I've been switched to DDG for about 4 months now. I am loving the Ads I get in youtube now that google doesn't know what I am interested in they have noting to do with anything I care about. It's wonderful. DDG still has a way to go for really technical queries. I just can't get the same results about this error or that in Java. Until then I'm 100% DDG for personal and 100% google for work.
I have been using DDG for roughly 2 years now and I always search for things technical or non-technical there first. If it does not give any result or when I know it's very technical I simply add !g to the end (but you can add it anywhere) and it automatically searches the same thing in Google.
Some examples of things I personally thing DDG could improve / is different then Google:
- DDG gives the feeling they prefer wikipedia over stack overflow. Stack overflow ranks often second.
- GLSL shaders. DDG does not index websites such as shadertoy. Example search for "Gold Noise Uniform Random"
- indexing Youtube and other videos. It takes up to 2 days before new youtube videos show up if you search for a video. Example a mcdonalds burned down in my city a few weeks ago so I searched for videos and photos. It did not find any videos only photos and articles. Google found a few videos including once on a dutch news website.
- Visual search and reverse image lookup is not that great. Only in Bing you can search for a video based on a image DDG and Google both can not do that. So both could improve that.
- DDG sometimes gives the feeling not enough people have searched for something, This feeling is more a feeling then a real thing. This is mostly because Google finds a lot of spelling / typo's in your search query and DDG appears to only repairs it until it contains valid words. Example search for "A apple a day keps the", Google corrects AN and KEEPS but DuckDuckGo only corrects KEEPS.
- Old websites are not indexed that well. Example if you are developing a gameboy advance game it takes a while before you find Tonc (one of the best resources regarding GBA development). With google this experience is terrible as well but it takes less time to find some good things.
Note that the comments regarding indexing should be attributed to Bing, the underlying search engine that DDG uses currently. I too switch to !g occasionally when searching particular niches.
> - indexing Youtube and other videos. It takes up to 2 days before new youtube videos show up if you search for a video. Example a mcdonalds burned down in my city a few weeks ago so I searched for videos and photos. It did not find any videos only photos and articles. Google found a few videos including once on a dutch news website.
If I know that I am searching a YouTube video, I usually search directly on youtube.com. I use Firefox search keywords for this, I just type "yt Rick Astley Never" in my top bar and instantly see the results. Pretty sure Chromium et al. should have something similar...
One problem with this approach is that Youtube's search just feels so bad (at least compared to what you expect out of Google) and what's worse, they limit the number of search results. So you get around 10 somewhat related results and then they just instantly stop and you get some "you might like these videos as well" results. Frustrates me to no end and I think there could be a great opportunity in somehow indexing videos properly and creating a search engine around it. Then again you'd think Google would've done this but maybe they aren't able to. But in any case I'd prefer an endless stream of semi-related videos compared to their 10 results.
> I have been using DDG for roughly 2 years now and I always search for things technical or non-technical there first. If it does not give any result or when I know it's very technical I simply add !g to the end
I am the same, but i default to !sp (startpage.com) first.
They claim:
> You can’t beat Google when it comes to online search. So we’re paying them to use their brilliant search results in order to remove all trackers and logs. [...]
The key to technical questions in ddg is to be very verbose. From tracking you Google knows you're a programer who works in Java, ddg doesn't do that by design.
When I search "transformer" in ddg I get the movie franchise, when I do it in Google I get the ones you see hanging on utility poles. Google knows I look at power electronics. When I search "voltage transformer" in ddg I get the same quality results as google.
I use DDG as well but I went further and told Firefox to use a dedicated container for google domains. I also did it because they made Youtube really annoying to use when you're not logged in, so I made a burner account but it's only active inside this container and they can't track me around the web (at least, not with that).
You might enjoy invidious. It's a frontend for youtube that cuts 99% of the bloat and show videos directly in your html5 player. It even supports subscriptions without a google account!
FWIW you can also subscribe to YouTube channels / Playlists (IIRC) via RSS feeds. I think they removed the official buttons, but the links still work and are easy to forge by hand.
The instance of the original dev has shut down because he seized developement, but the project ist still doing fine. There's multiple public instances, but those are often unable to handle all user requests and get rate limited by google every now and then. I'm currently using invidious.tube, it has a good "real" uptime in my opinion (the site is up the whole time but might have issues like described above). I'm considering just self hosting should things get worse.
