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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 tra

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.

Wowfunhappy 7y ago
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.
- jp_sc 7y ago
  It’s not about better results. It’s about good enough results without all the spying.
  - deleted 7y ago
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  - deleted 7y ago
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questionfor 7y ago
Can you share what is the right vocabulary for example? I have DDG as main engine for the phone and unless it’s Wikipedia level question, I have to use g!
- Semaphor 7y ago
  Don’t use natural language, use keywords and quotes. Essentially the way people searched 5-10 years ago. I rarely need !g
  - Proziam 7y ago
    This is the trick. Google got good at letting people search using 'natural' language. DDG is just a bit different. In some ways, I think it's better because my results are more specific in a lot of cases. I look up a lot of academic stuff where Google has the tendency to feed me a lot of garbage that DDG doesn't.
  - UncleMeat 7y ago
    > Don’t use natural language So... its worse. People want to use natural language.
    - zozbot234 7y ago
      If I wanted to search using natural language, I'd use Ask Jeeves. DDG is just fine in my experience.
      - no_wizard 7y ago
        I have to ask, in 2020, or any year, really, was Ask Jeeves ever good at this? Empirically? I can anecdotally it was terrible I somehow doubt that changed. Edit: Well I be darned, turns out it was their bread and butter: https://econsultancy.com/the-state-of-natural-language-conversational-search-in-2018/ https://econsultancy.com/the-state-of-natural-language-conve...
    - _jal 7y ago
      ...For certain values of "people", sometimes. I sure don't, it is imprecise, more failure prone and generally gives worse results. This reminds me of telcos trying to get in to content. "Humans appear to value short audiovisual bursts of stimulation. We shall conquer all by providing all the memes!" And then they knife Tumblr. It isn't that "people" "want" one search method over another. The search grammar is not why they're there.
whalesalad 7y ago
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.
- gameswithgo 7y ago
  One could ask that you provide clear examples of searches that don't work right for you, then maybe we can provide advice.
- fossuser 7y ago
  Have you tried it recently? I generally agree that people made excuses for DDG when it was clearly worse and unusable, but today it’s good enough to use instead (I think it’s better). I’d try it again if you haven’t for a while. Maybe your needs are different than mine, but since we’re both on HN there’s probably pretty good overlap. Small thing, but I really like how DDG results are primarily links to websites and I can see a bunch of links on the first page without scrolling. I think with google the last search I did had 3? I suspect the article is right about google being better about low intent searches (and just generally bad search queries from regular people which probably make up the vast majority of users), but I don’t care about that. I think DDG is probably better for more technical users.
  - Grimm1 7y ago
    I have tried it recently and my co-founder and I are literally building a new search experience because we are deeply unsatisfied with the current ones.
    - ampdepolymerase 7y ago
      Any links to your new project?
overcast 7y ago
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.
Waterluvian 7y ago
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.
- bloaf 7y ago
  3. You can't search for "older than" results. For example, if you want news reports about Ukrainian corruption, but only from before 2015, you're out of luck on ddg, have fun reading about Trump.
- frenchyatwork 7y ago
  > ... the British or .. some other version often isn't even in English. There's only one regular English version of the Wikipedia, unless you're refering to the Galic one, which would be a little odd (https://ga.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pr%C3%ADomhleathanach https://ga.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pr%C3%ADomhleathanach).
  - Waterluvian 7y ago
    I'm surely messing up the details. I just remember getting other versions of Wikipedia as my main result.
  - jbay808 7y ago
    I got the scots one once when I searched for the Hoover dam. https://sco.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoover_Dam https://sco.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoover_Dam At first I thought either I was going crazy or the article had been vandalized. But then I figured out that DDG hadn't taken me to the English result.
bigbob2 7y ago
I find DDG works for most purposes but I sometimes have to use !s to get meaningful results; even with very specific search terms such as a part number. These days I rarely find a need to use !g but it does happen a few times a week.
richthegeek 7y ago
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...
