Granted that DuckDuckGo.com is quite a childish name, but then so was Google when we first heard about it in early 2000s, wasn't it? I just switched to DDG recently and feel that not only is the interface fast and minimal (like Google used to be in those early days), but even the results seem to be a lot better (at least specific to the programming topic that I search too often). I'm getting a feeling that some day in future, DDG is going to become as big as Google, if not supersede it.
But a search engine's results are only as accurate as the number of users who search and contribute to it, so its my appeal to people to give a chance to DDG and start using it more and more instead of Google.
I use DuckDuck go as my default search on my machines, but I think the fact that Google is not anonymous does give them a big advantage.<p>An obvious example of this is when I search for "Django" (I am primarily a Django developer). DuckDuckGo will return results about the film as the top hits, whereas Google already knows that I mean Django Web Framework and will return those as the top hits.<p>I appreciate the fact that my searches are anonymous with DDG, but I doubt that it will be able to be "as good" as Google for that reason.
> I'm getting a feeling that some day in future, DDG is going to become as big as Google, if not supersede it.<p>Well, no, they don't even have their own search engine.<p>> a search engine's results are only as accurate as the number of users who search and contribute to it<p>That makes no sense. Anyway, we don't use DDG because its results are shitty.
Disclaimer: I work at DuckDuckGo so I'm a bit bias. I won't turn this into a sales pitch, but here are a few common misconceptions people have about privacy and search.<p>1) Many people don't realize that tracking isn't just about having something to hide. But, it can cost you money. From Airline tickets to staplers you pay based on a profile:<p><a href="http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887323777204578189391813881534" rel="nofollow">http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB100014241278873237772045781893...</a><p><a href="http://www.wsj.com/articles/why-you-cant-trust-youre-getting-the-best-deal-online-1414036862" rel="nofollow">http://www.wsj.com/articles/why-you-cant-trust-youre-getting...</a><p>2) People don't realize what's being tracked. I usually send them to <a href="http://history.google.com/history" rel="nofollow">http://history.google.com/history</a> to have a look. Or <a href="http://webkay.robinlinus.com/" rel="nofollow">http://webkay.robinlinus.com/</a> to see what their browser can access. That makes a lot of people realize just what is out there.<p>3) People feel they can't search without personalized searches.<p>The example is often a matter of disambiguation. For example, if I type "Python" I want code, not snakes. But, really, when is the last time you only typed 'Python' and wanted something generic about Python? You probably wanted a package lookup or the latest news on a release. So if you become more specific there is no issue.<p>Plus when you get a bit more specific on Python you can trigger things like package lookup:<p><a href="https://duckduckgo.com/?q=python+numpy&ia=about" rel="nofollow">https://duckduckgo.com/?q=python+numpy&ia=about</a><p>Or NumPy Cheatsheet:<p><a href="https://duckduckgo.com/?q=numpy+cheat+sheet&ia=cheatsheet" rel="nofollow">https://duckduckgo.com/?q=numpy+cheat+sheet&ia=cheatsheet</a><p>At the end of the day some people may truly be ok with all the tracking that takes place, and that's ok that's up to them. But, at DuckDuckGo our goal is to educate people on online privacy, and provide a trusted way to access information as best we can. (Not to mention Instant Answers and Bangs which are super addicting)
DDG has been my default search for the last few years and I only very rarely use it for it's native search results. The bang (!) search syntax is by far the biggest reason I use it. It allows me to search sooooo many websites directly from the address bar. If you want normal Google search results, use !g. If you want Google Images, use !gi. Amazon? !a. Wikipedia? !w. The list goes on and on and on.<p>Edit: grammar.