I haven't had success with using Invidious. I'd love to ditch the YT frontend and tracking though.
I have extensions that remove suggested videos on the sidebar, homepage, and during the video; as well as ads, comments, and product recommendations. I use YT in a Firefox container without an account that is separate from my other Google container.
You can run your own instance; that’s what I do. Public instances tend to be overloaded or their external IP becomes temporarily banned by YouTube (since its traffic is obviously more than what a typical home would use).
How do you specify what sites to be put in a container? What I want to be able to do is anytime I click on my bookmark link, it'll open it up in a new container. I haven't figured out a way to do this without some manual process.
The official "Multi-Account Containers" extension does that. Honestly I don't understand why it's not built-in, because as you mention without it it's hard not to "leak" outside of the containers.
With it you can associate domains with containers and tell Firefox to always open them in a container. It will also automatically un-containerize if you follow a link to a third party domain. Basically how I expect containers to work.
Holy crap thank you so much for this! This was the primary thing I complained about for containers and why I never bothered to use them. I completely agree this should've been integrated with it and it makes no sense to me why. Containers as it is are pretty tedious.
The Enhancer for YouTube extension cuts down on the annoying things when not logged in. I was able to move to YouTube to temporary containers using the EfYT extension to set my preferences.
I do the same. I am a little annoyed that I can’t pay for ad-free Youtube without also buying YouTube Music, which I didn’t need.
Content costs money, and if I don’t want ads, I need to pay the difference. I where a little surprised to see Linus Tech Tips break down they income and showing that Youtube Premium as significant source of revenue.
I think it’s they’re intrinsically baked together as YouTube has had to license music for all those YouTube music videos, which are hugely popular as you could imagine.
I tried a couple years ago, but didn't like it that much. Ended up going back to spotify.
I remember trying to get the Guardians of the Galaxy awesome mix, and it only had a youtube video with all songs glued together. Also, it was a bit weird experience overall because they matched so many random videos
When I tried it, I couldn't deal with it auto-generating a 'related' playlist whenever I played anything. (I pay for YT Premium, so if I could use YT Music then I wouldn't have to pay for Spotify.) How did you deal with that problem?
I do too and pay everywhere I can for the services that I use. The world would be a far better place if it didn’t need ad support, and the only alternative that so far works at all is direct payment.
Along these lines, why doesn't google introduce a paid search service without ads? My hunch is that no matter the price point, it would be a huge revenue hit compared to actual advertising payments.
My other hunch is that it would make the non ad-free experience greatly cheapened in the eyes of the consumer, in the same way youtube with ads feels different after experiencing youtube premium.
Because if you allow a paid option, all the people worth advertising to switch to that, and now the advertising portion of the business is worth a lot less.
They’re betting they can get more out of advertisers than paying subscribers.
You can use Youtube Vanced (Youtube Advance without the Ad) on your phone. I can not recommend it enough.
It also supports "Sponsor blocker". It's the best app for youtube addicts.
> they have noting to do with anything I care about
Why is this good? For me personally, both FB and Google figured out that I'm into home renovation and all they keep recommending me is relevant stuff. So I consider it free research done for me :) Contractors, webshops, pretty images are all over my feed.
I even press accept cookies for webshops I want to see more of their competition :)
Eh. I don't really want to be sold to even if the thing I'm being sold might be interesting to me. I don't need more stuff and I really don't need my brain thinking I need more stuff. To each their own.
I use DDG as well. I use FF as my primary personal browser, I have installed uBlock Origin and Enhancer for YouTube, https://www.mrfdev.com/enhancer-for-youtube, and I now never get any ads on YouTube.
I don't understand what's the issue with the technical queries.
Are they ambiguous? Are they paraphrasing the error description?
Because for me, most of the time, I just paste the error message into DDG, and the relevant Stack Overflow answer, not question page, the actual answer, is in DDG search results for me to use and fix my problem.
This is actually one of my favourites DDG features, along with currency conversion.
