
DuckDuckGo vs Google - gcuofano
https://fourweekmba.com/duckduckgo-vs-google/
======
Lifesnoozer
Recently switched over to DuckDuckGo on all my devices. Tried to do the same
thing several years ago and found it didn't really work out, but this time
around it is so much better, both when it comes to speed and results.

If anyone has doubts because they tried it years ago, I'd say go for it again.

~~~
benbenhu
And don't forget to use the bangs that can allow you to check other engines
results fast if you need.

For people afraid of getting off google, you can always search something like
'!g my-search', it works the same for youtube(!yt), google image(!gi), or even
hackernews(!hn)

And of course the best bang is the 'I am feeling lucky' one (!), i.e.:
'hackernews !'

~~~
a_dev_1234
I'm tired of people mentioning !g. If you want to use google, just use google.
Stop using duck duck go just to search google, and then say "but duck duck go
is better" lo. no it isn't. clearly.

~~~
striking
It's a way to wean yourself off of Google or quickly see results from a
different perspective. There's nothing wrong with it, it's just an easy way
out for people who don't trust ddg just yet.

~~~
makapuf
That and its a Good way To help ddg (recording used search queries) and
getting google results

------
grimgrin
Those who use DDG, do you miss dates in results? Having a date present
definitely helps me think about the results:

[https://www.google.com/search?q=dcss+branch+order](https://www.google.com/search?q=dcss+branch+order)

[https://duckduckgo.com/?q=dcss+branch+order](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=dcss+branch+order)

This isn't a case where I _know_ I only want 2017 results, and so I do the
syntax to filter it down automatically. I want all results, but I want to be
aware of the timeline of whatever I'm going to click.

But to take the thought further: I can understand when a date isn't important.
Say some documentation for a specific programming related thing. You'll
probably learn to use !clojuredocs or something.

What about outside that? Those searches I can't quite describe without
thinking, but my example above sort of works nicely because that game in
particular has changed a bunch (and will continue to) over time and you do
care about the date of a forum post or whatever.

For all I know, the answer is "that's when you use !g".

~~~
jasonkostempski
The only thing I miss is the "Past Year" option. I find it really important
for filtering out programming stuff that's too old. "Past Month" is too short.
I can't understand why it's not there. I've sent the suggestion several times.

~~~
482794793792894
It's because they get results from so many different sources. Many of those
sources just don't keep time records or don't offer it through the API that
DuckDuckGo interacts with.

~~~
thinkloop
Time records don't have to be scraped from the site or retrieved from APIs
(what APIs btw? Isn't it all scraping?). When the search engine crawls a new
page, or notices an update to a previously crawled page, as long as you're
crawling thoroughly, those dates can be pretty accurate.

~~~
sitharus
DuckDuckGo doesn't just run a web crawler, it aggregates from many sources
including Bing and area specific APIs. Not all of these sources supply date
information so you'd end up with some results having it and others not.

Information is here:
[https://duck.co/help/results/sources](https://duck.co/help/results/sources)

~~~
thinkloop
Any idea why search engines would allow API access for a competing search
engine? Usually APIs come with a caveat that you can't use them to rebuild the
same service. Also for ddg's level of traffic, it seems like special deals
would need to made, not just a general access key.

~~~
dredmorbius
Weakening Google's monopoly.

------
romo5
People are conditioned to think Search has to work online.

This was true when Google was created.

No one had the processing or memory available on their desktop to search an
entire index of the "useful" web.

Not anymore.

How large is a "useful" index of the web today? And can it fit on your laptop?
The answer is yes.

Can the entire thing be queried fast? The answer is yes.

As an example take the entire stackexchange and wikipedia dumps in their
entirety(including images). Compressed it comes to 50-60 GB range. Think about
that number. That's an rough approximation of all known human knowledge. It's
not growing too fast. It has stabilized. To query the content you need an
index.

So how large is an index to a 100 GB file? Generally around 1 GB. Let's say
you use covering indexes with lot of meta data and up that to 5GB to support
sophisticated queries.

With today's average hardware you can search the entire thing in milliseconds.

So why aren't we building better local search?

Because everyone is conditioned to believe, thanks to Google's success, we
need to do it online. Which means baking in the problem of handling millions
of queries a second into the Search problem. Guess what? This is not a problem
that local search has.

Every time a chimp or a duck needs to build a protein in it's cell it doesn't
query the DNA index stored in the cloud. Instead every cell has the index.
Every cell has the processing power to query that index in the nanosecond time
scale.

The cloud based search story is temporary.

If you want to index every reference to Taylor Swifts ass that every teenager
in Norway, Ecuador and Cambodia are making, then yes you need a Google size
index. But for useful human knowledge we are getting to the point where we
don't need Google scale.

If you don't believe me look at what is possible TODAY in Dash/Zeal docset
search for offline developer documentation search or Kiwix or with
Mathematica.

~~~
visarga
Your idea doesn't go far enough. What good are a couple of stale indexes of
Wikipedia and Stackoverflow going to be?

Instead, I am wondering why there isnt a federated open source search engine.
It would be a cloud of nodes, each node spidering and indexing a small hash
bucket of urls. With a million such nodes we could have a live updated,
distributed search engine to replace Google. We could run millions of queries
without paying someone - we'd pay back by serving as a node, just like in
BitTorrent. With all the interest in privacy, I wanted to see more discussion
of replacing Google with an open, non-censured and private protocol for
search.

~~~
runeb
In the same vein, what good is an index of the web going to be? Googles value
isn't their index, its how they translate your search terms into good results
from that index. Anyone can index the web, not everyone can make sense of it
from human questions.

~~~
visarga
There has been a lot of research in search engines since AltaVista collapsed
and Google won. Much of it is in public domain.

------
unicornporn
I'm sure DDG works great if you're an American. As someone who has tried a
region specific version of DDG though, I can say the results are downright
terrible.

Some say the DDG bangs are a solution. What do I win by doing that? It only
made me resort to !g all the time, because the results were so bad.

Now I use [https://www.startpage.com/](https://www.startpage.com/) with region
set to Swedish. It's practically a proxy for Google search, so it gives me the
right results but sans the filter bubble experience (yes, I want the regional
bubble). If you're a non US user, I can recommend it.

