Unverifiable privacy claims aside, I quite like that DDG is suitable for most (80%+) things I need to look up. Having !bangs to jump to wiki (or google) has been great too. That said, it is not without faults, even functionally.
- Local search is naturally very poor, to the point that 100% of my local search traffic is still on Google.
- Image search is nothing to write home about.
- I'm not pleased that looking up something contentious/political more often than not brings up reactionary or false content. It's either bad news sources or low quality blogs.
The last one might not be a problem to people whose opinions the results align with better but it is what it is. It's hard to say whether this is what the web would be without Google "censorship"/filter bubble stuff, or whether these are just the kinds of content the DDG (bing + other sources) algorithms have decided to rank ahead of them.
Either way, it is an invaluable resource and an important one to have. Search is already extremely concentrated towards Google but ideally there should always be usable alternatives.
Agreed, with one caveat: DDG image search, in my opinion, is far superior to Google Images because it still allows you to right click -> save image and right click -> open image in a new tab (and it actually opens the image, not the page that contains the image).
Google Images has been deteriorating every year for over a decade now.
About Google Image, it stopped doing direct links as a result of a lawsuit by Getty Images. How does DDG get away with it?
Another advantage of DDG/Bing is the ability to really turn off safe search. Unlike Google, it will not try to guess if you want nudity or not based on your search query, resulting in weird situations where you have to look for porn in order to get "anatomically correct" pictures.
They should have just stopped displaying Getty Images in results. They're scam artists anyway, claiming to own public domain historic photos and selling them for a thousand bucks a piece.
they're probably using it. with the volume of traffic they're using, and the fact Qwant and every other 'private' search basically uses Bing results, paying for API access makes the most sense.
(not arguing for GI over DDG or any other image search, just pointing out that those UI issues -- which were coerced by publisher lawsuits, not Google's own preference -- can be trivially fixed with extensions)
I don't use Google but as far as I can tell the behavior is very similar on both sites. (right click -> open image in new tab) on Google links directly to the image like DDG, though some are links to a data URL or cached versions of removed images on encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com
My counter experience - after giving DDG a chance for more than two years, two days ago I replaced my default search browser to Google, and never looked back.
In my experience I had to add g! to 90% of my search to get useful results, except for the most trivial searches. It was so much so that I would often add one in the beginning and one at the end, resulting in my google query ending up as "search term g!".
This fully coincides with my experience. Every once in a while, I hear about how much DDG has improved and how its results are now better than Google. I switch to DDG for a few days, get fed up with the (low) quality of the results, eventually start adding !g to all my queries because I _anticipate_ the results to be terrible, and at some point, I switch back to Google. Every single time I try DDG, this happens. Without exception.
I know not everyone shares my viewpoint but I wish people on reddit and HN would stop hyping up DDG. It will likely never be real competitor to Google. I don't mean to blame them in any way. Even Microsoft, with all their might, still fails to match Google's capabilities.
I was sort of in your boat, but is google really working out for you? It sure isn’t working out for me. I still use it out of familiarity and because DDG isn’t working either, but almost all the time that I want to find something that isn’t on Wikipedia or related to me buying something, I end up needing to do multiple search typically ending up doing something like site:these-are-all-the-bees-in-the-world.com because I was trying to identify the huge bee my cat almost ate, not trying to buy honey, or bee coloured dresses, or plush bees or bee branded diapers or whatever else.
Some of it isn’t Google’s fault or course, all the hobby stuff that happens in the blood bowl community group on Facebook never ends up in a search engine, but some of it is certainly Google’s fault. I’m just not sure how much privacy helps though, sure DDG might not try to sell me diapers because their advertisers might not know I have a two year old, but it still tries to sell me honey.
Google isn't really working for me either. I mean, it isn't the effective tool it used to be in the distant past.
Having saying that, yes, Google does work for me more than any of the alternatives and most of the times I can find even the most arcane and niche stuff I'm looking for, after investing few hours. Investing this level of efforts in DDG have never been fruitful and I have given up long ago trying anything but the most trivial stuff.
You just said you where using g! constantly. As someone that never had that issue I can only assume you simply never learned how to use DDG.
