
DuckDuckGo Search Improvements - tagawa
https://spreadprivacy.com/duckduckgo-search-improvements/
======
amirmasoudabdol
I’ve been adopting and promoting DuckDuckGo for more than 2–3 years now. I can
say that the transition period was quite long actually. I was invoking !g very
frequently at the beginning but I force myself to at least probe a few first
items first before trying Google. After these years I rarely use Google, and
every time that I actually search something on Google, before even seeing the
result, Google welcomes me by the whole TOS/Privacy stuff and I close the tab
and try the DDG a few more times. I think the friction of accepting their
privacy policy makes me think twice.

If you like DDG, recommend it to friends and coworkers. I usually put a link
in newsletter if appropriate.

~~~
RandomTisk
The biggest problem with DDG for me is how easy it is to game. Try doing
research on new cars/trucks and you'll find most results at the top are trash
sites like 2020-make-model.com and the like.

~~~
mikkom
It's bing..

------
savingGrace
I keep trying DDG. Year after year I set all of my computers to use DDG. I
last a week, a month, but in the end I always give up and set it back to
Google.

I was really hoping the title meant like it read. Maybe my hopefulness was
reading too much into 'Search Improvements.'

It is also possible that I don't need a search engine. I'm guessing that at
least half of the questions/searches result in a post on SO or Wikipedia.
There's probably a quarter of them that shoot me to some Medium entry. I guess
I could always just bookmark those sites and skip the search engine..

~~~
sshagent
Thats kind of where i was. Now though i'm persevering with DDG. If I'm unhappy
with a search i just prefix it with a !g and runs it again via google. I hope
that shows something to the DDG guys to know some things we still use Google
for, but overall I'm fairly happy with DDG

~~~
Ididntdothis
I wish i could create a button that quickly reran the search with “!g” instead
of typing it.

~~~
durovo
You can bookmark the bookmarklet that I just created at
[https://codepen.io/durovo-the-
typescripter/pen/GRRqRKX](https://codepen.io/durovo-the-
typescripter/pen/GRRqRKX)

------
mattkevan
After 3 or so years using DDG full-time, it’s a shock landing back on Google
and realising how many ads there are.

Out of everything on the first page of a recent search, there were only 8
actual results - everything else was an ad.

DDG feels to me like Google did when it first launched - simple, fast and
unobtrusive. A world away from the incumbents, like AltaVista and Yahoo, that
were intent on becoming ‘portals’, owning every moment of a user’s online
activity.

Google has become a portal.

~~~
jcomis
Do you not use an adblocker?

~~~
onlyrealcuzzo
Curious. What adblocker are you using?

I use an AdBlock Plus & uBlock Origin, and when I Google something -- by
default -- basically my entire search is ads. Do you need to add some
configuration to uBlock Origin or AdBlock Plus? Are you in the US?

I just use DuckDuckGo instead on Desktop. But since I have an Android phone,
it's just easier to use Google.

~~~
DuskStar
Wait, do you use AdBlock Plus _AND_ uBlock Origin at the same time? That might
be your problem - when I run uBlock Origin alone it blocks all those Google
search ads.

AdBlock Plus has a program where they allow companies to buy spots on their ad
whitelist, and I imagine that's interfering with uBlock Origin's more
absolutist stance.

------
Vaslo
I will be that guy and probably disliked for this but I use Bing. I get points
for just doing what I always do and I almost always get what I need. I’ve got
a few hundred Thousand points saved up and am waiting to get enough to buy
something new. When Bing occasionally sucks like it does when searching for
news, I go to Google.

I use DDG as part of TOR but the results are just not that good, and I really
want them to be.

~~~
johnpowell
I tried to use DDG so hard. Changed my browser, changed my phone. I have
pretty much gotten away from Google for everything except Youtube. I ended up
using !G around 25% of the time and got tired of it.

So I ended up switching to Ecosia which is a cleaner front-end for Bing. I
never really find myself using using google for search anymore. Bing is good
enough.

~~~
333c
DDG itself is a front-end for bing. It gets results from there.

------
abhchand
It takes a lot to even replicate _some_ of the functionality of Google search.
Huge credit to the DDG team for providing the second-best search results out
there along with a much cleaner and privacy focused UI.

I do occasionally go back to Google but that's for less than <10% of my
queries and when I do it's after a few attempts at finding something on DDG.

Definitely recommend to anyone for use.

~~~
XCSme
Isn't Bing second best search engine?

------
noja
For those of you using a single search engine: try DDG, but if your query
doesn't get the results you want (less often these days), prepend it with !g
to search google instead.

Or use Firefox's smart keywords [https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-
search-from-address...](https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-search-from-
address-bar?redirectlocale=en-US&redirectslug=Smart+keywords)

You could configure it to use:

    
    
      g something  # to search google
      d something  # to search DDG

~~~
tombert
I wonder, do the DDG people use the `!g` things as a way to further-refine
their search algorithm?

