
I Ditched Google for DuckDuckGo - rahuldottech
https://www.wired.com/story/i-ditched-google-for-duckduckgo-heres-why-you-should-too/
======
S_A_P
I switched a couple of times to DDG, and the first few false starts I remember
coming away from that thinking Google was just better. This time around, DDG
stuck. While DDG has been steadily improving, I think the quality of google
results has steadily worsened significantly. The focus on top of the page
answers and other changes seem to favor commerce vs information. I was
recently researching home WiFi gear reviews and google was adamant that I was
actually trying to buy WiFi gear. DDG has some of those results, but I also
noticed that actual reviews and forum posts were returned instead of amazon
and Best Buy links.

~~~
jahbrewski
Oh man, I so badly want to use DDG. I was actually using DDG for the past
several months and _just_ switched back to Google today. As a developer, I'm
constantly searching for things and I just couldn't justify the additional
5-10 seconds it would take me to re-do a search. Say I make 100 searches/day:
(.2 * 100 * 7.5)/60 = 12.5min/wk. Not to mention the disruption in flow caused
by those repeat searches. I applaud DDG for what they're doing, going up
against a behemoth, but I just can't seem to make it work for me.

~~~
llamataboot
Did you really just claim you want to use DDG but you can't because it takes
an extra 12 minutes per week?

~~~
chuckgreenman
Also, at 100 searches a day that's 6.25 searches per hour, if they're spread
evenly over a 16 hour waking period. Who makes that many searches?!

------
whalesalad
DDG just doesn’t work as well. Also, to ease switching friction it needs a
gradient mode where it will start in what looks and feels like Google and then
slowly transitions to their normal product.

Once you get over the initial UI muscle memory shock you eventually realize
that the results aren’t as good and you jump back.

I can rarely find what I need with DDG and usually always find it instantly
with google.

~~~
cpeterso
FWIW, I prefer DDG's UI and instant answers over Google's (and DDG's !bang
searches). I dislike how Google will frequently disregard words in my search
queries. I only fall back to Google for extremely narrow searches for
technical topics or recent events.

~~~
giggles_giggles
DDG's image search beats the pants off of Google's, too.

~~~
azinman2
Really? How so?

They certainly don’t have related/similar images, which I find useful.

~~~
Lammy
Google Image Search has been intentionally crippled ever since the Getty vs
Google lawsuit. GIS now seems to prefer showing me 'maxresdefault.jpg' YouTube
thumbnails for at least 50% of results, presumably because the uploaders of
those videos gave Google a license to use/distribute the work. Even for
copyrighted works that still gives Google another party to blame.

~~~
azinman2
Could you go into more details? What exactly were the ramifications of the
lawsuit?

~~~
Lammy
My understanding of it as an outsider is that Getty Images filed a suit
against Google seeking money for their images being displayed in GIS results.
They later announced a settlement, and the 'View Image' button disappeared and
the search result quality plummeted (my judgement) at exactly the same time.
Here's some more reading:

[https://venturebeat.com/2018/02/09/getty-images-and-
google-d...](https://venturebeat.com/2018/02/09/getty-images-and-google-
declare-a-truce-with-new-image-licensing-partnership/)

[https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/02/internet-rages-
after...](https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/02/internet-rages-after-google-
removes-view-image-button-bowing-to-getty/)

------
blakesterz
Jumping in here with an example, since I'm in the middle of doing this right
now.... I maybe have some ID Theft issues, so I'm doing some searches to try
and figure out if I can find anything that might help me answer what's going
on. Did this company screw up and confuse my account with someone else or do I
have a real problem? I'm doing different searches for names, locations and
some other searches for very specific things. Google results are far and away
better, in that they are returning things that are useful. DDG results are...
different, and when compared to what I'm getting with Google, they are not as
good. I don't know how much I can generalize from this one example, I don't
normally compare G with DDG, but right now, G is winning. It's really
interesting comparing the results though. DDG may indeed find something G
didn't since the results are pretty different.

~~~
JTon
I use DDG as my primary engine and my habit is to search there first. I have
to say, I often don't get the results I'm looking for. So, I simply "bang" out
a google search immediately after using DDG search "!g [search phrase]". My
coworkers chastise me for being inefficient, but hey, I see it as a small
price to pay to support DDG while still getting the results I need.

~~~
pteraspidomorph
You can append the !g at the end!

