- I read somewhere (mostly always on HN) how great it is.

- I set it as the main search engine on my browser.

- I use it for a while, but I notice how slow it feels compared to Google, and how the results (especially local, non US ones) are somehow off in some cases.

- I go back to Google after a few days, and I forget about DDG for a few months/years, at least until the next comment on HN about it.

...and the cycle begins, again.

I'm guessing it has to be the (what I once thought was subtle, but apparently is not) positive effect that Google promises it will deliver due to building a profile of me personally and returning different results based on what it knows about me.

For local results, DDG sucks by default. Google, when I enter something local or German, has great results, DDG only if I flip the local switch to "Germany". But besides that I prefer their results for most things besides rare searches (if there are under 100 results, DDG is almost useless). But bangs make it preferable to me even then.

(After spending a while with "Basic" to convince myself the results were just as good and I just had a trained reaction to the visual style, I went back to Default. And after a while, now Google results seem subtly off.)

It looks like my mind over-fitted on blue title/green url/black pull-text as the code for a web search result hit.

Sometimes for programming related questions DDG does a better job I noticed.

https://www.startpage.com/

https://www.startpage.com/eng/protect-privacy.html

I see many people say results from [whatever] are bad - but not enough info to know if they are tech people who 99% search for debian docs and uber eats... and or other people who say [other] are good / bad.. we need to start posting examples. If there were some way to use the firefox screen capture and share tool for example, to upload good / bad searches, i'd love to see how others see things.

I really want to make new search engine options, and want to show examples of the others and how they could be done better. Crowd sources examples of good and bad would be a benefit to many.

Where I run into trouble is on anything technical. Trying to find research or technical references is a hopeless cause and Google is still my work computer default.

From a privacy perspective, using DDG like this denies Google 95+% of the information it would be gathering about you.

Caveat: I have never wanted "local" or "personalized" search results. I'm willing to type "Chinese food near ZIP code" or "Chinese translation" instead of relying on opaque algorithms to use my location and personal data to decide whether I'm hungry or confused.

That's when I switched back to Google.

Especially on mobile. Can't they use something more mobile-friendly than "!g", such as "gg" or "/g" for example?

If not done universally, allow me to activate this feature in my preferences.

I tried DDG a few times but always switched back to Google eventually (typing <BACK> and then <SPACE> "!g" <ENTER> is tiring, especially on mobile). I think this option would make me switch to DDG indefinitely.

    javascript:(function(){ var s = document.location.search.split("&")[0].substr(1); document.location = "https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&"+s; })();

To be clear: while this button directs people away from DDG to Google, it actually allows people to use DDG as their first (main) search engine, and lets them switch to Google if necessary without much inconvenience. The better the DDG search results, the less views they lose to Google.

The workflow is exactly the same: Search for stuff in DDG, and if you suspect that Google might have returned a better result, prepend "!g " to your query (which might be even faster than clicking on the bookmarklet, depending on how fast you type).

BTW, you can also search through StartPage instead by using !sp, or Bing, etc so there's nice flexibility there.

Well, the quality of the search results is not always as good as with Google. I do look back. But DuckDuckGo improved a lot over the last couple of years. Nowadays, DDG is my go-to search engine, and Google is the fallback when I hit a really hard problem; the more obscure the question, the more like it is in my experience that Google will yield more helpful results than DuckDuckGo.

In some way, DuckDuckGo is even better than Google. For specific questions, it often replies with a short snippet from stackoverflow or some other site that answers my question before I ever click on a link. That is just brilliant!

Google does that, too, sometimes, but for coding questions, DuckDuckGo seems to be better at it.

I've done a few googles over the last year, like on my girlfriend's computer, but I really find their results are so commercially-oriented that when looking for information it all gets in the way.

Krylon, eh? Are you a painter?

But at home I tend to look up stuff on Wikipedia more often than I search things on Google/DuckDuckGo. At work, I have used Google until I made an effort to switch to DDG.

The best I can paint are stick figures. ;-) I came across that word long before I had any idea what it meant. I remember being very confused, though, when somebody showed me a picture of some rapper wearing a T-shirt that said Krylon. (As so often in life, it was a lot less funny when I was told what it meant... :-/ )

One of the biggest difference is something that happened very recently. Google is much faster at updating then the alternatives for some reason.

I suspect it is about event driven versus polling. That Google is given update when things happen from trusted news sites instead of having to poll or crawl for new things. Would not be surprised Google just has a lot more of these connections than MS has.

But I am probably unusual in that I now just try to keep all my data at Google instead of it being spread around.

A big one is my ISP is allowed to sell my data without even me knowing. So I use Google DNS instead of my ISP and also use YouTube TV. All to try to keep my data away from my ISP.

My biggest issue is companies being hacked and people getting my data like what happened to Yahoo. I just trust Google better able to protect.

