
Inside DuckDuckGo, Google's Tiniest, Fiercest Competitor - mparramon
http://www.fastcolabs.com/3026698/inside-duckduckgo-googles-tiniest-fiercest-competitor
======
breitling
I know a lot of people here love DDG, but my experience hasn't been the same.
I have tried many times to switch over to DDG, but the quality of search
results just isn't the same as google. It's like google just knows what I'm
looking for.

Everyone loves a good underdog story; I would love to see DDG catch up and be
equivalent to Google search.

~~~
at-fates-hands
You think this has anything to do with all the data they probably have on you
in order to serve you what you're looking for?

Not being sarcastic at all. I wonder if this one untold benefit of all the
data collection they do.

~~~
Volundr
In my case I know it often is. For example if I search for Rust on DDG, I get
the rust-lang.org as result 7. Scrolling down I don't see any more results
related to the language until well down the page (and still few of them).

Google: rust-lang.org is my second result and most of the page is taken by
libraries, the Wikipedia page, etc. Something tells me that's not what most
people see.

That said I have noticed on occasion when I break from my usual search
patterns, DDG has actually given me better results than Google.

I still have DDG as my default search engine because being able to do !hoogle,
!ruby, !clojure, etc is freaking awesome.

~~~
kibwen
This inspired me to check whether DDG has a !rust directive, and it actually
does! Very cool.

------
valarauca1
To any readers. I highly suggest you try DuckDuckGo, especially for tech
related/documentation searches.

The !{language} searches are incredibly powerful. Taking you to the language's
documentation repo, and displaying results only there. Which I find hugely
help for learning new languages.

I've switched over completely for my day to day searches. Google offers next
to nothing I can't get with DuckDuckGo.

~~~
ausjke
I use it occasionally, what does !{language} search mean?

~~~
duggieawesome
Say you want to refer to the JavaScript docs, you can type:

"!javascript function" and it will take you immediately to the documentation.

~~~
christiangenco
This works sporadically for me, and the autocomplete text is completely wrong:
[http://i.imgur.com/v3skzTX.png](http://i.imgur.com/v3skzTX.png)

That search, "!ruby string", also redirects to... a google search?

~~~
valarauca1
Luckily DuckDuckGo is partially open, you can help contribute fixes :)

~~~
droope
Duck duck go does not share search data with any open search database e.g.
YaCy [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YaCy](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YaCy)

It'd be pretty great if they did!

------
austinl
This article has been posted three times before. It's interesting to see how
opinions change over time.

10 months ago
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7270973](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7270973))

9 months ago
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7397794](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7397794))

3 months ago
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8263296](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8263296))

------
ausjke
I used duckduckgo when visiting China where google.com is blocked, its own
baidu.com is useless for searching technical content, most developers need use
vpn to visit google.com for development, but VPN is not a safe bet since the
GFW keeps evolving and many VPN can not cope with that for daily reliable
usage.

duckduckgo can do well in that market, better than bing.com and yahoo.com in
most cases from my experience, but not enough comparing to google.com.

------
ShannonSofield
I'm a big DDG fan, but I'd hardly call them a Google competitor when they
process .008 (4M/500M) queries that G does per day.

That said, their search operators are getting really powerful.

------
jstalin
I've been using DDG since the early days. At first, it wasn't very good, but
I've gotten to the point where I don't use any other search engine anymore.
And it keeps getting better at serving up relevant links.

