Weird things that DDG does:

- No geo prioritization. If I'm searching for things in (city I'm current in) I don't care for sites from companies located in (city in the US/Canada with the same name).

- You write "X in Y" (generic example) and autocomplete tries to "fix it with "Z in Y" thanks but I really mean "X in Y". Or sometimes it tries to fix it with even more unrelated things (though sometimes it makes sense).

Google does the same. Search for Warsaw while in Poland, yet use english search words. Most results will come up for things in Warsaw, Indiana. Including pages which google has tagged with "Warsaw, Indiana" so they clearly know that's where the results are coming from.

I'm from Poland and I just searched for 'Warsaw', 'Warsaw car rental' and 'Warsaw law office' using incognito mode and google.com and all of the results were for Warsaw, Poland.

It also detected that I'm in Poland and asked me if I want to switch to polish Google and filter results in polish language.

Same in Sweden. If you want to know what channels football matches are airing on here the following searches yield entirely different results:

Fotbolls vm

Football World Cup

The former gives you the correct site with the channels listed as the first answer but the second one doesn’t even have the channels on the first page.

I live in the Netherlands but grew up in the U.S. and I often go back and forth between Dutch and English when searching(depending mostly on context). I have also used my google account while living in the U.S. and later in the Netherlands (this used to really mess up google calendar). I’ve been searching for “World Cup” (English) on google.com. I get results in English, but they are parsed from the national Dutch news channel and they link directly to highlight clips on their YouTube channel. Seems like there is a probably a lot of complex integration between Google and local broadcasters to pull that off, and it might work just for me because I spent a lot of time setting language and locale settings to try and accommodate my unique use case.

They specifically advertise that they don't lock you into a filter bubble.

A geo-bubble is a filter bubble.

Not necessarily

A filter bubble is building a story of previous searches to get more relevant results.

So the first time you search 'Python' on Google with no history it might prioritize snakes or the computer language, but after some clicks it will know better how to prioritize

Now, DDG correctly detects the country I'm in, but even with that set the results are weird and not always relevant.

Filters come in various forms, search history, language, location, OS, account-based history, etc.

Filtering my results based on my location is still a filter bubble. Filtering it based on anything, and not just showing me exactly the same results as everyone else who searched the same query is the definition of a filter bubble.

People who don't want to be bubbled use DDG. It's a big part of the reason it exists, and you want that changed. What you actually want is another search engine, which is probably Google since they have the most functional (in the sense of utility derived by the end user) filter bubbles.

You can set your filter bubble to your country! It's right under the search bar when you start a search.

You can enable region specific search in the settings.

There is literally an option for geo prioritization right next to the search bar.

Learn to use a search engine. Why did this become a lost skill? You can tell it exactly what you want it to find using quotes or explicitly stating a locality.

I've been using search engines since Yahoo and Altavista were relevant players in the search space, I think I know a trick or two.

I use it by default and wind up using !g half the time as well. Though often DDG comes up with results I couldn't even dreamed of. As for today I was looking for the elevation of the nurburgring (in light of the track record and the insane performance of the 919 on the uphill section) and I ended up on this brilliant website with the entire height maps: https://veloviewer.com/segment/5539685

On the phone I switched back to google as default as inserting the !g was a horrible experience to go through every time I wanted to look something up quickly.

I had the same problem with an almost automatic !g.

A while back i decided to put more effort and try to survive with !so, !gh, !hn, !r, !w, and a couple more depending on the context.

DDG may not give exact results in less than a second, but i believe that blindly giving priority to the fastest result is a critical issue, in many areas.

For the very niche topics, i basically maintain myself lists of sites.

I still use !g as fallback or when i'm too lazy. And also for pentest reconnaissance, i have a hard time seeing how to do it without Google honestly (which is scary).

Page load of DDG is not quite good indeed, but i don't mind let it a few seconds.

"For the very niche topics, i basically maintain myself lists of sites."

