
DuckDuckGo is growing fast - headalgorithm
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/technology/privacy-focused-search-engine-duckduckgo-is-growing-fast/
======
readarticle
I absolutely cannot stand the quality of DuckDuckGo results, programming
related or not. I use !g on almost any general search query out of a
conditioned lack of faith in the ability of DDG to surface anything useful.
The name is childish and doesn’t inspire confidence either.

People I encounter that argue the results are “not that bad” are 9/10 times
ideological purists, or otherwise misguided, that’s purely my personal
experience though.

That said, after a few months of frustration I switched my search engine back
to Google earlier this year and _almost immediately switched it back to DDG_
the second I needed a bang operator.

Bangs are a superpower, a game changer, and by far the best UX for mobile
search I’ve seen so far. I bang everything and everyone, bang bang.

Googling with site:x.com doesn’t even come close. More characters, Google
determines the sorting and mixes in marketing copy results with the UGC I’m
looking for, “exact quotes” no longer work, forced AMP results for e.g. Reddit
etc.

DDG as a search engine is utter crap and I’ve little patience left to hear
otherwise, but as a way of turning iOS Safari into a sort of meta search
engine it’s invaluable and I genuinely cannot stop recommending it to other
“power users”.

Gram gram is sticking with google though, and the second Safari replicates
bangs I’m outta here.

~~~
ludocode
Before I bought a robotic vacuum cleaner, I read lots of reviews from people
saying it wasn't as good as vacuuming manually. It misses areas, it has a hard
time in corners, it takes forever. I bought it anyway. The simple fact is it
doesn't matter how much worse it is than vacuuming, because I'm not vacuuming.

I kind of feel that way about DuckDuckGo. Instead of lazyness, I guess you'd
call it ideological purity. I don't care how much worse DuckDuckGo is than
Google. It doesn't matter. The simple fact is the privacy implications of
Google make it a deal breaker, so I'll use any alternative no matter how much
worse it is.

In my mind they're not even competing services. Just like comparing a robotic
vacuum to manual vacuuming. It's like saying "What's better, a square or the
color yellow?" It doesn't compute.

I'd be lying if I said I never use !g. I do, when I don't find what I'm
looking for and feel like I should. Half the time, I don't find what I wanted
on Google either. I always hesitate though, thinking "Do I want Google to log
this about me?" I rarely hesitate when searching with DuckDuckGo. There's a
certain comfort and peace of mind that is worth any drop in the quality of
search results.

~~~
Santosh83
Give this person a cookie, for exhibiting sheer resolve, something that's
becoming all too rare in the manipulated, instant-gratification culture we're
heading deep into.

~~~
murgindrag
It's not resolve. It's experience. At a young age, you think through short
timelines. Crises don't happen. At an old age, once you've been through a few
crises, wars, pandemics, law suits, and whatnot, you start calculating
expected outcomes a bit differently.

I use DuckDuckGo not out of resolve, but because I used the Internet in the
nineties, and saw how data I put out then came back in some cases a decade or
two later in counter-intuitive ways.

~~~
fsflover
I am curious to know more about such experiences.

~~~
murgindrag
1) Interacting in online forums, pre-search engine, where such discussions
where considered more-or-less ephemeral, and only available to a closed group
of "Internet users" wasn't super-public. All of that is now archived and
indexed. If you search for me, you'll find it.

2) Giving my data to super-credible companies, pre-spam. Wouldn't you know it?
A few went out of business, and my data was neatly packaged up and resold to
the highest bidder. One was an enterprise database company.

3) Personal web page ended up on archive.org, before anyone really knew others
were grabbing/indexing/archiving things. It had more of the feel of your front
yard. Yes, someone could take a photo, but it wasn't common.

4) The whole Yahoo thing. My emails become property of some data broker who
now mines them for marketing and sales.

I obviously won't talk about more personal ones. And no one will talk about
litigations. But those sorts of things happen too.

The things I worry about now are the really sophisticated fingerprinting
mechanisms, where your typing patterns, your vocabulary, your linguistic
quirks, etc. become biometric identifiers. I'm not sure how all that data will
be archived, integrated, and combined 25 years from now.

History suggests Google won't be Google forever, though.

Oh, and let's not forget what happened with data, Jewish people, WWII, and
Germany. That's beyond my timescale, but these things happen.

~~~
fsflover
Thank you, added to favorites to show to skeptics.

~~~
murgindrag
It sounds like you're keeping a list. What's on your list so far?

~~~
fsflover
You can look at anyone's favorites list here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/favorites?id=USERNAME&comments=...](https://news.ycombinator.com/favorites?id=USERNAME&comments=t)
(replace USERNAME with the actual name of the user).