DDG is great; what it currently lacks (for me) is not search quality but reach; it has trouble indexing less visited corners of the internet.<p>Google did not become huge because of the search engine <i>alone</i>. AFAICT two things, based on related technologies, made Google oodles of money: AdWords and SERP ads. (AdWords used to be so unobtrusive I never tried to block them.)<p>I don't know how DDG currently pays its bills. They do feature unobtrusive and clearly marked ads on their SERP, too.<p>I'm not sure if ads can be reasonable without precise targeting, that is, tracking, tacit privacy invasion of various sorts, etc. Poorly targeted ads are disliked both by users ("dumb!") and advertisers ("poor conversion, money wasted").<p>The only other option I can see for a private company is to sell a subscription. Pay <i>n</i> USD / mo for no-tracking, no-strings-attached search.<p>The question is, of course, the value of <i>n</i>. It may turn out to be uncomfortably high for many users, just because advertisers value their eyeball rather highly.<p>You can already opt out of ads on some Google services, e.g. YouTube: try closing a few ads, or visit google.com/contributor when it (re-)opens. You can opt out of personalized ads, too. While many of us still won't trust all these measures, for many these would feel adequate.<p>I wish DDG all the luck. But being and <i>staying</i> an alternative, privacy-respecting search engine, even a low-profile one, isn't going to be easy.
I use searx.me more often than any other search engine because along with giving the result it also display the search engine which it uses to fetch the result. I mean it is very important to know the areas where each of the search engine excel. Privacy is a concern for sure, but DuckDuckGo cannot win me over on the basis of privacy only. DuckDuckGo can be an answer to privacy concerned people, but it cannot beat Google Scholar, YouTube, PubMed, Amazon etc. We must know which search engine is perfect for which kind of keyword.
I've used duckduckgo for a few years now, highly recommend it.<p>For 'easy' searches it's equivalent to Google.<p>For 'hard' searches it's nearly stricter better than Google, because if DuckDuckGo doesn't find something I also look at the Google results (append !g to the search), and they often come up with very different subsets of the internet.<p>To me it no longer has anything to do with privacy or not liking Google, it's just that DuckDuckGo has the better product for putting into your search bar.
I'd suggest to "Start contributing data to DDG in 2017". Most of their best results are crowdsourced. I've been using it as default for perhaps 2 years now. There's some consistent annoyances, but overall I actually prefer the experience to Google.<p>It's much nicer about disambiguation than google, and can be <i>incredibly</i> helpful. e.g. Search for Zen - you get a wide selection of possibles in probable order. Sadly there's far too many missing. Crowdsourcing needed.<p>It's <i>horrible</i> at localisation. eg set Filter by region to UK and search any global multinational. Chances are the UK site is WAY down the list and the .com and US options hard at top. on google UK the local branch is always first.<p>There's too many instant answers that presume a US only view of the world.<p>The instant answers when they have adequate data and ! searches are brilliant.<p>Lyric and video searches are orders of magnitude better than Google.<p>Maybe 5% of searches go to Google as I'm not quickly finding what I need.
For anyone using !g when they don't get the results they need - use !s. It will use Startpage, which fetches results from the Google search engine but without giving any personal information to Google's servers.
DDG is really great for easily doing specific types of search, eg. adding "!w" to your query will search for something on Wikipedia. For that feature, it's extremely useful and I don't like to be without it. But its own search results (which I think are actually anonymized Bing search results?) are nowhere as near what google manages by personalizing your search. So I'll often add "!g" to my query to get google results rather than ddg ones.
Every time I try to use DDG I ended using !g which kills its purpose, I just use Startpage[0]<p>[0]: <a href="https://www.startpage.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.startpage.com/</a>
I took the opportunity of starting at a new job to make the switch of default. I've found it to be generally giving me better tech search results than Google. For the most part, however, I haven't really noticed I'm using it, which I'd consider a good thing. It means it does its job without fuss or bother and gets out of the way.
It's my default engine everywhere. Very happy with it generally, and the fact that I can trivially redirect a search to Google makes it a no-brainer.
I use DDG full time and it has been awesome , I am a devops guy use DDG to trouble shoot my way out of problems I get stuck in and I have personally found this to be way better than google. The Bang search is very cool too , for example I use it to search github for docker orchestration related content directly ! , I also use DDG command line quite a bit and its really awesome , these are things which I feel are much superior compared to google and I hope DDG will become the geeks most preferred search tool in 2017
I switched to DDG a few months ago and have found it just as good as Google at least for my usage, at the very least I haven't felt the need to use Google as the results I have been getting have been just fine, and that's without the bangs functionality.
I have duckduckgo set on my phone. Recently, I started discovering that when I clicked a google search result link on my phone, google would mask that link and wouldn't actually take me to the webpage. Annoying. DDGo doesn't do this.