- mrcu5 7y ago
  Did you include the word "film" in your search? Otherwise there's no reasonable expectation for it to show up. It's like searching for "Philadelphia" and expecting the movie to show up and not the city.
  - glenneroo 7y ago
    I understand what you're suggesting but for fun I did that search on DDG and the film was the 8th result (on the first page of results ;)
    - scollet 7y ago
      The experiment was a success
- weystrom 7y ago
  So does Google, "Corpus Christi" is too ambiguous. "Corpus Christi polish film" is good enough. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Corpus+Christi+polish+film&t=ffab&ia=news https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Corpus+Christi+polish+film&t=ffab&... "Corpus Christi film" also works, results look relevant, but knowledge graph shows the old 2014 Venezuelan movie. This is where Google is way superior, it showed me average score on imdb and even local showtimes.
  - 7y ago
VikingCoder 7y ago
When I search for Fish Tacos on DDG's maps and Google, it's night and day. DDG gave me 4 results, none anywhere near me. Do you have a suggestion for how I could have been more effective?
- fiatjaf 7y ago
  DDG is not good for local stuff. That's in the linked article.
- AdamSC1 7y ago
  'Fish Tacos [X]' where X is the name of the city - or turning on your region toggle is usually enough to solve that problem.
- andrewprock 7y ago
  I do not use DDG for map queries. Google Maps is still light years ahead of anyone else for maps. For non-map queries, DDG is now well ahead of Google except for long tail stuff, for example: technical error messages.
  - smichel17 7y ago
    I currently also use Google Maps for map queries.. But I use it through DuckDuckGo, with !gm. I actually find this a better experience than navigating to Google Maps before entering my query.
  - Doctor_Fegg 7y ago
    For POIs, Google Maps is out in front. For motoring directions, Apple is catching up. For walking and cycling, OSM is streets ahead.
- kube-system 7y ago
  I find DDG more useful when I treat it like it's trying to help me use the internet, rather than like it's trying to replace the internet. try "fish tacos !yelp"
taywrobel 7y ago
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.
CriticalCathed 7y ago
Ironically Google changing how it responds to my search queries, and me finally figuring out that's why my google experience has degraded, is what actually made me switch to DDG as my primary search engine.
bad_user 7y ago
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.
- codethief 7y ago
  My experience with DDG has been exactly the same, not just with programming- and, in my case, math-related search terms but also when I look for personal websites of people in academia. On Google, it's usually the first search result but it often isn't even among the first 10 in DDG.
no_wizard 7y ago
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.
- JohnFen 7y ago
  > Google has gotten really good at not having you to know any incantations at all. I disagree -- the decline of the quality of Google's search appears to have begun when it started trying to second-guess what I'm searching for, and has continued to decline ever since.
moksly 7y ago
DDG doesn’t work well for my language, but it works perfectly well for my English searches.
kriro 7y ago
I'm using DDG but I have to "!g" a lot. The English language results are quite good but the German results are often not what I'm looking for. I'm assuming this will improve with time so I'm not too worried but DDG search results can still be improved a lot (imo). That being said, I'm not switching back anytime soon. Pretty happy so far. FWIW I use uBlock Origin and Privacy Badger.
stuaxo 7y ago
I use it regularly, but for some programming queries the results could be better and I have to use the Goog.
hinkley 7y ago
I've made a promise to myself to start paying attention to this when I do searches, but so far that promise has gone unfulfilled. If I had to hazard a guess, I'd say that I think I see quite a few SEO hackers pop up on the first page, to the point that it's sometimes difficult to find anything meaty. I'll try to keep an eye on it this week so the next time DDG comes up I can contribute something substantial (and substantiated).
latexr 7y ago
I never log in to Google’s services in the browser[1]; clear my cookies on browser close; use several other blocking methods for privacy; and have been using DDG as my main search engine for years. Yet, I’ve used `!g` more in the last months than ever before. In my usage, DDG’s results are getting noticeably worse. It’s unlikely I’ve forgotten “how to use it”. [1]: I only log in to a Google account for Gmail, and always on an app.
hombre_fatal 7y ago
On the other hand, when people say you need to learn how to search DDG, they basically mean you need to add more context to your search because DDG is easily confused and categorically worse. Having to "retrain" yourself to use DDG is the most romantic way to say "it's a worse tool so you need to give it more context."