For my username it is here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/favorites?id=fsflover&comments=...](https://news.ycombinator.com/favorites?id=fsflover&comments=t)

------
dpcan
Just. Change. Your. Name. Already.

Seriously. Please don't instantly down-vote. I think a serious conversation
needs to be had around this topic. If you don't agree, I'd love to hear a
thought-out answer as to why such a silly name is supposed to be taken
seriously.

When you get outside the geek bubble, the name is SO important.

I honestly believe the name is killing DDG's ability to grow. That, and not
having a private email solution. But I don't want to tell someone I'm @
duckduckgo either so...

For example, I tried to get my parents to try DuckDuckGo and they giggled,
stumbled with the name, and then said they'd stick with Google.

I know people giggled at Google when it started too, but it was so easy to
start letting "goooogle" roll off the tongue. PLUS it became a VERB! I do not
think duckduckgo has that ability.

Unfortunately "uck" is NOT a friendly, comfortable sound. It sounds like a
profanity. If feels angry or sinister.

But "oogle" is comforting, fuzzy, and fun to say.

This may sound silly, but I think it's a very real problem DDG has and they
should address it so we can move from G to DDG.

~~~
iamdamian
I had a similar experience this weekend. My artist friends are very open to
the idea of moving off of Google, because tracking doesn’t fit with their
ethics. But they also want confidence up front that the alternative will work
for them and is a popular, polished service.

My experience is that the name ‘DuckDuckGo’ gives a bad first impression and
is holding back growth for the product. IMO the brand is in an uncanny valley
where the individual words do mean something to everyday people (unlike, say,
Google), and there’s a vague allusion to a children’s game, but the concepts
don’t come together or inspire confidence. It’s not so much about being
‘childish’ (re: other threads on this page) as it is about being unpolished
and a little nonsensical.

They would be better off with 1) a simple one-word name or 2) a more complete
name with an obvious and thoughtful layer of meaning, even if more than one
word.

~~~
fsflover
> They would be better off with 1) a simple one-word name

[https://duck.com](https://duck.com)

~~~
RandomBacon
Person A: "What is ...?"

Person B: "I don't know, duck it."

Person A: "What did you just say‽"

Person B: "I said _D_ uck it, not _F_..."

Also, doesn't help that 'd' and 'f' are right next to each other on a qwerty
keyboard.

~~~
fsflover
Quack it!

~~~
RandomBacon
That sounds just as silly as I imagine "Google it!" must have sounded to other
people.

I will try telling others to "quack it" :-) Thank you!

------
sunaurus
I love the idea of DDG, but after using it for about a year, I realized that
I'm redoing most of my searches with !g. DDG seems to be quite bad at searches
that are in my native language and somehow also often doesn't find good
results for programming related queries.

I ended up switching back to Google. It was painful from a privacy standpoint,
but what good is privacy if I don't get useful search results.

~~~
mcv
I often find DDG better at programming related questions. Google is frequently
useless there.

~~~
coding_lobster
My experience has been the exact opposite. As soon as I need to look up
something very specific or niche DDG does not deliver and that's when I need
it the most.

~~~
ziml77
Not just that, but it feels like I get more results that are just rehosted
StackOverflow answers when using DDG.

~~~
mcv
Really? I used to get those a lot on Google, and after switching to DDG I get
real StackOverflow again.

A lot of sites try to game their Google rankings. It's possible DDG is less
subject to that.

------
lapcatsoftware
IMO the biggest issue with DDG is that you can't really advertise specifically
on DDG.

Most people don't realize this, but DDG doesn't sell their own advertising,
they use Microsoft's advertising network! This just seems bizarre to me that
they're outsourcing the whole reason they're supposed to be independent of the
other search engines.

I tried signing up for Microsoft's network, but it was a bad user interface
(typical MS), very confusing, and I couldn't really figure out how to
specifically target DDG and only DDG. I just gave up.

DDG needs to bring advertising in-house, or I don't see why they have a reason
to exist. They're almost a subsidiary of MS at this point.

~~~
chris_f
Since DDG also sources their organic results from Bing, I wouldn't be
surprised if there was also a contractual obligation that required DDG to use
Bing ads to reduce the cost they pay for the search results.

Over the last few months I have been working on an alternative search engine.
Maybe naively, I thought the most difficult part was going to be to convince
people to use it, but the real challenge if figuring out a way to monetize the
service in a way that maintains privacy and respects users. The more I go down
this path, the more I realize the next big search engine will be one that
provides better results AND comes up with a better way for monetization.

