Bang commands[0] really sealed DDG for me. I know Firefox had install-your-own search plugins forever, but the total lack of friction of typing “!yt badgerbadgerbadger” to get specifically YouTube results was fantastic.
!g (search on Google) also makes it far easier to switch. Don’t like the results? Prefix !g and try again.
My other favorites:
!sr [name of subreddit] - much faster than “reddit.com/r/[name]”
!r - Reddit
!w - Wikipedia
!cache - get Google’s cache of a page
!hn - HN Search
!godoc - Search godoc.org for documentation on a Go package. Your favorite language is probably represented
This is an offshoot discussion and I have nothing against DDG or bang commands -- just presenting another side of convenient searches.
> I know Firefox had install-your-own search plugins forever, but the total lack of friction of typing “!yt badgerbadgerbadger” to get specifically YouTube results was fantastic.
I find "use your own search" to be much less friction than going through DDG since it takes me right to results from the custom search, rather than having to redirect through DDG before going to the results. (Edited to add the following) I'm not going to lie and say that it doesn't make me a little paranoid to think of EVERY search I do going through one provider regardless of their current privacy stance.
I've used them since 2002ish in Opera, continued using them in Chrome, and now I use them in Firefox.
AFAIK you don't even need "install-your-own search plugins" -- just right-click on the search box on the site you want to search, and add keyword.
For example, I have "aj" for Amazon Japan and "au" for Amazon US, so I can just hit cmd-t for a new tab and type "au pretzels" directly in the address bar.
This has the advantage of letting you define your own, too.
I switched back to FF from Chrome a year ago and that's one of the things I miss the most. I really like FF and will continue to support them, but there were so many little conveniences Chrome got right that FF seems to completely ignore.
Yep, the simplicity of Chromes keyword-based search feature is so good, I have several setup which aren't even really searches at all, such as translate from detected language to English (tren Some sentence in other language).
You can of course do this in Firefox as well, but in Chrome -besides Chrome most of the time just adding them automatically- there's a simple preference pane where I can easily configure the three important parts; keyword, pretty title, and search URL with %s as the search token.
I wish Firefox would add this, it's a big holdover for me.
I don't understand the behavior your are talking about. I tried in Google Chrome and could not figure it out.
In Chrome's address bar, you type the name of a site (say reddit.com), then tab, then some keywords, and that does a google search for your keywords inside reddit.com?
On chrome://settings/searchEngines you can see all the search engines and their search queries listed. In the keyword column, you can also see the associated keyword. This means if you wanted to search in npmjs.com, then type npmjs.com and then a space in the omnibar.
Ofcourse, if you wanted to make it shorter, you can edit the keyword in the same page to say `npm`, then you can search by using npm followed by a space or tab
I've used that in Firebird/Firefox for over ten years. If I remember correctly it's configured by adding a keyword to a bookmark and adding a placeholder within the bookmark URI.
google had this capability for a long time, if you want to search for a result in a specific site, you need to type in the search site:www.reddit.com. i.e: " some error site:www.stackoverflow.com"
Exactly. I like to do this for both speed and privacy.
You can even use DDG bangs as your keywords. I do this for the bangs that I use most frequently (e.g. !w) for both reduced latency and increased privacy. This means I keep the muscle memory for using bangs on other folks machines, but I still get improved privacy and speed on devices that have my bookmarks synced.
The advantage to me is that I sometimes use a new browser and lose these settings. Also for defining my own, I seriously haven't found a search that isn't already in DDG. Maybe back in the old days when you wanted a search box from a specific forum (though the site: operator usually works better imvho).
I was totally with you on Opera in 2002, however :) All the way until they dumped their own engine and lost many of their unique features. It was still kinda fun to use last time I installed it though. But it also feels just like Chromium with some stuff tacked on.
JFYI, there's no need to install anything. Focus on a search field on (almost any) website, open the context menu, and "Add a keyword for this search". Put a letter or two into the "keyword" input. Profit.
That article is only about OpenSearch addons from addons.mozilla.org. While I don't see a good reason to remove them, I also don't see a good reason to keep them.
The OpenSearch discovery feature is staying and I haven't heard of any efforts to remove it. Or am I missing something?
That article is about add-ons from AMO that use the OpenSearch provider API, but it mentions eventually deprecating OpenSearch from Firefox, too. It's been touched upon on HN in the past[1].
However, I was wrong about OpenSearch providing the functionality that the "Add keyword for this search" bookmark feature implements. That feature is completely independent from OpenSearch and isn't going anyway.
"Add keyword for this search" via bookmarks are not going anywhere in Firefox as far as I can tell. This was a false alarm on my part.
What the fuck.. Mozilla is really hell bent in this war on their own users aren't they?
