

I Used DuckDuckGo for a Week and Had to Switch Back. Here’s why. - bmmayer1
http://notes.brianmayer.com/i-used-duckduckgo-for-a-week-and-had-to-switch-back

======
vklj
You can keep DDG as your default search engine, and use the !g bang command to
redirect the most difficult queries to Google. You get the best of both worlds
(except for some cognitive load when deciding which engine to use).

~~~
qwertzlcoatl
I just type !sp + searchterm into my search bar and it searches via
startpage.com, which uses googles search results without my IP address or
searches being recorded, no identifying or tracking cookies are used and SSL
encryption is set by default.

~~~
narozik
But this would foil what OP expects from google, a.k.a. to be geolocalized and
tracked to be served personalized results.

------
nemoniac
Call it extra cognitive load if you like but I find that DDG makes me think
more about my searches and direct them using !bangs. I feel better about this
than blindly letting Google take me where it wants.

~~~
bmmayer1
It's really about preference. A lot of people still use emacs even though it
takes more effort than other options.

~~~
greglindahl
You'd be hard-pressed to find an emacs user who agreed that it took more
effort than other options. Which is a good illustration of why we have more
than one editor: different people have different affinities to various editors
and IDEs.

In theory that sort of thing ought to be true for search, too. For example,
blekko (new UI as of 3 weeks ago) focuses on clustering results. Here's what
it does for pride:
[https://blekko.com/#?q=pride](https://blekko.com/#?q=pride) That gives you
the answer you wanted, without personalization, and gives other people the
answer they wanted, too.

------
kryten
_Google Keeps Up with Timely Search Queries_

...by tracking you.

you can't win every time.

~~~
gateaumoisi
you can by using this:
[https://github.com/broncowdd/googol](https://github.com/broncowdd/googol)

it parses google results on the server it is hosted on, and generate a page
you can use without being tracked.

test it here: [http://googlof.com/](http://googlof.com/)

~~~
kryten
Why bother with the hoop jumping?

------
tluyben2
My wife and me tried it as well; same thing. Two things make DDG unusable for
me; much slower than Google and doesn't understand context. I think that sums
up the article as well.

------
njr123
DDG doesn't actually have their own search engine though right? They are using
Yahoo/Bing on the backend?

~~~
pestaa
DDG does have its own search engine, but it also takes advantage of the
dataset Yahoo/Bing collected.

~~~
sp332
They also have a custom blacklist of spam sites that will not show up in
search results, even if they are indexed in the Bing dataset.

------
pcvarmint
I've used StartPage for years, and it doesn't seem to have been affected by
the recent NSA leaks. It is also as powerful as Google without the ads, since
it's based on Google (I'm surprised Google hasn't successfully blocked it). I
had seen DDG, but never took it as seriously as StartPage, whose PR director
Katherine Albrecht is a privacy expert and long-time advocate against loyalty
cards and RFIDs.

~~~
WayneDB
Thanks for mentioning this. I may switch to it.

------
gkya
Living in Turkey, I can tell that Google returns way better search results to
my queries about local stuff. DuckDuckGo in the other hand, has a lot of
search tooling (goodies) and returns more relevant stuff when I search
something more general or technical. My search engine defaults to DuckDuckGo,
with the exception of local queries, which I dispatch to Google.

~~~
narozik
I concur that duckduckgo has still room for improvement in the local search
area. It has already improved since I switched but I still find myself having
trouble finding some local relevant results.

To me this is still an improvement over google always directing me to a
localized version of their search and forcing me to tricks to get the global
google web search.

And if ddg fails short, I can bang to another search engine or use the address
bar to try my search elsewhere.

~~~
gkya
Personally, I have a whole lot of search engines I use with the Chrom(e|ium)
omnibar: tra\t for google translate, !m\t for linux.die.net/man/ !g for
google, !w\t for wikipedia and !d for duckduckgo. If I do not use any 'bangs',
the search is dispatched to DDG. (\t for tab)

Even though I do not consider google harmful or hostile, centralizing all my
access to info in one search provider sounds like a bad idea.

------
aclevernickname
Google does not offer a Tor Hidden Service, but DDG does [1]. Not only can
google not see my search query (unless I use !g instead of !sp), but not even
my ISP knows what I'm looking for. There is a bit of lag for searches (5 whole
seconds maybe), but those of us used to the way Tor works, this is not much of
a problem at all.

There's also a Firefox Search Add-on [2], for those interested. I combine it
with Foobar [3] for a more seamless and chrome-like interface.

[1] [http://3g2upl4pq6kufc4m.onion/](http://3g2upl4pq6kufc4m.onion/)

[2] [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/duckduckgo-
to...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/duckduckgo-tor/)

[3] [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/addon/foobar/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/addon/foobar/)

------
orim
I tried DuckDuckGo but didn't like the search results either. I'have had the
exact same problems with the coding error searches the author had. The results
were mostly useless. Then I tried startpage.com and never went back.

------
arh68
I switched to DDG recently, have noticed no lag, enjoy the !g and !yt
shortcuts (one less thing I have to set my browser up to do), and I really
like how it puts Wikipedia at the top. But that's not why I switched: I don't
want my web search queries to change my Suggested YouTube Videos. I noticed
this recently with Google (since I'm always signed in). Sometimes a search is
just a search, though, and it's almost like Google's slowly erasing that
memory from reality.