~~~
disneycember
Thanks for the tip! This is gonna save me a lot of Cmd + Left Arrow.

~~~
gumby
If you’re in a Mac you can simple type ^a for the front of the line (and ^e
for the end). The standard widget has some Emacs bindings built in (since the
NeXT days)

------
collsni
From the sound of the comments alot of people don't know how to search in DDG.
I have absolutely no problem finding the information I need and would say I'm
a pretty serious power user. Or I've just been using it for so long I don't
know what I'm missing.

~~~
hombre_fatal
If you have to "know how to search" in DDG, e.g. do something different than
your intuition (which Google handles very well), then it's simply a worse
search engine.

For example, I shouldn't need to add extra context to "elm dict" to get to
Elm's Dict package documentation. And I'm not even sure what I need to add to
get DDG to know what I'm talking about. Google knows.

DDG is pretty much always worse query-for-query than Google in my experience
especially for anything long-tail or in a different language. I don't think
there's any nuance to add here. Presumably you're using DDG for other
perfectly valid reasons which is where I'd focus my evangelism than "it's just
as good if you know how to use it" which is simply wrong because it (basically
Bing) is just not as good.

~~~
PopeDotNinja
"elm dict":

\- Google - first hit

\- Yandex - first hit

\- DDG - Not on first page

\- Bing - Not on first page

~~~
osamagirl69
Did you include the quotes? I get elm-lang.org as the 4th hit on ddg (but not
bing, bing it is on the second page) without quotes.

Curiously, putting the canonical partner string in puts elm-lang.org as the
first hit!

[https://duckduckgo.com/?q=elm+dict](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=elm+dict) \-
4th hit vs
[https://duckduckgo.com/?q=elm+dict&t=canonical](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=elm+dict&t=canonical)
\- 1st hit

Maybe it is a coincidence? ddg does sometime return inconsistent ordering of
search results for reasons that I have not been able to sort out.

------
3xblah
"It all started with a realization: Most the things I search for are easy to
find. Did I really need the all-seeing, all-knowing algorithms of Google to
assist me? Probably not."

"As a result, I’ve had a fairly tedious but important revelation: I search for
really obvious stuff. Google’s own data backs this up. Its annual round-up of
the most searched-for terms is basically a list of names and events: World
Cup, Avicii, Mac Miller, Stan Lee, Black Panther, Megan Markle. The list goes
on. And I don’t need to buy into Google’s leviathan network of privacy-
invading trackers to find out what Black Panther is and when I can go and see
it at my local cinema."

"I had, based on zero evidence, convinced myself that finding things on the
internet was hard and, inevitably, involved a fair amount of tracking. After
two years of not being tracked and targeted, I have slowly come to realize
that this is nonsense."

Every user is different. What is appealing to the author may not be appealing
to the reader. The author was searching for obvious things. HN readers and
commenters may have more difficult searches.

Outside of HN, it appears there is a very large quantity of users who search
for the same "obvious stuff".

~~~
kelnos
As a HN user and commenter, I've found DDG just fine as a daily driver
(switched nearly 2 years ago). I do occasionally have to fall back to Google,
but most of my searches are served just fine by DDG.

Agreed that every user is different. I think the overall verdict is that DDG
is certainly not as good at Google on an overall number-of-people-always-
satisfied scale, but it does quite a good job for most people.

~~~
codyb
Yea I’m the same way, switched a long time ago, probably about two years like
you and haven’t really had to look back.

Maybe it’s because I mostly browse with private pages, never sign in to
Chrome, always deny requests for location, etc and my results were never
particularly tailored to me in the first place?

I can’t remember the last time I “!g”’d actually. Maybe what I’m searching for
hasn’t been particularly daunting and mainly consists of jumps to Mozilla’s
JavaScript docs lately.

------
Eric_WVGG
I switched from Google to DDG on my mobile due to Google AMP pages sometime
last summer.

While I find DDG to be equally good for most "dry facts" searches, it stinks
for the sort of thing that I'm usually looking for on the road — "best Sichuan
in Chinatown" or "glossier sticker blackberry" (long story).

