My success rate with DuckDuckGo searches is noticeably lower than Google. I always search on DuckDuckGo first and then fall back to Google if I can't find what I'm looking for, which is about half the time. So I'm actually confused about why you don't have problems with the search results!

So the search quality doesn't keep me attached to it. The main reason I keep using DDG is because of the "bangs" feature:

https://duckduckgo.com/bang

So I can search for "104.20.44.44 !bgp" or things I've used bangs for in recent searches like "ascension kit !nhw", "dark brotherhood !uesp", or "samaxwelladams mass effect !yt" and instantly get what I'm looking for without having to add a bunch of special search engines to my browser.

I don't know why it never occurred to me to try putting the bangs at the end of the result, but you definitely just saved me a lot of future time I would have spent jumping to the beginning of searches to edit them.

Seriously, thanks.

You can actually put them pretty much anywhere and it still works.

+1. I can't believe I didn't know that.

I do the same, searching DDG and falling back to Google if I can't find what I'm looking for, and I only need Google about 10% of the time, rather than half.

But I never realized bangs worked at the end of the search. Glad you mentioned that.

!sp has google results without google tracking you. Start page I think it's called

They actually work anywhere, even in the middle.

I remember realising this and being astounded at the keyboard efficiency gains such a small thing can bring

> I always search on DuckDuckGo first and then fall back to Google

Why? Why the extra steps? What is the success rate on google? For what I search for for example (which is a wide variety of things) I have great success and really don't have a need to get the type of results that I have gotten from ddg. So my question is if 'success rate with ddg searches is noticeably lower' why do you continue to do that?

I can't answer for who you replied to, but I use DDG because I support what they are trying to do. I will often support something even if it is a bit more inconvenient if I feel like they support my moral and ethical standards.

Google has something like 10+ years of my saved search history. its just ridiculously good at finding exactly what I'm looking for (which quite often is something I searched in the past).

I tried DDG for a month or 2 and just couldn't get over how generic the results felt. Google results (for me) feel much more personalized and way more likely to include exactly what I'm looking for.

Ahh but generic results are exactly what I am looking for every single time. It is MY job to figure out what I want.

Pretty sure his post was sarcasm. ;-)

Why would you think that? I was being 100% serious.

Then I'm wrong. I for one cringe when others are so passive with how much privacy they are willing to give up.

Your experience is so different from mine! One of the attributes which initially made Google feel trustworthy, back when I first encountered them, was the fact that they didn't nag you to create an account and log in. I loved the fact that I could just go to google.com and search, get good results, and not feel like I was being strong-armed into some commercial relationship in the process. I just wanted to browse the web, after all, I wasn't there to build a relationship with the search company. At the time, this felt like a breath of fresh air; it was part of what I took "don't be evil" to mean.

Of course that quality faded away over the years, but I never grew comfortable with the idea of logging in to Search; it was just too creepy. But eventually it just got ridiculous, and the relentless pushiness of the whole Google+ fiasco was a big part of the reason I switched to DDG.

> Google has something like 10+ years of my saved search history. its just ridiculously good at finding exactly what I'm looking for (which quite often is something I searched in the past).

This is the opposite a lot of the time for me. If I found what I was searching for last time, I wouldn't still be searching but google thinks that because I clicked on it previously, it's what I'm after. If google gets it wrong the first time the wrong results become self reinforcing.

Somewhere around 12-18 months ago, I tried to switch, and it was awful. I had to continuously go back to Google.

2 months ago, I tried again, and since then, I've only had to go back to Google maybe 5% of the time. So, either DDG has really stepped it up recently, or Google has gotten really bad.

( I'm an engineer and mostly doing tech research, and this opinion is only regarding standard search. For image searches or specific-domain searches, I still use Google.)

Local or user-specific results; which is sort of the point of DDG. Google has gotten users used to their own search contexts.

I agree that Duck search is pretty good. In fact, the only thing I miss from Google is the function "translate:".

(I just tried "translate:this" and it didn't do anything, so I'll assume that's not how it's supposed to be used and that it translates something on google translator)

The '!gtranslate' bang does that

The main thing that I miss is "Last Year." For many topics (e.g., Mac OS issues), I want to eliminate legacy results. But "Last Month" is too tight and sacrifices quality.

1.) DDG results tend to be way spammier. Search a product name, get garbage results, rather than links to product pages at various stores.

2.) Index isn't as complete. I very frequently do site: queries on my blog/other people's blogs to find years-old posts that I vaguely remember. Google's indexed them, DDG hasn't.

3.) Google is way better at reading my mind. Vague queries, queries that aren't literal text strings, etc.

Pretty sure reading users' minds would violate our privacy policy.

> 3.) Google is way better at reading my mind. Vague queries, queries that aren't literal text strings, etc.

