10 ms·
4 Weeks with DuckDuckGo
- SeanDav 14y agoI find Googles' invasion of privacy a big turn off. I have long since stopped using Facebook for exactly this reason. I am not quite at the point with Google where I say I don't trust them, unlike Facebook. I regularly check out DuckDuckGo but its search results are not quite there yet for me, in comparison to Google. At this stage the gap is narrowing, both as a result of my increasing concerns over the invasion of privacy from Google and the increasing quality of DuckDuckGo. It is only a matter of time before I say goodbye to Google forever....
- googletron 14y agoI also found that to be true; but Google results are very much superior in my opinion for time being. But I am not sure what privacy concerns people have, that being said I am not too worried about that sort of thing.
- SpaceDragon 14y agoGoogle's invasion of privacy will only get worse, as it becomes increasingly difficult to get off their teat. "Do no evil" will soon become a rediculously bitter irony. Just wait.
- Teapot 14y agoNew user motto, 'Use no evil.'
- msfd 14y agoActually, if you like DuckDuckGo but sometimes want google search results, you can use Startpage, which provide the same results that google, but "privately" (like scroogle). You just have to add the iBang !sp in DDG.
- RegEx 14y agoI use google mostly for "How to do x in y framework", and I can get a good response 75% of the time, and that goes up to about 85% with some better phrasing. I tried ddg for a week, but I used g! so much that I felt a bit silly.
- rhizome 14y agoI've found that you can get that extra 10% of relevance by including the year in your query.
- loverobots 14y agoGoogle is better only with ads turned off. Otherwise DDG and Bing beat Google's ads anytime. Try surfing Google without an ad blocker to see what I'm talking about, they've gone way over what's acceptable. Either way I go the extra mile to give the underdog a chance.
- jarcoal 14y agoGoogle has gone so far over the line with ads it's ridiculous. I didn't even realize it until recently when I disabled my ad blocker for a moment. I'm amazed Googlers can look at that every day at work and not feel like their company has lost it's way. Just checked it now with ad blocker off on my 13" macbook air screen. The organic results are barely above the fold... barely. Offensive.
- prezjordan 14y agoCare to post a screenshot? I just disabled AdBlock and looks legitimately the same.
- blntechie 14y agoHere we go. Original - http://imgur.com/AGM7I http://imgur.com/AGM7I Ad-blocked - http://imgur.com/Sj7pe http://imgur.com/Sj7pe This is from my laptop screen. The first non-ad result is barely visible on the top fold of the page. Thanks to that key word goes to zach from a comment in this thread. The results are pretty astonishing. I'm disappointed on barely how little visual difference exist between an ad and a legitimate result.
- tonfa 14y agoIt is a commercial query though, organic results are often less relevant.
- loverobots 14y ago;) Google decided that companies that pay them more (between price per click and CPM) are more relevant? Color me surprised. Google is also on a jihad against extremely useful sites that do things like price comparison and reviews. Guess why?
- bob_kelso 14y agoI tried DDG for little more than a week about a year a go and it made me realize how much I use the search suggestion feature in Chrome. The lack of that feature using DDG really annoyed me. Often I don't know the exact spelling of the thing I'm looking for or the best way to phrase my question (English being my third language), and the suggestions I get in chrome just by typing a few letters in the address bar is really great. And often times I'm just looking for how to spell a word and with the suggestions I don't even have to leave the page I'm on.
- cemerick 14y agoYou might like: http://ddgg.nfriedly.com/ http://ddgg.nfriedly.com/ Adds in a browser search engine option that targets duckduckgo, but uses google for autocomplete/suggestions.
- bob_kelso 14y agoWow, thank you for pointing this out to me. I think it's time I give DDG a second chance.
- antidoh 14y agoJust installed it. Works well.
- karl_hungus 14y agoAnd there's no good reason not to do the encrypted install.
- martingordon 14y agoThe DDG + Google Suggest Plugin would be of interest to you: http://ddgg.nfriedly.com/ http://ddgg.nfriedly.com/ It gives you suggestions from Google but runs the search on DDG.