For example, it’s not using your location behind the scenes so “restaurants near me” doesn’t work. But swap to say “restaurants near ZIPCODE” and it’s fine.
I bring this up because oddly enough I had the opposite problem yesterday. When using a friends phone I just couldn’t find what I was looking for until I swapped from Google to DDG. From 15 useless queries to first try third result.
No, I have no issue or interest with finding restaurants near me. I'm talking about researching stuff, finding solutions to technical issues, old manuals, stuff that is a little bit more challenging than the basics. I used g! constantly because most of the times the results for non trivial stuff are worthless
Yet, I and many others can find solutions to technical issues easily on DDG. Hell that’s what I was trying to find on Google and failed.
If it’s a frequent issue for you perhaps you could provide some examples? I only ask because I hear people agreeing with you and yet I have never seen an actual example.
One recent example - for some reason I had to find a bunch of RPM packages for i386 arch from RHEL/CentOS 5 era. I'm not talking about the easy stuff that I could find on old mirrors or rpmfind, though even those would rarely show up on ddg, but the more obscure ones, which I could never find without google.
I still have DDG as default but almost always add !g on my queries, it's such an instinct I am regularly adding it when I have my secondary browser open with google search.
I use DDG as my main search engine since a year or two, and I add !g for 90% of my technical searches, but for everything else it's more like 10% or less.
I switched to DDG in 2013 or before, and been on it since. This is very true for technical searches, I actually set my work machine's default engine to Startpage.com for that reason. I don't always remember to check other engines when I'm focused on something, so SP (anonymous Google results) bumped off DDG for me there.
On my machine, it's the !bangs that keep me hooked. I realize the results aren't quite as good as Google's, but it's usually just the top few results that seem to be key ones missing from DDG. I'm really surprised at the lack of popularity of SP, it's been my Google reference for a long time now.
After the recent censoring of "tank man", I don't trust DDG's (Bing's) image search anymore. I'm not sure about their search engine either.
Has DDG published a statement about the whole deal? I've only seen the Microsoft's response ("oops something went wrong we only intended to censor a little bit") but I don't think DDG even said anything.
Even then, google likes to link to a twitter account (that is, main account) of some random person who reposted the image three months ago instead of the actual tweet, or author's twitter, or anything usable
That's just the nature of the game. Pinterest figured out what the google algorithm wants. At least we can easily filter out results with the advanced search operators that google has.
Instead of going to Google, if you are looking for local businesses in a particular category and their opening hours or contact information, then one recommendation that would preserve privacy is using OSMAnd on your phone for looking all that info up without requiring any network connection. Of course, that assumes that your community is well mapped on OSM.
I have DDG as my default, except sometimes I switch it back to G for a few days.
I do something both odd and inefficient for local business search: I open the Apple Map app, and restaurants and other businesses show up, especially when I zoom in. I live in a small town, and seeing a map (with satellite imagery enabled, of course) and zooming in on different areas reminds me of where I might want to eat, etc. Fun.
I have been using DDG for a few years, and find a few problems with their results:
* Some spammy links slip thru-- these are dumb sites with lot of stuffed keywords and zero actual content. I dont get these with Google. I've usually seen these when searching for questions related to email list providers, like Aweber or Activecampaign
* Last year, I started getting random porn results for harmless queries, like "Monster videogame 2010". Again, didnt get these on Google.
For these reasons, Im hesitant to recommend DDG to non-technical users.
Why I stick with DDG-- I like to search in private windows, and Google harasses you everytime to accept their terms and conditions. On my iPhone, if I have 10 tabs open, I'll have to do this 10 times. DDG saves me a lot of this hassle.
For me, the privacy is a bonus, but like other commenters have said, there is no way to verify these claims.
My occasional accidental Google search for programming related things has been filled with spammy sites - I wouldn't quite describe them as "no content", but there really wasn't much of it. DDG isn't really better, but I definitely wouldn't say it's worse, at least for my searches.
To clarify-- I didnt mean low quality, just zero quality.
so if I searched for "How to move my email list to Aweber" I would get a page that was a copy paste of the Aweber home page, with my search term randomly sprinkled in.