Ironically, I could probably get by just fine with DDG on the laptop where I'm
mostly using search as a proxy for Stack Overflow and Wikipedia, and Google on
the mobile for shopping and esoterica.

~~~
tejtm
Ahh, so that must be why I find DDG search results flawless.

Just the facts ma'am.

------
turc1656
100% agree with this. I switched a while ago and 98% of my searches are easily
found through DDG. I use Google's search as a backup when I'm in the rare case
of actually searching for something hard to find or very complex. And
sometimes it's just something that can't be found or doesn't exist, even on
Google. But using it as the backup is perfect.

------
Isamu
I hate "Here's Why You Should Too" articles but it's worthwhile trying DDG.

You may enjoy having a less menacing overlord in your browser.

------
ckrailo
I mostly shared the Wired author's experience, but theming is what made me
switch to DDG everywhere!

If you've themed your whole OS, terminal, text editor, etc to your favorite
theme (solarized, nord, etc), then DDG is the search engine for you.

Solarized Dark Dark Go, for example...
[https://start.duckduckgo.com/?kae=%23073642&kj=%23073642++&k...](https://start.duckduckgo.com/?kae=%23073642&kj=%23073642++&kx=%23268bd2&k7=%23002B36&k8=%23839496&k9=%23fdf6e3&kaa=%2393a1a1)

------
Anointmous
It doesn't matter how good _some_ results are, if the search engine
manipulates the results, tracks the users, and even more so - steals the ideas
and profiles the users.

Google has had some very public news stories of manipulating search results,
tracking users, and profiling users -- people en mass left google's news site
when they started manipulating it, profiling results for total control of
Chinese population is pretty recent too, there are dozens of examples. And
google profiling users and trying to guess what they are researching or
thinking about it is too easy.

And face it, google no longer has a way to innovate but go the way of
tracking, monitoring, and theft.

~~~
okintheory
Links?

------
bumbacloth
I have been using duckduckgo for years now and Im very satisfied. On google a
lot of the search results are ads so they are most of the time useless for me.
With ducduckgo I always find what Im looking for and the things I search for
dont come back to haunt me in the form of ads.I feel like I have a more
"clean" experience of the web. If I do a search for a smartphone I will not
have ads trying to sell it to me on every other website I visit afterwards.

------
notadoc
Sometimes DDG is better, particularly when google tries to infer intent rather
than just searching for the keywords typed.

Sometimes DDG is worse, just generally, and sometimes much worse.

Either way, I think DuckDuckGo needs a different and simpler brand. DuckDuckGo
does not roll off the tongue, it's not a verb or even verbable, and outside of
the tech world very few have heard of it. Call it Duck, call it Go, call it
something simpler and memorable.

------
skinnyasianboi
Little fun fact: DDG respects my macbook dark mode settings, google doesn't

~~~
saagarjha
Only if you don't change any of the appearance settings :(

------
alxmdev
The headline is great:

 _> Once you realize most things you search for online are boring and obvious,
you realize you don't really need Google in your life._

Yes! DDG really does work just as well as any other search engine for most
day-to-day things, and then there's always the !g prefix. The first page of
Google search results are half Amp and YouTube carousels anyway...

------
EastSmith
I am using DDG for more than a year as my default search engine on desktop and
mobile.

On technical topics, recent news and local sites I built a muscle memory to
just add !g at the end of the search.

For everything else DDG more or less does the job.

------
thdrdt
I use DDG as my main search engine because I like more privacy. But to be fair
I think Google is way better most of the time.

And I believe this is because Google is much more context aware.

A fake example: if you search "lounge new york" DDG might show you lounge
seats and things from New York, while Google 'understands' that you are
looking for a place to chill in New York.

But while this gives better results for lets say 80% of the time in Google,
the other 20% of the time it's very hard to search for things in Google if it
uses the wrong context. At those times DDG is way better.

~~~
kylebenzle
I can take your point but your fake example does return very similar results
in both cases, I'd be hard pressed to find a real example that acts the way
you describe on DDG.

------
johnpowell
I tried DDG within the last year. And I tried really hard. But I used !G about
25% of the time.

Then I switched to ecosia.org, I know it is a front-end for Bing. But it is
clean interface and the search results are more in-line with what Google would
return. In months I have had to use Google for search arount ten times in the
last month. And that was to find stuff I already searched on Google. But I
knew what I was looking for was obvious.

------
JasonFruit
DDG is great, and I use it by preference. The only thing I prefer Google for
is when I want to search for something in a specific geographical location.
Otherwise, I find DuckDuckGo more useful, and I wonder why others don't. Maybe
it's residual search mannerisms I've retained from my Altavista days.

------
TheRealPomax
It's funny, because I'm finding myself using Google far more after switching
to DDG years ago. At this point, more often than not the results I get in DDG
make me go "oh ffs, !g", and I really wish that wasn't the case, but here we
are. It used to be pretty great, now it's just... not?

------
Wump
I think DDG is decent and getting better. The tough thing though is that for
search the bar is high. Alternatives need to be as good as google, not 80 or
90 or 98% as good.

Most users, once they experience just a few instances of worse results will
just switch back to google.