I wrote a little about it here [0] if anyone is interested.

[0] [https://coil.com/p/runnaroo/Privacy-and-Search-Engine-
Moneti...](https://coil.com/p/runnaroo/Privacy-and-Search-Engine-
Monetization/5dXAW6NwF)

~~~
jameshush
DDG is probably doing a revenue share with Bing. Every ad that’s clicked a %
goes to DDG and MS.

~~~
chris_f
Also interesting is that the Bing API TOS [0] has the below line that prevents
users from using any other display advertising not provided by Microsoft:

"Display advertising that is not provided by Microsoft on any page that
displays any part of a response."

DDG is big enough that they are probably on a completely separate agreement
than the standard TOS though.

[0] [https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cognitive-
services/bi...](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cognitive-
services/bing-web-search/use-display-requirements)

------
ed312
Can we get some examples of searches from the "DDG is terrible" camp? I've
been using DDG for 100% of my searches on laptop and phone for ~3 years
without any complaint. I've never used the "pipe it through google" search
option.

~~~
hombre_fatal
Every time I try to use it, almost every search query I write while trying to
get work done I end up retrying with "!g". Eventually I find myself using "!g"
preemptively because I don't want to miss out on results like long tail
StackOverflow hits.

Though "elm list" is still my classic example.

~~~
majewsky
When you type "elm list" into Google and it understands that you mean the
language instead of the tree, it's because they have an extensive profile on
you. Of course DuckDuckGo won't do that since that's their unique selling
point.

I can see this being a legitimate gripe of an end user that just compares
search engines, but I was under the impression that this crowd understands the
proposition of DDG and doesn't complain when it's working as designed.

~~~
hombre_fatal
I hear this presumption a lot from people trying to defend DDG, but you can
trivially disprove this by googling it anonymously from a random IP address.
Try it with "elm list".

Frankly, when I compare my logged-in, static-IP Google results to anonymous
queries, I can see that the degree of "personalization" that people claim is
vastly overstated; not much seems to change.

It just seems like wishful thinking when the obvious reality is that Google is
just more advanced in its ability to semanticize input.

DDG "rust cargo" gives me images and results for cargo ships.

~~~
boomka
I followed your advice, turned on VPN, went private browsing and searched for
"elm list".

On DDG the first result was elm-lang homepage but the second was a tutorial on
lists in Elm. Down the page I also saw a wikipedia entry for a list of elm
trees. Seems ok overall to me.

Then I tried the same thing with Google and first I was stopped by captcha and
had to spend a minute clicking hydrants and traffic lights. Then I got a whole
page of results about various programming discussions on lists in Elm, but
nothing in the entire page about the trees. That does not seem right, I think
regular person would be much more likely to search for a tree, not for an
obscure programming language.

Verdict: I found DDG results better as in more relevant for general population
while still surfacing the programming ones. Also no hydrants on DDG.

~~~
joshuamorton
Would someone searching for the trees search "elm list" or "list of elms"?

------
ricardo81
There's definitely been a move towards de-googling and more pro-privacy
services.

I'd tried DDG in the past but found their response times a bit slow (perhaps
due to Bing API?) but that does not seem to be the case now, moreso because
they switched from Amazon to Microsoft servers.

DDG is perhaps the best known private search engine, though Mojeek and
Startpage were pro-privacy a good number of years earlier.

searchenginemap.com is quite useful for exploring some of the alternative
private engines, and shows who powers their search results. It is English
focused.

Not a huge DDG fan but appreciate they're offering privacy on a larger English
speaking search index, and would prefer people use it over Google if they can
help it.

~~~
manquer
They dont just proxy your requests real time to bing in real time so unlikely
it is because of bing API.

------
mindfulhack
My own usage scenario is reflecting the changing landscape I think:

\- I've noticed DDG's quality slowly improve, while Google's slowly decrease.
But Google is still on top.

\- When I really want to search for something, I'm using a mix of Google,
Yandex, DDG, and sometimes another weird one like Dogpile.com

The times they are a-changin', but slowly, over time.

It's quite ironic now that when I want to do some Internet searching, I will
use search engines - NOT (just) Google.

If I want to 'use google', I use Google. They're definitely not a pure search
engine anymore, for better or for worse. What they offer is nice very often,
but sometimes all I want is the ability to do some deep searching and nothing
be withheld from me. Google increasingly censors and filters out information
for an increasing number of their own reasons, none of which I ever asked for.
That's not why I fell in love with the Internet.