- SpeakMouthWords 14y agoThe writer appears to be the wrong audience of !bang. As a physics student, I find !w tremendously helpful. Image searching is also much faster since it all can be done in the search bar rather than requiring the mouse. !wa for wolfram alpha is again great. It's far better for sites in which there is no better alternative than using their search bar, rather than the type of usage the article seemed to employ.
- googletron 14y agoThats only because the search for wikipedia is good; but for example !python isn't as great. It is nice for convenience but relying on site's internal search is kind of a cop out, albeit smart for their purposes.
- Tyr42 14y agoOk, !python, in particular, sucks. So don't ! the python. Everything else is a plus though. !hoogle is awesome.
- tom9729 14y agoIf you can't use it for all sites you want to search, then what's the point? I'm sure python isn't the only site with a bad search.
- perigrin 14y agoI really have to ask if your point is that because a feature isn't universally useful it's automatically pointless?
- tom9729 14y agoI think that the approach that DDG is taking is wrong. Relying upon individual sites search engines isn't going to lead to uniform results because they are always going to vary in quality.
- protolif 14y agoI think the bubble trend is dangerous. For a while, I was comfortable with Google knowing so much about me. But since they're using that data to decide what I need to know, I decided that it was time to ween myself off their services, including Business Gmail.
- zobzu 14y agoWhat I find interesting, if not sad (sorry), is that it was clear, obvious, simple, like a punch the face that Google would use the data. Yet you and billion others decided to be comfortable with it. Today the trend is clearly changing and privacy starts to become important. People not getting/losing jobs over it and other such problems certainly don't help. But still. Faith in humanity certainly doesn't fare very well these days ;-)
- protolif 14y agoYou're right. They were bound to use that data. I just assumed that it was for serving up more targeted averts. I'm not against making money. I just don't want to see what happened with newspaper and TV happen to the internet.
- rjsamson 14y agoI really want to love DuckDuckGo, and will usually give it a try for a day or two every couple weeks - but Google is just a superior product.
- cormacrelf 14y agoI think speed is a pretty big issue, too. I can't bring myself to use DDG for really quick searches, for URLs I can't remember etc. because it's just not fast enough. DDG makes me wait between 5 and 10 seconds before I see anything, whereas Google is almost instant.
- taw 14y ago!wa, !imdb, !yt, !mtg etc. are extremely useful !bangs. Even !gi and !gm are much faster than going through Google. This is the real reason why I strongly prefer DDG to Google. If Google started supporting !bangs, I might consider going back but !bangless search just feels wrong.
- 13rules 14y agoThe fact that DuckDuckGo is even being compared to Google shows how much they have accomplished already ... it also shows that domain names do not matter AT ALL.
- aggronn 14y agoto be fair, i think HN is pretty much the only place that the comparison is being made, and most of the support comes from DDG's support for 'hackers' and because a lot of people here really don't like google and microsoft.
- suking 14y agoBingo, 99.99999% of people on the street would not know what DDG is - maybe even a higher % outside of SV.
- notatoad 14y agoi don't think it shows that domain names don't matter. it just shows that DDG is good enough to overcome their terrible name. who knows where they'd be with a better name.
- petercooper 14y agoGoogle had the same problem. I recall showing Google off to people (when it wasn't a household name) and they'd comment on what a stupid name it was and how they wouldn't remember it. Similar "stupid!" name outrages occurred over Vista, Xbox, Wii, iPad.. but they got absorbed into pop culture anyway and no longer seem weird. C'est la vie :-)
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- xpose2000 14y agoSearch quality is more important than privacy, and Google is better at most of my searches. Also, Google crawls and index's new content within 1-3 minutes. DDG takes 10+ minutes.
- rapind 14y agoI have to disagree with you there. Google may reach a point where I'm no longer comfortable sharing my information with them. If that happens then I'll be switching immediately. I don't think it's a foregone conclusion yet though.
- hammersend 14y agoI would expect that the more a search engine knows about me the more relevant my results will be. I have yet to see a compelling argument why that isn't the case. Since I use a search engine for the sole purpose of getting the result I'm looking for as quickly as possible, I am more than happy to make the trade off.