And it wasnt just 1-2 sites. Sometimes, the top 3-4 would be spam, and even Aweber's own help page would be pushed down.
Seemed to me someone was doing some sort of dynamic search stuffing which was fooling DDG, but not Google. But the dark SEO was so obvious, I'm surprised DDG (or Bing or whoever they get their results from) fell for it.
I've gotten that exact thing on Google but for some stack overflow questions or articles. However, they were usually pretty far down the list, though still on the first page.
Hmm. For your test query, both provide similar results (mostly links to blog.aweber.com), though Google has a higher percentage of third party YouTube videos.
>I have been using DDG for a few years, and find a few problems with their results:
I've tried it a few times, this latest time I've been using it exclusively for a month or two and the results are almost completely worthless 95% of the time and I end up using the !g operator. In many cases the results have nothing to do with that I typed at all.
I've de-googled in every other way possible but Google's search engine is so much better than everything else I've tried that the rest are unusable.
I've heard it said before that Google's effectiveness is mostly due to the vast amount of information they have about me but that's not it. I've used lots of computers all over the East coast that I had never used before without logging into an account and Google gives good results every time.
I like to search in private windows, and Google harasses you everytime to accept their terms and conditions.
I use incognito too for almost everything. However, I thought that the terms & conditions popup was only a Youtube thing (it drives me insane too)... I guess they haven't rolled it out to everyone yet.
Good point about search in private windows, without nagging.
I do much of my web browsing in private browser tabs. Why not? Even for things like HN, auto fill for login makes it easy and then when I follow links I don’t worry so much about tracking cookies.
For 2, what are you leaving safe search at? When off, that seems like it's probably correct behavior for a search engine, and google removes it as people find it undesirable.
It only happened for a brief time, so I guess it was a bug in DDG. But when it did happen, it was serious enough I stopped using DDG at work completely.
I have some skepticism in those regards, at least unless they make use of their own crawlers.
Bootstrapping themselves with different information sources as they've been doing is good for the very beginning as then they serve as a privacy-respecting aggregator to those sources, but as the tank man incident proved, you run the risk you'll be made complicit to censorship, whether intentionally or not.
Search has changed a lot in the past decade or so. Now most results pages are full of instant answers, e.g., knowledge graph responses (which we do completely ourselves) and local results (for which we have our own index + Apple Maps and local providers like TripAdvisor). In other words, it isn’t just one index, but about 20 that really matter in terms of adoption.
Additionally, people engage with the first thing on the page about twice as much as the second thing, and that second thing about twice as much as third thing, and so on. That means if instant answers are near the top (increasingly the case) it means that those sub-indexes are increasingly more important as they are engaged with relatively more than the traditional “10 blue links."
A lot of that traditional web index is also used for just navigational purposes, which we can easily do ourselves. We are already crawling for our tracker blocking data set, encryption data set, and several other things.
In other words, we do make use of our own crawlers, and also have the ability to change some things around for indexes we use, which we do routinely. However, you need all of these indexes to make search work well, and have them all come up at the right times (a lot of what we do in search ourselves).
In this context, I think people elevate the long-tail “web index” too much. Should we have satellites in space to make good maps? It is also necessary for search. Should we be collecting sports and stocks data ourselves? Also necessary for search, but no one really calls on us to do that.
Our approach has been to partner with the best data providers in each vertical so we can provide the best alternative to Google search. And when nothing exists or it isn’t good enough, we do it ourselves or add layers on top. To that end, it isn’t binary — there is a lot in between and in fact that’s the way it works today.
Also: Thank you very much for making DDG. Thank you for trying to help -- and being the springboard to others making the choice. I used to be a solid "advanced" googler, but made the switch ~3-4 years ago and haven't looked back. I'm glad to see your adoption has grown hugely.
Some specific things that would help me a bit (I don't know if they exist!) -- these may well be pipe dreams, but...
-- A decent search engine for mathematics in the form of LaTeX would be _amazing_...