------
joelrunyon
I did a guide on leaving Google a few years back. I should go update it now -
[https://impossiblehq.com/complete-guide-leaving-
google/](https://impossiblehq.com/complete-guide-leaving-google/)

~~~
app4soft
Here is another article from 2018 - [https://homehack.nl/bye-bye-
google/](https://homehack.nl/bye-bye-google/)

------
alias_neo
I made an interesting realisation yesterday.

I already use DDG everywhere, but I was having an issue with a site in
Firefox, it just refused to work, so I launched chrome and entered the same
term in the box.

Google popped up with the privacy/terms field thing it does and refuses to let
you pass this modal popup until you satisfy them.

Immediately, with the results sitting behind it, I realised, all I had to do
was stick .com on the end and I don't have any of this to deal with, I was
just being lazy.

I remember the early 2000s when we would press CTRL(?)+<something> to complete
the www. and .com etc...

I entered the site address in the address bar and hit enter, realising I
should really try to be less lazy, or at least set a book mark.

------
aledalgrande
I am on DDG, but I think until a search engine gets to at least 20% of the
market, it won't make any difference. It's just too niche. Big G can still do
whatever they want and lock in more of the internet with services like AMP.

------
kojeovo
So you can get proficient with `!g`?

~~~
eikenberry
And '!w' and '!a' and '!imdb' and '!dpkg' and '!steam' and '!sof' and '!godoc'
and ...

The !bang commands are DDGs killer feature. Why would you only use google when
you can use google and every other searchable resource very conveniently.

[edit: link to ddg bang docs;
[https://duckduckgo.com/bang](https://duckduckgo.com/bang)]

~~~
AdmiralAsshat
I was a power user of those for awhile, but then I discovered that Firefox's
One-Click Search Engines are more convenient, since they search the sites
directly, and don't litter my Firefox search history with a remnant entries of
DDG's intermediary links.

------
jader201
This was just posted last week:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21620744](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21620744)

------
every
I use [https://duckduckgo.com/lite](https://duckduckgo.com/lite) in a terminal
but google elsewhere...

------
mickotron
I switched my work and personal device Firefox settings to have ddg as
default. I then use the !google bang to search Google if needed. Usually this
is for retail queries. This simple step allows the best of both worlds,
although the privacy tradeoff is there cause I'm still using Google.

------
therealmarv
The Bing skin with privacy sprinkles.

If you really want to get out of US censorship & political correctness
influenced search bubble try Yandex (at least sometimes). One example: Just
compare specific NSFW results in image search on these search engines. It's
also a blessing to use search engines which are not that much SEO hacked as
Google sometimes.

------
CWuestefeld
Just the fact of the competition is a good thing. And even if DDG is but a
drop in the bucket, it appears that they've made a difference.

Having been a DDG user since pretty much the beginning, I watched their zero-
click results evolve, and it very much looks to me like this innovation drove
much of Google's current search experience.

------
pkamb
I switched on mobile to eliminate AMP pages.

------
caseyf7
DDG needs to copy the Google iOS app. The search bar should be the focus of
the app and not higher than the middle of the screen so it is easy to reach.
Currently the best screen real estate does nothing on the DDG app. That is the
only place where I haven’t switched to DDG.

------
x__x
In the beginning, G was a search engine. Now it just seems like a
recommendation and answers engine.

------
0xmohit
Ironical that this wired piece attempts device recognition and has 26 cross-
site trackers (as reported by Brave [0]).

[0] [https://brave.com/](https://brave.com/)

------
tempsolution
Yeah, but you do you realize that DDG is Bing. And while DDG does not track
you, Bing does. So essentially the reason why DDG kinda works well is because
a lot of user are still being tracked by Bing.

~~~
Isamu
>DDG is Bing

Eh? Maybe you are saying that because they serve ads from Bing?

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

>DuckDuckGo earns revenue by serving ads from the Yahoo-Bing search alliance
network and through affiliate relationships with Amazon and eBay.