- Killswitch 14y agoFinally, someone in the tech world who agrees with me... Is it really a bad thing that Google knows you like x product and shows you things related to it instead of completely irrelevant?
- neverm0re 14y agoYes, actually. I don't think you understand just how pervasive Google's presence is on the internet. Install Ghostery or similar sometime. Then watch where Google Analytics shows up. This will be some rather surprising places, including porn sites and things you might find yourself feeling rather sensitive about. Remember, not only does Google have records of every search associated with your IP, but they've spent a lot of work trying to differentiate and distinguish people as their IPs change. They also index all email you receive using their services or if your place of employment uses those services. In sum, this is actually a very detailed picture to paint of someone. It's not a matter of simply not using Gmail or Google, they've infested the internet with bugs that still provide detailed information of where people have visited and it's actually a bit of effort to slip under their radar. More effort than the average person will ever spend, anyway. And it's not like you can have them remove what they already know about you, you just have to write that off as a matter of record now. If you still think this is a good thing to hand this all over to a company that owes you absolutely nothing and whose existence largely depends on holding this information about you...
- Legion 14y agoI love DuckDuckGo, even if a good half of my searches end up beginning with !g. Love the bang syntax for site-specific searching. I have set up my browser before to do this, but now it's far more convenient to just set my browser's default engine to DDG and !bang syntax search.
- yuriyg 14y agoGoogle has provided this for years with the "site:" feature (e.g. search for "lists site:python.org"). In addition, Google uses its own results, since as the article correctly mentions "most site’s internal search engines suck".
- Legion 14y ago> Google has provided this for years with the "site:" feature Which is something completely different, and is also something present in DuckDuckGo.
- lotux 14y agoI like DDG and I'm using it for more than 6 months, and will never go back to google.
- rmATinnovafy 14y agoI've been using ddg as my default choice for about 7 months now. They have really improved in the last 3-4 months. The results related to programming are better than googles (imo).
- ek 14y agoI was discussing this with a colleague recently and I figured I'd mention it on HN the next time DuckDuckGo came up. I feel somewhat silly saying this, but DuckDuckGo is not that great of a name. I love the engine, and have gotten some great results from the few times I have used it, but I really, really wish it were not named DuckDuckGo. It seems tacky to me and it's hard to say. There's a support article that encourages users to "duck it". No thanks. I swear I would become a regular user of this product if it were named something more professional. I know tech products often have whimsical names, and it's usually positive or at least tolerable, but something about "DuckDuckGo" rubs me the wrong way.
- lhnn 14y agoReally? You're not going to use the product because of its naming. I understand possible apprehension at bragging about it and proselytizing, but whatever. I do think it's hard to sell to non-techies, though.
- waterlesscloud 14y agoName it something more professional like Google or Yahoo or Bing.
- coderdude 14y agoThis same comment is often thrown up here in response to DDG's main criticism. Maybe it will work this time? Probably not because all of those names are better search engine names than DuckDuckGo. I hope he just changes the name. No one will be upset by this move. Here are my reasons for not liking the name: - 3 is too many syllables (for a search engine name, which I think should roll off the tongue quickly) - Difficult to use as a verb - It sounds like a Japanese game show :)
- aiscott 14y agoAs I recall, google wasn't happy with people using the term as a verb for search. Also, I assumed the name was a play on the children's game: Duck Duck Goose.
- ph33r 14y agoLast week I was searching for a: Sabian 18" HHX Chinese cymbal. I was considering buying one for my kit and wanted to see some reviews, video samples, prices etc. DuckDuckGo: The top three results were American Ebay search results (I live in Canada), a drum shop in Memphis (15 hour drive), and various other online stores like discountdrumequipment.info... looks legit. Google: The first page of results had links to the official Sabian product pages, Youtube videos of people playing it, and the most impressive thing was a 3 day old Kijiji ad (still popular in Canada) with the exact cymbal I wanted for a good price in a city just 45 minutes from me. I responded to the ad, drove the 45 minutes, and purchased it. DuckDuckGo's stance on user privacy is admirable, but Google is going to be my primary search engine for a very long time with results like that... it's accuracy still impresses me.