For example, if someone does the !g thing, after searching for the same thing
without !g, that implies the DDG search didn't give them what they wanted.
Conceivably then DDG could run that search themselves and use that for
training their algorithm a bit more, mooching off of Google's results.

There's probably some kind of horrible implication there that I'm not thinking
of.

~~~
lucideer
ANECDATA:

on one hand, as a dedicated user of !g on DDG for many years, my urge/need to
use !g has gone down almost exponentially (despite being firmly in muscle
memory)

on the other hand, when I do turn !g, I find more and more that I still don't
find what I'm looking for

this is either down to:

(a) Google's results getting worse over time

(b) my searches getting more obscure over time

(c) selection bias due to DDG solving for my less obscure searches

I suspect (c)

~~~
thfuran
As a frequent user of google, I think a is not to be underestimated. Google
has gotten more aggressive with stemming and other forced "corrections" to
your search. This (I assume) helps in general but can frequently result in
undesirable search results if you are attempting to search for words like in
spelling but unrelated to common words or uncommon senses of common words,
both of which seem to occur somewhat frequently in technical jargon.

There's something to be said also, I think, for the ever expanding mountain
(of 90% shit) that is user-generated webcontent that must be sifted through by
any search engine: The problem of searching the internet is itself getting
harder and harder by the day.

------
mattsfrey
The problem is google isn't just a search engine it's the information seeking
megalith of our time. That little text input takes what you give it,
determines what the hell you're trying to figure out, and delivers results on
a level that just vastly supersedes anything else. I love the concept of DDG
and would greatly prefer to use it, it's just a painfully inferior tool and
shows no signs of coming close to what google offers.

~~~
jlarocco
That's great if it works for you, but doesn't match my experience. I've been
using DDG for years now, and rarely bother with Google any more. If I can't
find what I need with DDG I have better luck with Bing than with Google.

~~~
1123581321
The simplest explanation is that you don’t know how good Google is anymore.

I use DDG because I think it’s important and have family members doing it too,
but it costs us time when we search because the search completion is poor and
the results aren’t as intelligent as I expect. Perhaps maintaining those
expectations is my problem to solve, but that does not make the product’s
deficiencies go away.

~~~
macintux
Is Google that effective if you’re not logged in?

I try not to give them any more hooks into my privacy than I need to, so I
never search while logged in.

~~~
IfOnlyYouKnew
The amount of user-specific customisation Google does is generally overrated.
For the vast majority of searches, I see only minor shifts in ranking when
comparing logged-in to anonymous. Case in Point: [crystal] currently gives me
meth and stones before programming, even though I have done quite a few
programming-related (and even crystal-lang specific) searches.

------
GolDDranks
I've been using DDG for a half year now, and I'm digging it. A feature
request: A quick language filter! I use three languages in my daily live.
However, false friends (similar words with different meanings) and the fact
that some topics are more relevant in some languages make searching sometimes
an agony. Google suffers from this too; I can change languages from the
settings, but what I really want is a quick language filter, similar to the
date filter, since I tend to juggle with that many, many times per day. Or
would, if it weren't painful.

~~~
jraph
Maybe a solution for you would be using Firefox containers, with one container
per language?

------
ddtaylor
I use DDG daily and have been for nearly 2 years now. My biggest complaint UI
wise is that there are no page numbers. Yes, you can keep pressing "More
results" but you can't easily resume or share search result pages etc. It's an
insanely useful feature that is missing and I have no idea why.

------
cookie_monsta
I tried DDG for around a month. I really wanted to like it, but the results
were just too inconsistent. I ended up using !g about 90% of the time after
getting unsatisfactory results, which just doubled my time spent searching for
what were sometimes quite simple things.

I know it's more, but DDG really just feels like bing with privacy.

I ended up using startpage.com which basically gives you Google results
without all the stalky tracking nonsense. Now I only resort to Google for
about 10% of searches.

------
zpallin
I've been using duckduckgo as my primary search engine for a few years now,
since 2014. It has improved significantly over that period of time and I am
happy that it has come so far. I used to use g! flagrantly, but now I find
myself using it less and less. Still, I wish there was some way to stop using
yt!

I think it's time to switch to the dark theme. Thanks duckduckgo!

------
jolmg
Something that just strikes me as weird is how the tabs (for images, videos,
news, etc.) aren't really tabs to different pages, but rather some sort of
inline expansion thing. When I look at images, the regular results are still
there if you scroll to the bottom. They're there for a second until infinite
scroll triggers and loads the next batch of images, pushing the regular
results to the bottom again.

It's not really an inconvenience. It's just weird. Why do it like that?

------
mymythisisthis
Search is broken, almost all searches I do now, the first dozen links are all
crap (no content, gamed the algorithm). This is for Google or DuckDuckGo. I
hate the modern internet.

