

4 Weeks with DuckDuckGo - b14ck
http://www.mahdiyusuf.com/post/22483556686/four-weeks-with-duckduckgo

======
ek
I was discussing this with a colleague recently and I figured I'd mention it
on HN the next time DuckDuckGo came up.

I feel somewhat silly saying this, but DuckDuckGo is not that great of a name.
I love the engine, and have gotten some great results from the few times I
have used it, but I really, really wish it were not named DuckDuckGo. It seems
tacky to me and it's hard to say. There's a support article that encourages
users to "duck it". No thanks. I swear I would become a regular user of this
product if it were named something more professional.

I know tech products often have whimsical names, and it's usually positive or
at least tolerable, but something about "DuckDuckGo" rubs me the wrong way.

~~~
zanny
Google is just misspelled 10^10. I don't see how that is "professional" more
than google just built its brand out of thin air.

I can definitely give credit to Google for inventing the word though. So few
people try making companies without their names having some second meaning
besides "my company".

~~~
samirahmed
10^100 I believe

------
SeanDav
I find Googles' invasion of privacy a big turn off. I have long since stopped
using Facebook for exactly this reason. I am not quite at the point with
Google where I say I don't trust them, unlike Facebook. I regularly check out
DuckDuckGo but its search results are not quite there yet for me, in
comparison to Google. At this stage the gap is narrowing, both as a result of
my increasing concerns over the invasion of privacy from Google and the
increasing quality of DuckDuckGo.

It is only a matter of time before I say goodbye to Google forever....

~~~
SpaceDragon
Google's invasion of privacy will only get worse, as it becomes increasingly
difficult to get off their teat.

"Do no evil" will soon become a rediculously bitter irony. Just wait.

~~~
Teapot
New user motto, 'Use no evil.'

------
bob_kelso
I tried DDG for little more than a week about a year a go and it made me
realize how much I use the search suggestion feature in Chrome. The lack of
that feature using DDG really annoyed me. Often I don't know the exact
spelling of the thing I'm looking for or the best way to phrase my question
(English being my third language), and the suggestions I get in chrome just by
typing a few letters in the address bar is really great. And often times I'm
just looking for how to spell a word and with the suggestions I don't even
have to leave the page I'm on.

~~~
cemerick
You might like:

<http://ddgg.nfriedly.com/>

Adds in a browser search engine option that targets duckduckgo, but uses
google for autocomplete/suggestions.

~~~
bob_kelso
Wow, thank you for pointing this out to me. I think it's time I give DDG a
second chance.

------
ph33r
Last week I was searching for a: Sabian 18" HHX Chinese cymbal. I was
considering buying one for my kit and wanted to see some reviews, video
samples, prices etc.

DuckDuckGo: The top three results were American Ebay search results (I live in
Canada), a drum shop in Memphis (15 hour drive), and various other online
stores like discountdrumequipment.info... looks legit.

Google: The first page of results had links to the official Sabian product
pages, Youtube videos of people playing it, and the most impressive thing was
a 3 day old Kijiji ad (still popular in Canada) with the exact cymbal I wanted
for a good price in a city just 45 minutes from me. I responded to the ad,
drove the 45 minutes, and purchased it.

DuckDuckGo's stance on user privacy is admirable, but Google is going to be my
primary search engine for a very long time with results like that... it's
accuracy still impresses me.

------
antidoh
One of my favorite things about DDG is the bang, and my absolute favorite bang
(when I use one) is !g. Because the URL for the resulting page is just the
search, without all the cruft.

    
    
      !g googol
      https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&q=googol
    
      direct via google:
      http://www.google.com/#hl=en&gs_nf=1&cp=6&gs_id=36&xhr=t&q=googol&pf=p&sclient=psy-ab&oq=googol&aq=0&aqi=h1g-s1g2g-s1&aql=&gs_l=&pbx=1&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_qf.,cf.osb&fp=aa8b317ec80710f&biw=1036&bih=663
    

Whenever I want to send a google search to someone, I do it via DDG. Although
I usually send DDG searches, to help promote DDG.

~~~
sc0ttbeardsley
This appears to be a direct ripoff of open shortcuts from yahoo search.

<http://search.yahoo.com/osc/help>

~~~
antidoh
Good thing they didn't patent it, so others can use it.

------
SpeakMouthWords
The writer appears to be the wrong audience of !bang. As a physics student, I
find !w tremendously helpful. Image searching is also much faster since it all
can be done in the search bar rather than requiring the mouse. !wa for wolfram
alpha is again great. It's far better for sites in which there is no better
alternative than using their search bar, rather than the type of usage the
article seemed to employ.

~~~
reledi
You can manage your search engines in Chrome to get the same !bang effect.
Slightly better in my opinion, because you don't have to type the awkward '!'
and you don't have to go to a website just to search another website.

For example, if I have the URL <http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%s> tied
to the 'wa' keyword, I can now search Wolfram Alpha from the address bar by
typing 'wa'.

