A few years ago I switched my desktops to use DDG while leaving my phone using Google. At first I had to !g all the time. Now that’s rare.
Now I’m starting to have the other problem. If I search for a company, product, person, etc., on DDG it’s the first hit. But on google I just get a wall of ads and videos, and it’s hard to tell where the actual homepage is for the thing I’m looking for.
So as of now I would say, google is still better if you’re looking for something obscure and especially if you don’t know what it’s called. But today I would say DDG is better if you are searching for something specific by name.
I've switched to ddg for a while, and the one area where I find it really lacking in comparison to Google is that it is very poor in surfacing relevant hits from threads on forums or stackoverflow. Which is frustrating, as I'm almost more interested in results from there when looking up technical stuff than some spammy blog. It's gotten to the point where I almost always automatically bang out to Google for those types of searches.
But it is amazing how much poorer Google results feel to me these days compared to from a few years ago. For most regular searches ddg does quite well and when I have occasionally banged out to Google for the same search, more often than not I've ended up preferring the ddg search results.
My story is the same!
Also, when I want colouring pictures for my kids, DDG just lets met tap them and print them. That is nolonger possible using Google since some months. I also very much appreciate the code snippets when (already started typing "Googling"!) Searching for code related things.
> But on google I just get a wall of ads and videos
EFF privacy badger + uBlock Origin can definitely remove all the ads (as opposed to skewed search results). As for videos, I think you can get uBlock Origin to remove those too (I haven't tried because I'm ok with video search results).
> Now I’m starting to have the other problem. If I search for a company, product, person, etc., on DDG it’s the first hit. But on google I just get a wall of ads and videos, and it’s hard to tell where the actual homepage is for the thing I’m looking for.
You should also check out Qwant if you haven't. It's like DDG in this regard, but even "more so".
FWIW you would have had a similar experience using Bing. I built a script based on some principals that were in place at Google when I was there to measure search quality[1] and have watched Bing steadily improve over time. I attribute it to a combination of more click stream data as more traffic has been funneled their way (through DDG and others), and algorithm rot at Google which is putting more and more paid content into their results.
[1] And no, I'm not going to release it because as far as I know Google has never released any information externally about how they compute search quality and so its still protected by my NDA with them.
I actually switched to Bing years ago and had a similar experience, good enough results 95% of the time. In the last year though, I switched to DuckDuckGo, for the obvious privacy benefits, and the results are acceptable 99% of the time.
It seems there are real options in search these days.
Could you give an example <company> or <person> query that gives you "a wall of ads and videos"?
I just tried a number of companies and it always shows a full column with info about the company (name, logo, stock value, founders, social media profiles, etc.)
Have been using DDG for a couple of years. Am satisfied with its english result. One area for improvement would be non-english search results. For me it's non-english results are largely irrelevant, compared to google
Yeah I am finding more often when I add !g I don't get significantly better results anymore. I often still do it just to check, but don't often find it was worth it.
I find it's okay for desktop use, but frustrating on phones, because of the far inferior search suggestions. When I'm banging out nonsense on the shitty touchscreen keyboard, Google usually figures out what the hell I'm trying to search for. Duck Duck Go fails miserably at that, unfortunately.
Exactly the same experience here! It's incredible how Google looks like a storefront rather than a search engine now, if you have off of it for a while.
I think I've figured out what is happening when people tell me that DuckDuckGo's results "aren't good enough".
What's really happening is that they've been trained to search a certain way to using Google and because DDG doesn't have all the historical data of your searches on their platform they can't fill in the gaps as well.
After a couple days using DDG I found the right vocabulary to get good local results and which bangs to use to get results from the sites that I want. It's a more effective tool if you learn how to use it.
A lot of DDG fans on HN blame the user or social conditioning and use that as a crutch. It’s BS.
You need to provide clear examples of the differences in order to really make this argument to someone who might switch.
What specifically are the differences? The last time this topic came up someone told me I was a total noob because I didn’t know how to use search and that was basically the extent of it.