~~~
freediver
I rarely find this the case. Do you mind sharing some example queries?

~~~
mymythisisthis
I was looking for the etymology of a city name. Got buried in ads.

------
nikivi
I wish Google introduced a dark theme too. Hopefully all sites on the internet
become dark friendly one day without using external software to make it
happen.

~~~
input_sh
prefers-color-scheme is soon going to be a thing:
[https://caniuse.com/#search=prefers-color-
scheme](https://caniuse.com/#search=prefers-color-scheme)

The idea is to have one OS-wide dark theme switch and your browser to expose
that preference to the websites. Latest iOS/Android/Windows already have that
OS-wide preference, but, you know, it'll take quite a while before your
favorite websites start supporting it.

~~~
333c
As your link says, it already works for Firefox, Safari, and Chrome, which to
me makes it "a thing." The only big browser that (apparently) doesn't support
it is Edge.

~~~
johnp_
Sadly it doesn't work in Firefox after setting `privacy.resistFingerprinting`
and Mozilla refuses to allow an override :(

~~~
333c
Interesting, I didn't know that. I wonder if it would be possible to fix that
with a userscript.

------
ggambetta
Honest question: does anyone actually use DDG, other than the HN crowd? I
don't know anyone in real life that has ever heard of it, let alone use it.

~~~
divyamistry
I think it's utilized more than we might think. DDG put up pretty big bill-
boards around a lot of small and large cities. I believe those were mostly
around "tech-forward cities" because it might be an easier crowd to get under
the fold. They have a neat stats page where they track site traffic.
[https://duckduckgo.com/traffic](https://duckduckgo.com/traffic) It certainly
looks promising. I've switched to ddg as my primary search, and I regularly do
find queries that goog answers better. My partner often uses one of my devices
and they have not complained about not being able to find what they were
looking for.

There's certainly power of default at play where people just don't want
something seemingly unfamiliar, but there's also plenty of queries that the
big G answers without a sweat that DDG just can't seem to gather info on.

Anyways, that's a long winded way of saying that yea, I think a respectable
number of "real world" people use dduckgo.

------
anonu
I just need to stop doing !g in my ddg searches.

None of these improvements point to helping fix that. You've got my attention,
but search results need to be better.

If you just focused on "coding related" search results that would make a world
of difference. Maybe just put stack overflow on top.

~~~
WD-42
I actually emailed them (the have a specific address for suggestions) with
this idea. It would be useful if there were topic specific search modes,
coding would be an example, that weighted certain domains over others (like
stackoverflow and readthedocs). You could imagine this being useful for other
topics as well.

Of course I never got a response. I think it might be impossible due to their
model. They aren't really a search engine, more like a search aggregator, they
get results from Bing mostly if I remember correctly.

~~~
saagarjha
What is it? I’ve looked for a while and not been able to find an email address
to contact them with for suggestions…

~~~
WD-42
[https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-
pages/company/co...](https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-
pages/company/contact-us/)

------
olliej
It seems to only be UI improvements - the search itself is still terrible. I
have DDG as my primary search engine, and I would say I have to repeat 50% of
the queries in google, which has actual useful results after the first half
page of ads.

~~~
unholythree
In the past year or so I feel like I've had to resort to bangs like !g more
and more. It's like Boolean searches don't work with DDG anymore. Quotation
marks in particular seem meaningless to it.

------
ubercow13
One thing that makes it impossible to switch to DDG for me is how bad the
automatic correction is for simple typos and such. Google is incredibly good
at offering to correct your search to what you meant if you completely botch
the typing, eg. mashing “havlrt news” is fine to get here.

DDG often can’t even correct single letter typos where the character is
adjacent. On a phone there is usually no autocorrect or word suggestion in the
search box as it doubles as the URL bar, so this means you have to manually
fix typos to get the right results.

------
cabaalis
I'm a fan of ddg but have recently switched exclusively to ecosia. Sure, it's
Bing. But the results I get are pretty decent. Only occasionally do I have to
go to Google for better results.

~~~
Kiro
DDG is also Bing.

~~~
cabaalis
I suppose I was aware of that at some point but had forgotten. It's
interesting that I feel so much better about Ecosia. Maybe marketing?