-- I'd enjoy being able to pass parameters to bangs specifically. An example would be Google Scholar (alas still the best and the last part of their ecosystem I use -- doesn't seem to be as tied in to ads as the rest though) such as 'date from' and 'date to' parameters, with a sensible calling syntax, e.g. `!gsc;f:2015;t:- Convolutional Neural Nets`
-- Likewise, a customisable, ideally API-able scientific/technical search interface would be very useful (for me).
-- No big provider has tried to index the onionweb (I don't know if you're feeling that brave) -- I'd be interested to know
Finally, are you considering being a privacy-first cloud provider in your own right, out of curiosity?
Thank you for taking the time to explain things at least. I don't personally rely that much on "instant answers"- at least for the things that I'm most likely to have to look up, but I can see why they're so useful.
EDIT: Also, back to the point: any plans when it comes to only relying on Bing for images? That was the issue in the end- least how I understood it.
Respectfully, vast majority of searches in DDG will still end up with no instant answer and ten (Bing) blue links. Stocks, weather and calculator.. get you only so far (and are not "searches").
Why did DDG shutdown the community effort to extend IA when you say yourself that IAs are DDGs leverage?
Wow! At first when I saw the Yippy.com redirect to DDG, because it was so "sloppy" I had assumed the truth, which was they just shut it down and redirected. But this was falsely reported in a few places and even Wikipedia has an uncited claim that they were bought by you guys.
It's kind of sad that they shut it down. They actually had a decent index and a unique "category" thing on the sidebar that you could use to narrow down search results.
>Ideally it would be continually audited by multiple trusted third parties.. something maybe like the EFF.
For a for profit company, the third parties such as EFF would be good enough for most users. Would highly recommend that EFF offer some sort of certificate (PGP signed key would be fine) to authenticate such audit.
I have switched to Neeva (neeva.com) which has no ads, because you are the paying customer. So far, it's been a great experience. I have had to get used to paying attention to the first few results, which are usually ads in Google or DDG.
While there is no privacy audit that I'm aware of, the theory is that there is no motivation to sell my searching habits to anyone.
DDG plans such a feature, but it will likely never be their primary revenue driver.
I noped right out of Neeva after setting it as my browser's default engine, opening an incognito window, and getting the finger when I tried to search for something. I'm not installing a browser extension for a search engine.
They have almost infinite ways of identifying my right to use their engine given that they're the one emitting the Open Search snippet from within an authenticated window; uuid hostname or uuid path/query param are the two which spring to mind
Neeva's model is great but execution is suboptimal.
Two examples:
- While Neeva has no ads, they prioritize sites with tons of ads in their results (search for 'best laptop'). If your main premise is that ads are bad, why not penalize/remove second order sites that are heavy in ads?
- They claim they respect user privacy, yet make technical choices like using raw Google maps in their product as Maps module, which sends requests from the client directly to Google
The greatest feature of DDG in my opinion is that it does not put you into a bubble. Results are the same regardless of what I have been searching lately. Does neeva allow you to toggle features like that?
When using DDG I sometimes curse the bad results. Stupid DDG, I think, open google.com in a private tab, do my search, only to realize that google is not returning anything useful either. Modifying the keywords a bit, I get my results, and finally pasting the same keywords to DDG, surely, my results would have been the same too.
Personally, the nagging "I wonder if Google results would be better" is enough of a reason for me to not use Bing/DDG/etc. A search engine is a tool and it is hard to be productive when you can't trust your tools.
I run an instance of searx[0] for me and friends. It is very easy to set up and will aggregate results across DDG/Google/Bing/plenty of others if you wish. Strips tracking parts of links and can trivially do other rewriting you may want. Easy to add filter lists to remove blogspam domains, pinterest et al.
Bonus; you won't leak your actual client IP to any of them. Comes with morty[1], which is a decent "anonymizing" HTTP proxy.
Supposed privacy wins completely aside, it's the best search user experience I've had in many years. You do run the risk of getting CAPTCHA'd but so far I've had 0 of that with the above-mentioned.
Change is hard, one has to appreciate that. Productivity is not everything. I did my share of changes over a long time, and bit by bit, and this helped me to separate my resistance to change, and the actual pros and cons of the systems.