Out of curiosity, do you use the "Send Feedback" in the bottom-right(!) corner of the results page to let them know? I have almost zero belief it does anything, but without even attempting to provide feedback I don't think it's reasonable to expect any change
As the person who just read through feedback today, I can assure you that each piece of feedback sent is received, read and logged by real humans who care and more importantly deeply appreciate the fact that users take time to send feedback :)
Foremost, thank you for your service! I really, really want DDG to be successful and I'm glad to know the feedback doesn't /dev/null. If I might be so bold as to suggest that hiding the "Send Feedback" in the bottom right is a very opaque location for what is arguably a vital interaction DDG has with its users.
While I have an insider: I see a lot of mentions in the threads about folks who use "!g" or "!sp" -- are those counted as votes of suboptimal DDG results? I could see it going either way: it's a bad metric for those users who just default to doing it, but it's a good metric for searches that end in the frustration of a series of bad DDG results
Could you consider making a list of common feedback items that already have resolutions? I imagine it would make a popular HN submission in addition to a useful FAQ.
I have the same experience - my two major issues with DDG are the results for technical searches, and I wish that it showed more basic info for businesses like phone number/address/hours without me having to click around a bunch.
I've used DDG full-time for over two years now. I honestly don't miss Google.
Every time I use !g I'm reminded just how bad it's gotten. Between the SEO spam and ads I find myself scrolling at least halfway down the page to find anything even remotely relevant. I can't say that DDG always has the 'best' results, but at least they seem appropriate to what I'm searching for.
One thing I do wish DDG has is webmaster tools. I know they don't do their own indexing, but it would be nice to have a way to get performance & keyword data the way Google/Bing/Yandex etc present it.
That is brilliant indeed. Although I don't understand why I would use '!g' instead of just 'g'+tab/whitespace, as that would use google as the browser search engine - if you manually added 'g' as google's keyword, or if you used google enough that when you type 'g' it interprets as possible google
Yeah or "y <tab> <youtube query>". BUT! You can't do that in Firefox, which is one of the many reasons I switched back to Chrome (Brave) after trying to like Firefox for a couple of months. Chrome just does UX so much better. I really really miss containers though but Google has little incentive to offer that.
Agree! I tried to switch to Firefox many times. But the usability (for me) is nowhere near chrome/edge chromium.
You can do this on Firefox, by adding bookmarking google.com and adding 'g' as a keyword. But there's no way to manage your keywords/search engines, and even adding it is more involved than on chrome/edge
I've been switched for several years as well. I like most not seeing AMP links and am always reminded how terrible Google is when someone shares a link with me and its just a big ugly google AMP mangled URL.
After a few failed attempts to migrate from Google as my default search engine due to poor results, a couple of months ago, I decided to give DDG another try. Been using daily since, I don't even remember what Google is. Not sure if the service did improve that much or what, but I'm glad I could move on. Youtube, you are next.
I must be in the minority here, but even after trying ddg exclusively, I find myself doing !g all the time, to the point where I just switched back.
I do many technical searches throughout the day, and ddg falls short basically every time. Google is always closer to the mark with my search intent, with for example, deep links to stack overflow answers that ddg misses.
I honestly find it interesting people have trouble with duckduckgo. Although, the one thing I have found lacking is their exact phrase search. For exact queries I end up having to add !g the query. Otherwise, I find myself rarely needing to use google.
I started using DuckDuckGo, and one day I woke up and all of my email was on Fastmail instead of Gmail. No memory of switching, but all of my contacts were moved over. My accounts were using Fastmail aliases.
I called up my siblings and asked, "where did you get this email address, why are you emailing me here?" And they just said, "what are you talking about, you've always been on Fastmail." I have no idea what's going on. Sometimes I'll go to update my system, and I'll be using Pacman instead of the normal Debian package manager. Then the next day it will switch back. Sometimes I'll search for things online, and I won't find the result I'm looking for, but then a day later I'll get a physical letter in my mailbox with the answer to my question written on it.
So anyway, long story short, I decided to switch Bing instead and so far that's had only minor side effects.
As a first step you could try alternative frontends. On the web invidious¹, on Android I suggest NewPipe.
As a next step you could try out entirely different platforms. I personally find Peertube very appealing, because it federates with ActivityPub, which I already use and love. There's also LBRY, but I don't get how it works, so no opinion on that. It seems to have more well known publishers on it though.