Does this mean I'll have to install an extension to replace each search keyword I have? That would be dozens of extensions, many of them for obscure niche websites.
Take a look at my response to my original post, I was wrong about keyword searches via bookmarks being deprecated. OpenSearch doesn't provide that functionality.
That still means I have to set this all up for all the sites I want, which is a hassle.
The convenient thing about ddg is that it comes with a large number already setup out of the box.
I'd also like to know this. Been using Firefox mobile but chrome on PC and syncing custom search operators could be what gets me to switch back to FF on PC
I was thinking about OpenSearch custom search engines (being deprecated apparently as another comment notes, these appear on desktop as icons under the search input field "This time search with" and similarly in Android as icons above the on-screen keyboard. These definitely don't sync.
The other thing are bookmarks with the "keyword" property set. These do indeed sync, like other bookmarks.
It did work very well for me, at least for a typical search. Ctrl+T, <type search in already focused textbox>, Enter, Down arrow a few times, Enter.
There is a lot of value to me in this, the user, but actually negative to google: you can't really justify inserting ads into keyboard navigation, can you.
You can also use the bang command at the end of your query.... Just learned this myself recently and makes changing your search engine quickly if you don't like the results
And you can also write bangs "backwards", i.e. `w!` instead of `!w`. This may not seem like a big deal until you've tried to write `foo !w` on Android and had it "corrected" to `foo! w`.
Just an FYI for other, you can also suffix your search with this, so if you type it all out and decide you need to hit up your !g fallback, it still works at the end.
This is great for when I can't remember the exact domain name, and whether it's .org or .net or whatever. e.g. `! kotlin` takes me straight to https://kotlinlang.org/.
It is possible to setup those as the "keyword" for the search engines in the manage search engines setting in Chrome. I dislike having to type '!', so I just set it up so 'g' is the keyword for google, and so a google search is 'g keywords' from the address bar. It is a decent amount faster because there is no redirect.
chrome let's you type the first few characters of a page, and then press tab to enter a search term for that page..
e.g. y tab will let you search youtube, which is even a little faster than the DDG bangs for some sites.., but certainly acccompanied by unwanted privacy defaults.. not sure how much of it you can turn off and still use the feature..
This. I'll never understand the hype about bangs when you can do the same by typing a letter and tab your browser.
en. <tab> to search on English Wikipedia, etc.
Having to do ! seems awkward, plus you have to remember the letters.
Back in the day, say 15 years ago, there were dedicated search bars and prefix searches were the only option. I've hated the idea of separate search bar, so I used the prefix way after it was necessary even for the default search engine. Every browser ever that I can remember had supported them out of the box.
I just wanted to point out that you can also do this on Google, just use the `site:` prefix. Example: `site:youtube.com badger`. Obviously the bang prefix you're referencing are shorter, but this is nothing new.
Edit: Ah, I misunderstood. The bang prefix will send you over to the search results page of the site in question. That's pretty neat.
Over the past 5 years I’ve tried DDG several times. Each time except the last I wanted to stick with it but the results simply didn’t stand up to what I’d see on Google.
About 6 months ago (a year? I can’t remember) I switched and haven’t looked back. Now, when I look at google, the results actually look less relevant. As well, the ads on Google have become very obnoxious. I don’t feel like I’m being served the best results but instead results of companies who paid the most.
I think I mentally give DDG a harder time than it deserves. When I search something and don't see the result I want I think "Wow ddg is shit, I'll try this on google" And then I still don't see what I want and think "The info I am looking for doesn't exist or my search was wrong"
Despite both failing I tend to be a lot more lenient to google.
Bing and Yandex are worth trying too. I just had a total failure from a Google search yesterday, where the official site for a piece of software wasn’t on the first 3 pages. I went over to bing and it was #1. I’m getting to the point where I predict a search will fail on google and I go to another engine. This never happened before, even in the Demand Media content farm debacle where horse shit ehow ranking for millions of major keywords.
I’ve been using the web since the best option was Yahoo’s hand curated directories. Google is in really serious trouble. These search engine switches happen very quickly, as soon as one of them is showing better results, the switch happens abruptly and it’s one way.
Try "what is my ip" and you will see that DDG displays 207.46.13.131 in the cached snippets, which is Microsoft Bingbot and also the same IP that Bing shows in their cached snippets.
I think this is a great mentality to have. If I look back to the "Before Google Days", I was using Yahoo Search, AOL Search, whatever other search engines that existed. And not to sound like a cranky old man not hip with the kids these days, but having to shop around for what you're looking for doesn't seem like a bad thing to train the kids these days to do... now get off my lawn.