I use DDG almost exclusively; it is normal that I do not search with Google in a calendar month. On some devices, when I do reach for Google, it asks me to agree to their T&Cs so I just hit back. However:
* Google is very much better at finding solutions to programming errors. Duck Duck Go sometimes works fine, but sometimes it sends me on a wild goose chase (if you pardon the ... almost pun). This has always been a problem since I started using DDG.
* Duck Duck Go is poisoned by useless autogenerated results. If I want to compare two options, I don't want an autogenerated comparison. I want actual analyses and anecdotes from users. In that case, I normally add site:reddit.com rather than !g so I can't positively say Google is better but I believe it is. This started bothering me at some point, but it might be my fault.
In both cases, I think the issue is the same: Google is still better at prioritising conversational content over content produced predominately to get eyeballs near ads. This is slightly ironic.
I also noticed that DDG (and Bing I guess) return results that are obviously SEO-gamed websited. Throws be right back into the early 2000s, when the big G was full of nonsense like this. Local results are another part where google works clearly better. I add "site:.mytld" of course but it's clunky and the results are not always satisfactory.
I have had similar results for the last few years. I think it’s been since ~2015 since g! has given me better results on a query than ddg.
Sometimes google gives a larger number of irrelevant results, so maybe they have more index reach, or maybe they’re worse at filtering garbage. I can’t tell.
I don’t use ddg for local search. I usually use yelp or (preferably) a privacy respecting mapping app instead. Google’s local results were garbage and often somehow more gamed than yelp’s last time I checked. Maybe they’re decent now. Don’t know; don’t care.
I've got a lot of trouble with some technical Googling that just doesn't get the right results in DDG. I assume it's because the algorithms have adjusted to my interests, but it's making using DDG for professional purposes quite hard sometimes.
I’ve switched over to DDG as my default search engine across all devices/browsers. It’s not as good as Google - but it’s perfectly good enough for 95% of searches.
For that other 5%, it’s usually programming-related queries where everyday words take on new meanings. Since DDG doesn’t tailor search results, it has a harder time with some of my uncommon word usage.
For those, it takes two seconds to append “!g” at the end of the query to go to Google; it’s barely disruptive to my workflow. I’ve noticed myself doing that less and less since I switched in January. Perhaps a combination of DDG getting better, and me getting better at tailoring my queries for it.
The histrionic name-calling makes it difficult to take seriously. The standard criticisms of DDG are nestled in a sticky ooze of weird accusations like "Tor Project accepted a $25k “contribution” (read: bribe) from DDG", or "DDG consumed a room at FOSDEM 2018 to deliver a sales pitch".
Long time DDG user. Barely use bangs at this point. Haven't switched back to Google in ages.
I don't really do much local searching, but it seems like that's an issue. When I do local searches I just quantify things "Best Thai food in <My Neighborhood>", but I live in area heavily traversed by food critics (I tend to avoid group reviews like Yelp, and Amazon which I tend to think of as easily gamed in favor of newspaper critics and Consumer Reports or America's Test Kitchen, an approach with its own pros and cons).
Most things seem fine although the other day I got a ton of porn when I did an image search for an artist I was discovering "Rico Nasty". Thank god for work from home!
As an aside, I find Google's search result interface extremely off putting at this point. I'm not exactly sure what it is? It seems like there's barely any results above the fold, it's much noisier with widgets everywhere, and why are the description strings only a sentence long at max?
I downloaded a new copy of Chrome (or maybe it was the one that popped up from Cypress tests or something and I errantly used it as main browser window), and yeagh.
It's annoying when search results throws everything at you: youtube videos, images, product carousels, etc. Probably they should add new section to search "text only" and ignore "rich" media results. Also related suggestions boxes after returning to search results gets old fast and are not useful at all. I need to get to next result in list, not start a new search.
Unlike most people here it seems, I started using DuckGo few years ago and have no issues at all. Everything works well or well enough, and although you cant verify their privacy claim, I certainly know it's as private if not more than Google at the very least.