I made just the opposite choice, instead trying to offer different parts of my data to different companies. That way, when one company gets hacked, changes its terms of service, gets bought, etc., my losses are limited.

There's a couple things I do still use Google for, like YouTube. But since they no longer have 95% of my personal data, the impact of them having my YouTube history is drastically reduced.

Secondly, don't you think that actually maintaining it is very difficult? One inadvertant click could expose one of those accounts to another with a different service provider, etc. Arguably, it can work should you define a different browser profile for each of those accounts!? Nonetheless, it is neither easy nor smooth, in my opinion.

I limit my searches to com,org,net,io domains and the first pages are still full of spam.

The UI is race-to-the-bottom terrible.

Choosing "verbatim" takes 3 mouse clicks FFS!

Google is becoming only useful with esoteric knowledge. E.g. you need to append site:stackexchange for the search to be useful.

I always have to start an incognito tab to find anything that isn't pure drivel on my mothers machine. Otherwise I get search results that look remarkably like the spam she forwards me.

Try a search from an incognito tab and compare.

I don't currently have any issues with Google search result but I won't be surprised if underlying PageRank is slowly crumbling away. After all forums died off, blogs popularity has drastically dropped and most links between users are exchanged on closed platforms (FB) / communicators. Wisdom of the crowd might no longer be available in open web.

I gotta be honest, from my perspective, that feels like a weird thing to say. It's totally different from what I've seen.

I always get sites like MDN/W3C when I search for HTML/JS stuff, usually there isn't any blogspam at all on the first page of results. I always get Wikipedia articles and main company websites when I search for a company's name.

I have a lot of problems with Google, but I almost never see 'spammy' search results. It's weird that our experiences are so different.

DDG is just a wrapper for Bing.

Fwiw, I switched to DDG a ~year ago (can't remember honestly lol), and I've been quite happy. With that said, not a week goes by where I don't use the !g bang to run my search on Google. DDG just has terrible results. It's good enough a lot, maybe even most of the time, but frequently it's too terrible.

I'm still happy I switched, the "good enough" results are heavily reinforced by privacy, and not giving Google everything. The fact remains though, DDG misses the mark for me frequently.

"generates those results from over 400 individual sources, including key crowdsourced sites such as Wikipedia, and other search engines like Bing, Yahoo!, Yandex, and Yummly.[6][7]" as well as DuckDuckBot.

Also, more importantly, Bing, like google and facebook is building personal dossiers on everyone, while DDG is not.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DuckDuckGo

https://web.archive.org/web/20150124074006/https://duck.co/h...

https://www.theregister.co.uk/AMP/2017/08/15/bing_microsoft_...

If bing offers up the best results most of the time DDG will, as a result, offer up bing results most of the time. "Best results" easily determinable even with DDG privacy constraints.

They're definitely doing some cool stuff at DDG and its certainly a hell of a lot more than "a wrapper around bing." I just don't think expanding their own index infrastructure is something feasible for them right now.

“Just a wrapper” is misleading, but DDG returns bing results at least some of the time.

Another annoying one is Postgres ('postgres add primary key'), which always has an ancient version as the first result, sometimes as far back as 7.x.

Probably because you either haven’t searched often enough, or because you’ve been clicking on too many irrelevant links when presented with results.

I consistently get MDN and StackOverflow results in the top when I search because those are the links I click the most so Google has learned that I prefer those sites.

Speaking of W3C, in case you are not aware the site W3Schools has nothing to do with W3C, and W3Schools used to be filled with a lot of outdated information. I’ve heard they’ve gotten better but I still never intentionally click on W3Schools links and when I do by accident I immediately navigate away. Even though they’ve allegedly gotten better I don’t like them and I urge others not to use W3Schools. Use MDN, StackOverflow and the real W3C resources instead.

I'd actually prefer the 3rd party searches on google over duckduckgos, because I could easily refine the search on google by appending "MDN" in search and get the result. Not only that, I know I can find the MDN and W3C doc easily, so I want to broaden my search horizon normally when doing a google search anyhow

DDG doesn't give you as much of an oppurtunity to see the 3rd party sites though, so its more limited

Finally, biased searches. I actually prefer biased searches the vast majority of time, partially because I'm too lazy to bookmark sites I visit a lot. If I wanted an unbiased search result DDG is my go to tool

No, it's still far inferior to Google search.

Try "D without garbage collection" in both, and get back to me.

Google: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/13574552/d-programming-w...

Same exact thing, so what is your point exactly?

Of the top 10 Google results, 9 specifically relate to the D programming language.

Of the top 10 DuckDuckGo results, the number is 3.

Yeah... good to see you’re not reaching or anything.

Don't be silly.

Googley, but without the personal dossier.

Second result from Google: https://dlang.org/blog/2017/06/16/life-in-the-fast-lane/ (on StartPage this is the third result)

Second result from StartPage: https://dlang.org/spec/garbage.html (on Google this is the third result)