
Let's start using DuckDuckGo more often - rms_returns
Granted that DuckDuckGo.com is quite a childish name, but then so was Google when we first heard about it in early 2000s, wasn&#x27;t it? I just switched to DDG recently and feel that not only is the interface fast and minimal (like Google used to be in those early days), but even the results seem to be a lot better (at least specific to the programming topic that I search too often). I&#x27;m getting a feeling that some day in future, DDG is going to become as big as Google, if not supersede it.
But a search engine&#x27;s results are only as accurate as the number of users who search and contribute to it, so its my appeal to people to give a chance to DDG and start using it more and more instead of Google.
======
collyw
I use DuckDuck go as my default search on my machines, but I think the fact
that Google is not anonymous does give them a big advantage.

An obvious example of this is when I search for "Django" (I am primarily a
Django developer). DuckDuckGo will return results about the film as the top
hits, whereas Google already knows that I mean Django Web Framework and will
return those as the top hits.

I appreciate the fact that my searches are anonymous with DDG, but I doubt
that it will be able to be "as good" as Google for that reason.

~~~
ky738
And DuckDuckGo is not really comparable when you don't live in the US. Google
is far more superior, even without your info.

~~~
rms_returns
We have the chicken and egg problem there. Google have that results because it
has terabytes of information on everything and that's because millions use it.
If more and more people start using DDG, their results will also improve.

~~~
st3v3r
See, I'm not willing to do that. I'm not willing to put up with inferior
results on the promise that maybe, someday in the future, they might get
better.

~~~
macintux
I remember how impossible searching was before Google. DDG at its worst is
infinitely better than that.

~~~
st3v3r
It very well might be. But there's also something better. And I'd prefer to
use the better option.

------
thesmallestcat
> I'm getting a feeling that some day in future, DDG is going to become as big
> as Google, if not supersede it.

Well, no, they don't even have their own search engine.

> a search engine's results are only as accurate as the number of users who
> search and contribute to it

That makes no sense. Anyway, we don't use DDG because its results are shitty.

~~~
cptskippy
> Well, no, they don't even have their own search engine.

Really? I've never heard this, do you have anymore information about it?

~~~
jmathai
It's sort of a meta search engine that utilizes other search indexes. Here's a
post from the founder.

[https://duck.co/forum/comment/27893](https://duck.co/forum/comment/27893)

Edit, that's about 5 years old. The current page on Wikipedia provides a more
recent explanation.

"DuckDuckGo's results are a compilation of "about 50" sources,[42] including
Yahoo! Search BOSS; Wikipedia; Wolfram Alpha; Bing; its own Web crawler, the
DuckDuckBot; and others."

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DuckDuckGo#Overview](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DuckDuckGo#Overview)

~~~
Bedon292
They actually say hundreds of sources now on
[https://duck.co/help/results/sources](https://duck.co/help/results/sources)
and specifically call out Bing, Yahoo, and Yandex for search results.

------
AdamSC1
Disclaimer: I work at DuckDuckGo so I'm a bit bias. I won't turn this into a
sales pitch, but here are a few common misconceptions people have about
privacy and search.

1) Many people don't realize that tracking isn't just about having something
to hide. But, it can cost you money. From Airline tickets to staplers you pay
based on a profile:

[http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB100014241278873237772045781893...](http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887323777204578189391813881534)

[http://www.wsj.com/articles/why-you-cant-trust-youre-
getting...](http://www.wsj.com/articles/why-you-cant-trust-youre-getting-the-
best-deal-online-1414036862)

2) People don't realize what's being tracked. I usually send them to
[http://history.google.com/history](http://history.google.com/history) to have
a look. Or [http://webkay.robinlinus.com/](http://webkay.robinlinus.com/) to
see what their browser can access. That makes a lot of people realize just
what is out there.

3) People feel they can't search without personalized searches.

The example is often a matter of disambiguation. For example, if I type
"Python" I want code, not snakes. But, really, when is the last time you only
typed 'Python' and wanted something generic about Python? You probably wanted
a package lookup or the latest news on a release. So if you become more
specific there is no issue.