~~~
Svip
I must say I'm having the reverse experience. I very seldom use its Danish
regional setting, but even for Danish searches DDG is fine. It's only 4-5
times a month I need the !g bang. But knowing about Startpage, I now use the
!sp bang instead of !g.

Indeed, due to the bangs, I know use DDG as my proxy to a lot of other search
engines, like Wikipedia (!w/!wda/!w..) and Wiktionary (!wikt), and even
obscure ones like Memory Alpha (!memoryalpha). Very handy indeed.

~~~
FabHK
The wikipedia-in-certain-language bangs are very useful, indeed.

------
Kluny
What's with this person's writing style? I've never seen so many literary tics
in one place. "In short", 14 usages. Almost every sentence starts with a
prepositional phrase like "In fact...", "Yet...", "However..." Confusing
sentence structure like "How would have the net looked like?" It's so
irritating to read.

~~~
appleiigs
E-book writer... should explain his style. Here's a TLDR summary:

\- Google huge, DDG tiny.

\- Gabriel Weinberg serial startups all failed until he sold one for $10MM,
which allowed him to do and focus on DDG.

\- Privacy a big deal these days and DDG markets towards that.

\- DDG makes money from keyword advertising and affiliate revenue.

\- You too can profit from something!

~~~
roryisok
How much is $10MM? Like, a million million? Or is a millimeter thickness of
dollars?

~~~
dx034
No, it's a thousand thousand (roman numeral). In finance, using MM and MMM is
quite common (although bn is often preferred over MMM).

~~~
appleiigs
yeah, I am in finance. At the bank I used to work at we'd use $1M for $1,000
and not allowed to use $1K.

~~~
roryisok
That seems like a misunderstanding waiting to happen. $10M is 10,000,000 to me
but only 10,000 if you work in finance??

------
zizek23
The thing with Duckduckgo is the choice has to be ideological or you will do a
search again on Google again just to ensure you are not missing out.

This is Google marketing and brand perception at work because Google results
of late, 3 years, have been unimpressive and you have to sift through pages of
useless links and content to find any relevant information beyond the usual
suspects one already knows, so their intensive spyware operations doesn't seem
to help search quality.

It's surprising there are not more experimental search projects. One would
have expected a steady stream of regular attempts but not a single credible
effort exists. There was once an alternative search project called Cuil that
just seemed to fizzle off.

~~~
i_cant_speel
I have to say, I go to the second page of Google search results _maybe_ once
every couple months. I'm not sure what you are searching for but that has not
been my experience at all. It seems to always be getting better.

------
Animats
The useful insight about DuckDuckGo, which the author misses, is that even
with 0.1% market share, a search engine can be profitable. Search ads are
valuable, because they appear when someone is actually looking for something
and likely to buy. Almost all other ads are merely annoying interruptions.

DuckDuckGo isn't even a full search engine. They don't crawl the whole Web.
The heavy lifting is done by Bing and Yandex. That allows DuckDuckGo to have
coverage without much infrastructure. That's what makes the business possible
without too much expenditure.

~~~
captainmuon
The article also sort of answers my question how a third party gets access to
Bing and Yandex's indexes. I know they offer access, but how is it paid for?
By using the founder's money from an exit, and then some VC money until
profitable.

------
thinkMOAR
"If I do the same with Google, you get over 11 billion results!"

Yes i have this often, and then when i click for example from page 5 to page 6
it suddenly says NO RESULTS and im always left flabbergasted with the thought
"But google.. you just told me i got 11 million results to search through
myself..."

~~~
saimiam
I've had the same experience even with the 2nd or 3rd pages. Makes you wonder
if google isn't suffering from grade inflation.

------
djsumdog
Does anyone remember how back in the day, we had Lycos, Hotbot, Yahoo, Dogpile
.. a whole host of search engines. You'd go to two or three to get an idea of
what was out there. People had different indexes and there were a lot of
players.

Today, it's just Google. I've been using DDG for a few years, but about 1/3 of
the time I add an !g because I don't find the results I need on DDG.

The cost of entry to the search market is exceedingly high right now. This is
a pretty good article of detailing how one person was able to come up with an
idea and challenge the behemoth in very niche areas (privacy/the nsa leaks
were probably the reason I started looking at/using it around 2013).

Yet I still miss the days of using multiple search engines; seeing a variety
of results. I hate the de factor standard of Google. When a company controls
that much of search, they get to define the narrative. They literally shape
the way many people perceive the world.

I wonder if tech will get to the point where indexing will be easier and we'll
see more solutions that are cheaper and that can crawl larger datasets with
lower processing requirements. Maybe the next step will be distributed search
with shared indexes?

In any case, Google can't remain on top forever (at least I hope not). It'd be
nice to see more tech in this space, but it's an incredibly difficult problem.
There is reason Google climbed to the top like it did.

~~~
ianai
I really like the localized index idea someone posted earlier. If I could get
60% of my searches answered locally for the cost of 100 gigs of space I would
use it. Even more so if I could host it on a local server somehow.

~~~
roryisok
Why though? Is your connection that bad? I wouldn't want to use 100GB of
precious SSD storage for something I can get instantly in the browser

------
majewsky
Might be an interesting article, but that position:fixed footer with ongoing
animations is just too atrocious.

~~~
wickawic
On mobile it asks for an email in a persistent footer that takes up 1/3 of the
screen. When you type a fake email (there is no way to remove it) it brings up
another footer asking if you would like to have such a footer on your own
website ( also unremovable). Thank God for reader mode.

~~~
lqdc13
I burst out laughing, thinking they were trolling. But it's a real product.

------
andyhnj
I use DDG everywhere except at work, where (for some reason) it's blocked.

The one silly thing I miss about not having DDG at work: in DDG, I can type
"new guid" and it gives me a new random guid. If there's a way to do that in
Google, I haven't figured it out. (And yes I know there are a million other
ways to get random guids. It's just convenient for me to get them this way.)