I use DDG on a daily basis, being my default search engine for the past two years.
However I don't agree — many of my searches have awful results on DDG compared with Google and I often find no words to make it better.
Local searches are an obvious candidate, DDG is awful for my native language, giving me results in Spanish (I'm Romanian).
But lately I'm noticing programming-related results being worse on DDG as well. I'm not sure why because they used to be similar, but now some of the results DDG is giving me (for very specific search terms) are really, really bad, many times DDG ignoring my keywords and giving me something else entirely.
It's fine for now, I prefer the privacy, but they'd better improve and fast.
I've been a DDG booster for a while. Their search results are usually good enough. Except after longer use I've found two major issues that eventually forced me back to Google:
1. I can Image Search the most basic of terms and literally get "No Results Found" once or twice a day. Sometimes I'll get like... 8 photos.
2. I will weirdly get the Wikipedia link for a relevant query, but the British or Spanish or some other version often isn't even in English. And I do have "Canada" toggled on.
I think you inadvertently hit the nail on the head here, in that DuckDuckGo requires you to know its incantations, and Google has gotten really good at not having you to know any incantations at all. I can even obliterate the spelling of words and it often knows what i'm looking for.
Now, with that said, if your target is power searchers (like myself) I think you have a better argument, because Google often lacks in some of these areas (like being able to filter by a specific grouping of sorts, like if I want a "dev focused" search, not just filtering by a specific site, DDG has some methodology here that I haven't been able to easily surface with Google)
But there are cases where I've noticed DDG falling behind, like indexing newer content, or being able to filter by time accurately.
Today I was trying to find info about Corpus Christi - a Polish film that won some awards lately. DDG gives me information about a place in Texas, including stuff from the local newspaper and attractions. I'm searching from a Poland IP btw. Anyway, the actual film was at the very end of the first page of results for me.
It certainly feels like it priotises things weirdly.
Google Maps has a similar issue though: plenty of US placenames are just stolen from European places and oftentimes I'll be trying to get directions to a nearby town and instead it'll navigate to someplace in Alabama instead. Strangely enough, not where I want to go...
For me part of the problem is that DDG feels slow to index new results. Trying to search for anything that’s happened in the last week almost always is a swing and a miss for me.
It’s a stark contrast to google, where the results seem more or less live, including updated auto complete for things that have happened recently.
And that doesn’t seem like an issue at all related to privacy, it’s just a problem space that DDG doesn’t seem to handle well.
Please teach me how to use DDG, as I’m clearly missing something. I’m happy to switch to a service that provides better results in exchange for a bit more effort in constructing search queries, but the results I get for that effort really do need to be better.
The only specific advise I’ve ever seen is “use !g if you don’t get good results the first time”, which really isn’t encouraging.
Trained in what way? I type a couple words(misspelled) on Google and it magically returns me exactly what I need. Typing special keywords back in the day sucked.
I switched over to DDG a few weeks ago. I slowly regressed to more and more !g usage, and finally switched back to GOOG a couple days ago. Then just an hour ago I searched for "google fiber stadia", because I was curious how well they work together. The main reddit result opened in an amp page (and of course reddit pressured me to install the mobile app). I went back to the results and started scrolling down. I honestly couldn't tell at a glance what was ads, amp, or normal links. I personally feel like I'm in a bit of a no-man's land right now when it comes to search, but I think DDG really has a window of opportunity.
It's only good enough when you're in the US, I live in the UK and DDG consistently returns non local results even though the country is set correctly, it's especially annoying given how many US cities are named after their UK counterpart.
It’s not. Not even close. There should be some sort of “search benchmark” that could show this more objectively.
A table of searches with search queries and the correct first resukt. In maby cases it’s clear what the correct result is (Search for a major company and I want their website index page for example). In other cases the expected result is “what google does”, e.g when searching for “123 GBP in USD”.