>In July 2016, DuckDuckGo officially announced the extension of its
partnership with Yahoo! that brought new features to all users of the search
engine, including date filtering of results and additional site links. It also
partners with Bing, Yandex, and Wikipedia to produce results or make use of
features offered. The company also confirmed that it does not share user
information with partner companies, as has always been its policy.

~~~
nvrspyx
As far as I know (hence I could be wrong), that’s outdated. Since Yahoo was
purchased by Verizon, it is predominately Bing results with some
Yahoo/Oath/Verizon Media results sprinkled in, considering it now
predominantly uses Bing itself. Yandex is no longer used and Wikipedia is just
part of their knowledge cards or whatever they call them, like StackOverflow
is. In other words, it’s mainly Bing with DDG’s own crawler used specifically
for the knowledge cards and to modify the priority of results pulled from
Bing.

With that said, I do believe they have a special deal with Microsoft to not
pass along any information. Instead, the only information Microsoft sees is
DDG requesting the results on behalf of the users (aka Bing/MS just sees DDG’s
IP, etc. which can be seen sometimes in the results, not the knowledge card,
when you search for “what’s my IP” in DDG). My one gripe though is that
they’re definitely not as transparent as they could be about where and how
they source results.

------
CamelCaseName
Duplicate:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21620744](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21620744)

(Same story, same site, different TLD)

------
hereme888
So no one here uses engines like Startpage or Searx?

I tried to use DDG consistently a few months ago and didn't always get what I
wanted, so I found Startpage.

I'll give DDG another try.

------
kpennell
Once you start using DDG bangs (especially ! for going right to the site), it
changes how you use a browser. Ditto for !wikipedia, !gmaps, etc. so so cool

~~~
lancesells
They are great. Just want to point out you can use !w for wikipedia and !gm
for google maps.

------
TurkishPoptart
Using the bangs (!g, !wiki, !youtube) makes it for me. When I have a feeling a
result won't show up on DDG, I drop a !g bang in there and it works.

------
dgzl
I've using DDG for a while. Anytime I don't find a good result I just add a g!
to my query and it will respect to Google instead.

~~~
thanhhaimai
I'm glad that you and others are happy DDG users. I think the search engine
market could use more diversity and competition. However, seeing this comment
over and over again on DDG related threads is getting old. It's like saying:

"I quit eating beef and switched to eat veggies only because meat is bad.
Whenever veggies don't fill me up, I put beef steak in the bowl and it
satisfies my hunger."

Imagine hearing that whenever the topic of vegetarian comes up. It's not very
useful, and it dilutes the message.

~~~
scarecrowbob
I dunno... what about this:

most of the time, I have a pretty good meal out of just veggies and try to be
vegan with my diet most of the time. Sometimes I want a steak or some BBQ, so
I do it.

That's actually a message that a lot of my vegan friends push out, because
like most things life doesn't have to be absolute. It has massively reduced my
meat intake, that's for sure.

I find it is the same with google. 99% of the time ddg is a-okay, but
sometimes I'm not getting an answer so I google something, and the g! thing is
how I do it.

I am using substantially less google search this way... why is that a worse
situation than the alternative of either just using ddg and not finding stuff
or just using google and having fewer options?

------
lightedman
I ditched Google and DDG by knowing what websites I want to visit for
information in the first place, so that I may avoid most of the BS.

------
3xblah
Is it possible to submit Google queries using HTTP POST.

Using POST instead of GET is an option DDG provides. Startpage uses HTTP POST
as well.

------
kylebenzle
I too have ditched Google!

DDG is way better and no reason to stick with google, its gone to the dogs,
just thank go we have a replacement.

------
known
I built my own search engine. If I'm not satisfied I search in GOOGLE/ECOSIA

------
residentfoam
I have also recently switched to DuckDuckGo and so far I am happy with it.

------
ebg13
Sure thing. Get DDG to stop injecting reams of extremely unrelated porn into
my image search results
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21516941](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21516941))
and I'll consider it.

~~~
eesmith
FWIW, I use DDG and an image search of "filled torus" with "Safe Search:
Moderate" doesn't return any porn in an attempt just now.

It _does_ seem to treat "torus" and all uses of "tori" as synonyms, giving
lots of images of people named Tori, or taken/written by people by that name,
rather than more-than-one-torus.

Google Image Search doesn't make that association between the singular and
plural. You'll need to search for "filled tori" to see plenty of people named
Tori.

~~~
saalweachter
Ooooooh, that's what's happening on that search!

I had assumed it was some combination of a bad synonym, partial matching, and
a sort order that depended too heavily on site popularity and too little on
query relevance, but the torus -> tori rewrite never even occurred to me.

~~~
logfromblammo
Topologically, humans are usually toruses, ignoring that the digestive tract
splits into mouth and two nostrils at the caudal end.

It actually occurred to me that the search might be that smarty-stupid before
being exposed to the idea that the plural of torus is actually the same as the
proper first name of a lot of immodest image models. That made me feel a bit
smarty-stupid myself.

~~~
saalweachter
I'd assumed a much more vulgar synonym, myself.

