I first tried DDG in its early years and it just didn't yield the results I needed, I tried it again a couple of years ago and have stuck with it ever since as it has must better results these days.
Every now and then I search for something and don't get the results I'd expect. So I turn to Google, but for the past year or so I noticed that Google can't find what I expect for those search terms either. The difference seems to be that Google starts guessing and excluding keywords, without understanding that those keywords where important.
For me personally, Google is a less pleasant experience these days.
The DuckDuckGo privacy extension is currently the only type of "ad-blocker" I currently use. I really like the look and feel, as well as the functionality. The automatic downgrade from an A rating for the lack of an entry on https://tosdr.org/ is a little over the top for me though.
THANK YOU. I feel crazy when I tell people this but I 100% agree. Google seems to look at your search as a general guide now rather than actual parameters. I also have to surround each word in quotes or they get excluded on the SECOND OR THIRD RESULT.
I'm very upset because this hinders my daily work and research. I'm starting to rely on Bing which is definitely worse than old Google but may be better than current Google.
I want to like DDG but it's normally missing article dates or other small features I depend on. I'll keep checking in to see if this changes.
I know this could be overcome by me being less lazy, but my favorite thing about Google is the results I get without ever having to click a link. This is especially true for searching things like TV shows, actors/directors, athletes, etc. It's just great UX.
I tried to switch to DDG on mobile recently (using the Brave browser) and I found myself really missing those inline results.
Is there any possible way the old google could be resurrected? By google themselves or just someone cloning the tech? My google-fu keeps getting worse, on pages I know I've found handily in the past. I'd almost pay for a good search, cash or personal data or whatever.
I've always used that, but it annoys me that verbatim can't be combined with e.g. restricting the date on a search, because both use the 'tbh' parameter.
ha, a few weeks back a very similar post came up and i expressed that i felt the DDG results were letting me down. I just actually switched back to Google yesterday, i tried hard, but it just got too annoying having to search for 50% of things twice.
Some people are going to ask "How does Startpage make its money?" and fortunately they've put that info in their Privacy Policy:
Our search result pages may include a small number of
clearly labeled "sponsored links", which generate revenue
and cover our operational costs. Those links are retrieved
from platforms such as Google Adwords. In order to enable
the prevention of click fraud, some non-identifying system
information is shared, but because we never share personal
information or information that could uniquely identify
you, the ads we display are not connected to any
individual user."
> Our search result pages may include a small number of
clearly labeled "sponsored links", which generate revenue
and cover our operational costs. Those links are retrieved
from platforms such as Google Adwords. In order to enable
the prevention of click fraud, some non-identifying system
information is shared, but because we never share personal
information or information that could uniquely identify
you, the ads we display are not connected to any
individual user."
this always seemed like the right kind of trade-off - the sponsored links are generated from the search terms, not the 'personalised' search_terms+surveilled_data blob. if this is _all_ that Google the search engine did, I probably wouldn't have switched.
> The difference seems to be that Google starts guessing and excluding keywords, without understanding that those keywords where important.
I still find this weird because it's the exact opposite for me. I've posted this here several times, but to say it again: Everytime I use google, they honor all my forced terms. DDG, as soon as they don't have a lot of results, says "As we can't show you a lot of results, we decided you want something completely unrelated instead. Have fun."
Google also shows you which terms they excluded, DDG quietly drops them.
I like DDG, but when they made that change, it made me use !g more often.
edit: Because people tend to downvote me when I say this, here are examples:
Query: google "amp" modal
DDG: Google Maps SO issue, Google Sheets landing page, more google maps results. Only 7 is related by simply showing the AMP homepage.
Google: Only google amp results related to "modals" in some way.
And yes, the results google shows are actually in DDGs index, it's just that they decided they know what I want even though I forced the amp term.
Google has gone from incredible to shitty over last few years. When I am looking for specific things, Google will most often present me with links to big websites. This happens most with medical searching like when I tried to find if low body temperature is somehow related to depression. Google showed me completely irrelevant links from WebMD, nhs etc. I had to go to page 4 to find some links to forums where people were discussing about it.