~~~
quadrangle
DDG has !sp too for StartPage to get Google sans tracking

------
narozik
Reading this my first reaction is to ask how much OP has been paid by google
to write this piece of stupid, to me this looks like a mix of infomercial and
fanboyism.

The title is misleading makes us think he had no other choice but to go back
to google but when reading the article the reasons invoked are personal
preferences preferences and comfort sprinkled with laziness.

Google feels faster by a small fraction of a second to OP, he asks to be
geolocalized and profiled so he can skip a couple keywords in his query and
his unreasonable expectations be met by google.

Here's an advice try searching for "pride weekend san francisco" instead of
"pride" when you're looking for info about the pride weekend in san francisco.
Try searching stackoverflow when you want stackoverflow results (though in my
experience ddg almost always features a relevant stackoverflow result and link
in ddg instant answer)

And this supposedly is worth renouncing privacy and being profiled and tracked
across the internet and mined to oblivion ?

I'm not saying duckduckgo is perfect and will fulfill your every need but what
telling the world you _had to_ switch back to google because ddg didn't
fulfill personal expectation of it being google is dumb, really.

------
nodata
For me the results were simply not as good.

------
hartator
I think google search > duckduckgo, but the request "pride" seems to be a
pretty weak point to compare, I would expect definition even if there is
someting going on in my city. I would never google "pride" but more "pride
weekend in Sfo" or something.

------
pvdm
Author is allowed his opinion and choices. I am staying with DDG because I
value privacy more.

~~~
kingsidharth
You're allowed to state the obvious. I will still write this comment.

------
dasil003
Given how non-trival search is and the relative resources and histories of the
two providers in question, it's sort of amazing these are the worst comparison
points the author could come up with.

~~~
johansch
Microsoft (the source of most of the results in the case of DDG) is not
exactly poor.

------
lightscalar
The past tense of verbification of DuckDuckGo should probably be
'DuckDuckWent', right?

------
Ultron
I personally value my privacy and liberty over a few additional nanoseconds of
waiting, or what might be not as refined results.

This article isn't insightful or original, only pathetic. The attitude shows
you how many in the US are unwilling to make even the tiniest sacrifice to
preserve a human right like not having all you information surveyed, recorded
and stored for Big Brother to use against you.

Sad.

~~~
Drakim
You seem to be overly focusing on certain parts of the article to make your
point. The fact that DDG is terrible at searching for error messages (showing
sites experiencing the errors rather than explanations of the errors) is a
pretty non-trivial minus for developers.

~~~
narozik
One guy making a point in a blog post doesn't make a fact.

In my own experience, google is now offering poorer results to the point of
being useless. I've been using it to search for error message for about 15
years now. While on the other hand duckduckgo very often nails it with a
relevant stackoverflow result in instant answer.

I guess ymmv according to how much you're inside the bubble.

I'd like to see something more factual to show how much ddg sucks at
fulfilling queries for info to fix error message vs unfiltered google.

------
weland
> Earlier this week, I searched for “Pride,” expecting to find out more about
> Pride Weekend in San Francisco. DuckDuckGo seemed to have no understanding
> of that context, whereas Google’s first results were exactly what I was
> looking for.

In the meantime, everyone studying philosophy or psychology in the San
Francisco area is probably bashing their head against the wall, because they
want to find starting points about the moral implications of pride or its
psychological cues.

The Google bubble is a good thing in about, what, 1% of the cases. Don't fall
in love with it.

> It must be no more than 200-300 ms, but it really makes a difference.

At the risk of being impolite, this has to be the most retarded claim I have
ever heard from someone who is doing programming, ever since I heard a
colleague of mine revolutionizing virtual memory by thinking how the MMU could
instantiate another MMU to avoid stack overflows.

You can literally compensate for the time you need to make 100 queries by
getting to your office 30 seconds earlier.

~~~
relix
The article is titled "I used ... and switched back" not, "why you shouldn't
use DDG". It's by definition subjective, and if this person found better
results 99% of the time, then that's a good reason to switch back. Those
students studying philosophy might like DDG better, and that's perfectly fine.

200-300ms is a difference that you can feel. This is not about losing that
time, this is about waiting for your results a little bit longer which adds
friction and annoyance. If you can't understand that then I hope you're not in
charge of any user-facing interfaces. It's the reason sites use CDN's and
cache pregenerated pages, it's the reason why DNS systems have edges
distributed all over the world, it's the reason why Github improved reaction
time from 1 sec down to 300ms in their latest update, etc...

~~~
narozik
It is usually more about perceived speed and feels than actual speed. And
giving the user a quicker feel is a user experience improvement.

But feeling quick to display results is worthless if you have to make 5
queries to find your results, if you actually find it, and in my experience
google rarely offers what I'm looking for in the first few searches.

It was not that way until they removed some and modified others search
operators from their engine.