I have similar experience. Upon reflection, when searching, I had some preconceived expectation about the result, maybe a stackoverflow answer, maybe a wiki article, that made me "think" google result was better. But in reality, it was because I was expecting the result, in particular the result from google, before having the result. The longer you use DDG, the less google-specific result I expect. Of course, DDG's search is improving, but I think it is my own search result expectation that leads to the impression that google's search was better.
Google's results have definitely become more quirky. Just now I was writing some SQLite database code and was wondering how the sum() aggregate handles integer overflow. So I searched for "sqlite integer overflow" in DDG and Google. To my surprise the first result in Google is someone's random blog post[0] from 2011 describing their experience which doesn't answer my question at all. I am very surprised Google decided to put this as the first result. Both DDG and Google gave me results on Stack Overflow, but only Google managed to give me the official documentation of aggregate functions on the sqlite website, with the snippet highlighting the relevant fact: "Sum() will throw an 'integer overflow' exception if all inputs are integers or NULL and an integer overflow occurs at any point during the computation."
Overall I still believe for sloppily constructed queries for which I want specific results Google seems to read my mind better and produce better results than DDG, but Google is very quirky.
This is a particularly interesting query, as both SO and the query itself share the word overflow, which probably is throwing off DDG from the result you were looking for.
For me, on DDG, it's the first result on the 2nd page, on Google, it's the third result.
It would appear that DDG and Google's results differentiate in a way, that the sequence of words probably don't matter on DDG, but do matter on Google.
Same, when I first tried DDG (2 yrs ago) the results were horrible. Now I've switched to DDG permanently 2 weeks ago as the results are good enough. Later I'm gonna change my parent's default search engine to DDG in a few days of more testing.
I love that DDG has almost no spam and the fact that it's so on point to the queries and doesnt perform the wide search. My dad has a few websites that he's visits daily, and he just goes to them directly. Since Google and DDG cant differentiate themselves much any more, I feel like the next direction for every tech company is a larger emphasis on user privacy and it's only going to be more important for already established markets as a differentiator.
Once DDG grows by 2x more, it'll become a significant competitor to Google. At the point, that additional data advantages likely approaches diminishing returns. Remember, network effects arent exponential in real life, they follow an "S" curve.
I've had very similar experiences, I'd tried DDG several times over the years but around ~12 months ago I found DDG's usability and quality of searches to jump significantly.
I completely disagree on the quality front. I really wanted DDG to be good and I tried sticking with it for a while. I found usability (reads keyboard shortcuts, special keywords, etc.) a breath of fresh air compared to Google. But it's no substitute for the significant lack of quality results. For when you don't really need search it works great.
DDG is terrible at any location type search and extremely US centric.
You can switch to country mode but then it stops including loads of results.
A perfect example is when you search for a product or book or something. Without the switch, it returns the company website and amazon.com, the latter being utterly useless and irrelevant to anyone outside the US.
But if you turn the switch on, the company website disappears, but you get amazon.co.uk.
Or another example, I was searching for a butternut squash soup recipe. Oddly DDG had no BBC food results. Until I clicked the switch, then it did, but loads of good other recipes completely disappeared.
As for bar, restaurant, etc. names, ugh. DDG is useless.
They need to figure out how to do local searches with privacy, a way I can set a rough location and they remember it.
At the moment their location centric searches are a decade behind Google.
Well, as DDG doesn't track you, you'll have to provide it a bit more context, such as the city you'd like to conduct the search for (or language or country), either in the search query itself, or using the switch displayed conveniently on top of every page of search results. I don't find that too onerous.
Conversely, I find it annoying when Google gives me Swedish results, just because my VPN happens to route through Uppsala today.
I've searched for books, bars, restaurants, opera, and plenty more in many countries (with VPN routed to plenty of other countries) in the last several years on DDG without any issues, and with no need to switch to other search engines.
And you way under estimate how much work it takes to make and maintain a proper dark mode across a site. If it was truly 3 lines of CSS, every single website out there would have native dark mode.
It's the cycle of search engines. We saw this with AltaVista et.al. back in the Web 1.0 days, which crufted up their user interfaces only for a neat new upstart to come along: Google. What set Google apart was that it had a simple, effective, and above all clean user interface, with minimal cruft.
Inevitably, Google has succumbed to the same temptation that AltaVista did, and now there's a neat new upstart to come along, with a clean user interface and minimal cruft: DuckDuckGo.
> and now there's a neat new upstart to come along
DuckDuckGo is 12 years old. They're far away from being a new upstart.
To put that into perspective, AltaVista's prime years only lasted six or seven years (~1996-2002; sold off in 2003). DDG is now one of the oldest independent search engines in Internet history.