~~~
Locke1689
The best thing is you can even configure Chrome to do the same thing for local
files. My Racket repository is always in ~/code/racket. The "rkg" keyword (for
racket-git) is set to
file:///home/andy/code/racket/doc/search/index.html?q=%s, which allows me to
easily search all of the latest racket Git docs in Chrome in just three
letters + Tab.

------
protolif
I think the bubble trend is dangerous. For a while, I was comfortable with
Google knowing so much about me. But since they're using that data to decide
what I need to know, I decided that it was time to ween myself off their
services, including Business Gmail.

~~~
zobzu
What I find interesting, if not sad (sorry), is that it was clear, obvious,
simple, like a punch the face that Google would use the data.

Yet you and billion others decided to be comfortable with it. Today the trend
is clearly changing and privacy starts to become important. People not
getting/losing jobs over it and other such problems certainly don't help.

But still. Faith in humanity certainly doesn't fare very well these days ;-)

~~~
protolif
You're right. They were bound to use that data. I just assumed that it was for
serving up more targeted averts. I'm not against making money. I just don't
want to see what happened with newspaper and TV happen to the internet.

------
RegEx
I use google mostly for "How to do x in y framework", and I can get a good
response 75% of the time, and that goes up to about 85% with some better
phrasing. I tried ddg for a week, but I used g! so much that I felt a bit
silly.

~~~
rhizome
I've found that you can get that extra 10% of relevance by including the year
in your query.

------
13rules
The fact that DuckDuckGo is even being compared to Google shows how much they
have accomplished already ... it also shows that domain names do not matter AT
ALL.

~~~
notatoad
i don't think it shows that domain names don't matter. it just shows that DDG
is good enough to overcome their terrible name. who knows where they'd be with
a better name.

~~~
petercooper
Google had the same problem. I recall showing Google off to people (when it
wasn't a household name) and they'd comment on what a stupid name it was and
how they wouldn't remember it.

Similar "stupid!" name outrages occurred over Vista, Xbox, Wii, iPad.. but
they got absorbed into pop culture anyway and no longer seem weird. C'est la
vie :-)

------
mrschwabe
"most site’s internal search engines suck, returning results that are somewhat
hit or miss. "

If I want to find a movie, I type !imdb Avengers

If I want to find a recipe, I type !allrecipes pizza

If I want to play music right now I type !grooveshark AC-DC Thunderstruck

If you know where to look use bangs. If you think Google does a better job,
there's a bang for that too type !g

~~~
goggles99
Bangs? is that like using "site" in Google?

Using Google:

If I want to find a movie, I type site:imdb.com Avengers

If I want to find a recipe, I type site:allrecipes.com pizza

If I want to play music right now I type site:grooveshark.com AC-DC
Thunderstruck

~~~
EvilTerran
googling "site:imdb.com ..." uses google's index, restricted to imdb.com;
DDGing "!imdb ..." uses imdb's internal search.

I almost never bother with sites' internal searches, as google's "site:"
feature almost invariably works better, so I wouldn't be inclined to use DDG's
site-search bang-lines myself. YMMV, I guess it depends on how good the site
in question's internal search functionality is.

~~~
sad_panda
Heh, I always use Google instead of most site's internal search engines. Have
you ever tried using MSDN search before? Even with the advanced filter
options, the results are awful, awful, awful compared to what Google pulls up.

~~~
DanBC
See also the mind-bogglingly dreadful search provided by Amazon.

I dread to think how many human hours have been wasted because of sub-optimal
Amazon searches.

------
rjsamson
I really want to love DuckDuckGo, and will usually give it a try for a day or
two every couple weeks - but Google is just a superior product.

------
pirateking
A pretty balanced review of the two search engines. I have had DuckDuckGo as
my main search engine for almost a year now. I still find myself using the
google bang (g!) for a significant percentage of searches. However, I don't
find typing the extra 3 characters in my search query to be enough of a chore
to warrant switching back to Google as default engine. From experience, I
usually have a strong premonition when a particular query will be more
appropriate for Google to handle, so I don't waste time hitting DuckDuckGo
first.

------
xpose2000
Search quality is more important than privacy, and Google is better at most of
my searches.

Also, Google crawls and index's new content within 1-3 minutes. DDG takes 10+
minutes.