~~~
AdamSC1
Hey Andy,

Do you know what firewall system your work uses? We were blocked in a few of
them but found that reaching out to those companies got it fixed.

Would be happy to help investigate!

Disclaimer: DDG staff.

------
darrmit
I tried DDG several times over the years before finally sticking with it about
2 years ago. Now it feels weird to go back to Google because I've gotten used
to using some of the bangs.

I love DDG and what they stand for, and I'll gladly trade the creepy
personalized results for the more organic results I get there.

------
ams6110
_How do you make money if you don’t track users?

All you need is a keyword. For instance, let’s say I’m looking for a new
computer, I insert the keyword in the search box “new PC” and all you have to
show me are ads related to that. I don’t necessarily have to see all the
things I’ve been looking for in the past._

Seems eminently sensible to me. And much more likely to produce ads that are
relevant to what I'm looking for _right now._

~~~
482794793792894
Yeah, I often wonder how what Google is doing can really be so much better
that it justifies leaking billions of users' information all over the place
and the massive infrastructure costs that they must have.

------
apatters
Much ink is being spilled currently over the evils being perpetrated by the
tech giants. What's so exciting about DuckDuckGo is

1\. DDG competes directly with Google in Google's core market

2\. Not being evil is DDG's differentiator _for real,_ they're not just paying
lip service

3\. DDG is small and profitable... in other words, they're a successful
startup.

It can be done. It is being done.

------
bugmen0t
I know the American Dream story of somone small being big corporations is
appealing, but s/Solopreneur/Team/.

~~~
orthecreedence
"Solopreneur" ...what a stupid, stupid word to make up.

------
ballenf
I've had more than one family member uninstall DDG thinking it was malware.
DuckDuckGo, imo, implies some degree of arbitrariness in whether they'll take
your search query seriously. The article mentions he came up with the name
before he had a product. It's just too bad he didn't think of a kids game just
before this search engine.

It's my default search engine and without fail when a non-tech colleague is
over my shoulder for an internet search they bust out laughing at the name and
are insistent that it's a prank website. I persist and calmly explain. They
relent and give that look you give a crazy person you don't want to argue
with.

~~~
adolph
I remember when Google looked that way too. The lack of other links, gif
animations and backgrounds, the prototype-style primary colors . . .

~~~
ballenf
But the name Google implies a mind-boggling large number of results or
websites that it's processing or searching for you. Maybe the name has a
degree of playfulness, but it's not named after a children's game that
revolves around the arbitrary choice of an unlucky child.

They also had the luxury of entering the market before there was a dominant
player. Not to mention the brilliance of the pagerank algorithm.

------
davesque
I feel like one of the appeals to using DuckDuckGo is that it simply isn't
Google and, therefore, doesn't come along with all the ethical baggage. That's
true now, but who's to say that will continue to be true in the future? At the
end of the day, the same forces still drive large businesses to cut corners,
costs, and creeds if they want to compete effectively with one another.

~~~
ballenf
There are no guarantees, but if they're not currently amassing data trails
then they won't be an attractive acquisition target for a data aggregator. If
they ever change their privacy policy, you just stop using it.

------
lochlainn
I've been using DuckDuckGo for about a year now. I would say it has complete
parity with every search engine other than Google, and only seems to miss
things when I do very specific searches. A common example is looking up an
error in dmesg: I can usually get a specific bug thread on Google, but only
more general results on DDG.

------
earth_walker
I've used DDG on and off since the initial HN submission, and I have to agree
with the 'like quitting smoking' comment.

In the past I would switch to it when I'm feeling some google-morning-after-
shame (e.g. after seeing some targeted ads), I would stick with it for a day
or two, but eventually go back to the 'what I wanted is on the first page'
magic of google.

I've used DDG more consistently since changing the firefox search default, but
there are still some things that I end up googling - sometimes DDG shows too
many irrelevant results on the first page.

I think paying more attention to the bangs and moving away from 'keyword'
searches will probably help - after all a tool is more useful if you learn how
to use it properly - but for some topics (e.g. Haskell examples) if the first
answer it finds isn't what I was looking for, the next couple of pages of
results are usually useless too.

------
yellowapple
Off-topic:

Can we _please_ stop with this trend of random websites asking to spam me with
notifications? Is there some framework everyone's using that's trying to grab
notification permissions at every possible opportunity? At the very least,
sites should at least tell me what they're going to have pop up as a
notification and give me the option to subscribe to those notifications
through some link in the actual site (like what Gmail does when desktop
notifications aren't enabled yet).

I understand notifications are useful for "webapps", but for a blog post they
seem entirely useless, so every time I see the prompt to allow notifications I
reject it immediately on the basis of it almost certainly being spam.

------
Arubis
Having swapped over to DDG a couple years back, I recall my frustration and
Google-fallback habit lasting for ~6mo. At this point I'll end up using the
big G maybe every week or two--mostly I forget that they're there.

Honestly, my second most-used "search" style interface these days is Wolfram
Alpha. Google comes in _third._

Say what you will about their respective search result quality, I found that a
lot of the delta between DDG and G! could be made up by just spending time
with DDG. I believe I've subconsciously adjusted both my keyword structure
(I'm conscious of using "explicitly" "quoted" "keywords" to ensure they're
included in my results) and my expectations.

------
projectant
But how good can a search engine be if it _does not_ track its humans, and
therefore _cannot_ use browsing / search history as contextual clues for query
ranking / semantics ?

It might be very good. But can such a system compete with one that does use
search history as context?

~~~
user68858788
There used to be a concept of google-fu, where writing search queries was a
skill in itself. I got quite good at finding what's needed. Then, over time,
search results became less and less useful. I noticed that search results
seemed to be weighed more on my history than the query written. I'd get
results with words synonymous to web page titles I'd recently visited, but
otherwise no connection to my search. To get decent results now I have to use
incognito or change the search settings to be "verbatim." I hoped things would
get better, but years later things are the same.