Their very long-term, very slow, grinding upwards is one of the most amazing aspects of what they're accomplishing. It's incredibly difficult to do versus an entrenched monopoly (and one of the most powerful brands and corporations in the world at that). You almost never see it happen in tech once a monopoly is stable.
Microsoft could decide to terminate their access to Bing APIs at any time resulting in DDG’s immediately losing most of their users. DDG does not have their own crawler or index.
They seem to only use their crawler for Instant Answer type results while all their "traditional links" come from "a variety of partners, including Verizon Media (formerly Yahoo) and Bing".
The text in their help is confusing, but it kind of implies that their crawler is for answers only, and that web results come from Bing and yahoo (which is powered by Bing).
I don't know why they would, though.
They get paid and it doesn't steal traffic from them.
Unless Bing releases its own anonymous mode and DDG becomes a competitor.
Then they could charge more or force DDG to display "powered by Bing" in the logo. That would be the end of DDG.
Details of their deal with bing is unknown. It could be that Microsoft is giving it for free or they may have even better terms. There is zero transparency.
The only thing I prefer about google at this point is that occasionally if I search something where I just want an answer and not a result link, google will just give me the answer in that little box at the top of the result page. Something like "when are the oscars". It's a nice little convenience that saves me from having to click some article and scan for the info. If DDG had something like that, I'd never even miss google.
Keep trying it though, it's getting there. They have the Wikipedia box on the right of the page for most results. They bring up a calculator if you search for an equation (e.g. 4+4), there's a currency converter summary and typing weather + zipcode brings up a short summary of the local forecast. I'm sure there are lots of other examples as well. But yeah, "when are the Oscars" just brought up links to go.com, an ABC TV web presence if IRC.
As others have shared I've used DDG off and on for a few years. In the beginning if I didn't see what I wanted I switched to google for that search but left DDG as the default. It's been quite a while since I last had to to this, DDG's results seem to be on par with G these days, at least in my experience.
> We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we also source from a variety of partners, including Verizon Media (formerly Yahoo) and Bing.
> In fact, DuckDuckGo gets its results from over four hundred sources. These include hundreds of vertical sources delivering niche Instant Answers, DuckDuckBot (our crawler) and crowd-sourced sites (like Wikipedia, stored in our answer indexes). We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we also source from a variety of partners, including Verizon Media (formerly Yahoo) and Bing.
Hmm I think the Bing is overemphasized if we say that "DuckDuckGo uses Bing underneath so the company whom you should really be complaining to is MSFT."
The explanation is fluff and has no meaning if they don't give which percentage of queries is answered by which source. e.g. it is probably all bing for any non trivial query. To me, it seems they just want to create an illusion that it is more than a glorified proxy / meta search engine.
They probably do a different ranking on the bing index, not directly proxying. If you try non trivial searches, you can see that ddg does not have a different result than bing, only order and representation differs.
Try various "what is my ip" queries and you will see that the cached IP on results which show it in the snippet is the same on DDG and Bing (and Ecosia), while different on Google.
Agree 100%. I recently switched all my devices to DDG as default search because the quality of Google search results has declined significantly. The same 5 sites are at the top of every search in a given problem domain. It's turning the Internet into a monoculture.
I've had the same experience with me basically tossing in the towel with DDG because my need for efficiency outweighed my need for privacy. It seems like Google is systemically showing more crap in advertisements, making it harder to distinguish between ads and genuine search results, and their advantage is dwindling. That and it's just annoying to be sending information to Google as a default from a privacy point of view.
I've been using DDG for a while now, my biggest if not only concern with DDG is local specific events or chronologically close events.
If my search string has or shares close proximity to either an event in the past or a local event else where of a similar name, I rarely find my results.
For instance during the Australian Election recently, if I searched for Australian Election I was never returned results for the election occurring at that time (literally). Instead I was returned the results of the prior election, I assume the prior Australian Election has a higher search ranking than the election happening on that day.
NB: Maybe I need to get more Australian's on DDG...
Of course my searching habits have changed to counter act this, now I counter act this by adding either/or/both a locale and datetime and it nearly always works. I still have to use the !g for more specific searches but I say DDG covers 90% of my use cases now.
I was disappointed wih DDG's regional results, especially since it seemed to have correctly identified my location.
What I only realized after a year or so, was that it defaults to off, and you actually need to turn it on, to get regional results. ("Oh, that's a button? Huh, I thought it was just graphics...")
Long term Australian DDG user here, and with similar disappointment in getting local search results, but I've grown accustomed to using other tools for that, or using DDG to find other tools for specific Australian search requests in addition to specifying, as you mentioned, locales and or dates.
I'm on the very same page in Italy. Beside local search and news it's getting very good. And I'm fine trading off some discomfort and some occasional !g bang for clean experience and privacy.