~~~
rapind
I have to disagree with you there. Google may reach a point where I'm no
longer comfortable sharing my information with them. If that happens then I'll
be switching immediately. I don't think it's a foregone conclusion yet though.

~~~
hammersend
I would expect that the more a search engine knows about me the more relevant
my results will be. I have yet to see a compelling argument why that isn't the
case. Since I use a search engine for the sole purpose of getting the result
I'm looking for as quickly as possible, I am more than happy to make the trade
off.

~~~
Killswitch
Finally, someone in the tech world who agrees with me... Is it really a bad
thing that Google knows you like x product and shows you things related to it
instead of completely irrelevant?

~~~
neverm0re
Yes, actually. I don't think you understand just how pervasive Google's
presence is on the internet. Install Ghostery or similar sometime. Then watch
where Google Analytics shows up. This will be some rather surprising places,
including porn sites and things you might find yourself feeling rather
sensitive about.

Remember, not only does Google have records of every search associated with
your IP, but they've spent a lot of work trying to differentiate and
distinguish people as their IPs change. They also index all email you receive
using their services or if your place of employment uses those services.

In sum, this is actually a very detailed picture to paint of someone. It's not
a matter of simply not using Gmail or Google, they've infested the internet
with bugs that still provide detailed information of where people have visited
and it's actually a bit of effort to slip under their radar. More effort than
the average person will ever spend, anyway.

And it's not like you can have them remove what they already know about you,
you just have to write that off as a matter of record now. If you still think
this is a good thing to hand this all over to a company that owes you
absolutely nothing and whose existence largely depends on holding this
information about you...

~~~
hammersend
"Then watch where Google Analytics shows up. This will be some rather
surprising places, including porn sites and things you might find yourself
feeling rather sensitive about."

I'm not a huge porn surfer but when I do find my self in certain corners of
the internet, I use private browsing mode and a vpn. I doubt Google is using
that as part of my profile.

The rest you say doesn't bother me as again it is a trade off. I trade
information to get good search results.

------
mwill
I tried using ddg as my default search in chrome but had to switch back pretty
quickly, not because of search relevance, but because of speed. For me every
ddg search takes roughly 2-5 seconds to show results, as opposed to Googles <1
second.

I tend to do many searches in quick succession, so it sort of breaks my train
of thought.

I suspect this has more to do with my internet connection/location than ddg,
but for now it still makes it frustrating to use day to day.

------
losvedir
I've spent approximately the last 4 weeks with DDG, as well, and I haven't
decided yet if I want to keep it as my primary search engine.

For the most part it works well, although, I periodically g! just to make sure
I'm not missing something important.

The thing is, I don't particularly mind Google building up a profile of me,
keeping track of my browsing, email, and prior searches. I mind them doing it
to _show me ads._

I strive to avoid needless purchases and prefer to keep as few items as
possible (I've whittled my wardrobe down to couple pairs of pants and about a
week's worth of shirts, undies, socks). I want to keep a simple, regular
grocery list of bread, chicken, etc, and so avoid the coupons lest I be
enticed to buy a fancy cereal or something. I know that Google constantly
inundating me with products more and more relevant to my interests will lead
to a life of higher spending.

DuckDuckGo is better in that regard (usually only one ad in the results) so
I'm happy. But if I could pay a yearly ad-free fee to Google I'd do it in a
heartbeat.

------
vph
In terms of privacy, before you embrace DuckDuckGo as a "good guy" and Google
as a "bad guy", please be aware of a more-or-less universal truth: you are a
good guy, until you become big.

After all, Google's motto is "don't be evil". I think it's a bit naive to
compare DuckDuckGo to Google at this point in time, where they have different
statuses.

~~~
comechao
Yes, we can compare. Doesn't matter if Google is old and DDG is young. It does
not change the fact that people have a need for good privacy terms and in this
case, privacy is THE feature that DDG is offering.

~~~
Bikepump
But to follow up on his point, if DDG were ever to become Google's size they
would have little choice but to abandon their privacy approach as well... it's
just not possible to make a profitable search engine with competitive quality
without machine learning algorithms that use user data.

------
mst
It's simple.

For brute force 'rgrep /internet' google has the scale and the technology to
be way ahead of everybody else. But when I already know roughly what I want
will exist, I apply duckduckgo.com, because they're less raw processing and
more intelligently automated quasi-curation.

~~~
cwp
Agreed. I use DDG as my default search engine, because most of the time my
searches are for the form "find me the web site for X" where X is a thing in
the world. I fall back to Google when DDG doesn't give me the result I need
(rare, but it happens) and when I need to learn about a concept. For those
amorphous "tell me about X" queries, Google is unmatched.

------
Legion
I love DuckDuckGo, even if a good half of my searches end up beginning with
!g.

Love the bang syntax for site-specific searching. I have set up my browser
before to do this, but now it's far more convenient to just set my browser's
default engine to DDG and !bang syntax search.

