I've tried DDG before on several occasions, but always got frustrated with the quality of the search results and changed back. After PRISM, I started finding Google's results less and less accurate, so I tried again. I now find that for most of the searches I do, DDG results are letting me find what I need faster than I can with Google... Kudos to them! I applaud both their technical achievements and their principles.
I agree about the quality getting much better, but the one thing I really miss with DDG is the Google Search Tools, and being able to narrow my searches down by date (last month, last year, last week), etc.
For technical searches it really helps being able weed out old content and solutions (old rails 2 solutions, etc).
I'm glad you said this, because it was the reason I stopped also. I'll give it another try at home.
However there are a lot of times at work where having search results relevant to me is essential. Since DDG is all about not being the search bubble, to use them all of the time, I'd have to change the way I worked to bookmark my projects and search for my blog entries in the blog's search bar instead of just using the omnibox in Chrome (that is using Google) for everything.
Reason #2 is that search advertising helps pay for the GMail service that I rely on. I don't want to go back to my cable company's email accounts. Yuck. Terrible spam filtering and much worse webmail UI.
But, I'd like to stop using Google as much as the next guy. I'm waaaay too reliant, and I'd be surprised if the U.S. hasn't infiltrated their employee ranks, along with other countries, for greater influence and access to data than is even currently known by congress. Using Google is like living in a whorehouse.
With regards to your email: I recently switched from Google Apps (free tier) to Fastmail.fm and the transition has been pretty seamless. The interface is snappy and decent looking, and importing all of my gmail over IMAP worked well. On the other hand, I now pay a yearly fee for my email. The fee is fairly nominal (~$40/year for a mid-range account), and my money ensures that Fastmail doesn't need to harvest my content to keep the lights on.
Thanks for the advice, but I don't know that I'd place all my eggs in a basket affected by the politics and distance of the Federated States of Micronesia.
That's the problem with domains these days. Yay we're using a Libyan domain and whoops (remember- they took it offline http://readwrite.com/2011/02/20/what_happens_to_ly_domains_w...). io - British Indian Ocean Territory: same deal. People aren't thinking.
Yeah I think that's a very valid point. Thanks for the link -- was an interesting read :)
EDIT: Just as an aside, Fastmail is operated by Opera and runs on many domains that they control. For example, their IMAP and SMTP servers are messagingengine.com.
So, a US Govt owned domain. Remember Lavabit? Your email host is not good enough, unless it's, at least, your own. Then you have a whole host of new problems.
If you're not aware of it already, you might want to keep an eye out for Mailpile, which should have a bunch of the features of GMail (web-based, labelling, spam filtering) while being open source and allowing you to run it yourself (I'm sure hosted versions will pop up as well).
Many development related queries seem to come back with undesired results in DDG where Google would come through but for most of my queries DDG is certainly doing a good job.
And I love the spartan results page I get back. It's easy on the eyes.
If you're going development related queries, I strongly suggest taking advantage of the !bangs and searching the official documentation first.
Being limited to only the jquery docs vs. googling until I found a random stack overflow question that I could copypasta helped me improve as a developer.
The reason for this (and the main reason I despise DDG after a month of using them) is that they only show one result per site, regardless of relevance. Stack Overflow being what it is, limiting sites of that kind of quality/focus to a single result is frustrating.
Hopefully someone will tell me there's a way to fix that, but limiting sites to a single result is a poor design choice. And forcing me to think "maybe this site has more relevant related pages" and act on that thought doesn't work, because I prefer to scan the results DDG has already given me.
I've also travelled the same path. I do like that there is no filter bubble[1]. Unfortunately sometimes it would be best if they did take location into account - a search for The Greek (a restaurant in my home town of Santa Cruz CA) gives me results that aren't close to useful. Fortunately a !g added to the search term fixes that.
Because I would expect geographical answers to take location into account. Also the towns around here all run together so knowing exactly which one to use is quite hard.
Using Google for well over a decade means I am used to typing as little as possible to get results. Filter bubbles are more relevant to searches for BP, Egypt etc.