The "bangs" make all the difference. Just this morning I used !ups <tracking number> to track a package. I use !w (wikipedia), !gm (google maps), !gi (google images), !yt (youtube) and !a (amazon) all the time. Less often I use !so (stack overflow), !gsc (google scholar), and others. Sometimes I even use !g (google) or !b (bing) if the search results are inadequate. But that's very rare for me.
Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, they all have something in common: EaaS. Ecosystem as a Service. DDG should start offering email first, then news, stocks, maps, social, and finally ads. You don't survive with search alone, you need to monetize it on one hand and keep your users coming back on the other.<p>Oh, I wish it was called something simpler like "Ducker" or "Duckit", but whatever, bikeshedding territory.
I switched to DuckDuckGo as my primary SE and will be using Bing as a fallback. I'm slowly moving as far away from Google as I can.<p>On that note, any good alternatives to G-Suite that aren't necessarily Microsoft O365 (though I'm not against migrating to that either). A straightforward email migration is a big plus, documents not such a big deal.
They do a nice job of extracting and presenting the top StackOverflow answer:<p><a href="https://duckduckgo.com/?q=stl+string+remove+characters&t=h_&ia=qa" rel="nofollow">https://duckduckgo.com/?q=stl+string+remove+characters&t=h_&...</a>
By far my biggest gripe with Google <i>and</i> DDG is that they have started quite simply ignoring search terms. I search for 'foo bar' (without the quotes), they return results which clearly do not include "bar", neither in the blurb nor on the page itself. At least Google will mostly obey if I quote the search terms, but DDG doesn't even do that.
At DuckDuckGo, no cookies are used by default.<p>>Yet they do store a cookie by default - this cookie is called "user_segment" and is valid for 1 month after it is first set.[1]<p>They have removed it but this kind of behaviour doesn't exactly raise trust. Also they are based in US so 'privacy' is just PR.<p>I would recommend to use startpage.<p>[1]<a href="https://archive.is/qntuk" rel="nofollow">https://archive.is/qntuk</a>
[2]<a href="https://8ch.net/tech/ddg.html" rel="nofollow">https://8ch.net/tech/ddg.html</a>
Well, as Google continues dumbing down their search engine, there's certainly room in the market for a search engine with the same kind of power that Google used to have...<p>...but that being said, DuckDuckGo ain't it. It's in fact, quite far from it. It's roughly as good as old Yahoo Search (pre-Bing), which also nobody used because Google's is vastly superior.<p>Give me a search engine like Google circa 2010-11 (back before the menagerie of Bird algorithms began trading "fuzzier" results for raw search power) and I'm good.
I've been using duckduckgo as my main search engine for about 2 years but I never recommend it to anybody. It just feels like a homeopathic remedy to me. What's the business model? I don't allow them to show me ads and they don't allow me to pay for the service. I just can't imagine how that can scale.<p>Search engines are such an important tool that I would be more than willing to pay $10 a month for a good quality one with strong commitment to privacy and maybe additional premium features.
I don't really get DDG. I guess it's nice that they pattern-match some queries and give you a a query specific UI on top of the results or maybe some results UI that makes a lot of sense for the query -- though Google and Bing do that too, and I don't believe they are hardcoding those rules/patterns like DDG seems to be doing.<p>I 've given it a few honest tries this year but the results are really not that great, certainly far inferior to Google's or even Bing's, and it 'feels' slow -- but then again, a few dozen ms slower than Google is 'slow' to me (and I am sure the difference is higher than that ).<p>I suppose the major selling point is that it doesn't track your queries and that's nice and all, but it definitely is not important enough for me to trade that for better results and responsiveness.<p>I wish them the best though.
I think twice a year I get my antigoogle moment and try to use it, it rarelly last more than two weeks when I don't find something or get frustrated because Google always loads faster. It's a shame. As much as I want to love DDG I find pretty hard to use it for a long time.
>I'm getting a feeling that some day in future, DDG is going to become as big as Google, if not supersede it<p>If they become bigger than Google what's to stop them from becoming another Google?<p>Why punish myself by using an inferior service just to give it the seat at the big 5?