It’s not that DDG doesn’t let me find what I want eventually, it’s that it doesn’t have the right result as #1 which is extremely frustrating when you are used to the I’m feeling lucky-click on the first result without reading.
To switch I’d want google quality results with zero added effort on my part e.g in learning better DDG-querying or accepting a slightly longer time to browse results. That’s pretty tough to pull off without the resources and data that Google has.
I’ve been using ddg for a little over 5 years. Those first few years of use I found myself using !g a ton, but I think ddg’s results are actually better now. Not that the search is necessarily better, but I don’t have to wade through a bunch of ads. I know this is a tired position around here but honestly there’s very little I get out of google’s search that I don’t get from ddg.
To my knowledge duck duck go uses Bing's search API to get their results. To me Bing and Google have not been sufficient for my searching needs and the needs of a large group around me for a long time now.
On a separate but related issue because DDG is using Bing the overall experience is lackluster, as other user's have noted
things like very slow to re-index new results, new information climbs up to the top very slowly and often times I have to switch off their search with a ! command to get my results because they just aren't working. But if I have to do that I'd rather be on that other search site entirely.
To be fair google also for the last few years has also started providing a very lack luster search experience and using dark patterns around their results to get you to click ads.
They all kind of suck.
My opinion is biased though because I'm currently working on a new search engine to solve these things.
I use DDG as the primary search engine on my own devices and Google at work.
DDG is still worse than Google in the following aspects:
- autocompletion is crap, DDG thinks that "lyrics" is a word that improves every search
- DDG is worse at searching SO/Reddit/GitHub. Just a few days ago I was looking for a solution to an issue with my 3D printer, and DDG missed the most useful Reddit post
- a filter bubble is often a good thing, I don't search for political news, but Google knows I usually search for technical issues, so where DDG is happy to return results about tabletop games, rock formations and corrosion, Google knows I am looking for Go, Nim, Crystal and Rust.
I’ve been using DDG exclusively for years. People talk about how hard it is to switch, but I’ve never had any trouble getting exactly the results I’m searching for. I sometimes wonder what makes google search results so amazing, but not enough to risk it.
Agreed. I tried it a few times over the years and found the results to be pretty poor, but I tried again recently and found the results to be good enough to fully switch both my computer and phone to DDG.
Although I'm fully switched over, there are 2 drawbacks:
* Since DDG tracks you less, the results for local searches may be worse. If you're in Boston, TX you'll probably want to search for "boston, tx restaurants" whereas I'm guessing Google could handle "boston restaurants" if your location is in Boston, TX.
* Finding brand new results seems a bit harder. I found this especially true when searching for election results. Searching for, e.g., "nevada election results" was showing me results from 2016 and 2018 on the day of those elections this year. Now the DDG results seem to correctly point to 2020 results.
I'll believe this when the third result for "filled torus" isn't "Cum Filled Pussy Porn Videos" unless safe search is enabled. DDG's contextual awareness is abysmal.
I don't know. I am using DDG from outside the U.S. but with English as the primary search language. The Google's localized results are just an order of magnitude better. I end up re-doing almost 10-20% of my searches in Google after being dissapointed with DDG results. Most of the time Google results are sadly superior.
And don't get me even started in searching in my native language (Finnish). DDG is close to useless there, since it can not parse the different, obscure word forms we use (although I type word X in form A, I want my searches to include results in of word X in semantically related forms B and C). Google did not initially parse Finnish very well, but it eventually became amzingly good something like a decade ago.
Like the author, I switched over when the google ad thing happened, and for the same reason. But instead of DDG, I decided to try out ecosia ( https://www.ecosia.org ) which is a wrapper over Bing. But they'll take all the ad revenue and use it to plant trees. So I get decent search results (bing isn't quite as good as google, but it's pretty decent for what I need) and also get to save the earth a little bit.
Aside from a limited set of head queries where they've added their own custom stuff, DDG is a wrapper around Bing. The results are identical and any webmaster can tell you that Duckduckbot is not crawling the web like Google/Bing.