Plus when you get a bit more specific on Python you can trigger things like
package lookup:

[https://duckduckgo.com/?q=python+numpy&ia=about](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=python+numpy&ia=about)

Or NumPy Cheatsheet:

[https://duckduckgo.com/?q=numpy+cheat+sheet&ia=cheatsheet](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=numpy+cheat+sheet&ia=cheatsheet)

At the end of the day some people may truly be ok with all the tracking that
takes place, and that's ok that's up to them. But, at DuckDuckGo our goal is
to educate people on online privacy, and provide a trusted way to access
information as best we can. (Not to mention Instant Answers and Bangs which
are super addicting)

~~~
cpayne624
I'm a ddg fan. You guys should have a big, conspicuous WHY? button on the
homepage that links to all this. The 'Learn More' link takes me to what you
guys don't do, which is good, but it's light on the _why_.

~~~
AdamSC1
Thanks for the great suggestion. We're currently exploring ways to get the
'why' message out there more. I'll certainly bring it up with the team :)

------
keeganjw
DDG has been my default search for the last few years and I only very rarely
use it for it's native search results. The bang (!) search syntax is by far
the biggest reason I use it. It allows me to search sooooo many websites
directly from the address bar. If you want normal Google search results, use
!g. If you want Google Images, use !gi. Amazon? !a. Wikipedia? !w. The list
goes on and on and on.

Edit: grammar.

~~~
dethos
Completely agree. I also have been using DDG for a few years and got used to
the bangs.

The results for a general search usually are good enough, so don't I even
bother to use Google directly.

------
nine_k
DDG is great; what it currently lacks (for me) is not search quality but
reach; it has trouble indexing less visited corners of the internet.

Google did not become huge because of the search engine _alone_. AFAICT two
things, based on related technologies, made Google oodles of money: AdWords
and SERP ads. (AdWords used to be so unobtrusive I never tried to block them.)

I don't know how DDG currently pays its bills. They do feature unobtrusive and
clearly marked ads on their SERP, too.

I'm not sure if ads can be reasonable without precise targeting, that is,
tracking, tacit privacy invasion of various sorts, etc. Poorly targeted ads
are disliked both by users ("dumb!") and advertisers ("poor conversion, money
wasted").

The only other option I can see for a private company is to sell a
subscription. Pay _n_ USD / mo for no-tracking, no-strings-attached search.

The question is, of course, the value of _n_. It may turn out to be
uncomfortably high for many users, just because advertisers value their
eyeball rather highly.

You can already opt out of ads on some Google services, e.g. YouTube: try
closing a few ads, or visit google.com/contributor when it (re-)opens. You can
opt out of personalized ads, too. While many of us still won't trust all these
measures, for many these would feel adequate.

I wish DDG all the luck. But being and _staying_ an alternative, privacy-
respecting search engine, even a low-profile one, isn't going to be easy.

~~~
StavrosK
How poorly targeted can an ad be when you've told them _exactly what you 're
looking for_? It doesn't get much more targeted than "car dealerships
Florida".

~~~
st3v3r
Well, if you're looking to buy a Honda, and the ad that gets shown is for the
Mercedes Benz dealership, that's pretty crappy targeting.

~~~
StavrosK
It is, but there's no better _potential_ for ad targeting than in a search
engine, which is what the GP was lamenting. I read their comment as "how can
they target ads well if they don't track me?", to which the answer is "they
don't need to track you, you've literally told them what you want".

------
aq3cn
I use searx.me more often than any other search engine because along with
giving the result it also display the search engine which it uses to fetch the
result. I mean it is very important to know the areas where each of the search
engine excel. Privacy is a concern for sure, but DuckDuckGo cannot win me over
on the basis of privacy only. DuckDuckGo can be an answer to privacy concerned
people, but it cannot beat Google Scholar, YouTube, PubMed, Amazon etc. We
must know which search engine is perfect for which kind of keyword.

~~~
hedora
It would be great if they made ! more discoverable. For instance, it could
tell you the ! code needed to limit searches to the engine that produced each
"niche" blue link and gray box at the top of the screen (the one that inlines
amazon product thumbnails/prices, wikipedia article synopses, stack overflow
answers.", etc)

~~~
aq3cn
But the question is, why are we looking for a Swiss Army Knife?