Google is now fundamentally out of sync with the soul of the Internet at the
core level. Thankfully, the Internet is bigger than it.

~~~
blntechie
I use DDG for everything except for programming and local searches. For
everything else, DDG works almost 100% of the time for me.

------
alzaeem
DDG is the default search engine I use on the desktop and in iOS Safari for
more than a year. I'm glad to see them growing and hope their privacy centric
approach becomes dominant across the web, but the reality is that their search
results can be quite poor except for simple queries. I used to use bing in the
past and I don't recall having as many frustrations. I hope DDG are able to
invest more in this area as they grow, because for most consumers the
compromise in search quality may not be worth the privacy gains

~~~
rrrhys
> for most consumers the compromise in search quality may not be worth the
> privacy gains

This is exactly me - I moved back to google for search when I realised I was
subconsciously adding `g!` to every single search

------
Jestar342
DDG user for nearly 11 years (IIRC). Switched almost immediately to it after
it launched. I prefer the results I get to Google.

Maybe I've mastered DDG-fu or something but I also cannot stand looking at
Google results anymore, especially not if there is page upon page from the
same site (e.g. if the thing I'm searching for has results on Facebook,
LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, experts-exchange, etc, etc - it often has page
upon page of mild variations of the same link) which DDG doesn't seem to do.

The bangs are what wins me though. Their value to me dwarfs that of the
privacy concerns (which _is_ really important to me, anyway) it's like a
curated list of specific searches available to me as long as I can get online,
and I don't need to sync anything. So good.

~~~
input_sh
I'm not _that_ old of a user, but I've been using somewhere between 6-8 years
now.

It basically boils down to two things: a) bangs, and b) just seeing the same
results as everyone else does.

Usually when I can't find stuff on DDG, I can't find them with !g neither. I
don't see myself switching to anything else unless I'm forced to (if it goes
out of business or something).

~~~
codyb
This seems to gel with my experience. I probably end up trying Google maybe
once or twice a month, and generally I don’t find much.

I don’t use bangs frequently although they are neat.

I don’t think I’m some search savante, or a hardcore purist/idealist despite
moving to DDG for the privacy reasons.

Maybe it’s because generally I’m looking for docs rather than specific answers
these days.

------
DrAwdeOccarim
I've been using DDG as my default search engine now for over a year and 95% of
the time it's great. It's main failure in my hands it trying to find obscure
scientific literature or bleeding edge/just published scientific literature.
Anyone else have this problem? I assume it's because the goog has goog scholar
and so spent years building a massive scientific journal article database.
What I don't get is the lack of same-day/week search results for an exact
scientific article title with DDG.

~~~
commoner
Semantic Scholar makes a nice alternative to Google Scholar.

[https://www.semanticscholar.org](https://www.semanticscholar.org)

The DuckDuckGo bangs for Semantic Scholar are !s2, !semantic, and !smsc.

------
Communitivity
I love the ideology of DuckDuckGo, which is why it is my default search
engine. However, I hate how often I have to do a Google search to find the
results I want. If DDG wants to compete and win, then they need to compete on
more than ideology and start returning better results.

It's an uphill battle though unless they have algorithm superiority - Google
has many years of experience working through issues and establishing
infrastructure, and they have a lot of money to pour into maintaining their
lead. I do hope DDG comes out as a long term viable alternative, but they are
going to need a lot more money to do it and they're going to need to develop
more differentiators than bang operators and ideology.

------
ntw1103
I have been using duckduckgo for over a year, and it works pretty well. One
frustration is the mapping. Apple maps is really awful. I end up switching to
osm/bing if I need to look something up on a map.

~~~
Jestar342
`!bm`, `!gm`, `!osm` for Bing, Google, and OpenStreet maps, respectively.

~~~
ntw1103
Thank you, great tip.

------
newsbinator
Every few months I read on HN how much more accurate DDG searches are than
they used to be, I try it for a day, I get frustrated, and I return to Google.

There's no benefit to !g if you use it for 4 out of 5 searches.

~~~
Semaphor
Could you give some example searches? I always read this, but I have far below
10% of my searches with !g

~~~
ZephyrBlu
Seconded. This polarization between "it's good" and "it's shit" is very hard
to understand.

~~~
gen3
I think part of it has to do with the “style” people use to search. I’ve found
searching DDG with how I searched google in 2010 to work well. Modern “magic”
google searches don’t work as well, it’s more throwing key words together.

------
jeromenerf
I use ddg as my entry point for any search, using bangs to Wikipedia, start
page as a google alternative, Reddit, images.

Google results are sometimes better but most of the time, I find search
results heavily biased towards “social platforms”, commercial and otherwise
SEO’d resources. Old content is just hard to find, whether it is a prominent
news paper article, a niche personal website, etc.