I've found myself using double quotes more often now than ever before. Google just doesn't seem to understand what I'm looking for.
The growth of content marketing has ruined Google search results.
Doesn't DDG also exclude keywords it doesn't think are important? And it doesn't have a "missing `keyword`" warning below the results either, as imperfect as that was.
Ex: `libwacom huion gaomon`, missing libwacom in first result.
I tried switching to Brave and DuckDuckGo over the last six months, but found myself opening google and re-running the search so often that I recently gave up, and, with misgivings, reset my browser and search preferences back to google.
Duckduckgo just never found what I was looking for, and, in broader searches, would return relatively fewer results.
I went through the same process, until I realized that Google’s results aren’t better for me because I evolved.
What Google does is to have context and to use that context to make the queries more specific. They use for example your location and your history of searches.
However being privacy conscious, I deleted my Google history and disabled the collecting of history in my Google account. And then the results became visibly worse.
This is important because when people complain loudly about the difference, they usually have a search history in Google going back a decade, reflecting a trail of embarrassing moments of course that most couldn’t make public. Not many people are curious to look at that history, although to Google’s credit, they do expose it in full detail and a nice interface.
With DDG you just have to be a little more explicit. For example searching for “ruby” won’t yield results related to programming (except for ruby-lang.org), but searching for “ruby programming” does. So in general you just have to be a little more specific and we’re talking about a word or two.
Nowadays whenever I can’t find something on DDG on my first try, I’m confident that I won’t find it with Google either. And lately I feel like DDG is better, maybe due to my changing search patterns.
The real gain is privacy and this reflects in the searches you’re doing. I can’t convince myself to search for medical conditions on Google anymore. What if I’d get classified as a diabetic (I’m not)? What if that data leaks and this affects my credit score? No thank you.
I understand the point being made, but it's arguably irrelevant why Duckduckgo's results are lower in quality - the switch still involves the loss of not insignificant utility, which goes against the experiences I'm reading here from all the people here saying how great their search results were.
Moreover, I'm not convinced it's entirely due to my search history, location or other online history. It's definitely not search skills, or inspecificity of search terms that's the problem.
IMHO, it's mostly poor coverage. In my casual experience, it's particularly evident in academic journal articles, but there's definitely poorer coverage in general. Even when I know the web page I'm looking for, I can't get it to show up in the search. Or, as I mentioned, a blanket search will bring up a page or so of relevant links, compared to many pages from google.
The elephant in the room here is Bing. Bing is an objectively worse search. There's no way around that, and no ideological dressing that can change the fact.
But nowadays they are better for that same keyword. Whether somebody on their side noticed my issue on Reddit and manipulated this particular result, I don't know. But they definitely aren't just a shell over Bing.
Google provides the best results in this case, without doubt. For a software company of their size, hiring some of the best engineers and specialized in ML, I wouldn't have expected otherwise.
I still use Google's Search for double checking whenever I don't find something, but as I said, I increasingly find that for my search queries Google can't help me in finding anything that DuckDuckGo can't.
I don't search academic papers so of course we have a different experience.
---
Btw, I don't think caring about privacy is an ideology. I've worked in the advertising industry and I still do, although I'm on the publisher's side now.
Companies are carelessly trading user data and if that happens to me (1) I need to be informed and (2) I need a substantial reward in return to outweigh the risks and as long as there are cost effective alternatives that protect privacy, I'd rather use those, voting with my wallet and all that.
> We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we also source from a variety of partners, including Oath (formerly Yahoo) and Bing.
The other 400 sources are just used to widget stuff while the organic links are mostly from Bing and Oath. So it's a mash-up.
My experience has mirrored yours. Today i found, a little bit surprisingly, that when i went to !G to get a different selection of results, what i got was considerably worse than DDG.
my guess as to the reasons for this particular failure of !G is that, because i have been gradually shifting to fastmail for the past 1.2years and the chain of messages between myself and the company i was looking up never managed to make it from linkedin --> gmail.