It's interesting that DDG runs on Azure and uses Bing as its backend. That makes me wonder if this whole privacy theater of DDG is the new iteration of Microsoft's "scroogled" negative campaign.
As much as I hate corporations who resort to smearing their competitors instead of elevating their own offerings it looks like it does change public opinion and essentially works in practice.
It would be nice if there were a tool of some sort where I could type a search term and on two halves of my screen the results from Google Search and from DuckDuckGo would appear… after trying that for a month or two, one would be better informed how the results differ, and be more confident about switching (one way or the other).
I've had the idea for a while of writing for myself such a tool (probably can't be a browser extension?), but I haven't gotten around to it yet. Does one already exist, or is trivial to write?
As I type this comment, I found that at the commandline on macOS one can do, say:
open -a "Google Chrome" "https://duckduckgo.com/?q=umbrella"
open -a "Google Chrome" "https://www.google.com/search?q=umbrella"
(or whatever your usual browser is) and it's easy to wrap that in a script:
function search() {
open -a "Google Chrome" "https://duckduckgo.com/?q=$*"
open -a "Google Chrome" "https://www.google.com/search?q=$*"
}
This (invoke like say `search freddie mercury`) opens two tabs and I haven't yet figured out how to open them in side-by-side windows, but maybe I'll try for a few weeks to be disciplined about doing all searches this way, and see how it goes. Seems worth finding out!
* Not opening the extra window if Chrome isn’t already running.
* URL-encoding your query.
* Auto-detecting the screen bounds (and Dock).
* Auto-detecting the active browser.
But I didn’t want to turn this comment into a full-fledged gist. As is, this works in Chromium-based browsers (replace the name in the `browser = Application('Google Chrome')` line). Adding support for all of them and Safari is simple: https://gist.github.com/vitorgalvao/5392178
There have been programs which did this before google became so popular. Unfortunately I don't remember the name of the software, but it would query several search engines and show the results below each other. I remember it had some colors indicating the progress next to it - like green, when it found something on that engine. That was the time when there was also Software to find the cheapest provider for dialing in over modem line at a particular time of the day - because it was expensive and each minute counted.
In the olden days, I used to search with Dogpile. It was a multi-search engine query site: In those days, there were a bunch of search engines (altavista, yahoo, google) and to find what you wanted it was easiest just to use Dogpile.
Like most people I know, I switched to Google directly when I realised I just scrolled down to Google and clicked the first link.
My only issue with DDG (which is my main searchengine), is that they often ignore keywords (google is catching up to them though… do people really enter random terms that they don’t want to search for?), annoyingly without telling you that they ignored the term (google does), and even worse, sometimes this happens when you force a search term with "’s. That’s almost exclusively the reason I need to do !g. And as bing doesn’t have the same issue, it has to somehow be them actively sabotaging my search.
"China banned DuckDuckGo in 2014 and we have no plans to change that. This image belongs in search results and never disappeared from our main page. For the image tab we mainly use Bing and they fixed the error. We’re looking to supplement w/ more sources."
So, what percentage of ddg's results for queries come from bing? like a ballpark estimate. Is it like 10%? 50%? 80%? Because in your answer you still carefully avoid giving any actual numbers.
I still say (by looking at the results for random queries) that ddg is is mostly bing, do you have any actual data to refute this?
No data to refute it because the 10 links are still from Bing. Their crawlers and indexes are only for the instant answers for very specific queries. For the other 99.99% of queries, it's just Bing.
Happy it bit them in the ass for the tank man image because they're constantly lying without lying about their complete reliance on Bing. Put differently, if Bing shuts down tomorrow, so does DDG.
I just went and repeated all my google searches from this morning, and the only knowledge cards that I got were from Wikipedia and the rest of the results were ads or the "blue links." I'm a little confused if the instant answers/knowledge cards refers to a larger piece of the results that blends in?
I've started using DDG last month and fallen back to Google for a few searches as the results are just better. DDGs results are often "good enough", but not quite on point as Google is. You can literally type in a question on Google and get an answer. DDG requires more thought of what you type in and you have to scan more results. First page is usually good enough, but I find myself changing the keywords more often than I did on Google. Overall I'm quite happy with it and use it on a daily basis.