I make all kinds of search queries but I only use privacy centric search
engines when required for my particular concerns. In my opinion, the best way
to stay anonymous is by disguising yourself as normal. Today's browser are
capable of switching search engines with the use of a single letter before the
search query to make use of a particular search engine. And one can easily
visit Firefox search engine database to include it in their list.

[https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/search/?atype=4](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/search/?atype=4)

I haven't use DuckDuckGo's bang features, so I really don't understand what
are they trying to achieve other than proxying the search result which I
already satisfactorily achieve by having multiple Firefox profile with
different proxies.

I think this is never ending quest of integrating new search engines in
DuckDuckGo. But it will never match the native use. For example, take Wolfram
Alpha or TinEye(Reverse Image Search).

Bottom line is that there are million ways to stay anonymous while using
native search engines instead of routing it through third party services.

------
gpm
I've used duckduckgo for a few years now, highly recommend it.

For 'easy' searches it's equivalent to Google.

For 'hard' searches it's nearly stricter better than Google, because if
DuckDuckGo doesn't find something I also look at the Google results (append !g
to the search), and they often come up with very different subsets of the
internet.

To me it no longer has anything to do with privacy or not liking Google, it's
just that DuckDuckGo has the better product for putting into your search bar.

------
anexprogrammer
I'd suggest to "Start contributing data to DDG in 2017". Most of their best
results are crowdsourced. I've been using it as default for perhaps 2 years
now. There's some consistent annoyances, but overall I actually prefer the
experience to Google.

It's much nicer about disambiguation than google, and can be _incredibly_
helpful. e.g. Search for Zen - you get a wide selection of possibles in
probable order. Sadly there's far too many missing. Crowdsourcing needed.

It's _horrible_ at localisation. eg set Filter by region to UK and search any
global multinational. Chances are the UK site is WAY down the list and the
.com and US options hard at top. on google UK the local branch is always
first.

There's too many instant answers that presume a US only view of the world.

The instant answers when they have adequate data and ! searches are brilliant.

Lyric and video searches are orders of magnitude better than Google.

Maybe 5% of searches go to Google as I'm not quickly finding what I need.

~~~
AdamSC1
We always welcome more contributions. We crossed 1000 Instant Answers this
year and they make for some wonderful experiences!

------
clydethefrog
For anyone using !g when they don't get the results they need - use !s. It
will use Startpage, which fetches results from the Google search engine but
without giving any personal information to Google's servers.

------
Joeboy
DDG is really great for easily doing specific types of search, eg. adding "!w"
to your query will search for something on Wikipedia. For that feature, it's
extremely useful and I don't like to be without it. But its own search results
(which I think are actually anonymized Bing search results?) are nowhere as
near what google manages by personalizing your search. So I'll often add "!g"
to my query to get google results rather than ddg ones.

~~~
Forlien
You can add these shortcuts into your browser. On firefox, you can right click
on a search box and specify some character(s). I'm sure there's a similar
process on chrome too.

~~~
xj9
too much work. changing my default search engine to ddg is faster and easier.
i don't even know all of the bang commands! if i followed your advice i would
have a significantly inferior experience.

------
zouhair
Every time I try to use DDG I ended using !g which kills its purpose, I just
use Startpage[0]

[0]: [https://www.startpage.com/](https://www.startpage.com/)

~~~
sureshn
This site appears to be a front of google and in the end its relying on google
to search and get the result, some how I don't see this to be too different
from directly using google in a incognito window

~~~
Ladnaks
A incognito window doesn't hide your identity from Google. They still get your
IP address and your browsers's fingerprint, which is more than enough to
identify you.

------
Twirrim
I took the opportunity of starting at a new job to make the switch of default.
I've found it to be generally giving me better tech search results than
Google. For the most part, however, I haven't really noticed I'm using it,
which I'd consider a good thing. It means it does its job without fuss or
bother and gets out of the way.

------
macintux
It's my default engine everywhere. Very happy with it generally, and the fact
that I can trivially redirect a search to Google makes it a no-brainer.