I would estimate that greater than 90% of that traffic is bot traffic. Having run two web search engines in the past: search.netscape.com (pre-google) and blekko.com. Robots accounted for > 80% of traffic at Netscape (around 3M searches/day in 2000 IIRC) and definitely more than 80% at blekko. Maybe 90% or more. Some traffic is obviously bot traffic (single source IP, common patterns, obvious bot useragents) and then there's the non-obvious bot traffic that is random-ish, but in aggregate is clearly bot traffic. For instance, way too many queries matching the pattern "(mortgage|home loans) (zip|county|city|state)" even if they are coming from random IPs and user agents.
At blekko, under high traffic, we would loadshed obvious bot traffic first and prioritize searches from humans.
At Mojeek which also has it's own crawler/index, like Blekko, we see around 80% bot searches. That % has also grown as we grow.
Would syndication search services, like DDG or Startpage, see a higher level of bot traffic than a crawler search engine? We don't know and it could depend on several factors. Bot traffic handling is certainly an ongoing and important challenge.
This is a fascinating trend - how could you even launch a search service today where that portion of your processing time is going to be spent powering bots (ad agencies?) and not addressing human queries.
Wonder what a human-centric 'search' experience will look like in 2025... no more search bar, pre-emptive article fetch based on whatever some ML algorithm decides for you?
This reminds me of someone saying that eventually Amazon will just start sending you things and charging you for them with no intervention on your end.
It'll just happen to be what you needed at the right time.
Exactly. If you can accurately ignore 50% of the bot traffic you halve your hardware expense. The trick is doing it in such a way that the bots don't notice.
I’ve been on DuckDuckGo for nearly a year now and while I’m mostly happy, it can be a frustrating experience as somebody living in Ireland. When making a location specific search, often even including the word “Ireland” or the city I live in, I will get results from the UK, or the US. Bizarrely, toggling the “Ireland” location switcher on often makes the results worse - which is surprising since it will often prioritise .co.uk domains above .ie domains, which seems like a slam dunk for location-dependant searches (such as for example “buy new bike chain”) out of Ireland with an “ireland” toggle switched on.
Example: there is a mobile network named Three in both the UK and Ireland. With the Ireland location toggle enabled, the search “Three network coverage” places the Irish Three (three.ie) in fifth position, under four .co.uk results.
I’m at the point where if I need to search something that could be location dependant I throw a !g onto the search term by default.
I find Google over-agressive in the other direction when it comes to location. I’ll search for “Empire State Building” and get a page full of local junior high science projects about the Empire State Building and local burger joints with Empire State Building posters on their walls.
Yeah, same here with NZ. Even with the location toggle enabled, if I don't append "NZ" to my query, I end up with a whole lot of useless results from the USA, UK, etc. I still use DDG for everything but the most technical queries though.
I get reminded that I wasn't using Google in the rare case where I can't find what I'm looking for and !g or need to use a device I don't own and it shows how bad it's gotten (in particular hard to distinguish the ads - and the sheer amount of ads)
> specially for local results. thats where DDG is not upto the mark. Google has an advantage there.
I've had a different experience, I prefer being able to choose the location. For technical queries it gives me better results, for general queries less SEO'ed content and when I want something local I change the switch.
Bonus is that I can choose a different location, which has been useful this year because my travel pattern has changed to staying at a remote location for longer periods - I can still easily get my home country results when I need them without trying all sorts of extra keywords.
When you come across these, be sure to use the "Send Feedback" button in the bottom right. User feedback is an important part of improving in a non-tracking environment.
I think and hope that this is just the beginning. We desperately need tech diversity in all sorts of verticals, and search and social media are at the top of the list, with AWS/Azure/GoogleCloud closely following. Jason Calacanis is saying as much today: https://twitter.com/Jason/status/1349482476612141056
Plenty of people saying it already but I’ll throw my voice into the mix too. Been using DDG for about a year straight across all devices and I honestly forgot I wasn’t using Google. I have never been unable to find anything I was after, well except for some unusual Hail Mary queries with exact phrase matches, but those are my fault and likely wouldn’t return anything from Google search either.
If you’re on the fence... it’s literally free and completely painless to switch out the default search engine in every browser I have used at least, I recommend trying it out!
Hey, this isn't productive. The parent comment provided a good opener for others to ask them their experience migrating away, etc, and that's the kind of discussion we often like to have around sharing our experiences with new or different tools.
None of the things you mentioned are replacements for either Twitter or Facebooks core products.