A project I'm involved with https://private.sh/ has search privacy that is more verifiable than ddg. It uses client-side cryptography in the javascript, and routes your request through an anonymizing proxy, similar to how TOR works. The encrypted query is only readable by the search engine, in this case, gigablast, whereas the independent proxy scrubs your IP address.
Every time a DDG article pops up on HN people start praising it and how it's 95% as good as Google, etc. DDG uses Google's and other search engines' data. DDG does not do their own crawling. Please do a quick search here on HN and read up on all the previous conversations about privacy and security implications of that before selling the narrative that DDG is somehow more awesome than more established search engines.
>DDG uses Google's and other search engines' data. DDG does not do their own crawling.
>Please do a quick search here on HN and read up on all the previous conversations about privacy and security implications of that before selling the narrative that DDG is somehow more awesome than more established search engines.
I'm not sure I understand your argument. What are the privacy and security implications? If you submit a query and DDG turns around and gathers the results elsewhere, those other sources would have no idea it was you submitting the query; all they see is a request from DDG. Sounds like a better deal than directly exposing yourself to the sources you mention.
Is this true? Even if you’re not exposed to those sources you’re exposed to DDG instead, so are you saying they have somehow more moral grounds to stand on when it comes to not sharing user data with others given that they see no problem with taking Google data and semi-packaging it as their own in the first place?
>so are you saying they have somehow more moral grounds to stand on when it comes to not sharing user data with others given that they see no problem with taking Google data and semi-packaging it as their own in the first place?
That isn't at all what I said nor implied. The gist of my comment was DDG is the lesser evil of all parties involved.
Your statement:
> DDG uses Google's and other search engines' data. DDG does not do their own crawling. Please do a quick search here on HN and read up on all the previous conversations about privacy and security implications of that [...] (emphasis mine)
You draw a connection between the potential third parties involved and the adverse affect to the individual's privacy and security stemming directly from their involvement. I was outlining that, if DDG was sending the request to those parties -- not the individual making the query -- the other parties wouldn't be aware of the individual unless DDG explicitly tells them (which I don't believe they do).
> if you’re not exposed to those sources you’re exposed to DDG instead, so are you saying they have somehow more moral grounds to stand on when it comes to not sharing user data with others given that they see no problem with taking Google data and semi-packaging it as their own in the first place?
It's all about aligning your goals with the interests of the company. DuckDuckGo has built their business around being a privacy-focused search company. It is not in their interest to ruin that brand (and their company). Google is built on showing you ads and giving you free stuff in return (which requires they collect a lot of information). So yes, I think it's better (and quite natural) to trust DuckDuckGo a lot more than Google when it comes to privacy.
I use it as my main search engine because google puts up a super annoying cookie banner if you are not logged in or have approved them before and that doesn't work with temporary containers (a genius extension for firefox that presents each new tab with its own cookie jar, making sites isolated not just from each other but even from other tabs that access the site).
I wish DDG would have a toggle for the privacy/speed/other attributes of the destination site. I'd like to set minimums and simply never see those sites in my results.
This would require allowlists and easy disabling for targeted searches but would generally stay enabled.
If they crawled the sites themselves, then they could detect tracking code and allow users to filter out sites with that (filter by no ads, no analytics, no paywall, etc.) However, since they mostly just use Bing I don't know how easy that would be.
I haven't used DDG much but I tried for a while to use Bing (which, I believe serves most of its organic search results in the US?), since Microsoft had a thing for a while where they'd basically pay you to use their search engine. But even with that, I eventually found myself back on Google. So I'm not inclined to try DDG for a while anyway.
Whatever happened to Brave? Aren't they working on a search engine, too. Anyone know if that similarly uses Bing, Yandex, etc, for the search results or if they have their own crawler? It's been a while since I've looked in depth at user agent logs to see if Brave is making an appearance.
Brave are working on their search engine, they have been slowly inviting people to start using it (I got my invite a couple of weeks ago). As far as I know, it doesn't rely on other search engines for its results, although they do provide an optional setting to enable Google fallback in case a query doesn't return enough results, which mixes in Google results together with Brave's own.