I wish I could get into DuckDuckGo but I feel like in a time period where it's so important to optimize for Google using anything but Google puts you at a disadvantage.
People are goming Google left and right, so it's actually better for you to try and use a search engine that people are not gaming as hard, if you are looking for information.
I don't disagree with that. My main point is that the world Googles and if you're anticipating growing a business through search you're probably better off using it than not.
Speaking of which, I can't for the life of me unsubscribe from DDG, no matter how many times I tell them to stop pestering me on the unsubscribe service.
Is the email being forwarded from another account? I work for a service that sends marketing emails to a large userbase, and that's the most common issue with unsubscribing -- that your email address isn't the one subscribed.
I hate to admit it, but Google's omniscience as regards my personal life makes for some really damned relevant SERPs.
I might be able to overlook that in order to guard my privacy, but I doubt my mom would. I simply can't see any Google competitor, let alone DDG, providing more relevant results without invading my privacy and, by extension, sharing everything about me with the USG. I wish it were otherwise, but I'm unfortunately convinced that we lost this one for all but a dedicated few a la FSF.
I want to like it too but I don't think DDG results will ever be as good as Google because of the no tracking thing. Google just has more context to figure out what I actually mean with my query, and the more I use it the smarter it'll become.
It's been my default search engine for a while. My observations:
1. The bang syntax is rather convenient. I'm an Alfred user (Mac OSX), and I can easily get nearly everywhere with !.
2. The results are getting much better. I often search for something and think "these results aren't good enough" and do !g for google. The top link on google is the normally the second or third link on DDG.
Recently I learned that DDG donates a portion of profits to Trisquel http://trisquel.info/ (bottom of page) and probably other projects. That's pretty cool.
I think DDG would be a much more viable option if they owned ddg.com. The reason I still use google is because it flows naturally on the keyboard. I use search as a navigation method, and typing duckduckgo.com is annoying. I would absolutely make the full switch if command + t + ddg.com + query returned what I wanted.
The search results are good, I salute you for that, but it's just not convenient so I still find myself at google. You are asking for a major workflow change but not making it easy.
I used to use DDG as my primary search engine before, but after a while I found that clicking on the search results takes a long time before the page opens. It didn't happen with Google. Never understood why that was.
Just tried again today, and it seems alright now. I'll switch back and see.
Someone please correct me if I'm wrong, but I assumed the lag was because DDG doesn't let result pages know what search terms you used to find them, and was sending you through some generic middle page to hide that info?
I think you're right about speed, though. DDG just keeps getting better.
Did you know if the mouse is hovering over a DDG result, you can press o to to open it? And I think there's a way to navigate through results using only keys... I forgot how though...
Sadly DDG does have some bugs. I reported this one a few weeks ago but nothing ever happened. They keep adding a www. prefix to urls even when the original site didn't have it.
For example look at https://duckduckgo.com/?q=apsw and look at the 3rd result at Google Code (Python, my project). They make the result URL be www.code.google.com but there is no www and clicking gives an error. They seem to be second guessing if a www prefix is needed, usually guessing right, and then getting it wrong. Having to edit the www back out of URLs is a pain.
Searches per day seems less interesting than "number of people who use DDG daily" (which might admittedly be challenging to know depending on how deeply DDG goes down the privacy road). A little googling shows that people search 60+ times per day (i imagine DDG users search on the high side). So I'd guess DDG has... 60-70k people using it as their primary search engine?
I miss a few things there such as filtering by date and image search. Also, in some cases Google still produces better results. But I switched to DDG as a default search engine in Firefox, and use Google as a fallback only once in a while.
My only concern was that it takes away from Mozilla since they have a deal with Google, but what can you do...
I don't. Doublign every six months is nothing to be embarrassed about but it's not especially epic. Contrast, say, Vine - which grew about 4000% in the first 6 months of this year: http://www.wired.com/business/2013/06/twitter-vine-growth/
I am pretty much using DDG for most searches, with Google now being the exception. I did take a little while to get used too, but now it seems natural to search using DDG.