A search engine, router level ad-blocker, browser-based adblocker and messaging app do not replace a public messageboard or a pseudo-public/pseudo-private messageboard/events service.
Actually maybe "unbound" is that because there's a bunch of projects with that name, so who knows.
I’m not looking to replace them. Logging onto those products doesn’t seem to make my life better. Seeing my friends rant about politics doesn’t seem to make us closer. Having only politics on my mind isn’t a good thing so I think I’ll be better off with not relaxing them.
Some people perceive Google to be better because when DDG fails, they try Google and sometimes Google succeeds.
That's no different than flipping a coin and hoping for heads. You normally flip with your right hand, but when it comes up tails you try again with your left. About half the time, your left succeeds where your right fails, therefore your left hand is better at flipping coins. I'm sure there's a name for that bias? (Notice that you could do it in reverse and draw the reverse conclusion - the same goes for Google and DDG.)
To actually compare them, you'd need to do the same searches on both, not just the ones where DDG did poorly.
I would be very curious to see what percentage of these are "!g" queries, but this is still awesome. Very happy to see they are doing well. I'm definitely a full-time DDG user.
Since switching to DDG, I haven't used Google Search once nor !g. I've had a better experience with DDG: no sponsored results, less skewed rankings, less censoring (Google removes many results from DMCA requests), and of course no tracking. Google's lazy-loaded useless suggestion boxes, added a few years ago, that push the content down, often when clicking on a link, were my final annoyance before switching. For the first bit after switching, I missed seeing the daily Google doodles, but I'm now more cynical towards Google and no longer care.
I've been using DDG for a while now as my primary search. I've found it does a much more literal searches, but doesn't always interpret the intent of my sentence as well as Google does.
I find myself using the !g at times when I can tell that the search didn't work as well as what I've seen on Google, but it's become much less frequent.
I pretty much always go with whatever DDG has for most things. If needed I'll redo the query with "!g" to confirm an d in my experience there are a lot of times the DDG query was better in my opinion. Things like about locations or very recent news are usually easier to find on Google though.
One factor you might not be thinking about is that if you use DDG first then you're getting a biased sample. You only try Google when DDG fails. So you see some times when Google succeeded where DDG failed, but you don't notice the times when DDG succeeded but Google would have failed.
As a counterpoint, I also use DDG with a !g fallback. I'd place the success of fall-backing to Google at 20% at most. (i.e. most of the time, if DDG fails, Google will fail too).
Do you see this reflected in higher user numbers coming from DuckDuckGo over time?
I run a website too. Let me check the stats...
So according to Google Analytics over the last 30 days, 0.7% of my visitors came from DDG. Not bad. That is more then half of Bing, from which 1.2% of my visitors come.
Over time, the DuckDuckGo trend does not look as exponential as in their chart though. More like a linear growth that about doubled from early 2019 to now. But that could be due to many factors of course. Blocked analytics being one.
If users are using the DuckDuckGo mobile app or extension its baked in tracker blocker does block a lot of analytics tools so there is likely a large level of under reporting especially on the mobile side.
1. Google (82.75%)
2. Direct (6.33%)
3. Bing (3.63%)
4. DuckDuckGo (1.85%)
6. Yahoo (0.94%)
Kind of upsetting that as of January 1st my website was delisted from Bing + DuckDuckGo for no apparent reason meaning that my traffic is down by 5%. If anyone has any contacts within the Bing team I'd be really interested to know why my site was removed.
Congrats to DuckDuckGo! It's amazing to see a privacy-first Google alternative making such great progress! I personally contribute with a few searches every day :)
Unlike Google, DDG doesn't filter out StormFront and other similar sites (Bing also doesn't, apparenty). I think that is good because tech companies shouldn't impose politics on very basic tech like search indexes. I wonder how long it will last though.
Looking at different website's google analytics, I can tell that DDG has been picking up last 12 months. Possibly cuz of all FB, TWTR, GOOG privacy chatter.
A lot of people are talking about the quality of DDG results and I thought I would mention that there is a way to tell DDG about their search results. It's pretty hidden but there is a "Send Feedback" button in the bottom right. They should really make it more visible so that they can get community feedback about what results they need to improve.