DDG gives more predictable results. It reminds me of why I started using
Google over other search engines decades ago.

------
kdamken
I really, really want to like DuckDuckGo. But every single time I’ve switched
from Google, I’ve found them to be much worse at returning the best results
for what I’m looking for.

For example, let’s say I want to look up “ear infection”. Google will spit out
a bunch of info right on their results page, often saving me the trouble of
even going to another site. DDG however will just give me 10 webmd links.

If they want to compete, the privacy angle isn’t enough. They need comparable
functionality as well.

~~~
notzorbo3
Try startpage.com. I moved away from google a year ago and never looked back.
I've never _once_ needed to fall back to google. That's probably because
startpage.com is basically anonymized google.

I know we're supposed to root for the entrepreneurs here on HN, but DDG
honestly seems like more hype / marketing than a decent product. You never
hear anything about startpage.com (maybe because it has a boring name?) but it
just works.

~~~
kdamken
Thanks for the suggestion. I just gave them a try with my "ear infection"
search, and found that while they provide similar links, they don't give the
additional info (like the summary of what it is and the "People also ask"
dropdown box) right on the results page that google search does. This is
especially important to me on mobile, especially when I have a weak cell
signal.

------
jondubois
DuckDuckGo is OK but they seem to be penalising single-page apps so my project
websites rank low on DuckDuckGo but high on Google. So I can't support
DuckDuckGo.

~~~
guitarbill
Some might see this as a win for DuckDuckGo

~~~
Sargos
People who like inaccurate search results?

~~~
wruza
That seems to be pretty one-sided view on decisions one makes out of trade-
offs. Having iPhone 4 few weeks ago with js obviously off and now having SE
with js:on, I'm not sure whether my web experience got any better or not at
all (overall phone experience got better, no doubt).

------
lyk
I used to use ddg, then startpage, but I've been using a self-hosted searx for
a while now. It's a meta-search engine that scrapes other sites. Results are
always great, and it's nice being able to enable specific engines for
different sites. Check it out: [https://searx.me](https://searx.me)

~~~
heroprotagonist
That one seems down at the moment, at least for me. List of instances:

[http://stats.searx.oe5tpo.com/](http://stats.searx.oe5tpo.com/)

------
staticelf
DuckDuckGo has really, really improved on their results for me who do not live
in USA. Before, it was pretty much unusable. But today I use DDG as my main
search engine on all my devices.

You should too.

~~~
AdamSC1
Our engineers have been working really hard on international results - I'm
sure they will be happy to hear it's making a difference for our users!

Disclaimer: DDG staff.

~~~
staticelf
Glad to hear that! Big difference and I am glad you're not completely US-
focused which is unfortunately common. :)

------
shp0ngle
I still don't understand - does DDG have its own crawler and index, or is it
outsourcing all that to third parties?

If the second, as I suspect, it's not really long-term viable anyway, is it.

~~~
mda
Second, they might crawl a few things, what percentage of the queries are
answered by their index, that information they will probably not say.

------
losvedir
Isn't DDG basically Bing + bangs? Doesn't seem fair to credit it at beating
Google without highlighting the billions of dollars that MSFT has invested.

~~~
AdamSC1
DuckDuckGo uses multiple sources for our results, as well as our instant
answers and bangs.

But the most important feature is that DuckDuckGo is the search engine that
doesn't track you. We don't store your personal information and we don't sell
you out to advertisers.

Our goal is to raise the standard of trust online, and so at DuckDuckGo you
are not the product, search is. We think that's an important difference.

Disclaimer: DDG staff.

~~~
pmoriarty
_" We don't store your personal information and we don't sell you out to
advertisers."_

But is that information collected by you or anyone affiliated with you or
given to anyone?

How about information that doesn't directly identify you, but could be used to
identify you? (things like browser fingerprints, IPs, cookies, etc)

~~~
AdamSC1
If you want to look at the nitty gritty we have a very simple and straight
forward privacy policy:

[https://duckduckgo.com/privacy](https://duckduckgo.com/privacy)

We do not collect or share any information that can be used to personally
identify you.

------
thanatropism
I see DuckDuckGo as an improved search bar more than as a search engine,
though it's admirably fast at the latter.

DDG's bangs are effectively a CLI interface to web searches. !g does google,
!yt does YouTube, !w does Wikipedia, !wa does Wolfram Alpha, !scholar does
Google Scholar...

Huge timesaver.

~~~
Crespyl
It's interesting, since browsers have had custom keyword searches for ages,
and I've known that and just never taken the time to set them up.

Having DDG with its bangs I use them all the time, and if there's some
specific new site that I want to search there's (so far) always been a fairly
guessable bang already set up for it.

I find it exceedingly convenient.

------
tiffanyh
Isn’t DDG just using Yahoo on the backend to perform the search (which in turn
is using Bing)?

What prevents Yahoo from (a) offering a competitive search to DDG or (b) Yahoo
from shutting of DDG from using its search engine?

~~~
Catalyst4NaN
DDG is using over 400 sources apparently, of which one is Yahoo
[https://duck.co/help/results/sources](https://duck.co/help/results/sources)

~~~
josinalvo
> [https://duck.co/help/results/sources](https://duck.co/help/results/sources)
> "We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which
> we source from Bing, Yahoo, and Yandex."

I thought they where re-implementing search.. Are they "just" aggregating?

~~~
bamboozled
I recently spoke with Gabriel and his view was that they're going to continue
to outsource / proxy / aggregate unless they need to implement their own
search. Right now it's not worth the investment apparently.

~~~
Sargos
Yeah because Search is an actual hard problem and putting up a proxy like DDG
is not. DDG will never have any real value beyond that.

~~~
FabHK
Eliminating tracking of your searches is not valuable?

~~~
Sargos
I said value beyond that. That meaning the privacy proxy.

------
syphilis2
I created a website a year ago and I simply cannot find it using Google.
Searching for the site title: Google - not in top 100, DDG - result 8. I am in
Google, since I can search for the exact URL (which is the same as the site
name), but otherwise I don't show up. It's incredibly frustrating considering
the amount of no-content and repeated articles Google does return.

Related, my biggest gripe with the WWW today is how difficult it is to find
personal websites among (what I'd call) all the ad-revenue garbage.