Overall, I've been finding it pretty good. It has information cards for various entities on the right-hand side, similar to all other search engines. You can additionally search for images, news, and videos.
DuckDuckGo has shown the world that building a privacy respecting search engine is possible. It brought an alternative to mainstream tracking based search.
I'd like to see DDG innovate more as the product seems stale at this point. 10 years have gone by and the product hasn't evolved much, feels pretty much the same. It seems they are in some kind of contractual Bing Search/Ads dependency lockdown preventing them from innovation in search. Also, are ad-based business models really what we want from the web?
On the other hand I can see them saying 'what we are doing has worked pretty well in the past, lets continue doing that".
I have been using DDG as my main search engine for a few years now. I occasionally try out other search engines, but I haven't been to Bing (directly) or Google for many months at least. DDG is "good enough" for me. If I can't find a reasonable result to my query, I work on modifying my search terms or just give up.
Having said that, my main concern is that someday in the future DDG will be sold to some less ethical company and I'll have to abandon it (having to start the search for a new search engine of choice all over again).
I use DDG on my computer and phone. I like it a lot. Took me about 6 months to get used to how it searched and once in a while I still need to use !g to get google results.
"Like Google Search, DuckDuckGo makes money by selling ads on top of people's search results. The difference is that while the ads you see when searching on Google are generally targeted to you in part based on your past searches, plus what Google knows about your behavior more broadly, DuckDuckGo's are purely "contextual"-that is, they are based only on the search term."
I searched "why men are stronger than women" in Google and DDG a few days ago. Very different results. Google seemed to be telling me I'm a bad person for thinking these bad things.
How about distributed crawlers coupled with a distributed datastore similar to Freenet?
Your browser automatically crawls the pages you visit and adds the info to the distributed index that is also stored on all participating machines (perhaps with a copy on the cloud for query performance). Though a single browser may visit only a few pages, we ought to get a pretty good WWW index from the combined crawling of millions of browsers.
Some indexes are really big. Plus, when you index a page, you must be sure that you are not indexing your email inbox. It would be better if the index is on the cloud, while the crawlers are distributed, but are not part of your browser.
I just cannot understand this statement of how DuckDuckGo's quest proves online privacy is possible; at least here in South Korea, DuckDuckGo has been under the control of arbitrary censoring of government which means the communication is under watch.
The best use I have found for DDG is when on mobile I use chrome and when a website says you have reached your max articles per month just share to DDG and and read away
Anecdata, I've switched to DDG as my default search engine on both desktop and mobile.
At the beginnning I would still go back to google for technical queries, but by now I have accepted that DDG is actually better at excluding spam/SEO stuff than google. Also the fact that it actually honours keywords like 'site:' 'domain:' is a huge time saver.
The difference may be regional or specific to my areas of interest so perhaps your mileage may vary but to me DDG has improved substantially in the past 2 years whereas google just seems to increasingly just push for this natural language paradigm and discard my specific query, showing instead whatever popular approximation it chooses (I can only assume this probably saves them a tonne of resources and caters to >90% of users).
The only feature I still feel google is unmatched is 'regional' online shopping discoverability. The 'Google Shopping' service is still the go to place for me to find specialist physical stores near me that also have an online retail front.
On mobile, I find DDG incredibly useful because it doesn't send me to AMP pages (which are inevitably broken), and on iOS I can't install any browser extensions to redirect me away from that mess.
- Local search is naturally very poor, to the point that 100% of my local search traffic is still on Google.
- Image search is nothing to write home about.
- I'm not pleased that looking up something contentious/political more often than not brings up reactionary or false content. It's either bad news sources or low quality blogs.
The last one might not be a problem to people whose opinions the results align with better but it is what it is. It's hard to say whether this is what the web would be without Google "censorship"/filter bubble stuff, or whether these are just the kinds of content the DDG (bing + other sources) algorithms have decided to rank ahead of them.
Either way, it is an invaluable resource and an important one to have. Search is already extremely concentrated towards Google but ideally there should always be usable alternatives.