I also find that DDG results are often unusably bad. But I wish Google would give you the option to restrict your search to being interpreted as a search for that literal text. Those unsolicited magic results can really get in the way.

I think surrounding the query with quotes will do that.

In my attempt to switch over to DGG, I found its programming-related search results to be particularly bad. Searching DDG would give relevant results of questionable quality, or completely unrelated results (like links to tennis racket information when searching for help with the Racket programming language). The same search on Google would return relevant Stackoverflow threads and blogs which seemed more reputable.

I still use DDG about half of the time, and can't think of any egregious examples I've encountered recently. Perhaps they've gotten better, or I've learned to write better search queries.

Sites on tennis rackets are 100% valid results when searching for the term "racket". DDG isn't doing anything wrong there. The only reason you're getting the results for Racket the programming language only, as you wanted, from Google is based on the information they have on you and your past search habits.

DDG explicitly places an emphasis on privacy and non tracking. You cannot expect the same targeted, contextual results that Google gives you if you don't want to give up some degree of privacy. People who do not want to give up that level of privacy and use DDG do so with the understanding that they lose that level of personalization.

You may be happy to provide personal information (browsing habits, clicks, etc) in exchange for better results. If so, then Google is the search engine to use. Some people do not accept that tradeoff; this is the market that DDG is for.

I'm pretty sure they meant Racket-specific queries that have enough context to make clear it's the language, not just plugging the term "racket" into the search engine. The point being that Google is better at picking up the context of queries, even when they don't have your search history.

When it comes to search-engine tests I do the obvious thing, I search for my name! Google gives me my site at the top. Duck Duck Go puts my site in place 10-15.

I share a name with an American baseball player, so I'm not surprised I don't come universally top.

(Yes I know that Google does personalized results, but even without that I "win".)

You're the 25th result on Google for me. How are you testing non-personalized results on Google?

It could be that it's localising the results geographically better. DDG's results have improved enormously for me recently, to the point that I completely forget it's not Google these days, whereas I used to use the !g bang about 80% of the time, but the one thing I do still fall back to Google for is local non-US-centric content.

I've tested in the past using private browser windows, mobile phones - not running android - and at web-cafes.

Surprised I'm not there, but I guess these things change over time.

All of those probably geolocate your IP to the same region, unless you were travelling the world at the time. You really need to use proxies or tor to get a genuinely non-personalised Google.

I switched to DDG about 3 weeks ago, I'm having to !g quite a lot still and sometimes even switch back to non-encrypted google so they can take account of my past searches.

I can't believe you're not aware of the gulf between DDG searches and google ones, they are, to me at least, noticeably better.

OTOH, I've tried DDG before and this time I haven't switched back, it's now good enough that !g is enough for the 10% of times it fails. The loss in relevancy is now small enough for me to be happy to gleefully accept the gain in privacy.

I've realised that whenever a query is particularly complex, DDG is going to fail. I almost know which queries to !g even before typing them. Niche programming questions especially. For example, I've been doing a bunch of i18n for a client in .Net and anything past the most basic questions, the content available online for doing it well is surprisingly sparse, I guess it's something most .Net programmers don't have to deal with. Google has been providing much better links to complex questions. Also a few weeks ago I wrote a purposefully very lightweight widget without jquery and questions like "do X in javascript without jquery" or "do X in javascript with IE8 support", google seems to be much better at respecting the "without jquery" and "with IE8 support" bits of the query.

I also don't see the point of their other bangs. SO search, reddit search, etc. are so awful. Just so utterly terrible when you compare them to google that you wonder what the point of those bangs are.

Personally, I think their extension that shows the top SO result is more annoying than it is good, it almost always cuts off the actual code, you have to click once to see the rest of the answer anyway, generally speaking you get much more insight from the actual SO page as you see the other answers and I'd far prefer the SO result to be at the top to click than suddenly a huge, virtually pointless, chunk of text which cuts off half the actual code being at the top of the search results.

I also, quite guiltily, miss being able to search a film title and get the local listings or other location based searches, I know google are spying on my location, but damn is it much better on google. As someone who believes in privacy quite ardently, I feel I am actually keenly aware of the benefits you give up by not disclosing that information. I admit I only just found the DDG setting to set your country, but they really should make such an important setting much more visible rather than assuming everyone new is in the US, getting amazon.com results when you want amazon.co.uk results is very frustrating. Google automatically redirects you to google.co.uk with the option to switch back.

Google is also much better at mixing relevant video and image results with your search when appropriate (e.g you search a celeb's name or you search for something like "fallout 4 settlement management mod" google will show a mix of links, images and videos).

EDIT: though, again, I'm not finding myself switching back, I do urge anyone privacy conscious to give DDG another go for a few weeks, it really is very good now and you can prefix queries with "!g " if you want to google search instead.