~~~
Eupolemos
Just to be thorough; did you try this:
[https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6259634?hl=en](https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6259634?hl=en)

It is an extra step to make google aware of you.

~~~
syphilis2
I did, so the site is in Google and is crawled by Google (Analytics I believe
has the option to do that). I also went through various SEO suggestions, set
up Google Analytics, added meta tags, improved load speed (it's a pretty
minimal static page anyway), among other things.

------
pmoriarty
When I search for:

    
    
      "strace" "hex" "ascii" site:stackoverflow.com
    

on DDG lite:

    
    
      https://duckduckgo.com/lite/?q="strace" "hex" "ascii" site:stackoverflow.com&kd=-1
    

the returned results only show "hex" and "ascii" but do not include "strace".
I expect results with all three search terms (and if that fails, to return
nothing).

------
amelius
I tried to find some info on the architecture of DDG, and found this article
from 2013: [1]. It seems they used Solr at the time.

Is there anything more recent?

[1] [http://highscalability.com/blog/2013/1/28/duckduckgo-
archite...](http://highscalability.com/blog/2013/1/28/duckduckgo-
architecture-1-million-deep-searches-a-day-and-gr.html)

~~~
djsumdog
If you reverse some of their servers, you'll also find they're hosted mostly
on AWS. So that privacy thing....

------
hvmonk
Interestingly, contrary to most comments, i recently had to switch to Google
after using DDG for about two years. It was just getting slower and slower -
across all devices. Yes, programming and technical questions are answered
better than Google, but rest of the queries were returning lesser optimal
results - most likely it has to do with privacy and data collection.

------
mikehain
I'm a fan of DuckDuckGo and I've found myself using it more and more these
days. I actually had to change my launcher on Android because the default
Google Go launcher that comes packed with the Moto X Pure has no option to
remove the Google search from every home page. I switched over to Nova
launcher just so I could put a DDG search bar in its place.

------
dredmorbius
I've been using DDG for 3-4 years now. Good results generally, love the bangs.

Still thin results an a few sites, Ello and Reddit comments particularly IME
(I use and search both frequently).

For console, there's
[https://duckduckgo.com/lite](https://duckduckgo.com/lite) (no JS).

Hit counts and date-bounded search stills sends me to Brand G.

------
spektom
I'd like to act as devil's advocate for a bit.

Showing ads according to a search term is totally possible, but having no
attribution attached to a "click" or to an "impression" give very little
advantage for the marketer who is paying for the ads. There are cost models
allowing to pay for the actual action (like installing an advertised
application) not just for clicks or views. Re-targeting people who had
expressed their interest in a product is a useful tool for marketers as well.
Having some kind of link back to the advertising campaign, which your users
came from along with their LTV allow you to measure campaign productivity,
which helps optimize future campaigns. And much more.

I really like the idea of not being tracked on the Internet, but it's seems
like currently it's not feasible to remove a tool many marketers get used to.

~~~
spektom
People, who downvoted my comment - care to explain? Does downvote button on HN
compare to "I don't like what you're saying"?

------
jbergstroem
Does anyone know of a way to help DDG improving by passing them statistics
about how I use !g as well as passing information about the results I prefer
from google? I can only assume it would be riddled with privacy issues but
would be happy to occasionally provide it.

~~~
AdamSC1
Whenever you do a search you'll notice there is a "Feedback" button in the top
right-hand corner of the screen.

This allows you to lets you share your feedback about the site or specific
results with us. Your personal information is not recorded.

If a query isn't returning as expected you can share it there!

Disclaimer: DDG staff.

~~~
jbergstroem
Thanks! I'll keep this in mind.

------
jankotek
Bing, Seznam, Yandex, Baidu.. there are many other search engines with
surprisingly good results. Give it try.

I started using alternatives, for privacy, but also because they are often
better. Google Maps can not even find near pharmacy in EU country.

~~~
endisukaj
You think Bing, Yandex, and especially Baidu are better for your privacy than
Google?

~~~
daxorid
With regard to Yandex and Baidu: there's the notion of threat proximity.
Google is a US company, beholden to US laws. If you reside in the United
States, you also reside in the jurisdiction of state actors with the
capability to _get at you_.

If Putin himself showed up to Yandex HQ and demanded a full data dump of every
search you made, he is still _incapable of touching you_ , whereas J. Random
Agent at the FBI can throw you in a 6x8 steel box.

~~~
endisukaj
Has anyone ever been sent to jail in the U.S. because of their (innocuous)
searches?

------
throwaway970992
I've been using it for ~ 4+ years and it's great most of the time. I sometimes
jump to Google if I can't find what I'm looking for, but these excursions
generally aren't very successful.

------
smt88
Insofar as DDG is a mashup of many search engines, doesn't it technically have
a _massive_ team? If you add up the teams building the products that feed DDG,
then you probably end up with a much larger team than the one building Google
Search.

I might describe that as gaining on Google, but still losing quite badly.

I'm still impressed by DDG of course and welcome some alternative to Google,
which is a dangerous monopoly with a search that I've come to despise in
recent years due to its ignoring what I've actually typed.

------
yuhong
I am thinking about the current debt based economy which is based on growth
and stock prices, and Google and the tracking ad bubble is a good example of
the problems. Brendan Eich talked about it:
[https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/870483249587519489](https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/870483249587519489)
Google was VC funded so had to exit using IPO (in this case).

------
baxtr
DDG is really great! I use it on all my devices since January. I've tried it
before to by changing the default to DDG on my iOS devices. However, I've
always switched back to google after a couple of weeks. Not this time.

Every now and then when I'm not happy with the search results, I use the "g!"
Shortcut to get the google results, but the occasions I'm doing this is
definitely decreasing.