I just tried DDG for the first time, and I'm blown away how good it is! Since I'm mostly using search engines for programming, I searched for "clojure filter" on DDG out of curiosity. It gave me all the relevant documentation pages BUT here is the "blown away" part - it showed me a small Clojure code snippet on the right side of the screen, explaining the usages of the "filter" with a short and concise docstring. It also worked with Kotlin and Swift! I tried the same search query with !g prefix to google it, but left rather disappointed - it's just links to the documentation. As a programmer, this is a tipping point for me to completely ditch Google.
I've been 100% DDG for ~6 months now and almost never have to use !g anymore. Part of the problem was getting over the anxiety of wanting to double check with Google every time I use the service. 99% of the time I use !g I get the same results as what I got from DDG anyway. Plus having the dark theme saves my eyes and battery.
That FOMO is real. In some cases, ddg is similar to earlier versions of google where second or third link was more what you wanted but all of the links would be somewhat interesting if not relevant beyond first pages.
Google now a days is optimised for top links and page only. If you didn't find what you wanted there, then the rest is not what you are looking for. Anything after first page on Google is 90% useless. Anything beyond first few links is useless. And those first links have a good chance of being filled with ads.
LCD panels can be active dark or active light depending on how the polarizer is oriented and the specific display technology used, so it is not useful to blanket claim they slightly go either way, it varies. The linked article only took two samples (probably both TN panels which are generally active black) with unknown error margins, i.e. it is not a scientific study of how much power LCDs use in general.
Let's just say there is no significant difference between white and black for LCDs in general.
I've been using DDG for a few years and I find it superior to google.
I used to often use the !g bang to google a result if I didn't find what I was after, but over time the results on DDG and google have ended up roughly on par. And now I could never go back to using a search engine that lacks a bang-like interface.
I also like that my results aren't region specific unless I actually ask for a region specific result set. I had a lot of issues using google because it was constantly finding local things when I'm looking for something more global.
The way I see it is DDG doesn't assume to know best and gives you the tools to find the answer you're seeking. Google thinks they know best and if you're not after their "happy path" you won't be able to find what you're looking for no matter what. Look at how much they degraded the ability of things like quotes and pluses to affect the search.
It's awesome to see that DDG is continuing to grow. They're an awesome example of a product carving a niche against giants in a competitive field and it's inspirational to see.
I switched a few years ago, and as a Scandinavian user it's good, but not superior to Google.
It struggles a lot with Scandinavian languages being similar enough that search results will often default to another country, i.e. if searching in Danish you will get Norwegian results.
For anything news or tech related, i only use DDG, but for local queries, shopping etc, i sadly still default to using !g.
DDG web search has come a long way and I think I am now finally able to use it exclusively.
I just wish it did not use Apple Maps. I hadn't used it since it was launched, I thought it might have improved a bit, but no. A quick browse around Sydney shows so many mistakes. It doesn't even list Katoomba as a town, mislabels it "Blue Mountains" instead (which is the name of the government area/council).
I am not sure how they manage to get away with having maps that are simply wrong (the park next to where I live is mislabeled; instead a random piece of grass around 3 blocks south gets the park name). OpenStreetMap might not have fancy features, but at least it's accurate most of the time.
Honest question: what distinguishes DDG from Google or Bing? Why shouldn’t they (or won’t they) follow the same trajectory as our once beloved “don’t be evil” Google of the late 2000s?
I’ve used DDG off and on, and I think the interface is fine (perhaps better these days as Google seems to have gotten worse), but I see the idea of selling clicks as being too lucrative.
Are we just rooting for the downfall of the incumbent / the rise of the underdog?
In many ways they are more like a VPN company — a proxy for hire. If they want to expand, a good way would be to acquire Keybase or maybe something like https://bloom.sh and continue exploiting the inferior Google alternatives market.
That's less of a business model and more of a marketing campaign. As a business model, enhanced privacy sucks bc it yields reduced profits until the day a significant portion of the money-spending population decides to make decisions based on privacy.
> [You Either Die a Hero, or You Live Long Enough To See Yourself Become the Villain]
There is nothing to say what happened to Google wouldn’t happen to other companies. I assume some leaders have more self-control. But... I think the larger issue at hand isn’t to prevent it with Just One More Law (tm) or anything like that, but to instead actively chose to not use a fallen companies product and increase the awareness that Cool Company is now Evil Company. Let the problem correct itself.
They sell clicks, but non-tracked, non-invasive keyword clicks. Which of course means a search for iphone 11 will have some paid ads to click on.