~~~
kleiba
I used DDG for a while as my default engine, but realized that I was using the
Google redirects more and more until I finally switched back again. Google's
search result were just better for me.

~~~
macintux
I'd estimate I redirect no more than 10% of my searches, and given how much I
distrust Google, it's worth it to keep searching elsewhere.

------
sureshn
I use DDG full time and it has been awesome , I am a devops guy use DDG to
trouble shoot my way out of problems I get stuck in and I have personally
found this to be way better than google. The Bang search is very cool too ,
for example I use it to search github for docker orchestration related content
directly ! , I also use DDG command line quite a bit and its really awesome ,
these are things which I feel are much superior compared to google and I hope
DDG will become the geeks most preferred search tool in 2017

------
roryrjb
I switched to DDG a few months ago and have found it just as good as Google at
least for my usage, at the very least I haven't felt the need to use Google as
the results I have been getting have been just fine, and that's without the
bangs functionality.

------
equivocates
I have duckduckgo set on my phone. Recently, I started discovering that when I
clicked a google search result link on my phone, google would mask that link
and wouldn't actually take me to the webpage. Annoying. DDGo doesn't do this.

------
joeclark77
The "bangs" make all the difference. Just this morning I used !ups <tracking
number> to track a package. I use !w (wikipedia), !gm (google maps), !gi
(google images), !yt (youtube) and !a (amazon) all the time. Less often I use
!so (stack overflow), !gsc (google scholar), and others. Sometimes I even use
!g (google) or !b (bing) if the search results are inadequate. But that's very
rare for me.

------
Entangled
Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, they all have something in common: EaaS. Ecosystem
as a Service. DDG should start offering email first, then news, stocks, maps,
social, and finally ads. You don't survive with search alone, you need to
monetize it on one hand and keep your users coming back on the other.

Oh, I wish it was called something simpler like "Ducker" or "Duckit", but
whatever, bikeshedding territory.

~~~
justinclift
That strategy doesn't seem to have worked out for Yahoo.

Not sure DDG users really need/want another er... EaaS.

------
isaac_is_goat
I switched to DuckDuckGo as my primary SE and will be using Bing as a
fallback. I'm slowly moving as far away from Google as I can.

On that note, any good alternatives to G-Suite that aren't necessarily
Microsoft O365 (though I'm not against migrating to that either). A
straightforward email migration is a big plus, documents not such a big deal.

~~~
jquast
suggest fastmail.com

~~~
jumpCastle
I have a question about fastmail: I tried migrating from gmail but the
original date of the emails didn't transfer. Anyone knows how to solve it? I
had to go back to gmail since it's a deal breaker and I couldn't find a
solution, but I really want to leave gmail (so I can have a direct
relationship with the service provider without advertisers involve)

~~~
ocdtrekkie
How were you trying to migrate? I've been doing a Gmail->FastMail migration
and I definitely had no issues with original email dates.

~~~
jumpCastle
It was a few months ago, so I don't remember exactly, but I believe I followed
the instructions that fastmail provided. If you say you didn't have this
problem then I will try again.