~~~
yuriyg
Google has provided this for years with the "site:" feature (e.g. search for
"lists site:python.org"). In addition, Google uses its own results, since as
the article correctly mentions "most site’s internal search engines suck".

~~~
Legion
> Google has provided this for years with the "site:" feature

Which is something completely different, and is also something present in
DuckDuckGo.

~~~
tonfa
But chrome and firefox provide it for years, without giving up your queries to
a 3rd party search engine.

~~~
rys
In this context, all search engines are "3rd party".

~~~
tonfa
If you want to search amazon, or the python website, why give your query to
ddg? Especially if you don't have to when you use browser keywords.

~~~
perigrin
In a word: curation.

Amazon is probably always going to be the most relevant search engine for
their site, but the current choice for python searches may not be.

An example similar to python but that I have first hand experience with is
Perl's CPAN searches. There are two search engines for CPAN,
<http://search.cpan.org> and <http://metacpan.org>. DDG's !cpan originally
defaulted to the first one, but at the time it's results were not as accurate
or informative as the second one. Upon appeal the DDG people switched the
default to <http://metacpan.org> providing everyone who used the !cpan results
with what they felt was a better result.

------
cormacrelf
I think speed is a pretty big issue, too. I can't bring myself to use DDG for
really quick searches, for URLs I can't remember etc. because it's just not
fast enough. DDG makes me wait between 5 and 10 seconds before I see anything,
whereas Google is almost instant.

------
hrktb
These are good points, though I think ddg really shines in it's focus on the
query, and not trying to be too clever.

Google tends to put too much weight on regional proximity and browser language
settings, sacrificing the relevance to the query. I guess their approach works
for a majority of people and queries, but there are so many times it just
feels wrong.

E.g. on a simple query : <http://imgur.com/ezKUm> (I am located in France, so
french results come first. the two windows are in incognito mode for fairness,
it's worse when logged in)

------
rmATinnovafy
I've been using ddg as my default choice for about 7 months now.

They have really improved in the last 3-4 months. The results related to
programming are better than googles (imo).

------
stanislav0
"I certainly don’t mind a search engine using my previous search history to
help me find better content."

I actually do. This, in fact, is a form of control over the information you
get. Since I do not like that, I stick with DDG despite all the
inconveniences.

Google should give people a way to opt out of the bubble.

~~~
Bikepump
> Google should give people a way to opt out of the bubble.

Just sign out and clear your cookie every so often, or use an incognito
window.

------
asselinpaul
I also use DuckDuckGo on a daily basis and it's great. Far better than google
in my opinion. And how, with DuckDuckHack, it will only get better...

------
lotux
I like DDG and I'm using it for more than 6 months, and will never go back to
google.

------
exim
For me, just couple of queries was enough to see that results were bad.

------
samstave
Back in 1998/9 I was Director of IT of a tech company in the valley. IT, as
always, was resposible for deploying all corp machines with the std image.

I was following what was happening in the valley at the time - and everyone
used Yahoo!.

I went through and replaced all browser homes with the new and scrappy
Google.com as the main search page.

I deployed this on all new machines as well, and I educated users on why this
new, minimal site was better.

They ALL started using Google from that point on (~400 employees)

\---

This is the same thing that needs to happen here.

Get an IT manager to set the default page to DDG and educate the users.

( __CAVEAT! -- users are far more informed now than then, back then people
hardly understood the internet's potential, let alone WTF a search co was --
so telling the avg user "google is bad, DDG good" will be more challenging
than then...)

~~~
zanny
The problem is that Google came out and destroyed everyone in terms of search
results relevance. Duck Duck Go won't steal the market until it does search
better. The average joe that will cause the shift doesn't care if Google is
tracing their history to target ads at them, and doesn't realize that
information snooping is a slippery slope.

------
loverobots
Google is better only with ads turned off. Otherwise DDG and Bing beat
Google's ads anytime. Try surfing Google without an ad blocker to see what I'm
talking about, they've gone way over what's acceptable.

Either way I go the extra mile to give the underdog a chance.

~~~
jarcoal
Google has gone so far over the line with ads it's ridiculous. I didn't even
realize it until recently when I disabled my ad blocker for a moment.

I'm amazed Googlers can look at that every day at work and not feel like their
company has lost it's way.

Just checked it now with ad blocker off on my 13" macbook air screen. The
organic results are barely above the fold... barely. Offensive.

~~~
comex
I don't use AdBlock and I haven't consciously noticed an ad in a long time. In
fact, I'm having a hard time finding queries with an ad at the top at all.

~~~
zach
My reliable go-to query for maximum ads is [electric heaters].

~~~
Drbble
[Credut cards]

To be fair though, most people asking queries like this actually do want ads!