As they've built their user base on privacy and those unhappy with Google, it's very unlikely the user base would shrug and carry on if DDG switch to Google mode tracking with all the dubious extras of data collection, and retargeting etc. Not that it's going to work though, as DDG have um, DDG search. No platform, no phone, no analytics, home speaker, fonts, domain registry, email etc, ad nauseum. So where to collect the data until they're a FANG monster with a finger in every pie?
So we either see it coming a long time off, or DDG become a privacy focused monster with fingers in lots of privacy aware pies. Or stay as just DDG privacy friendly search.
They make money from affiliate links too. IOW their "organic" search results are actually money-making advertisements. Obviously DDG claims this revenue doesn't influence search rankings, but if you're the kind of cynic who tars all tech companies with the FB brush, I don't know why you'd believe that.
Also, while the ads shown to you may not use as many personalized signals as Google, they are syndicated through Yahoo/Bing which means if you ever click on one, that ad network knows that much more about you. They are tracking you just as much as Google, you just don't get the benefit of increased ad relevancy. So I really don't understand the win, except inasmuch as a lot of commenters on HN hate all things Google and this gives them a way to unplug.
There's obviously no guarantee in the long run, but Gabriel Weinberg (DDG founder) is arguably one of the most holistic tech founders when it comes to tackling socially impactful problems in tech probably due to his interdisciplinary background. He's detailed his approach in a variety of podcasts and blog posts over the years
I originally started switching my default browser search results to DuckDuckGo about 18 months ago due to privacy concerns and not wanting to support Google.
A strange side-effect I noticed over this period was being able to find things _much quicker_ than my colleagues. I thought maybe I was just better at picking what words to type in - but after we did some comparisons, DDG really does just provide better results now (and increasingly so) for the kinds of searches we're doing.
The bangs are useful, but honestly I haven't really needed to use them. Occasionally I'll use a !g or !yt, but this is maybe 1% or less of my searches.
I've even taken the rare step of disabling uBlock and some other Firefox extensions because I _want_ DDG to succeed.
3.5 billion queries for google daily, 54 mil daily record for DDG.
That means that google achieves the daily record for DDG for slightly more than 14 minutes.
It is incredibly hard / nearly impossible to compete against a tech monopoly in its core business grounds. I would like to switch to DDG, but for me the google results are definitely more relevant than the DDG results.
I wish it was otherwise.
I don't think the comparison against google is all that interesting because it is such an extreme outlier. How about comparing against the second most popular search engine?
Why would that be interesting, they have no market share?
Bing has less than 3%, it operates at a loss. Not even MS cares about it and they just keep it around as a part of the technological suite that they have in order to convince the government that they are not a tech monopoly, even though everyone know they are. All big guys do this trick in one way or another.
For that reason I don't think one should compare DDG with anyone but google.
Option 1: No other search engine besides google is even worth discussing. Discussion over, have a nice day. Boring.
Option 2: Out of all the search engines competing with google, how is ddg positioned? Why is bing only 5 times its size considering it has MS's might behind it? How important is Baidu?
Option 2 undoubtedly makes for more interesting discussion. Also, if Bing is only a distraction/hobby for MS, then alternative options become even more important.
I love DDG, I just want to point out that everyone is hating on Google's new search results, in part because of a distracting favicon, and DuckDuckGo results have had similar favicons for months now.
Can't say I ever noticed the favicons at all, nor do I see any comments complaining about them. I don't think favicons are Google's problem, I see no evidence for this hypothesis.
A more likely problem is the information density of the results pages. Google rarely manages to put more than a single search result above the fold on my screen, while DDG generally gets in six. That, unlike favicons, is a huge disparity between the two.
I don't see any mention of favicons in this thread other than the one I responded to, and I don't know what thread from yesterday you're talking about.
But since both DDG and Google have favicons on the results page, I find it hard to believe this is really a matter that has people moving to DDG. This hypothesis basically amounts to "people are blind idiots who notice favicons on one page but not the other", and I don't think that's true.
Favicons are mentioned once in the first page of that discussion. I think attributing all that outrage to the favicons, not the fact that they made ads look like results, is a massive mischaracterization of that discussion. Bordering on bad faith...
I maintain that favicons are VERY low on the list of reasons people are switching from Google to DDG. DDG having favicons too should be proof enough of that.
I think you are the only person trying to infer that anyone claimed favicons were the key thing.
The original tweet that started the whole discussion is: "There's something strange about the recent design change to google search results, favicons and extra header text: they all look like ads, which is perhaps the point?"
The comment you replied to said: "everyone is hating on Google's new search results, in part because of a distracting favicon" (emphasis mine).
There is no real inconsistency there, but for some reason you seem to have decided that there is and that it is very important.
Ironically I made the switch to DDG in protest of the Dragonfly fiasco. Only later I learned DDG results are sourced from Bing, which provides censored search in China for years. But I stayed with DDG because the UX suits me.
