different language. Fuck you very much, YouTube.
I like DuckDuckGo, but its inferior search quality for some non-English languages makes it unusable. Majority of people don't search in English.
/wishful_thinking