I don’t know how this search engines rank their results today, but I would pay
for a way to filter out « big names » out of the search results and explore
this long tail set by published date, etc.

Use cases are very different between « searching » and « researching ». I want
a research engine :)

~~~
Mediterraneo10
For niche personal websites that are not readily shown on DDG, a good resource
to try is millionshort.com.

------
jeswin
I have tried to use DDG several times, but Google is just better. For
instance, if you search 'Serena Williams' on Google you see her recent US Open
results nicely presented. Similarly, if you search for GOOG (on Chromium-based
browsers [1]) you get a stock chart. The point is, Google saves me time due to
the domain-specific customization they've done.

The bigger issue for me is that if DDG becomes popular, they might chart a
path similar to Google in terms of privacy. It's another ad supported search
engine after all.

[1]: They show dumber results on Firefox and should be in anti-trust
territory, but that's a different discussion.

~~~
brianush1
RE: [1] They show the exact same page for me both on Firefox and Chrome when I
search for GOOG. I use Firefox as my main browser, and am logged in to my
Google account on Chrome.

~~~
commoner
Google shows a less powerful search interface on Firefox for Android. If you
change the user agent to Chrome, Google then shows the same interface it shows
to Chrome.

This has been such a noticeable problem that a Firefox add-on (Google Search
Fixer) was created to fix it:

[https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/google-
search...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/google-search-
fixer/)

Google Search Fixer is currently available on Firefox Nightly for Android.

------
mwexler
Given their ads over the last three months, I'm not surprised to see growth.
The real question is if they can keep the new users.

For those not in the adv area, we saw billboards, radio and TV spots, and
transit posters (vehicle side and station walls)... On top of their growing
digital spend, all emphasizing privacy.

Apple is obviously taking this push too, and some folks will care.... But is
this positioning enough? <popcorn><couch>

~~~
Kye
What does "adv area" mean?

~~~
mwexler
Sorry, advertising area. Often, brands choose not to do "national ads" but
instead double down on certain geographic areas. I wasn't sure is DDG did a
national US or a regional buy.

------
JakeKalstad
I've been using start page for the past few years as a default, but find
myself typing in google.com->tab to search a lot of my day. The difference
between pasting in a random golang compiler error into startpage vs google
trained me to google all of my software issues. The biggest non-technical
hurdle at this point is google maps. The ability to type in an address and get
a map with directions and nearby businesses has been pounded into my brain and
when I use DDG or startpage with an address I generally end up sighing and
pasting it into google.

~~~
jameshush
I use StartPage too and maps and currency conversation are the two things that
make me open up Google

~~~
mkayokay
I use xe.com for currency conversion - short url, easy to use and is not
google.

But there is no way around maps for me - at least for driving - for outdoor
stuff I generally use Locus Map on my phone

------
Semaphor
Been using DDG well over a year by now. My single biggest complaint (and
that’s inexplicably something that got worse) is that they sometimes ignore
search terms, even if you use "" to force a term. This is the main reason for
me to use !g as DDG results become useless when that happens.

My most common bangs are !w (Wikipedia), !wde (German wikipedia), !ddgde (DDG
toggled to German results), !rt (Rotten Tomatoes for TV reviews), !imdb
(looking up actors) and !gm (Google Maps. Sadly still the best results if I
search for a name instead of an address)

------
Angostura
I use DDG on mobile devices, for one reason only - so I don;t see those damned
AMP pages.

------
petargyurov
I've been using DDG for a long time. To date, my most common bang usages are
still:

!g maps

!g <obscure programming error>

I still recommend it to everyone though.

~~~
lhoff
DDG has a direct bang for google maps

!maps

The have a searchable list for every bang they support.
[https://duckduckgo.com/bang](https://duckduckgo.com/bang)

~~~
petargyurov
Oh nice, didn't know that. Will be using it from now on.

------
pkamb
I wish there was a search engine that dedicated the first X results to Stack
Exchange and Reddit.

Neither DDG or Google are very good at that, but those sites are consistently
the best and most honest results.

On Google many searches give mostly affiliate blogspam articles unless I
append "reddit" or "forum" or "stack" to the search, at which point I get
great results.

~~~
kevincox
You can kind of do this yourself on Google. Add `site:stackoverflow.com OR
site:reddit.com OR site:stackexchange.com` to your default search engine. Then
if you don't find something you link on the first page remove them.