------
SeanDav
OT:

> _" Google would be an elephant while DuckDuckGo is a mosquito (this is not
> to emphasize; I’m actually making things better for DuckDuckGo)."_

Actually the Author is not making it better, in fact worse. From the numbers
in the OP it appears Google is about 1000 times bigger (roughly) than DDG.

A better, and perhaps more apt comparison would to compare Google's Elephant
to DDG's Badger (small badger).

------
Osmium
Is there going to be a replacement for DuckDuckHack[0]?

Had a cool instant answer integration I wanted to contribute, that I hope
would be useful to a lot of people (primarily students/scientists).

Seems a real shame for there to be no route to community contributions in the
future.

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

------
jatins
One reason why Google seems to do better is because it knows more about me.
For example when I search for "reverse a LL" shows me reversing linked list on
Google (which is what I intended) but something completely else on DDG. Maybe
because Google just knows that I tend to search for programming stuff.

------
monochromatic
I've switched over on my phone, mostly because I'm sick of not having any
other way to opt out of AMP.

------
simion314
I switched to duck duck go recently and for me it is good enough, when I feel
I get bad results or not what I need I search with !g and for my surprise
google returns same results most of the time. It would be good to have more
duck duck go like sites/projects in case ddg fails or goes evil.

------
cgarvey
I've been using DDG as my primary search for about 2 years now, it rarely ever
falls short for me. When it does, it's usually related to some type of image
search I'm doing, I think google still has nicer tools for that.

Overall, super happy with DDG.

~~~
chiefalchemist
Agreed. It's not perfect but I'd prefer to give it the first chance(s), and if
necessary fallback to Google, etc.

------
sweetp
I always use DDG first, and then as a last resort ill look on Google. I think
I only really checked on Google maybe 2 or 3 times this past month. For me
Google is mostly irrelevant, and I could quite happily not use it.

------
greggarious
Persoanlly I love DDG. It handles a vast majority of my search traffic quite
fine.

Quick tip: Rather than falling back to Google, try the "!sp" bang command for
StartPage, which crawls Google to supplement it's results.

------
rallycarre
I've switched to duckduckgo for security reasons and noticed not much
difference. Even when I switched back to google for something I couldn't find
with duckduckgo the search results are very close.

------
cpeterso
I'm curious how DDG's affiliate revenue compares to search-based ads. The
article glosses over affiliate programs, but they are an interesting revenue
alternative to ads.

------
codelord
I don't understand what's the difference between Google and DuckDuckGo when
all of my traffic is going through Comcast and AT&T anyway. There's no
privacy.

~~~
orthecreedence
Unless AT&T/Comcast are somehow MITMing your SSL connections (unlikely), then
your search terms are all encrypted and all the ISPs know is that you are
using DuckDuckGo.

------
vadansky
According to uMatrix, DuckDuckGo serves 43 cookies from Google? Does it only
"No Follow You" if you're proactive enough block them using uMatrix?

~~~
sbov
Privacy badger detects zero trackers. When I open my developer toolbar, all
hits when I search are to duckduckgo.com. When I installed uMatrix, the only
thing I see are references to duckduckgo. And _zero_ cookies. This is using
Firefox on Linux.

It appears as if Google has infected your internet.

------
twsted
Two years and a half just with DDG. It’s really ok for me. Just a number of !g
sometimes. Google searches are surely better but I feel comfortable with DDG.

------
solidr53
Love how everybody concerned about their privacy are most likely querying DNS
via 8.8.8.8.

But I understand, I try to think of the internet as a non-privacy place.

~~~
callinyouin
What a strange straw man. People who are very concerned about their online
privacy are likely not using that as their DNS.

------
malchow
DuckDuckGo is great.

Also, the HBS case study prose style is annoying enough in itself. To have the
style emulated by a non-native writer is fun. And weird.

------
1024core
But doesn't DDG just repackage results from Yahoo (now Bing)? At least, it was
doing that a few years ago when I last checked.

~~~
aembleton
They also have their own crawler:
[https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckbot](https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckbot)

~~~
1024core
But that doesn't mean they don't just repackage Bing's results (with some of
their own thrown in).

------
donmatito
Couldn't access the website - too many pop-up! Hopefully the HN comments made
me want to try DDG again

------
flashdance
I'd just like to say that this is a great article--stuff like this is why I
keep coming back to HN.

------
MrJagil
Why do search engines have to exist on a website? Couldn't they be a built-in
part of the browser?

~~~
turc1656
Not really. A search engine crawls the web (billions and billions of sites)
and indexes them for quick and easy access. If you use Outlook for email, it's
kind of analogous to how the search option works there. When an email arrives
on your company's system, the mail server processes the mail and indexes it
for searchability. The key here is that either your computer or your mail
server have to have a copy to make it searchable.

So, for the case of web searching, you would have to know/read the content on
the entire web. This is the "crawling" process that search engines perform.
They read it and store/index what they need for searchability. It is entirely
infeasible, obviously, for anyone (let alone every person) to do so on their
individual devices.

~~~
MrJagil
Thanks for the answer! Couldn't Apple crawl the web and store the index for
safari to search through? This way, an iPhone user would search Apple's index
instead of Bing's, no website needed.

~~~
turc1656
If I understand your question, the answer is that what you describe is
basically the same thing currently on Android phones with the Google search
widget thing (I think it's called Google Now).

It can perform a search without going to Google's main search page. It may or
may not open the results in a browser window, though (I don't know because I
don't use it). But regardless, it goes through Google's main search system,
much like the proposal you made for Apple.

Whether or not it is accessed through the site directly is kind of irrelevant.
It's still accessing the same remote system in the same way. Whatever
interface you choose to use is just a user preference, really. You're still
submitting a query to the site/service over an internet connection and you are
getting the response back with the results.

Does that answer your question? I'm not sure if you were asking if this
hypothetical from Apple could avoid using Google or if you were asking
something else. Because if you are trying to avoid giving your data to Google,
then you should also be concerned with Apple.

~~~
MrJagil
Excellent explanation!

>I'm not sure if you were asking if this hypothetical from Apple could avoid
using Google

Yes, that is what i was trying to get at!