------
bitL
Last week I had a lot of issues with DDG where it barely returned a single
page for some development-related queries it shined on before. I am wondering
if something went wrong with their algorithms? I also periodically observed
disappearance and reappearance of certain sites as a result of the same query
(and not just different ranking, but them either completely vanishing from the
results or you could get to them at some point).

------
Nasreddin_Hodja
There are two annoying things that keep me from using ddg by default:

* the way they do scrolling by up and down arrow buttons.

* "load more" button instead of normal pagination.

But sometimes I have to use ddg when google forces me to solve recaptcha (this
often happens when I connect via mobile network).

------
nbrempel
I've now completely switched to DDG. I still occasionally use !g, but it's
quite rare.

The results have been getting much better over time and I'd argue that the
quality of Google's results is actually declining. Some queries return almost
an entire 1st page full of ads.

------
caseyf7
Please make search the focus of the mobile app. It’s more like a browser and
it’s much too hard to tap the top of the phone for the search box. It should
be more like the Google app. Make it easy to quickly search.

------
jotm
If every search engine, and most websites, could stop displaying local results
(which have nothing to do with what I search) that would be fantastic.

Why in the world would you show me local results in the local language when
I'm searching in English? Google is the worst offender, they so "helpfully"
run stuff through their own translate, resulting in a special kind of garbage
SERPs.

Yes, I know there's settings, but I just can't be bothered to login every time
on a different device or browser. And personalized search has its own
problems.

------
emrehan
I use DDG everywhere. It really helps to use bangs to directly search in
websites. It’s like a supercharged web tool.

pro tip: Use !s for StartPage instead of Googling. It is a privacy preserving
Google proxy.

------
kgwxd
I noticed Past Year a few days ago. I had hit the drop down to use Past Month,
saw Past Year and thought, whoops I'm on Google. This eliminates the top
reason I fallback to !g.

~~~
spookybones
Wow. Been waiting for this.

------
ckrailo
Solarized Dark Duck Go Theme:

[https://duckduckgo.com/settings#appearance](https://duckduckgo.com/settings#appearance)

    
    
      Background Color: #002b36
      Header Color: #073642
      Result Title Color: #fdf6e3
      Result Visited Title Color: #93a1a1
      Result Description Color: #839496
      Result URL Color: #268bd2
      Result Hover, Module, and Dropdown Background Color: #073642

~~~
ckrailo
Discovered I can share it as a link:
[https://start.duckduckgo.com/?kae=%23073642&kj=%23073642++&k...](https://start.duckduckgo.com/?kae=%23073642&kj=%23073642++&kx=%23268bd2&k7=%23002B36&k8=%23839496&k9=%23fdf6e3&kaa=%2393a1a1)

------
saagarjha
> If you've selected a different theme (or have customized your theme) you can
> open the settings dropdown on the SERP and click the theme that matches your
> OS theme, and DuckDuckGo will begin matching your OS theme automatically
> moving forward.

Unfortunately this has the side effect of clearing all my three customizations
and forcing me to use the default. Is there a way to keep the theme colors but
use my own font?

------
paul7986
Daily users and lately I use !g three out of ten searches which is a decrease.
Apple Map integration and its recent satellite view is great!

Things I still use Google for are...

\- getting Distance from one city to another

\- getting X business locations nearby with hours

\- movie times/listings

And unfortunately

\- email...would love to use a DDG email service .. wish DDG would somehow let
me use my iCloud email through its interface. I and I think millions of others
would move away from Gmail then.

------
alskdj21
I've been using DDG for the past three years and I'm impressed. The first few
months of transition wasn't that easy as I' missing those Google results with
dates. As of now, I would fall back to !g to get a quick overview of
events(those tabs when you search e.g. champions league, whatever Google
called it).

------
cjohansson
I prefer DDG over other search-engines any day, the thing I love best is that
the search results are impersonal to me, the problem with Google is that it
learns your preferences and ends up being just an echo chamber for your own
opinions

------
Andrew_nenakhov
I have recently switched to DDG as the main search engine on all my devices,
home and work. My estimate that 80% of all my queries are done with DDG,
turning to Google and local Yandex only rarely.

------
IB885588
I'd use the DDG iOS app if only the search field wasn't at the very top, out
of reach in one-hand phone typing... It's terrible UX on anything but the
smallest phones out there.

------
eternalny1
I love how it detects your OS settings and if you are in dark mode like I am,
the page is in dark mode now too.

I wish more sites would do this, but I have an extension for that.

------
haolez
Suggestion: make the favicon match the theme selected, since we see it a lot
in the address bar when using DuckDuckGo as the default search engine.

------
hart_russell
Remember to disable your adblock extensions on DDG. Let them earn some money
for their privacy focused search engine.

------
jb3689
I've been really impressed with DuckDuckGo lately. Aside from directions I use
it for almost everything