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- hrktb 14y agoThese are good points, though I think ddg really shines in it's focus on the query, and not trying to be too clever. Google tends to put too much weight on regional proximity and browser language settings, sacrificing the relevance to the query. I guess their approach works for a majority of people and queries, but there are so many times it just feels wrong. E.g. on a simple query : http://imgur.com/ezKUm http://imgur.com/ezKUm (I am located in France, so french results come first. the two windows are in incognito mode for fairness, it's worse when logged in)
- samstave 14y agoBack in 1998/9 I was Director of IT of a tech company in the valley. IT, as always, was resposible for deploying all corp machines with the std image. I was following what was happening in the valley at the time - and everyone used Yahoo!. I went through and replaced all browser homes with the new and scrappy Google.com as the main search page. I deployed this on all new machines as well, and I educated users on why this new, minimal site was better. They ALL started using Google from that point on (~400 employees) --- This is the same thing that needs to happen here. Get an IT manager to set the default page to DDG and educate the users. (CAVEAT! -- users are far more informed now than then, back then people hardly understood the internet's potential, let alone WTF a search co was -- so telling the avg user "google is bad, DDG good" will be more challenging than then...)
- zanny 14y agoThe problem is that Google came out and destroyed everyone in terms of search results relevance. Duck Duck Go won't steal the market until it does search better. The average joe that will cause the shift doesn't care if Google is tracing their history to target ads at them, and doesn't realize that information snooping is a slippery slope.
- Teapot 14y agoWhile i'm a big fan of privacy. I think DDG's biggest advantage over G is the lack of bubble. Which gives users better Results. Us techier people knows that it's a more complicated, but there's no need to bother users with grey areas. "I upgraded the Search Engine for everyone, it's a bit better now" Google changes so much these days that most users wont notice it's not G anymore.
- stanislav0 14y ago"I certainly don’t mind a search engine using my previous search history to help me find better content." I actually do. This, in fact, is a form of control over the information you get. Since I do not like that, I stick with DDG despite all the inconveniences. Google should give people a way to opt out of the bubble.
- Bikepump 14y ago> Google should give people a way to opt out of the bubble. Just sign out and clear your cookie every so often, or use an incognito window.
- mst 14y agoIt's simple. For brute force 'rgrep /internet' google has the scale and the technology to be way ahead of everybody else. But when I already know roughly what I want will exist, I apply duckduckgo.com, because they're less raw processing and more intelligently automated quasi-curation.
- cwp 14y agoAgreed. I use DDG as my default search engine, because most of the time my searches are for the form "find me the web site for X" where X is a thing in the world. I fall back to Google when DDG doesn't give me the result I need (rare, but it happens) and when I need to learn about a concept. For those amorphous "tell me about X" queries, Google is unmatched.
- pirateking 14y agoA pretty balanced review of the two search engines. I have had DuckDuckGo as my main search engine for almost a year now. I still find myself using the google bang (g!) for a significant percentage of searches. However, I don't find typing the extra 3 characters in my search query to be enough of a chore to warrant switching back to Google as default engine. From experience, I usually have a strong premonition when a particular query will be more appropriate for Google to handle, so I don't waste time hitting DuckDuckGo first.
- mwill 14y agoI tried using ddg as my default search in chrome but had to switch back pretty quickly, not because of search relevance, but because of speed. For me every ddg search takes roughly 2-5 seconds to show results, as opposed to Googles <1 second. I tend to do many searches in quick succession, so it sort of breaks my train of thought. I suspect this has more to do with my internet connection/location than ddg, but for now it still makes it frustrating to use day to day.
- vph 14y agoIn terms of privacy, before you embrace DuckDuckGo as a "good guy" and Google as a "bad guy", please be aware of a more-or-less universal truth: you are a good guy, until you become big. After all, Google's motto is "don't be evil". I think it's a bit naive to compare DuckDuckGo to Google at this point in time, where they have different statuses.