>Because if you are trying to avoid giving your data to Google, then you
should also be concerned with Apple.

Definitely!

>Whether or not it is accessed through the site directly is kind of
irrelevant. It's still accessing the same remote system in the same way.

I'm just curious if there's a business opportunity for Apple here. They could
basically make mobile safari switch to the hypothetical "Apple Search" for
queries made in Safari's address bar (I personally don't search from
google.com). It would of course only be worth anything to the end user if they
saved time not being routed through google.com

In a similar vein, I've read some comments describing "Siri" as a way to get a
bite of the web-search-cake.

~~~
turc1656
Yeah I think there is a business opportunity for them if they really wanted to
give it a go. DuckDuckGo leverages Bing, Yahoo, and a number of other sites. I
don't see why Apple can't do something similar and forge similar agreements
and then use iOS, Siri, and everything else they have as part of their
"ecosystem" to drive searches through their new platform.

------
TheGrassyKnoll
DDG user. I use this to cook pasta: 7 min !timer (goes off to google & starts
a timer)

------
ishtu
Use search engine[1] that respects[2] your privacy

[1] [https://www.ixquick.eu/](https://www.ixquick.eu/) [2]
[https://www.ixquick.eu/eng/privacy-
policy.html#hmb](https://www.ixquick.eu/eng/privacy-policy.html#hmb)

~~~
r0fl
The results are terrible. I tried a simple search for a large Porsche
dealership which is down the street from my house and it did not even come up
in the top 5 results.

Would be a great search engine if it was the year 2001.

~~~
ishtu
Well, for such use cases Google is a better tool indeed. I personally know my
neighborhood and never google what is down the street. And if I need
dealership I will try to find it on car maker website which is easy to look up
even using search engines from 2001.

------
SubiculumCode
I'd love me some DDG Scholar functionality (not the Google Scholar bang)

------
EvanKnowles
They're beating Google at monopolizing the internet's advertising?

------
fooker
How do they plan to scale with the number of users?

------
rejschaap
Using Google to analyze its own competitor seems a bit questionable. Though
with the difference in usage being what it is, I doubt Google would bother
with any funny business.

------
wentoodeep
DDG is just icing on cakes, a convenient UI to search the web/search engines.
Now trend is shifting towards chatbot, is DDG still relevant?

------
sabujp
i use ddg for finding things that haven't been taken down by dmca notices.

------
laser
"Google would be an elephant while DuckDuckGo is a mosquito (this is not to
emphasize; I’m actually making things better for DuckDuckGo)."

Why would this guy go out of his way to say this metaphor is actually
literally informative and generous towards DuckDuckGo while apparently having
exerted no mental effort and being incorrect by orders of magnitude on his own
data?

If you're most generous to the writer, you get 12 million hits /day vs 13
billion hits /day according to his data from Wolfram, for a ratio of ~1/1100,
which applied to a pygmy elephant of 5500 lbs yields a corresponding weight of
~5 lbs for the mosquito, or over 2,000,000 mg, versus the average mosquito
weight of about 5 mg. Even if he meant a small 2000 kilogram pygmy elephant
and a 20mg elephant mosquito, he's still 5 orders of magnitude too generous
towards Google in mass comparison in his metaphor in which he is "actually
making things better for DuckDuckGo".

I think most people think of animals like African Elephants when they hear
"elephant", though, in which case you're looking at a 13,000 pound animal
versus a ~12 pound one if you use hits as your metric, or a ~95 lb one if you
go by visits as your metric.

So an actually fair metaphor is if Google's an elephant, DuckDuckGo is
somewhere between a goose and a hyena. Better watch out, Google.

~~~
alexasmyths
That was one of the most HN comments I've ever read.

Hey, it's just a metaphor.

Scales and ratios not needed.

edit: Wasn't meant to be negative ... as I could see myself writing something
like that and my GF giggling at me for a week ...

~~~
badosu
I agree with parent, it's not just a metaphor but a wildly inaccurate guess
that makes the reader think duckduckgo is more irrelevant than it really is.

> _That was one of the most HN comments I 've ever read._

What does this mean?

~~~
Uehreka
HN has a reputation among some[who?][weasel words] as a place where many
commenters are some combination of pedantic, overly literal and out of touch
with mainstream culture. Taking this metaphor to pieces would seem to check
the first 2 boxes pretty neatly.

~~~
BartSaM
You actually make it sound bad. I would more likely to say they are precise
and usually won't allow for inaccurate information to fly through the front
page without pointing out the issues.

~~~
dithering
See guys, this is why we don't get invited to parties...

~~~
toxican
We'll just have to hold our own shindig, with educational flash cards and
nature documentaries.

------
ceefan
duck.com is owned by Google.

------
feelin_googley
Why does DDG not present "direct" URLs in its search results?

Why does DDG, like Google, _by default_ instead prefix all results with a URL
pointing to DDG servers enabling DDG to track what results that the user
clicks on?

Google started doing this some years ago, e.g., all the URLs in search results
are prefixed with something like
[https://www.google.com/url?q=](https://www.google.com/url?q=)

Needless to say, this serves no useful purpose for users and it showed the
direction the company was moving in.

Easy for any nerd to remove client-side, but it is on by default and this will
catch many non-technical users who do not know about them or how to remove
them.

In DDG the prefix is something like
[https://duckduckgo.com/l/?uddg=](https://duckduckgo.com/l/?uddg=)

Even assuming no logs are kept with client IPs, and no correlation can be made
by any party in possession of DDG's logs bewteen client IP and clicked URLs,
this practice is still collecting data. The data collected is not merely _what
searches a user submits_ i.e. search data, but also data about the user's
_browsing_ , i.e., which URLs she chooses to follow. And of course it
collecting this data _without asking for the user 's permission_.

If the company can argue having this data is useful to the company and
therefore somehow useful to users because company will make better
website/software (a common argument made by many web companies caught
collecting user data by default), then it seems the respectful thing to do is
ask users if they want to contribute such data. Let users make the choice.

As I recall this default prefixing of results is not something that search
engines before Google used to do. Nor did the original Google do this either.
It is something that Google started doing some years ago.

Note: Some browsers allow the user, e.g., to preset a default HTTP referrer,
to set it to the target URL, to send an empty one, or to not send this header
at all. Same options as offered by "meta referrer" except it is _controlled by
the user_ in their _browser_ , not via a third party website. I have no idea
if the popular browsers have such settings.

Finally, a problem with having bad design choices (such as prefixing URLs) and
then offering users the option of changing the "settings" _via a website_ is
that this usually requires Javascript or cookies, because as everyone knows
HTTP was designed to be stateless. Cookies and Javascript are two things
privacy conscious users may want to avoid. By default DDG does not set cookies
or require Javascript. (Good.) But if in order to change a bad default, the
user has to enable cookies or Javascript, then we have sacraficed the goal of
no cookies or Javascript required. (Bad.)