Fantastic! I wonder if anyone has researched how quickly users can find what they are looking for on different search engines, after a super quick introduction to the basic controls. Of course, everyone has been primed by whatever search engine they have used the most, so that would have to be accounted for.
A particularly common result on DDG which bugs me is whenever I'm searching for something which I'm positive will be answered on Stack Overflow the first page of results includes one Stack Overflow question and the rest of the results are from other sites. This can be annoying when the search is basically "how to convert X to Y", and the only Stack Overflow result is "how to convert Y to X". The similar results for each site shown on Google is a killer app in these situations, and is probably the main reason I "!g".
A few dozen of those were mine! For geographically local stuff I have to use !g unless I get really specific with my search term (which is understandable). But for most other things DDG is good enough.
same here. I've set DDG as my default search engine, yet for local stuff I have to use !g . At the same time the region selection/force feature is just great
I have been using DDG for 6 months, I'd say 90% of times results are good enough to find what I'm looking for.
I even tried DDG Apple powered maps,but Gmaps is still vastly superior, imho
I've tried to use DuckDuckGo a few times now - I really wish that they would write their own indexer and maintain their own index, it frustrates me that they rely on the Bing Index - which frequently favours low quality SEO optimised content or doesn't have the result you are looking for on the first page...
Each time I find myself going back to Google as it frequently surfaces the result I'm looking for on the first page.
When google's search fails to find the most basic of things because it's all Ads, is it any surprise?
At what point did google search go from that great search engine to what amounts to an ad landing page full of spam. Sundar keeps trying to go into other markets rather than weeding the garden already sown, and its not going to end well.
I am on my third attempt of forcing myself to use DDG. Been back on DDG-only now for about 2 weeks and all i can say is that it still has a long way to go to be a viable alternative to Google. In my experience, even Bing provides significantly better results.
One thing I loved about DDG, that 'forced' me to use it on mobile, is being able to filter by date (last week/month/year) on mobile. Google and Bing don't offer that simple feature in any way.
* Search
* Scroll the tabs bar (All, Images, Shopping, etc) all the way to the rightmost entry, "Search Tools"
* Tap "Search Tools"
* A secondary menu bar with "ANY TIME \/" will appear. You can use that to filter by date-range.
When using Google, the amount of times I ended up clicking a different link just because a box above decided to load that very moment was unthinkable. That alone was a big enough of a reason to switch.
Been using it for few years now, technical searches and in some languages other than English are still subpar compared to Google but you can add !g and it will open google on those ones
I seem to be using the Google bang command less past few months. I started using DDG in Dec 2018 after a story here showed (with evidence) that Google invited a female inventor out for an interview & then stole/patented her work.
Overall using two search engines provides solid results with DDG being my main engine.
It was cool to see DDG browser app in the top 20 iPhone apps this week!
This is slightly off-topic, but I wonder why duckduckgo don't try and acquire a domain like ddg.com -
It sounds minor but I find it a hard domain to type for trying out a search (when google isn't giving me what I want), whereas if it was ddg.com I'd probably jump to it more as an alternative. Maybe I am just incredibly lazy, though.
I think most people are even lazier then you. They don't type domain names at all. They set their default SE to duckduckgo.com and then search via the url bar.
using DDG full-time now for a year. results are quite relevant. better than the crap Google shows you these days. only localization remains an issue. DDG would return shops, restaurants etc on the other side of the world whereas Google would return those within a few miles. I know that comes with a price...
Use Bing every now and then, the underlying web search engine of DDG. They will track your clicks, unlike DDG, but those clicks are vital for training their ranking system.
I switched back to google after using DDG for about half a year, DDG results are nice, but if you mix searches between different language you need to manually set the country for which you are searching, google does this automatically.
I would be willing to create an account (at least for some contexts, like work) and let DDG track me as long as it would improve my search results and I had 100% visibility and control over what they retain.
Yeah they do have their own index but the majority of results come from Bing. There are several search engines using Bing as the backbone, but Microsoft doesn’t appear to want to have any new search partners. Both the google and Bing search indexes are controlled by trillion dollar companies, so alternative search engines are operating under agreements with either company.
A search engine company without their own search engine is not very promising. I'm assuming/hoping they have plans to serve most queries themselves in the future.
I looked around for a roadmap, but I haven't found one. I imagine that indexing large portions of the web is a huge investment, hopefully they can do more as time goes on and money comes in.