- comechao 14y agoYes, we can compare. Doesn't matter if Google is old and DDG is young. It does not change the fact that people have a need for good privacy terms and in this case, privacy is THE feature that DDG is offering.
- Bikepump 14y agoBut to follow up on his point, if DDG were ever to become Google's size they would have little choice but to abandon their privacy approach as well... it's just not possible to make a profitable search engine with competitive quality without machine learning algorithms that use user data.
- mrschwabe 14y ago"most site’s internal search engines suck, returning results that are somewhat hit or miss. " If I want to find a movie, I type !imdb Avengers If I want to find a recipe, I type !allrecipes pizza If I want to play music right now I type !grooveshark AC-DC Thunderstruck If you know where to look use bangs. If you think Google does a better job, there's a bang for that too type !g
- res0nat0r 14y agoI think all of those !bang searches above work just as efficiently as is (minus the bang of course) for me in Google. I'm not switching to some new search engine anytime soon.
- goggles99 14y agoBangs? is that like using "site" in Google? Using Google: If I want to find a movie, I type site:imdb.com Avengers If I want to find a recipe, I type site:allrecipes.com pizza If I want to play music right now I type site:grooveshark.com AC-DC Thunderstruck
- EvilTerran 14y agogoogling "site:imdb.com ..." uses google's index, restricted to imdb.com; DDGing "!imdb ..." uses imdb's internal search. I almost never bother with sites' internal searches, as google's "site:" feature almost invariably works better, so I wouldn't be inclined to use DDG's site-search bang-lines myself. YMMV, I guess it depends on how good the site in question's internal search functionality is.
- sad_panda 14y agoHeh, I always use Google instead of most site's internal search engines. Have you ever tried using MSDN search before? Even with the advanced filter options, the results are awful, awful, awful compared to what Google pulls up.
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- antidoh 14y agoOne of my favorite things about DDG is the bang, and my absolute favorite bang (when I use one) is !g. Because the URL for the resulting page is just the search, without all the cruft. !g googol https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&q=googol direct via google: http://www.google.com/#hl=en&gs_nf=1&cp=6&gs_id=36&xhr=t&q=googol&pf=p&sclient=psy-ab&oq=googol&aq=0&aqi=h1g-s1g2g-s1&aql=&gs_l=&pbx=1&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_qf.,cf.osb&fp=aa8b317ec80710f&biw=1036&bih=663 Whenever I want to send a google search to someone, I do it via DDG. Although I usually send DDG searches, to help promote DDG.
- tonfa 14y agoJust configure a keyword for your browser, you also get a clean url.
- sc0ttbeardsley 14y agoThis appears to be a direct ripoff of open shortcuts from yahoo search. http://search.yahoo.com/osc/help http://search.yahoo.com/osc/help
- antidoh 14y agoGood thing they didn't patent it, so others can use it.
- exim 14y agoFor me, just couple of queries was enough to see that results were bad.
- asselinpaul 14y agoI also use DuckDuckGo on a daily basis and it's great. Far better than google in my opinion. And how, with DuckDuckHack, it will only get better...
- losvedir 14y agoI've spent approximately the last 4 weeks with DDG, as well, and I haven't decided yet if I want to keep it as my primary search engine. For the most part it works well, although, I periodically g! just to make sure I'm not missing something important. The thing is, I don't particularly mind Google building up a profile of me, keeping track of my browsing, email, and prior searches. I mind them doing it to show me ads. I strive to avoid needless purchases and prefer to keep as few items as possible (I've whittled my wardrobe down to couple pairs of pants and about a week's worth of shirts, undies, socks). I want to keep a simple, regular grocery list of bread, chicken, etc, and so avoid the coupons lest I be enticed to buy a fancy cereal or something. I know that Google constantly inundating me with products more and more relevant to my interests will lead to a life of higher spending. DuckDuckGo is better in that regard (usually only one ad in the results) so I'm happy. But if I could pay a yearly ad-free fee to Google I'd do it in a heartbeat.