Thanks for the answer

~~~
ocdtrekkie
In my case, FWIW, I used an IMAP-compatible mail client (Outlook), and dragged
my crud from one mailbox to the other. I did have some issues where mail
conversations where different messages were under different labels ended up in
not copying fully over, but that's partly because I migrated section by
section.

Also, of course, note that if you have a mail message under two Gmail labels,
and use IMAP to copy your folders, you'll probably end up with two copies of
that message.

Migrating out of Gmail, FWIW, is still a pain because they are so nonstandard
now.

But I never had an issue with the dates on the emails.

------
Tempest1981
They do a nice job of extracting and presenting the top StackOverflow answer:

[https://duckduckgo.com/?q=stl+string+remove+characters&t=h_&...](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=stl+string+remove+characters&t=h_&ia=qa)

------
l0b0
By far my biggest gripe with Google _and_ DDG is that they have started quite
simply ignoring search terms. I search for 'foo bar' (without the quotes),
they return results which clearly do not include "bar", neither in the blurb
nor on the page itself. At least Google will mostly obey if I quote the search
terms, but DDG doesn't even do that.

------
551199
At DuckDuckGo, no cookies are used by default.

>Yet they do store a cookie by default - this cookie is called "user_segment"
and is valid for 1 month after it is first set.[1]

They have removed it but this kind of behaviour doesn't exactly raise trust.
Also they are based in US so 'privacy' is just PR.

I would recommend to use startpage.

[1][https://archive.is/qntuk](https://archive.is/qntuk)
[2][https://8ch.net/tech/ddg.html](https://8ch.net/tech/ddg.html)

------
awalton
Well, as Google continues dumbing down their search engine, there's certainly
room in the market for a search engine with the same kind of power that Google
used to have...

...but that being said, DuckDuckGo ain't it. It's in fact, quite far from it.
It's roughly as good as old Yahoo Search (pre-Bing), which also nobody used
because Google's is vastly superior.

Give me a search engine like Google circa 2010-11 (back before the menagerie
of Bird algorithms began trading "fuzzier" results for raw search power) and
I'm good.

------
simias
I've been using duckduckgo as my main search engine for about 2 years but I
never recommend it to anybody. It just feels like a homeopathic remedy to me.
What's the business model? I don't allow them to show me ads and they don't
allow me to pay for the service. I just can't imagine how that can scale.

Search engines are such an important tool that I would be more than willing to
pay $10 a month for a good quality one with strong commitment to privacy and
maybe additional premium features.

------
neximo64
I find duckduckgos results quite bad though, i've given it many shots over the
past year but often have to keep switching back to Google.

~~~
StavrosK
I find that the results _feel_ quite bad, but, whenever I _actually_ compared
results to Google's, the latter wasn't better at all.

~~~
neximo64
I meant I used to find bad results and used google and found the results were
more relevant, I tried to feel duckduckgo's results were better.

~~~
StavrosK
Hmm, odd, that doesn't match my experience at all. I realized how bad Google
was when I started using DDG and realized that all the bad results in DDG were
bad in Google too.

Maybe it improved since you used it?

------
markpapadakis
I don't really get DDG. I guess it's nice that they pattern-match some queries
and give you a a query specific UI on top of the results or maybe some results
UI that makes a lot of sense for the query -- though Google and Bing do that
too, and I don't believe they are hardcoding those rules/patterns like DDG
seems to be doing.

I 've given it a few honest tries this year but the results are really not
that great, certainly far inferior to Google's or even Bing's, and it 'feels'
slow -- but then again, a few dozen ms slower than Google is 'slow' to me (and
I am sure the difference is higher than that ).

I suppose the major selling point is that it doesn't track your queries and
that's nice and all, but it definitely is not important enough for me to trade
that for better results and responsiveness.

I wish them the best though.

------
slyzmud
I think twice a year I get my antigoogle moment and try to use it, it rarelly
last more than two weeks when I don't find something or get frustrated because
Google always loads faster. It's a shame. As much as I want to love DDG I find
pretty hard to use it for a long time.

------
bobajeff
>I'm getting a feeling that some day in future, DDG is going to become as big
as Google, if not supersede it

If they become bigger than Google what's to stop them from becoming another
Google?

Why punish myself by using an inferior service just to give it the seat at the
big 5?

------
gbersac
If you want a search engine which respect your privacy but with a fancy gui
(unkike duck duck go), you should try qwant :
[https://www.qwant.com/](https://www.qwant.com/)

French technology which work really well !

------
wesleytodd
Already have been!!!