Wowfunhappy 7y ago

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.

jp_sc 7y ago
It’s not about better results. It’s about good enough results without all the spying.
- deleted 7y ago
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- deleted 7y ago
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questionfor 7y ago

Can you share what is the right vocabulary for example? I have DDG as main engine for the phone and unless it’s Wikipedia level question, I have to use g!

Semaphor 7y ago
Don’t use natural language, use keywords and quotes. Essentially the way people searched 5-10 years ago. I rarely need !g
- Proziam 7y ago
  This is the trick. Google got good at letting people search using 'natural' language. DDG is just a bit different. In some ways, I think it's better because my results are more specific in a lot of cases. I look up a lot of academic stuff where Google has the tendency to feed me a lot of garbage that DDG doesn't.
- UncleMeat 7y ago
  > Don’t use natural language So... its worse. People want to use natural language.
  - zozbot234 7y ago
    If I wanted to search using natural language, I'd use Ask Jeeves. DDG is just fine in my experience.
    - no_wizard 7y ago
      I have to ask, in 2020, or any year, really, was Ask Jeeves ever good at this? Empirically? I can anecdotally it was terrible I somehow doubt that changed. Edit: Well I be darned, turns out it was their bread and butter: https://econsultancy.com/the-state-of-natural-language-conversational-search-in-2018/ https://econsultancy.com/the-state-of-natural-language-conve...
  - _jal 7y ago
    ...For certain values of "people", sometimes. I sure don't, it is imprecise, more failure prone and generally gives worse results. This reminds me of telcos trying to get in to content. "Humans appear to value short audiovisual bursts of stimulation. We shall conquer all by providing all the memes!" And then they knife Tumblr. It isn't that "people" "want" one search method over another. The search grammar is not why they're there.

whalesalad 7y ago

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.

gameswithgo 7y ago
One could ask that you provide clear examples of searches that don't work right for you, then maybe we can provide advice.
fossuser 7y ago
Have you tried it recently? I generally agree that people made excuses for DDG when it was clearly worse and unusable, but today it’s good enough to use instead (I think it’s better). I’d try it again if you haven’t for a while. Maybe your needs are different than mine, but since we’re both on HN there’s probably pretty good overlap. Small thing, but I really like how DDG results are primarily links to websites and I can see a bunch of links on the first page without scrolling. I think with google the last search I did had 3? I suspect the article is right about google being better about low intent searches (and just generally bad search queries from regular people which probably make up the vast majority of users), but I don’t care about that. I think DDG is probably better for more technical users.
- Grimm1 7y ago
  I have tried it recently and my co-founder and I are literally building a new search experience because we are deeply unsatisfied with the current ones.
  - ampdepolymerase 7y ago
    Any links to your new project?

overcast 7y ago

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.

Waterluvian 7y ago

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.

bloaf 7y ago
3. You can't search for "older than" results. For example, if you want news reports about Ukrainian corruption, but only from before 2015, you're out of luck on ddg, have fun reading about Trump.
frenchyatwork 7y ago
> ... the British or .. some other version often isn't even in English. There's only one regular English version of the Wikipedia, unless you're refering to the Galic one, which would be a little odd (https://ga.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pr%C3%ADomhleathanach https://ga.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pr%C3%ADomhleathanach).
- Waterluvian 7y ago
  I'm surely messing up the details. I just remember getting other versions of Wikipedia as my main result.
- jbay808 7y ago
  I got the scots one once when I searched for the Hoover dam. https://sco.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoover_Dam https://sco.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoover_Dam At first I thought either I was going crazy or the article had been vandalized. But then I figured out that DDG hadn't taken me to the English result.

bigbob2 7y ago

I find DDG works for most purposes but I sometimes have to use !s to get meaningful results; even with very specific search terms such as a part number. These days I rarely find a need to use !g but it does happen a few times a week.

richthegeek 7y ago

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...