~~~
gpm
> Why does DDG not present "direct" URLs in its search results?

They explain it here:
[https://duck.co/help/results/rduckduckgocom](https://duck.co/help/results/rduckduckgocom)
It's to prevent sites from seeing what search term you found them by.

Turning it off: Menu button at the top right of search results -> other
settings -> Privacy Tab -> Redirect (Toggle)

Edit: Note that I have the redirect setting turned on, and don't get the
redirects. Presumably because I'm running firefox nightly and they know that
this browser supports rel="noopener" (which they use on the link).

------
snakeanus
I would actually switch to ddg if they actually bothered to free more parts of
their site and backend. Right now their JS is nonfree for example.

------
jjawssd
Is there any practical decentralized alternative search engine? YaCy seems
dead.

------
dsschnau
Hell yeah duckduckgo owns

------
viach
Why not using Yandex directly? I mean, really?

------
ftw45
DuckDuckGo is really an amazingly stupid name for a browser brand, and the
logo completes it.. How small would Google be with such a name?

------
SubiculumCode
DuckDuckGo, powered by Yandex? In all seriousness, does that mean Putin and
Russia would have my searches? Not trolling,just interested to know what I
would be choosing by going with DDG.

~~~
SubiculumCode
You can negatively vote the question, but the question was in earnest, and I'd
appreciate an earnest answer of why their partnership and reliance on Yandex
is not a privacy concern.

~~~
SubiculumCode
e.g.,
[https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/05/30/yandexs_ukraine_off...](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/05/30/yandexs_ukraine_offices_raided_for_treason/)

------
wdn
I will stick with Google for now. Google usually returns the result I wanted.
Google's page is also cleaner.

But when DDG improve the search result, I will make a switch there.

------
nickpsecurity
The comments on this article mostly talk about the privacy benefits DDG
brings. Yet, we've known since the Orange Book (TCSEC) that system integrity
is a prerequisite for confidentiality/privacy. As in, the DDG servers and
network need some strong security to ensure they're doing what the staff and
users think they're doing esp with all the press it gets. Example attacks:

1\. Root the search servers. Gradually leak out what people were doing in a
way that looks like fake search results to attackers running "searches" that
are actually commands to trigger leaks. The leaked data would be stored in
memory temporarily.

2\. Subvert the engine to send malicious JavaScript to users that leaks their
search results to a specific location. Might reduce risk of detection by first
determining browser configuration for common ways of spotting leaks. Then,
don't send anything to _those_ users.

I'd guess the boxes and setups were originally optimized for speed and cost
rather than isolation. So, what's security like at DDG? A quick glance shows
they run...

"DuckDuckGo is coded in Perl and JavaScript with the help of the YUI Library,
served via nginx, FastCGI and memcached, running on FreeBSD and Ubuntu via
daemontools. We both run our own servers and have servers on Amazon EC2 across
the world."

Probably not that private once hackers are involved with Perl and Ubuntu. On
nation-state level with EC2. The servers and cache at least get security
updates regularly. So, safe assumption is private against passive collection
and low-to-medium-strength attackers.

~~~
mattnewport
I imagine most people using DDG over Google for privacy reasons are concerned
first with what _Google_ does with the data it collects on them and only
secondarily with the potential for other actors to get access to that data.

~~~
nickpsecurity
Entirely true. I bring it up since the article mentioned the Snowden leaks and
data ending up in government's hands. The leaks, esp Core Secrets, also said
they had a way to get the FBI to "compel" the backdooring. Others said TAO's
hackers often made up for what passive collection couldn't do. If they're in
the threat model, the DDG isn't likely the solution in and of itself unless
their security has the same threat model.

Good for other threat models that majority of users are actually worried
about, though. I did say that in original comment.

~~~
mattnewport
It's still better than most alternatives in other respects it seems to me. The
fact that they go out of their way not to track IPs or store personally
identifying information means there is less data available for a hacker to
access if their security is compromised. Sure it's possible that a
sophisticated attacker could add tracking of information that DDG do not
intend to track but the situation is a lot better than with Google. They are
also safer from other types of non hacking attacks like court orders by
deliberately not tracking information that might be demanded.

Security can always be improved but they already seem to be a much better
choice than most of the alternatives.

------
Derbasti
Write a whole article about DuckDuckGo, and don't mention bang searches. !py
searches the Python documentation, !w searches Wikipedia, !g searches Google,
!a searches Amazon, and better yet, !gde, !wde, and !ade search the German
Google, Wikipedia, and Amazon.

For natural language queries, I use !g, because Google is better at this sort
of thing. For local queries I use !gde, because Google has better map
integration. For most everything else, I prefer DDG, because it doesn't "did
you mean DickDickGo?", and it doesn't "I don't know what you're looking for,
but here are five ads instead".

~~~
r3bl
> Write a whole article about DuckDuckGo, and don't mention bang searches.

Ummm... yes it does. It's literally the very first point the author discusses
once he starts comparing the search results. Here's a link to the relevant
subsection: [https://fourweekmba.com/duckduckgo-vs-
google/#Search_DuckDuc...](https://fourweekmba.com/duckduckgo-vs-
google/#Search_DuckDuckGo_vs_Google)