If you want a search engine which respect your privacy but with a fancy gui (unkike duck duck go), you should try qwant : <a href="https://www.qwant.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.qwant.com/</a><p>French technology which work really well !
Already have been!!!<p>Started using Beaker Browser as my main browser, DDG as my search, and am working on moving the rest of my life off google (read: gmail).<p>Also have been messing with doing more work on a raspi tablet rigged with a bluetooth keyboard/trackpad combo.
I really like that google isn't anonymous and that it pulls everything that I've done in the past to give me better results. I usually have to jump through a lot of hoops to get the same level of results from DDG.
> Let's start using DuckDuckGo more often<p>I am at a loss to understand really why 'us' should start doing this 'more often'. Is there something inherently good about using ddg vs. google? Why should anyone use it more vs. what they have already decided works best for them? This smacks of 'make the world a better place by using ddg' unfortunately as many others have noted it's simply not a better mouse trap. And what does the name have to do with it at all?
I use DDG but only because of the bang system. In other words I can supply a !g anywhere in the query and it will use the encrypted google search. This is also useful when you also use other ones like !yt !fl !gh !r and so forth. But to be honest, I hardly ever actually use the ddg search engine.
I tried to use DuckDuckGo and it was terrible. Couldn't even last a week. The results were dramatically worse.<p>And putting aside the quality of results, the actual design of the site is not very good. This is probably a preference, but I find it much easier to quickly scan a Google results page (or even Bing), but DuckDuckGo, with the font face and spacing they use, is not as clear.
Questions for you to ponder:<p>1) Why do you think their results would get better if more people use their engine?<p>2) If their results really are better than Google, as you claim, why is their user base so small after all these years?<p>3) Why should we trust them any more than Google? How do you know they're not actually collecting your data or passing it on to the third party engines they use?
Anyone use DDG's grouping search syntax much?[0] I've always wondered if this is something just for bots or if humans actually write out complex searches like that.<p>If you use it how are the results?<p>[0]<a href="https://duck.co/help/results/syntax" rel="nofollow">https://duck.co/help/results/syntax</a>
But DDG still goes to Google (as well as the other providers).
And I see it returns less relevant results compared to Google itself.
Where it might be shining is in avoiding the search per unit of time throttling done by Google, and less content tailored by user IP which I see an intrusion into ones privacy.
DDG is my default search engine because I'm addicted to the !bangs. For example, I use !pf to quickly convert an article into a PDF.<p>I maintain a blog where I "showcase" the best bangs for the Duck: <a href="http://duckgobang.com/" rel="nofollow">http://duckgobang.com/</a>
I try to use DDG and set it as my default search. But more often than not I end up doing !g. And if I don't, I feel like I'm missing the answer that will really help me work through my coding issues. After awhile, it just gets to be more annoying than anything, and I go back to Google.
>>> Granted that DuckDuckGo.com is quite a childish name<p>Call me crazy, but I suspect that's part of the reason DuckDuckGo has had a hard time catching on. A name matters.<p>If I was DuckDuckGo I would rebrand to something simpler that could be used as a verb. But what do I know?
Sure, just make me a chrome add-on that splits the tab in two vertical ones with DDG in the left and Google on the right whenever I search from the location bar which is nearly always so I don't have to search twice when DDG misunderstands what I want.
One of many things that disgust me about the latest big revision to Opera (version 41) is that Opera Mobile doesn't include DDG as one of the (7) default search options (though it <i>does</i> include Amazon, eBay, and IMDB). Ugh.
@rms_returns, my only question is why are you asking us to use DDG rather than Google? You seem to be drawing some sort of direct comparison to Google, but you're not stating why we shouldn't use Google or what DDG does better.
I've tried multiple times to switch completely. Currently I use DDG on my iPod touch (which is what I use for web things on the go) but when I'm on the laptop or desktop I stick with Google as default.
> But a search engine's results are only as accurate as the number of users who search and contribute to it<p>Are there not privacy concerns about this for DDG?
i think they do need to ditch that name though, whilst as you say google wasnt really any less odd in the early days however it did sort of roll off the tongue, where as duckduckgo is somewhat clumsy and unpleasant no matter how many times you say it. i know it shouldnt be important and its not really, its just annoying