Started using Beaker Browser as my main browser, DDG as my search, and am
working on moving the rest of my life off google (read: gmail).

Also have been messing with doing more work on a raspi tablet rigged with a
bluetooth keyboard/trackpad combo.

------
Arzh
I really like that google isn't anonymous and that it pulls everything that
I've done in the past to give me better results. I usually have to jump
through a lot of hoops to get the same level of results from DDG.

------
gist
> Let's start using DuckDuckGo more often

I am at a loss to understand really why 'us' should start doing this 'more
often'. Is there something inherently good about using ddg vs. google? Why
should anyone use it more vs. what they have already decided works best for
them? This smacks of 'make the world a better place by using ddg'
unfortunately as many others have noted it's simply not a better mouse trap.
And what does the name have to do with it at all?

------
banterfoil
I use DDG but only because of the bang system. In other words I can supply a
!g anywhere in the query and it will use the encrypted google search. This is
also useful when you also use other ones like !yt !fl !gh !r and so forth. But
to be honest, I hardly ever actually use the ddg search engine.

------
zitterbewegung
I use DuckDuckGo exclusively on my phone. Half of the time I seem to fallback
to Google but since you can use !g to get google results I still use it.

------
id122015
I am already using it. and when you want a custom Google search that goes
through DDG you do: !g 1 byte to MB or any other search you want

------
eeeeeeeeeeeee
I tried to use DuckDuckGo and it was terrible. Couldn't even last a week. The
results were dramatically worse.

And putting aside the quality of results, the actual design of the site is not
very good. This is probably a preference, but I find it much easier to quickly
scan a Google results page (or even Bing), but DuckDuckGo, with the font face
and spacing they use, is not as clear.

~~~
Ladnaks
Try startpage.com. They fetch the search results from Google without revealing
your identity to Google. My primary search engine since more than a year.

------
jonathansizz
Questions for you to ponder:

1) Why do you think their results would get better if more people use their
engine?

2) If their results really are better than Google, as you claim, why is their
user base so small after all these years?

3) Why should we trust them any more than Google? How do you know they're not
actually collecting your data or passing it on to the third party engines they
use?

~~~
hedora
1) More revenue -> more developers -> more deep web onebox results.

2) Result quality is trumped by inertia and ecosystem stickyness (I commented
above)

3) They have a smaller team and are focused on one product, which means they
can survive without doing this. Also, the risk of detection is high, since it
relies on hiding revenue, third parties that keep secrets, and the US never
issuing a subpoena for their logs. In contrast, Google would go out of
business tomorrow if they stopped collecting and monetizing data.

------
greenyouse
Anyone use DDG's grouping search syntax much?[0] I've always wondered if this
is something just for bots or if humans actually write out complex searches
like that.

If you use it how are the results?

[0][https://duck.co/help/results/syntax](https://duck.co/help/results/syntax)

~~~
gonhidi
I often submit equivalent queries when searching using Google. I tend to use
OR a lot to specify alternatives to specific keywords (e.g. osx OR "os x" OR
macos), though it's a years-old habit often not that important with today's
search engines; I sometimes also use it to search sets of domains (e.g.
site:w3.org OR site:whatwg.org). In general I feel that when the first few
pages of results using a simple query don't get me to what I am looking for,
using a more complex expression can unearth hits which I would have otherwise
skipped or not reached.

Regarding Duck Duck Go's advanced search syntax, I've use it in a similar
fashion, though not as much. Keep in mind that the provided link doesn't seem
to reflect the current implementation. For instance, the syntax for grouping
using parentheses doesn't seem to be as strict (which is a relief), excluded
words are seemingly not limited to being at the end of the search string, and
AND has a higher precedence than OR (which is currently a pet peeve of mine
because I am used to Google doing it otherwise and I like not having to use
parentheses in my usual queries).

------
arthurz
But DDG still goes to Google (as well as the other providers). And I see it
returns less relevant results compared to Google itself. Where it might be
shining is in avoiding the search per unit of time throttling done by Google,
and less content tailored by user IP which I see an intrusion into ones
privacy.

------
coldshower
DDG is my default search engine because I'm addicted to the !bangs. For
example, I use !pf to quickly convert an article into a PDF.

I maintain a blog where I "showcase" the best bangs for the Duck:
[http://duckgobang.com/](http://duckgobang.com/)