I like DDG because it covers most of my basic search needs. I only use Google when I need services that are related to my location. Searching with Google is becoming less effective for me because the first pages almost always bring up ads or business-related content (like blogs that are sponsoring something or are trying to sell some product or service).
Same here. Google is scarily good at giving me local results, but for general web searches, DDG is almost always more accurate.
Google almost always takes my very specific query and stretches it too far, so the results are actually for something a lot more commonly searched for. I see this a lot with programming-related searches where I'm looking for a very specific problem and Google just gives me general tutorials on the topic while DDG usually has the correct SO answer in the answer card and all the other results are more relevant too.
I've never considered switching to DDG but I'm starting to seriously consider it. The thing that is pushing me over the edge is the latest Google search results display change making everything look like an advertisement. Honestly, it's just super confusing to me and I can't get used to it. Here I come DDG.
A testimony on how hard it is to compete in a red ocean. Ten years, big growth and still barely a dent on Google's share. But I hope you get there someday.
A significant fraction of Mozilla's funding comes from google paying to make google the default. I am not sure what the dollar value of this agreement was, but it was a sizable fraction of a billion dollars a year last I checked.
Because Google pays them to do it and essentially to a large extent sponsors Firefox's development. Would you rather have Firefox die due to lack of funding?
I've been really skeptical of DDG, but one of my favorite features they've implemented is the system wide dark mode support on macOS and iOS. It's worth using just so I don't burn my eyes out on Google's solid white results page at night, with the option to jump to it if I need it.
The results are sometimes worse, but at this point, I'm pretty happy with DDG. DuckDuckHack is discontinued though, which is a shame. I feel like it's one of their advantages (letting the community write new features into the engine), but they don't seem to want to do anything with it.
I'm not good at graphing data, but isn't the graph exponential while the growth is almost flat or, at best, linear? They mention the graph is yearly but still their best period was 2017-2018, which is not accurately plotted.
I'm not trying to throw mud at DDG's great accomplishments but it does feel a little deceiving if you just look at the graph and go out sharing it with your friends like they're outpacing Google or the search market overall 5-10% yearly growth, which means they are currently at par at most, once their initial boom passed.
I have been using DDG for like ten years, I love it, but I still use google for country specific results. I live in Switzerland and if I want, for example, a toy for my kids, something I want to order locally (for free shipping or the like), I use google.ch with the country option set on. I hope for DDG to add a bang someday like !.ch to have only results from swiss domains (not only .ch but all domains registered to a Swiss address). Of course for all countries.
I've used DDG for some years now, and never had the problem switching and needing !g that others describe. (I use things like !w to search specific actual sites, but not to change global search engine.)
The only thing that bugs me is regional result relevance. It gives you a toggle on/off for present country by IP; as far as I can tell it has no effect.
I get /en-us/ and amazon.com as (all) the top results whether it's on or off.
As a 99% DDG user: I've always had better results with Google on specific tech problem-solving searches. Not sure how to explain it but it feels as if Google Search understands better the significance of the word order I'm using in order to give extra context. With DDG performing the search it's like I can tell from the first result that it really didn't get at what I was trying to figure out. How is Google so much better that that? It's been this way for years.
Still this isn't enough to take me away from the bangs and additional speed and privacy.
(Even when I see some joker/SEO is e.g. abusing Unicode to get bolding in DDG search results, saw that the other day)
Maybe it's because for me it's just locale (UK, en-gb) and not language? I don't know, it doesn't work well for me though.
If Amazon appears in the top 'web' results, it's always amazon.com (not .co.uk) however toggled. The sponsored links in 'shopping' results are always amazon.co.uk & £-figures though, however toggled.
Company websites, airlines, booking systems etc. that I know I'm going to need the /en-gb/ variant of invariably appear in results as /en-us/ URLs.
I've been using DDG for a bit more than one year in all my devices. At the beginning, DDG results in any non-English language was not very good, but it got improved a lot recently! I still use !g bang command if I don't find something, but it is nice to see that DDG gets better and better over time :-)
Adding specific bangs to your phone's dictionary amazingly improves using DDG on mobile devices.
e.g. for Google, I just have to swipe "bang" at the and of any query to add "!g" at the end of it. DDG picks it up flawlessly - you don't have to mind the spacing, etc. Google fires up instantly.
I've been using DDG for a gradually increasing share of my searches and as my primary mobile browser for years.
The search side has been great, though Google still wins for many queries, due to personalization. On the other hand Google also fails for me on many searches by being "clever" compared to its functionality a decade ago and assuming I've made a typo or are searching for something I've not.
