Either that is completely bullshit, or it’s technically-bullshit.
1. They don’t have to censor because their sources censor for them. “Oh we’re just an aggregator of censored results” doesn’t mean “this is an uncensored search engine” like the claim would have you believe.
2. Proof of this is evident in by comparing Russian yandex.com, my now go to for anything related to hacking, pirated anything, topics of censorship or controversial discussion, even “legit” but rarer information like how to train or use X or Y AI model, etc. The domains that appear on yandex remind me a time gone by. Like image search before Pinterest, unreliable but not sterilized.
3. I use DDG everyday. In the last year or so, I have found myself going to Google, Bing, Brave, Yandex, SearX, and other more than ever. The quality of DDG has for me, unquestionably slipped. I have a strong distaste for Google, and have used them this year more than ever.
They are not uncensored, although maybe they allow that burden to be done for them to keep their nose high in their air on the topic.
However, I fear it may be a moot point as I find myself looking elsewhere often now.
Hacker News sneakily censors and manipulates what you see too, not just DDG. The abuse is inescapable form Big Tech and only getting worse. That's why the next level is trying to force showing IDs to more websites and acting like it's everyone's destiny to be characters from Minority Report or 1984.
I went to DDG to get away from all the Google AI stuff being shoved down my throat.
While it seems DDG is on the same path of AI / chat centric search UX, at least they allow me to turn off all that stuff. But... search has gotten so bad in general, DDG is having the same results issue I had on Google. I don't see DDG as a player in the Ai space so I think my usage will only decrease as search result quality continues to decrease.
I am hopeful in the long run that search index / results will become better as the core UX for most people becomes chat, search result pages become low human traffic (meaning ads are worthless), and search becomes one of many research tools for to the agents
A surprising fact I /do/ know about DDG: they don't update bang searches anymore, which was one of my favorite differentiators. This feature adds a lot of utility to DDG as a browser default search engine.
You can search "!w Gabriel Weinberg" and it will open the Wikipedia article because of the leading exclamation mark and w. If a site changes their search url, you can submit the precise new pattern they should use for a redirect. If a new service pops up, you can use the same form to request a new search prefix. These form submissions could give someone at DDG an easy interface to verify quickly and approve or reject them.
These form submissions get ignored and have been for years at this point.
Only takes a few clicks most days for the annoying captcha to trigger for me. I never complete it on principle, but maybe that's why it keeps coming back.
Anyway the DDG html search site is next to useless now, and I'm fed up of the AI nags, so I'll be right behind you once I have searched for my coat.
Brave search is far better. It does it's own indexing which is better than google or bings, and lets you up rank or down rank websites without having to set up an account
They do track what you click as well. Need privacy badger to rewrite their tracking urls or adguard to block their links.ddg site. Combined with MS stink, not sure how they have such a rep for privacy.
DDG bangs is a nice feature. But feels neglected. No way to see a changelog and lots of old broken bangs. There is a form to submit new bangs suggestions but unclear if anyone reads the submissions or how the acceptance process works. No forum or other channel where users can discuss or upvote suggestions for new or changed bangs.
I don't think Google, Bing, or anyone else plan to syndicate their AI results the way they did their search results, so DuckDuckGo will go from being unnecessary to obsolete.
Firstly, Thank you to the entire DuckDuckGo team. DuckDuckGo is the browser I use most all the time. Any product that stops or reduces tracking and surveillance capitalism, I am happy to use and support.
Do you have plans to build an email service without the tracking? Would love to hear thoughts about this. There may be users willing to pay a small monthly fee for this.
The reason I don’t use DuckDuckGo is that when you sell keyword based ads on your platform, it really isn’t private. If you’ve ever worked with keyword based ads, they might be anonymous, but anything you are searching is showing up somewhere to some third party.
I really like Kagi, becuase I can pay for the search and my searches aren’t being leaked to third parties.
I understand that having the DDG browser on Linux is difficult. It would be great if there was a way to just sync bookmarks and passwords using the browser extension for other browsers.
I use DDG browser for work and mobile and Firefox on Guix.