~~~
bbcbasic
Nice. I like the passion you clearly have for this topic

------
9erdelta
I try to use DDG and set it as my default search. But more often than not I
end up doing !g. And if I don't, I feel like I'm missing the answer that will
really help me work through my coding issues. After awhile, it just gets to be
more annoying than anything, and I go back to Google.

------
maaaats
I can never remember the (short) url, so I end up Googling it so I don't have
to spell it out..

~~~
AdamSC1
ddg.gg or duckduckgo.com

You can also set it as default in any major browser either manually or using
one of the extensions.

------
DoodleBuggy
>>> Granted that DuckDuckGo.com is quite a childish name

Call me crazy, but I suspect that's part of the reason DuckDuckGo has had a
hard time catching on. A name matters.

If I was DuckDuckGo I would rebrand to something simpler that could be used as
a verb. But what do I know?

~~~
pOVTVOItY
Agreed, it can't be verbified easily.

DDG admins: this is a real problem, you need to get creative on how to fix
this.

------
baq
Sure, just make me a chrome add-on that splits the tab in two vertical ones
with DDG in the left and Google on the right whenever I search from the
location bar which is nearly always so I don't have to search twice when DDG
misunderstands what I want.

------
DrScump
One of many things that disgust me about the latest big revision to Opera
(version 41) is that Opera Mobile doesn't include DDG as one of the (7)
default search options (though it _does_ include Amazon, eBay, and IMDB). Ugh.

~~~
frik
Opera got bought by an Asian ads company.

Vivaldi browser seems to be the spiritual successor of Opera by its previous
developers.

------
johndubchak
@rms_returns, my only question is why are you asking us to use DDG rather than
Google? You seem to be drawing some sort of direct comparison to Google, but
you're not stating why we shouldn't use Google or what DDG does better.

------
anthony_romeo
This is the sort of low-effort post I expect on reddit. And I come here to
avoid that.

------
eriknstr
I've tried multiple times to switch completely. Currently I use DDG on my iPod
touch (which is what I use for web things on the go) but when I'm on the
laptop or desktop I stick with Google as default.

------
tscs37
I personally found searx to be better than DDG, plus it's self-hosted. (It's a
metasearch engine, you don't need an index)

------
Yhippa
> But a search engine's results are only as accurate as the number of users
> who search and contribute to it

Are there not privacy concerns about this for DDG?

------
rb808
Also use bing more. I know my privacy has gone already - I just want to
encourage competition for Google. The results are great 98% of the time.

------
gaspoweredcat
i think they do need to ditch that name though, whilst as you say google wasnt
really any less odd in the early days however it did sort of roll off the
tongue, where as duckduckgo is somewhat clumsy and unpleasant no matter how
many times you say it. i know it shouldnt be important and its not really, its
just annoying

------
jplayer01
I've always had problems with their search results and I end up switching back
to Google every time.

------
disposablezero
Switched to DDG for most things 3 years ago.

------
yarou
I actually tend to use Bing. _hides_

~~~
jaclaz
>I actually tend to use Bing. _hides_

I would find more appropriate in the context _ducks_ ...

~~~
yarou
Haha absolutely!

------
cpcat
i got bored from using Google. i like trying new products so i'll go with DDG
until i get bored from it.

------
coke
Well ... No.

------
madman2890
...

------
mibbiting
Adverts on hackernews now eh?

~~~
feelslikefelt
Precisely. This is not what I expect to see on Hacker News. This isn't a
discussion of DDG's abilities. It's simply an advertisement.

If this was a link to DDG's contribution page or some kind of information
document or review, it would be different. However this just screams "USE THIS
SERVICE FOR X REASON!"