In the same way that "Google is an advertising company", I see DDG as a marketing company. They've done a good job marketing Bing results with a privacy wrapper. I recognize the value, but it's different from competing directly on search.
I strongly disagree, especially when you have all the Wikipedia / contact / google map embedded into Google search, with one click it can call phone number from a restaurant.
Edit: To add more, it's all those details that makes Google better than other, search engine are not just for searching things it's all about the display and relevance.
No it isn’t. I try to switch every few months, usually sticking with it as my only search engine on mobile and desktop. The results suck, and it is completely lacking in information about real-time topics.
Just compare the results for a live sports game across DuckDuckGo and Google. Or the query “democratic primary”.
In both of these google presents relevant accessible information while DDG does not.
DuckDuckGo wastes your time but protects your privacy. At the moment Google‘s results are so much better that I am willing to give up privacy in exchange for convenience.
I will continue trying DuckDuckGo every few months. Hopefully someday I will not feel drawn back to Google.
DDG is my daily driver and I do not miss Google Search in the slightest. I rarely need to !g and its often futile because Google returns nearly the same results.
However, my favorite feature of DDG is it's native dark theme.
I recently switched to DDG after giving it a shot 2 years ago and finding it wanting.
Good, bad, or indifferent, I land on the same 5-10 platforms (or did Google only promote those platforms??) for 95% of my searches. This makes DuckDuckGo's !bang commands more efficient than a Google search.
Google wins for completely agnostic default searches and rich map functionality. For everything else, I am very satisfied with DDG.
Most people, I believe, could be served just fine by most "Free" alternatives. Many people, I believe, wouldn't notice if you replaced 1) their desktop OS with GNU/Linux, 2) their browser with Firefox, 3) their search engine with DuckDuckGo, 4) MS office with LibreOffice or FreeOffice, and 5) their various smartphone apps and social media services with webapps and/or Free alternatives.
How is this surprising? As long as it "just works" most people are going to be fine and won't really notice a difference.
I !g occasionally in DDG (which I've been using full time for over 4 years) but have found that Google's results aren't better, just different.
[+] [-] burlesona|6 years ago|reply
Now I’m starting to have the other problem. If I search for a company, product, person, etc., on DDG it’s the first hit. But on google I just get a wall of ads and videos, and it’s hard to tell where the actual homepage is for the thing I’m looking for.
So as of now I would say, google is still better if you’re looking for something obscure and especially if you don’t know what it’s called. But today I would say DDG is better if you are searching for something specific by name.
[+] [-] _coveredInBees|6 years ago|reply
But it is amazing how much poorer Google results feel to me these days compared to from a few years ago. For most regular searches ddg does quite well and when I have occasionally banged out to Google for the same search, more often than not I've ended up preferring the ddg search results.
[+] [-] teekert|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nikanj|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ce4|6 years ago|reply
Notice how often when you search for "company" you find the company's ad first and then below the native search result...
[+] [-] einpoklum|6 years ago|reply
EFF privacy badger + uBlock Origin can definitely remove all the ads (as opposed to skewed search results). As for videos, I think you can get uBlock Origin to remove those too (I haven't tried because I'm ok with video search results).
[+] [-] feanaro|6 years ago|reply
You should also check out Qwant if you haven't. It's like DDG in this regard, but even "more so".
[+] [-] ChuckMcM|6 years ago|reply
[1] And no, I'm not going to release it because as far as I know Google has never released any information externally about how they compute search quality and so its still protected by my NDA with them.
[+] [-] redm|6 years ago|reply
It seems there are real options in search these days.
[+] [-] halflings|6 years ago|reply
I just tried a number of companies and it always shows a full column with info about the company (name, logo, stock value, founders, social media profiles, etc.)
[+] [-] a_c|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kodt|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] markandrewj|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] redwall_hp|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mcdevilkiller|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] koheripbal|6 years ago|reply
One thing I wish they'd add is to run the calculator if my search term starts with "=".