Context can't explain everything. Ive read an article DDG found for me and wondered why all prices were in DM (currency in germany before euro). The article was really that old. Something like that never happend on google. Context can explain some fails of DDG, but not all.
I agree. In general, DDG tends to have pretty solid results now. I'm glad it doesn't think it knows what I'm searching for better than I do.
The one advantage I will give Google is that the layout can be better in some situations. For example, if I'm getting multiple results from StackOverflow and MDN on the same query, I like how Google groups them. Also, searching for something like sports scores is a better experience on Google because I don't need to click into any links. Other than that, I find DDG just as good if not better in almost every other area.
I rarely get useful results from Duckduckgo, so !g is my usual first attempt, not a secondary thing after trying DDG's results.
For example, just now, I came across "ED survivor". No idea what "ED" means here (it's eating disorder).
I just put it into DDG and got nothing on the first page that looked like it could be pertinent: A user name "ED survivor" on Instagram posting about vegetarianism, Ed Stafford on Wikipedia, "ED: The Survivor" (a mod for a computer game evidently), Devil Survivor Full HD (a film obviously, no idea what ED means here), a few more in this vein, until the page ends with the TV series Survivor on Wikipedia.
Google: First hit "Template:ED survivor" in Wikipedia (and that page contains the words "eating disorder". Second hit "Eating Disorder Survivors Wall", third hit "Surviving ED" from HealthyPlace (so it's health-related – and the snippet shown on the result page starts with "Eating Disorders recovery is a long road.).
The rest of the results on Google are all similar, all of them(!) clearly tell me what ED means in this context.
DDG gave me crap, none of the results(!) came even close to answering my question.
This is not a singular occurence, just a thing I wanted to know a few minutes ago. I'd love to take DDG's search results, but when not narrowed down to specific origins with bang commands, the results are usually worthless.
Edit: and before people tell me that I should have used quotation marks around my search terms, great, let's try that: Two results with "We would like to show you a description here but the site won't allow us.". From the top three results, one times out, one redirects to a sports betting site, and one to a product in an online apothecary (nothing to do with eating disorder). Then penis extension. Erectile dysfunction, something general about mental disorder, and again two results about penis enlargement.
Totally agree. Had a similar experience as well and then tried again a few months ago and am happy. I do still need to jump over to Le Goog for some searches though. The UI supports a good amount of tweaking which was helpful for getting me used to the switch too
"Startpage acts as an intermediary between you and Google, so your searches are completely private. Startpage submits your query to Google anonymously, then returns Google results to you privately. Google never sees you and does not know who made the request; they only see Startpage."
> Why does Google let Startpage access their search results?
> Startpage.com has a contract with Google that allows us to use their official "Syndicated Web Search" feed, so we have to pay them to get those results.
So what is their own business model? Do they show ads? (I disabled adblock but didn't see any.)
My main problem with Google was that the entire first screen (above the fold) was full of advertising and included no actual search results, in the majority of my searches. DuckDuckGo is better at that, for now, so I made the switch about a year ago.
It just occurred to me that I never see ads on Google. I'm not sure why. Possible reasons: I have an old computer, use out-of-date browsers, and my computer is set to spanish (but almost all search results are in english), browser set to 'block web advertising'. But..never any ads, at all - no sponsored results etc, nothing, not on the side or on search results or at the top of the page. (I have seen a load of them on other peoples' computers' google searches, so I know what they look like.)
As I started to work in an advertising agency some years ago they told me about ads on google. I didn't believe them until they showed me. It's beyond me how anybody can use the web without an ad blocker.
I use it, but it fails in several areas. It has no filter to limit searches to a year, their options stop after 1 month. Their image search results also lack the depth of Google's. These are features I actually use heavily. So even though I have my browser defaulted to DDG, I find myself having to go to Google several times a day. I really hope they improve this.
Same, at the start I regularly dropped back to Google if I couldn't find what I was looking for, the last few times I tried that the Google results were even less helpful than the DDG ones. Maybe my Google-fu is just rusty, though.
It's my default search engine now, and the bangs shortcuts are handy if I need to temporarily override the search engine (ie: !g for Google, !w for Wikipedia, etc).