On the mobile app side, DDG is a bit frustrating though. About 5% of sites have major issues. Probably the worst is Indie Hackers, where I simply can't log in. After hitting oauth, a blank page with a Firebase URL comes up and I'm still not logged in. Fortunately most sites with oauth-based login don't have this issue on DDG but enough do that it's annoying.
I've noticed the significant drop in quality of Google results as well. Tried DDG couple of years ago, but wasn't happy. This post, however, pushed me to install the DDG extension in Chrome and give it another chance. Let's see how it goes.
Unlike some other comments, I use Google mainly and DuckDuckGo sometimes.
As I'm building a product or doing some other imperitive job, I'm not focused on privacy (other than the fact that I put on AlgoVPN and switch between my VPNs often) than getting results that fix bugs or genuinely help me.
Sometimes when I'm searching pretty vague/generic queries I go to DDG because there's a ton of websites that hack their SEO to the top and DDG alleviates that.
As Google recently rolled out its horrible UI I may go to DDG a bit more, but at the end of the day I just need good search results, regardless of which platform (which both engines provides, but based on if the query is generic or not)
Good, now do something about shady websites at the top of most of my searches with DDG.
For instance, search for any late model car and you'll find a slew of websites like 2020-make-model.com or 2021modelmake.com etc. These sites look like they're all generated from a similar template with minor changes, with some real pictures along with short poorly written articles that are completely useless, at best they're speculative. They're just good enough to get into the top search results but don't actually provide consumers with any useful information.
A couple of months ago I switched from Google to DDG and I'm quite happy so far. The reason? The outrageous number of ad results I was getting. I once even thought I was not searching on Google but on a scam website that looked like a Google, but sadly I checked and realized it was Google.
I just don't understand how Google has turned into an ad manager instead of an Internet search engine
I don't want to sound like an astroturfer but bing results have actually gotten much better too. Though search is a big field and something I wouldn't mind mozilla getting into too.
This is an oft repeated misconception, their results come from multiple sources. (ddg user since ~2013, and there were times when they did heavily favor yandex or bing usually, but these days the sources are much more varied, and they also have their own crawler called duckbot I think)
I made the switch today, I’m liking it so far. Google results just aren’t relevant anymore, I don’t like scrolling through obvious keyword spam sites that are full of nothing of value.
I use DDG a lot and that may be (partially?) because of the privacy thing but the auto-complete is basically useless.
Otherwise it's getting better and better. I have replaced the Google search bar on Android by the DDG one and I notice less and less the difference in quality, while I love searching anything without the feeling it will affect my Google profile account.
Any information on traffic from different language users and regions?
I'm impressed by DDG's search results for non-English queries. I remember it was almost unusable in Japanese a couple of years ago. It's not bad now even in Japanese, although there is an obvious overwrap with Bing's results if I compare using the same query.
As long as the search results don't need to be extremely localized, I found DDG much better and less obnoxious for a year.
Still can't get away from "Pizzerias around me" style queries on G + not expecting DDG to take these up anytime soon, as they are probably like 10% of my search queries per day anyways.
DDG gives you the option to have it detect your location or you can set your location manually. I just set mine to approximately my usual location and it gives pretty good location-based results. For example, “pizza near me” shows a map with a bunch of nearby pizzerias.
As much as I love Google for what they did for entire human knowledge back then, I would love for their monopoly to experience a real challenge at least somewhere else except China and Russia. Switched to DDG a year ago and happy to use it since!
this is truly awesome to see how much DDG has progressed, it’s nice to know there are still some tech companies out there that won’t gouge its’ users for every last bit of information and advertising they can
If you are Google, would it be in your interest to support a supposed competitor, who really is only just aggregating Google search results mashed up with others like Bing, that appear to basically produce the same results as Google; in order to at least be able to make the claim that you are not a monopoly?
Does your answer change when you consider that Google gave the duck.com domain to DDG a few months ago?
If that does not change your opinion, why would a competitor that controls a rather pivotal assets like an extremely valuable domain like duck.com to what is presented as a competitor to Google?
I find that my non-verbatim searches on Google return mostly garbage, so I'm not sure I would call "please stop displaying garbage" the best feature of Google. Maybe a "last thread" feature. That said, I've recently started switching to DDG.
Same, been using Ecosia both at work and at home for a few months now. Maybe twice a month I make a point to Google something for very specific/technical results. Otherwise Ecosia is great!
I don't keep up with SEO trends, but if you can spare a one-sentence summary or a link: I'm curious what fits under the umbrella of current SEO madness?
!g (search on Google) also makes it far easier to switch. Don’t like the results? Prefix !g and try again.
My other favorites:
EDIT: formatting[0] https://duckduckgo.com/bang