[+] [-] sgt|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] coldpie|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cjohansson|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ferzul|6 years ago|reply
nowadays, i get different results for those specialised searces, but they aren't better. i much more rarely bother with google now.
[+] [-] mmhsieh|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TLightful|6 years ago|reply
Google is over. A zombie behemoth that will continue through sheer inertia.
[+] [-] chuckgreenman|6 years ago|reply
What's really happening is that they've been trained to search a certain way to using Google and because DDG doesn't have all the historical data of your searches on their platform they can't fill in the gaps as well.
After a couple days using DDG I found the right vocabulary to get good local results and which bangs to use to get results from the sites that I want. It's a more effective tool if you learn how to use it.
[+] [-] whalesalad|6 years ago|reply
You need to provide clear examples of the differences in order to really make this argument to someone who might switch.
What specifically are the differences? The last time this topic came up someone told me I was a total noob because I didn’t know how to use search and that was basically the extent of it.
[+] [-] bad_user|6 years ago|reply
However I don't agree — many of my searches have awful results on DDG compared with Google and I often find no words to make it better.
Local searches are an obvious candidate, DDG is awful for my native language, giving me results in Spanish (I'm Romanian).
But lately I'm noticing programming-related results being worse on DDG as well. I'm not sure why because they used to be similar, but now some of the results DDG is giving me (for very specific search terms) are really, really bad, many times DDG ignoring my keywords and giving me something else entirely.
It's fine for now, I prefer the privacy, but they'd better improve and fast.
[+] [-] Waterluvian|6 years ago|reply
1. I can Image Search the most basic of terms and literally get "No Results Found" once or twice a day. Sometimes I'll get like... 8 photos.
2. I will weirdly get the Wikipedia link for a relevant query, but the British or Spanish or some other version often isn't even in English. And I do have "Canada" toggled on.
[+] [-] no_wizard|6 years ago|reply
Now, with that said, if your target is power searchers (like myself) I think you have a better argument, because Google often lacks in some of these areas (like being able to filter by a specific grouping of sorts, like if I want a "dev focused" search, not just filtering by a specific site, DDG has some methodology here that I haven't been able to easily surface with Google)
But there are cases where I've noticed DDG falling behind, like indexing newer content, or being able to filter by time accurately.
[+] [-] richthegeek|6 years ago|reply
It certainly feels like it priotises things weirdly.
Google Maps has a similar issue though: plenty of US placenames are just stolen from European places and oftentimes I'll be trying to get directions to a nearby town and instead it'll navigate to someplace in Alabama instead. Strangely enough, not where I want to go...
[+] [-] taywrobel|6 years ago|reply
It’s a stark contrast to google, where the results seem more or less live, including updated auto complete for things that have happened recently.
And that doesn’t seem like an issue at all related to privacy, it’s just a problem space that DDG doesn’t seem to handle well.
[+] [-] Wowfunhappy|6 years ago|reply
The only specific advise I’ve ever seen is “use !g if you don’t get good results the first time”, which really isn’t encouraging.
[+] [-] questionfor|6 years ago|reply
I have DDG as main engine for the phone and unless it’s Wikipedia level question, I have to use g!
[+] [-] overcast|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anderspitman|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] speps|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alkonaut|6 years ago|reply
A table of searches with search queries and the correct first resukt. In maby cases it’s clear what the correct result is (Search for a major company and I want their website index page for example). In other cases the expected result is “what google does”, e.g when searching for “123 GBP in USD”.
It’s not that DDG doesn’t let me find what I want eventually, it’s that it doesn’t have the right result as #1 which is extremely frustrating when you are used to the I’m feeling lucky-click on the first result without reading.
To switch I’d want google quality results with zero added effort on my part e.g in learning better DDG-querying or accepting a slightly longer time to browse results. That’s pretty tough to pull off without the resources and data that Google has.