mrcu5 7y ago
Did you include the word "film" in your search? Otherwise there's no reasonable expectation for it to show up. It's like searching for "Philadelphia" and expecting the movie to show up and not the city.
- glenneroo 7y ago
  I understand what you're suggesting but for fun I did that search on DDG and the film was the 8th result (on the first page of results ;)
  - scollet 7y ago
    The experiment was a success
weystrom 7y ago
So does Google, "Corpus Christi" is too ambiguous. "Corpus Christi polish film" is good enough. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Corpus+Christi+polish+film&t=ffab&ia=news https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Corpus+Christi+polish+film&t=ffab&... "Corpus Christi film" also works, results look relevant, but knowledge graph shows the old 2014 Venezuelan movie. This is where Google is way superior, it showed me average score on imdb and even local showtimes.
- 7y ago

VikingCoder 7y ago

When I search for Fish Tacos on DDG's maps and Google, it's night and day. DDG gave me 4 results, none anywhere near me. Do you have a suggestion for how I could have been more effective?

fiatjaf 7y ago
DDG is not good for local stuff. That's in the linked article.
AdamSC1 7y ago
'Fish Tacos [X]' where X is the name of the city - or turning on your region toggle is usually enough to solve that problem.
andrewprock 7y ago
I do not use DDG for map queries. Google Maps is still light years ahead of anyone else for maps. For non-map queries, DDG is now well ahead of Google except for long tail stuff, for example: technical error messages.
- smichel17 7y ago
  I currently also use Google Maps for map queries.. But I use it through DuckDuckGo, with !gm. I actually find this a better experience than navigating to Google Maps before entering my query.
- Doctor_Fegg 7y ago
  For POIs, Google Maps is out in front. For motoring directions, Apple is catching up. For walking and cycling, OSM is streets ahead.
kube-system 7y ago
I find DDG more useful when I treat it like it's trying to help me use the internet, rather than like it's trying to replace the internet. try "fish tacos !yelp"

taywrobel 7y ago

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.

CriticalCathed 7y ago

Ironically Google changing how it responds to my search queries, and me finally figuring out that's why my google experience has degraded, is what actually made me switch to DDG as my primary search engine.

bad_user 7y ago

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.

codethief 7y ago
My experience with DDG has been exactly the same, not just with programming- and, in my case, math-related search terms but also when I look for personal websites of people in academia. On Google, it's usually the first search result but it often isn't even among the first 10 in DDG.

no_wizard 7y ago

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.

JohnFen 7y ago
> Google has gotten really good at not having you to know any incantations at all. I disagree -- the decline of the quality of Google's search appears to have begun when it started trying to second-guess what I'm searching for, and has continued to decline ever since.

moksly 7y ago

DDG doesn’t work well for my language, but it works perfectly well for my English searches.

kriro 7y ago

I'm using DDG but I have to "!g" a lot. The English language results are quite good but the German results are often not what I'm looking for. I'm assuming this will improve with time so I'm not too worried but DDG search results can still be improved a lot (imo). That being said, I'm not switching back anytime soon. Pretty happy so far. FWIW I use uBlock Origin and Privacy Badger.

stuaxo 7y ago

I use it regularly, but for some programming queries the results could be better and I have to use the Goog.

hinkley 7y ago

I've made a promise to myself to start paying attention to this when I do searches, but so far that promise has gone unfulfilled. If I had to hazard a guess, I'd say that I think I see quite a few SEO hackers pop up on the first page, to the point that it's sometimes difficult to find anything meaty. I'll try to keep an eye on it this week so the next time DDG comes up I can contribute something substantial (and substantiated).

latexr 7y ago

I never log in to Google’s services in the browser[1]; clear my cookies on browser close; use several other blocking methods for privacy; and have been using DDG as my main search engine for years. Yet, I’ve used `!g` more in the last months than ever before. In my usage, DDG’s results are getting noticeably worse. It’s unlikely I’ve forgotten “how to use it”. [1]: I only log in to a Google account for Gmail, and always on an app.

hombre_fatal 7y ago

On the other hand, when people say you need to learn how to search DDG, they basically mean you need to add more context to your search because DDG is easily confused and categorically worse. Having to "retrain" yourself to use DDG is the most romantic way to say "it's a worse tool so you need to give it more context."