It isn't as automatic as you are asking for but that is probably more than you
can really expect for what seems like a very niche desire.

~~~
guywhocodes
I want this but a _like_ match for almost all my searches. Search engines are
horrible at matching queries with types of result I'm looking for

------
skeptronus
One thing I hate about ddg is that the search results are quite inaccurate
sometimes, especially what you are looking for is relatively uncommon/obscure.
I hope to see a change in the future.

~~~
mrweasel
I think it depends on what you’re looking for. Google just removes keywords if
it can’t find what you’re looking for, but rather unintelligently it will
frequently removes the most important word.

In those cases I prefer DDGs inaccurate results.

For the past few years I noticed that if DuckDuckGo can’t find anything
relevant, then neither can Google.

~~~
gilrain
Interesting. For me, DDG is more aggressive than Google about changing my
search terms. They both do it, but DDG more frequently asks forgiveness rather
than permission.

DDG: You meant this.

Google: Did you mean this?

------
holri
For non Americans it does not make much sense to use an American company fpr
privavy reasons, because the NSA has direct access to them. I like qwant and
startpage as a good alternative.

~~~
megalomanu
I agree, but the main reason that I'm using Qwant myself is that non-English
results on DuckDuckGo are not good at all. Qwant results are pretty convincing
today, much better than a few years ago when it looked like an opportunist
product.

The only thing I'm really missing from Google is the integration with Maps,
Google Search is so convenient for finding a good restaurant, shop or bar
around you. There were alternatives in the past (like Yelp) but Google killed
them all, at least in France.

~~~
holri
For maps I use OpenStreetMap. Good enough for me and I can fix issues and add
data myself and contribute for a common good.

~~~
megalomanu
I must say I'm not as virtuous as you :)

------
darrmit
I've been using DDG for a long time and it really seems like the results have
gotten less accurate and informative in the last year or so. For a while I was
very satisfied and typically could find what I was looking for, even in the
arena of obscure technical knowledge.

I'll keep using it because at this point my brain is wired to !g when I can't
find something, and the benefits outweigh the lack of results, but I do hope
they can improve and continue to grow.

~~~
extropy
Probably the SEO teams took notice and starting to optimize for DDG (Bing)
algorithm too.

------
mopsi
AMP alone is a good enough reason for switching to DDG.

------
pkamb
Tip for mobile users: remap "ggg" to input "!g" to make the Google shortcut
much easier to type.

------
baryphonic
I must be the only person who has found that for most searches, DDG gives me
what I want better than Google does. The problem is only in the 1-5% of cases
where DDG just isn't optimized for the query (programming is one of those).

When I use g!, I find the Google experience horrible. The UI/UX sucks, it
surfaces a lot of irrelevant results. I also find that the AI meant to improve
the experience is rarely a benefit, and often makes it worse. And Google seems
so far out of its depth in AI that its systems meant to promote "social
justice and equality" often seem to backfire and fail on their own terms.

I just now tried to search "black man" in both Google images and DDG images,
and the results are exactly representative of my problems with Google's
failure as a search engine. The top two G results are George Floyd and Ahmad
Arbery, and the fourth is actually a white boy accused of stabbing a black
man. The _pièce de résistance_ was two or three rows down, where G suggested
"related searches" and the top one was "black man funny" and a thumbnail of a
picture that at the very least was mockery (including it as the representation
for "black man funny" is just racist). The full list of results included what
looked like literal minstrelsy and other mockery. I am by no means a social
justice activist, but I detest racism and this is what Google was promoting.
And regardless of my views, Google clearly holds itself up as some sort of
agent of social change, so why is it so racist?

DDG, by contrast, showed pictures of professional men in the top results.

(Just as an aside, one of the common themes black people call out about racism
is that poor black kids - boys in particular - are indoctrinated to believe
that sports, entertainment or crime are their only avenues for opportunity in
life. This is usually portrayed as a systemic issue, which teachers,
institutions (banks, potential employers, government bureaucracy) and the
media perpetuate with a sort of resigned, inertial Kafkaesque belief that
things will never change. If we are to accept the views of social justice
activists, how do the top Google results not literally reinforce these
stereotypes, before promoting a literally racist set of search results?)

In my experience, Google started declining when it doubled down on AI far too
early, and now their system is too complex for anyone to understand or
wrangle. Google is the present-day Leviathan, and independent of their
horrible privacy practices and political-ideological alignment, their software
just seems defective.

------
cletus
Let's put this in context: 2B searches/month is <1000 QPS. That's not a
business. That's a single server side project. And this is after 10 eyars?

So cue the usual HN DDG responses of "I switched to DDG and it's fine", "I
used DDG and went back to Google" and "I use DDG but !g everything".

I personally think DDG is founded on two false premises:

1\. People care about privacy. 99% of people don't; and

2\. Personalized search doesn't have value. I think Google's dominance here is
a good example of why it does.

At the end of the day, you can search Google incognito if you want to. People
do this.

DDG is inserting themselves between the user and Bing/Google. I just don't see
how it survives long term doing this.

------
mikorym
For all the comments about how you have to switch to Google every other
search:

Try writing out more words that explain what you are looking for. This always
works for me. If it doesn't then do !mill and enjoy going down the rabbit
hole.

------
intricatedetail
I've been using DDG as default for over a year. First I search on DDG and if I
don't like the result I go on Google. It's in my muscle memory so I sometimes
don't even notice which service I am looking at.