[+] [-] duncan-donuts|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Grimm1|6 years ago|reply
On a separate but related issue because DDG is using Bing the overall experience is lackluster, as other user's have noted things like very slow to re-index new results, new information climbs up to the top very slowly and often times I have to switch off their search with a ! command to get my results because they just aren't working. But if I have to do that I'd rather be on that other search site entirely.
To be fair google also for the last few years has also started providing a very lack luster search experience and using dark patterns around their results to get you to click ads.
They all kind of suck.
My opinion is biased though because I'm currently working on a new search engine to solve these things.
[+] [-] orthoxerox|6 years ago|reply
DDG is still worse than Google in the following aspects:
- autocompletion is crap, DDG thinks that "lyrics" is a word that improves every search
- DDG is worse at searching SO/Reddit/GitHub. Just a few days ago I was looking for a solution to an issue with my 3D printer, and DDG missed the most useful Reddit post
- a filter bubble is often a good thing, I don't search for political news, but Google knows I usually search for technical issues, so where DDG is happy to return results about tabletop games, rock formations and corrosion, Google knows I am looking for Go, Nim, Crystal and Rust.
[+] [-] irrational|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wycy|6 years ago|reply
Although I'm fully switched over, there are 2 drawbacks:
* Since DDG tracks you less, the results for local searches may be worse. If you're in Boston, TX you'll probably want to search for "boston, tx restaurants" whereas I'm guessing Google could handle "boston restaurants" if your location is in Boston, TX.
* Finding brand new results seems a bit harder. I found this especially true when searching for election results. Searching for, e.g., "nevada election results" was showing me results from 2016 and 2018 on the day of those elections this year. Now the DDG results seem to correctly point to 2020 results.
[+] [-] ebg13|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vesinisa|6 years ago|reply
And don't get me even started in searching in my native language (Finnish). DDG is close to useless there, since it can not parse the different, obscure word forms we use (although I type word X in form A, I want my searches to include results in of word X in semantically related forms B and C). Google did not initially parse Finnish very well, but it eventually became amzingly good something like a decade ago.
[+] [-] onychomys|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] typpo|6 years ago|reply
Aside from a limited set of head queries where they've added their own custom stuff, DDG is a wrapper around Bing. The results are identical and any webmaster can tell you that Duckduckbot is not crawling the web like Google/Bing.
In the same way that "Google is an advertising company", I see DDG as a marketing company. They've done a good job marketing Bing results with a privacy wrapper. I recognize the value, but it's different from competing directly on search.
[+] [-] Thaxll|6 years ago|reply
Edit: To add more, it's all those details that makes Google better than other, search engine are not just for searching things it's all about the display and relevance.
[+] [-] Jaxkr|6 years ago|reply
Just compare the results for a live sports game across DuckDuckGo and Google. Or the query “democratic primary”.
In both of these google presents relevant accessible information while DDG does not.
DuckDuckGo wastes your time but protects your privacy. At the moment Google‘s results are so much better that I am willing to give up privacy in exchange for convenience.
I will continue trying DuckDuckGo every few months. Hopefully someday I will not feel drawn back to Google.
[+] [-] cpascal|6 years ago|reply
However, my favorite feature of DDG is it's native dark theme.
[+] [-] pricees|6 years ago|reply
Good, bad, or indifferent, I land on the same 5-10 platforms (or did Google only promote those platforms??) for 95% of my searches. This makes DuckDuckGo's !bang commands more efficient than a Google search.
Google wins for completely agnostic default searches and rich map functionality. For everything else, I am very satisfied with DDG.
[+] [-] elagost|6 years ago|reply
How is this surprising? As long as it "just works" most people are going to be fine and won't really notice a difference.
I !g occasionally in DDG (which I've been using full time for over 4 years) but have found that Google's results aren't better, just different.
[+] [-] pnako|6 years ago|reply
If I type "the two magicians from TV" in Google, I get what I'm looking for (Penn and Teller). It's way down the list in DDG.
I suspect DDG is a glorified regex, whereas Google is able to infer connections and figure out what I meant.