One thing not mentioned in TFA but I came across following the 'we're hiring' link to the Back-end Engineer role. They use PERL (v5). That certainly surprised me!
DDG has been around for a long-long time, and when it started Perl was an old fashioned choice but still very reasonable. Even if they moved to other languages they probably still have old bits of Perl code running somewhere.
For about first 5-10 years of its existence DuckDuckGo also promoted their use of Perl, and afaik they contributed to Perl development.
Wow. You launched in 2008? Congratulations!!! 17 years, privately owned, in the business of search which is tough because google just dominates.
I wish you another 17 years bro. DuckDuckGo is my primary search now.
The slow speed at which DuckDuckGo loads/responds to searches from Asia is quite apparent. I don't know if supporting IPV6 would improve this (will they?), but I see faster results from almost every search engine compared to DDG, which is unfortunate.
I don't like the current AI trends much, but I've found duck.ai the best way to experiment with AI. I've had mixed results with DDG search and the site is sometimes slow to load.
This was an interesting read. I'm surprised by the market share statistics especially. It feels higher than my lived experience would suggest, but I am likely missing context on broader population usage.
the most surprising thing is why they didn't change this terribly long and impossible to remember name which completely killed them after all these years
44 comments
[ 1.9 ms ] story [ 55.3 ms ] threadEither that is completely bullshit, or it’s technically-bullshit.
1. They don’t have to censor because their sources censor for them. “Oh we’re just an aggregator of censored results” doesn’t mean “this is an uncensored search engine” like the claim would have you believe.
2. Proof of this is evident in by comparing Russian yandex.com, my now go to for anything related to hacking, pirated anything, topics of censorship or controversial discussion, even “legit” but rarer information like how to train or use X or Y AI model, etc. The domains that appear on yandex remind me a time gone by. Like image search before Pinterest, unreliable but not sterilized.
3. I use DDG everyday. In the last year or so, I have found myself going to Google, Bing, Brave, Yandex, SearX, and other more than ever. The quality of DDG has for me, unquestionably slipped. I have a strong distaste for Google, and have used them this year more than ever.
They are not uncensored, although maybe they allow that burden to be done for them to keep their nose high in their air on the topic.
However, I fear it may be a moot point as I find myself looking elsewhere often now.
All search engines got so much worse in the last years - it is so sad. We lost some of our knowledge that way.
This already started before AI, but AI further reduces the quality now.
As someone using Duckduckgo a lot, I feel the opposite sometimes regarding google :>
I still use google occasionally for its google search image option but yea thats about it
While it seems DDG is on the same path of AI / chat centric search UX, at least they allow me to turn off all that stuff. But... search has gotten so bad in general, DDG is having the same results issue I had on Google. I don't see DDG as a player in the Ai space so I think my usage will only decrease as search result quality continues to decrease.
I am hopeful in the long run that search index / results will become better as the core UX for most people becomes chat, search result pages become low human traffic (meaning ads are worthless), and search becomes one of many research tools for to the agents
You can search "!w Gabriel Weinberg" and it will open the Wikipedia article because of the leading exclamation mark and w. If a site changes their search url, you can submit the precise new pattern they should use for a redirect. If a new service pops up, you can use the same form to request a new search prefix. These form submissions could give someone at DDG an easy interface to verify quickly and approve or reject them.
These form submissions get ignored and have been for years at this point.
https://0x0.st/K4kE.png
Anyway the DDG html search site is next to useless now, and I'm fed up of the AI nags, so I'll be right behind you once I have searched for my coat.
Suspicious as heck to have enough money for supporting +300 employees plus all other operating costs without an obvious money cow for those costs.
Rather use Qwant, Brave or even Ecosia.
Do you have plans to build an email service without the tracking? Would love to hear thoughts about this. There may be users willing to pay a small monthly fee for this.
I really like Kagi, becuase I can pay for the search and my searches aren’t being leaked to third parties.
I use DDG browser for work and mobile and Firefox on Guix.
For about first 5-10 years of its existence DuckDuckGo also promoted their use of Perl, and afaik they contributed to Perl development.
yes, yes, I know why it's named like that