~~~
hoseja
I suspect you know, but you can search google via ddg by appending the !g
bang.

------
dchuk
As someone who used to do a decent amount of web and search engine results
scraping in a past life, one thing I’ve never understood about DDG is how on
earth this setup is economical. If they’re hitting (presumably) bing’s api a
few billion times a month, surely they’re paying a lot of cash to do that,
even at a heavily negotiated rate.

Also, so many folks here are saying they use the bang option to search Google,
through DDG. So either they’re using google’s search api or scraping on the
background, both of which are expensive in their own ways.

Beyond technical, at a business level, how are they actually pulling this off?

------
lhball
I've been using DDG as my main driver for over 2 years now. Contrary to the
vast majority of commenters here, I almost never use !g.

90% of of the time, if my first search didn't produce a useful result on DDG,
I end up !stackoverflow or !stackexchange.

The other ~10% of the time I do use !g, it's almost always if I'm looking for
something very specific, e.g. that one article on markov-chains from HN years
ago.

Frankly I don't understand how someone can go back to googling after using the
DDG interface for so long. There are __so may __ads on Google now it takes
forever to get to the relevant results.

------
627467
I was using ddg before recently switching to runnaroo for a couple of months
now.

Runnaroo seems to always surface wikipedia, stack overflow and github which is
almost always what I'm looking for. And if it's not there a quick scroll to
the bottom gives me a Google link I can click.

Like others, using ddg previously have trained me to add !g automatically
meaning I almost never looked at ddg. I can still add !g to runnaroo but since
i know google (or ddg) is just a quick swipe away I never type it.

I would definitely move back to ddg (anything but google) if I ever have a
reason to stop using runnaroo.

~~~
627467
But, if I'm making a date based search I'd still use ddg, given that runnaroo
doesn't seem to support it yet.

~~~
chris_f
Runnaroo does have a date restriction similar to DDG, it's just in a different
place.

See the arrow in the below:
[https://imgur.com/sY4qi63](https://imgur.com/sY4qi63)

Always room for improvement with it though.

------
babuskov
On one of my old devices, I still have an old version of Safari (which fails
to update) and when I open Google it asks to accept some terms, but their
JavaScript is "modern" so I cannot click that dialog away. So, I'm switched to
DDG on it and it works fine for general search, esp. as it seems less attacked
by "SEO optimized" spam sites. But Google is still better in some areas. Like
when I check something that has a date+time as an answer, Google computes it
into my timezone. And non-English search is much, much better in Google.

------
lazyjones
DDG has been good enough for me for years (2013 or so I switched), but I fear
that pressure will be increasing for Weinberg to sell to some online giant who
offers billions for that kind of traffic.

------
AnonC
I don’t know what happened with DuckDuckGo in the last one or two years, but
I’ve had to resort to !s (startpage) or !g (Google) search most of the time.
Even before that, it was never great for software/tech related information.
It’s ok for some searches. And I use the !w (Wikipedia) and !imdb when I’m
using a browser that doesn’t have multiple search engine support.

If it gets even worse, I’d have to give up and choose something else.

------
8bitsrule
It might be growing fast, but as a long-time user (since year one), its search
has become less-and-less useful to me. It tries to cast a very wide net for
its results, and trying to get it to focus on what you really want has become
harder and harder. Nowadays if I want something specific, I head straight to
Bing -- it's actually responsive to carefully-defined search strings.

------
diegoperini
DDG is the default search engine in my browser. Unfortunately it doesn't
always retrieve the results I'm looking for. But I insist on typing my terms
before I fallback to Google. This way, DDG will know that I searched but
wasn't impressed with the result. If they are not collecting this level of
analytics, they should definitely do so. I'm willing to opt-in.

------
mas3god
I switched and never went back, way better than google. I clearly havent had
the same experience as the top commenters in this thread.

