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 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.
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 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.
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.
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 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 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.
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.
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.
"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 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.
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.
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.
I prefer DDG over Google because I seem to encounter less SEO blogspam, but I wonder how long it'll be before such blogspam is tuned for both. Ideally there are conflicting parameters that would make it difficult to game both search engines for any ambiguous query.
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’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 switched to DDG earlier everywhere this year and, honestly, I've totally forgotten about Google Search. However, I also run pi-hole, and unfortunately, the DDG top results are usually all sponsored and don't work, due to pi-hole. I don't begrudge DDG the click revenue, but I haven't spent time trying to set the whitelist rules.
That's funny ... I haven't noticed this problem. I don't run pi-hole, I use uBlock with some customizations so I'm guessing I'm just not seeing the sponsored links at all.
I killed all text/image ads after an accidental click on a non-intrusive ad a decade ago infected my work laptop and haven't looked back. I'm going to turn it back on for DDG and just "be careful". Hopefully this is less of a problem in 2021, and hopefully it's not a problem at all on DDG, but the ad I clicked by accident was on a mainstream, non-porn/traditionally risky site ... it was a flash exploit, though, so at least that's gone given my configuration.
[+] [-] jffry|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] howdydoo|4 years ago|reply
I'm not sure if HN bans whole domains or not, but this seems like one to ban.
[+] [-] eganist|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wsdrdsw|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Amezarak|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Waterluvian|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] klaudius|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] IAmGraydon|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] syshum|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Dislingual|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] geerlingguy|4 years ago|reply
I 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.
[+] [-] ignoramous|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alexandargyurov|4 years ago|reply
Any other city recently get them as well?
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/duckduckgo/comments/qyss8g/spotted_...
[+] [-] PopAlongKid|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 6a74|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jakear|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] InvisibleUp|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] codazoda|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zibzab|4 years ago|reply
Gets really annoying if you use a browser that doesn't save cookies
[+] [-] charcircuit|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TekMol|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] bellyfullofbac|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] 1MachineElf|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] m3nu|4 years ago|reply
1: https://twitter.com/borg_base/status/1474807112282906627
[+] [-] paulcole|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] robodobo|4 years ago|reply
"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."
[+] [-] axpy906|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xnx|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] frabcus|4 years ago|reply
https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/so...
[+] [-] seanw444|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Waterluvian|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dazc|4 years ago|reply
/wishful_thinking
[+] [-] orthoxerox|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CAPSLOCKSSTUCK|4 years ago|reply
Also, this article mentions DuckDuckGo's email protection service, which some (like me) may be unfamiliar with. Seems like a proxy for incoming email that strips trackers, pretty neat: https://www.theverge.com/2021/7/20/22576352/duckduckgo-email...
[+] [-] textcortex|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tmcneal|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] tmcneal|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] s_dev|4 years ago|reply
Most of the returned results (gstatcounter) don't include DDG.
[+] [-] twobitshifter|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] aix1|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tappaseater|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mdip|4 years ago|reply
I killed all text/image ads after an accidental click on a non-intrusive ad a decade ago infected my work laptop and haven't looked back. I'm going to turn it back on for DDG and just "be careful". Hopefully this is less of a problem in 2021, and hopefully it's not a problem at all on DDG, but the ad I clicked by accident was on a mainstream, non-porn/traditionally risky site ... it was a flash exploit, though, so at least that's gone given my configuration.