------
mlthoughts2018
They still aren’t building out their own in-house search & machine learning
systems. It’s very disappointing. Until they are willing to invest significant
money & staffing to do that, the quality is just going to continue to be too
poor.

It’s just a different ad model on someone else’s (Bing) search engine, without
actually learning from customer behavior unique to their search engine.

------
iamsb
I really hope they focus on non english searches as primary focus. Google has
pretty much stopped innovating in non English, non Latin script search quality
and it will be much easier to target that market. It may not immediately drive
revenue, but it will build enough search market share for DDG to become
dominant player in non-English speaking geographies.

------
loughnane
I’m a native English speaker and have been using it primarily since 2012-13.

I love it, as I’ve said here in the past. I came for the privacy and have
stayed for the bang syntax. Paradoxically it lets me search with google
products better than google.

Under google I type in “Boston, MA” then need to click with a mouse.

Under ddg I type “Boston, MA !gm” and am brought right to the map.

Same thing for the hundreds of other bangs

~~~
goalieca
I too like banging but i find myself banging less and less these days because
she knows exactly what i want and gives it good the first time.

------
Hippocrates
I’ve been on DDG for at least 3 years and not missed google. DDG is my default
engine on all devices. I think it does fine, and I’m a power-user doing
hundreds of searches a day (programmer/internet junkie obviously).

If google is any better (I’m sure it is) it is not better enough to matter.

Id still like to see more competition and disruption in the space.

------
lma21
I switched from Google to DuckDuckGo a few months ago. I always found myself
switching back to Google, whether I was looking up some news info or tech-
related or programming hints. I switched back to Google. Any one experienced
the same thing? What did you do?

------
tomxor
> as more and more users have begun to value their privacy on the internet.

Google's captcha DoSing me drove me to DDG not privacy... Much of the time the
results are poor but I just cannot endure google any longer.

I wonder how many others have the same reason. This affects mobile internet
users particularly badly.

------
lazzlazzlazz
I also use DDG by default, but I redo about 50% of searches with the `!g`
prefix.

Image search on DDG is awful though.

------
mrlala
I hardly use DuckDuckGo for actual searching.. mostly on my phone I'll pop
open the app if I want an easy way to go to a site or search for something I
really don't want tracked.

So it's convenient for that, but can't say I use it very often still.

------
martopix
I used to use DDG and disliked the quality of results. I use Ecosia now, also
doesn't track (they say), but uses microsoft results, which are better. Plus
their revenue goes to planting trees. Does anyone have criticisms of Ecosia?

------
nafizh
Instead of complaining about DDG on every DDG related post, maybe we can do
some constructive comments on how they can improve. Love it or hate it, they
are the only alternative to Google if you like your privacy.

------
indymike
I use DDG for everything but searching for code and programming issues. Google
seems to have much better results for code related searches, but for
everything else, DDG does well enough.

------
Multicomp
Apparently I am a grandma searcher because DDG does fine, if I occasionally
make a trip to the second serp. That's searching for programming errors etc as
well.

~~~
TallGuyShort
Actually I found a few years ago that DDG suddenly got really good at
programming searches. I still use it for most queries and have better results
than most HN comments, but I'd say I use !g the least at work.

------
kilroy123
I really wish Apple would make a privacy-focused search engine.

Google search has gotten so bad lately. I'm sure Apple could make a product
that is "good enough."

------
dredmorbius
Looks as if the doubling rate is near 12 months, down from 18 a year or two
back.

I'd like to see:

\- A semi-log plot. Or underlying data.

\- Comparison to overall Internet usage growth.

\- Comparison to Google search growth.

------
polote
it might be worth comparing with google search growth

------
tarkin2
I use ddg for 95% of my searches. I sometimes go to google but I can’t say
they’re necessarily better.

------
anderspitman
DDG has been doing a ton of billboards in Utah. Anyone seeing that elsewhere?

------
jonny383
Sorry, but DDG is trash in comparison to Google in terms of relevant results
and finding things.

Before you get all bent out of shape: yes it's less evil, yes it's better for
privacy, etc. But it really doesn't compete on a fundamental level of search.

~~~
leokennis
I disagree completely.

For some things Google is better, namely for stuff where you have almost no
clue ("song with children screaming over tv noises").

However for searches where you do have some clue ("error code 456 when
installing xyz"), Google will drown you in AMP, useless "answer boxes" and
scammy sites while DDG will generally find you the vendors site and some Stack
Exchange discussions.

------
shadowpawn
I dont surf porn with out it.

------
shadowpawn
Wont surf porn without it.

------
divyanka1916
duckduckgo is very very inaccurate