I have a Google CSE for the sites I have subscribed in RSS reader. It provides results that I could never get with straight Google search. Curious to know what your sources are like if you don't mind?

Well that's more of a manual work than anything else, not optimal in term of speed. Trying to keep following mailing lists diagonally, keep contact with other people in the niche. It eventually leads me to some other new site, mailing lists, blogs, videos. Then i use a bunch of scripts to maintain a todo list, and i'm processing (keep & index/drop) them when the time comes, and it loops.

TBH, i mostly do all of that just because i don't want to be stuck deeper in the Google web, but that's more of a philisophical issue. I could easily live without all the DDG stuff, but not (yet) without all the Google stuff.

I love ddg exactly because of the bangs! I make queries like !wiki (wikipedia), !gm (maps), !gi (images), !imdb, !yt, !gsc (scholar) directly from the address bar all day.

I believe you can replicate the bang functionality in Google Chrome, should you use it.

> I end up having to use !g in half my searches.

I googled this, but couldn't find the "!" operator as a google operator. What does "!g" do in search? Or are you trying to say "I end up leaving Google for half my searches" which is not only shorter, but more clear than what you said.

Edit: Ah, that makes more sense, thanks guys. I completely misinterpreted that comment in two different ways.

On DuckDuckGo you can use bangs (!) to do special functions the !g redirects you to a google search. For a full list you can look here https://duckduckgo.com/bang

DDG !bang search.

Non-javascript: https://duckduckgo.com/bang_lite.html

!g is a bang or whatever they call it. If you put "potato !g" in DDG, it redirects you to google search

Did you try it recently?

This was my usual experience as well. But a few months ago, I started using tor-browser for laptop and orfox browser for mobile (equivalent of tor-browser, but for android) as my main browsers and couldn't use google search with them (search blocks tor).

I started using using ddg for almost everything and was surprised how good it was. I could launch firefox to use google, but almost never did it (except to use apps from G suite). I wonder also if in my latest previous attempts, I wasn't most of the time using "!g" because I wasn't trusting ddg results.

Try !s instead of !g. About same results as Google, with way more privacy.

That's depending on what you search. In my searches as developer, I do less than 5% of my searches with the !g

I hardly ever find I need to use !g. I wonder what we are doing/searching for differently.

Same here. And I miss the bangs (!w, !i, !a, !yt, !wv etc.) when I'm on a non-DDG search engine.

FWIW, you can use !s to redirect to Startpage to get Google results with just a bit more privacy.

This.

DDG is super super bad. I don't know why people recommend it at all. Now that you mentioned !g I remembered all my DDG experiments... 1) change my default search engine to DDG, 2) use it for some time, 3) use !g in half of my searches, 4) use !g in all of my searches, 5) say "fuck it" and switch back to google

Well I must be using it wrong. Very wrong.

I find it better than Google for code / technical searches, and all things work related

I find it better than Google for historic or old content as Google barely acknowledges such content is possible any more. Admittedly DDG is "least worst" in this respect but it hasn't entirely thrown the results out with the obsession with recency and update frequency (I consider this to have essentially ruined Google). Google were better at this and dated searches in their first 2 years than now.

Google then ruined themselves further by feeling it can overrule my keywording attempts and gives a page of results featuring no result with the must have term. Adding insult to injury they proceed to heavily promote brands over small companies and blogs, or anything really.

Once a week I'll try !sp and not find what I need on Google either. The rare times I want video search Bing is orders of magnitude better than Google.

Interesting.. since most of my searches are code or tech related, how exactly does DDG compare positively to Google? What difference do you notice that makes you prefer it?

Right now I end up on SO or a handful of other forums depending on the subject.

Might be worth a shot if you say you get better results faster!

When I know I'm asking an SO sort of question I can !so directly. The whole ! system transforms ease of use - I miss them elsewhere!

TL;DR I mostly find what I need quicker with least faffing around changing terms to try and fight them "knowing best".

Google shot themselves in the foot when they removed code search, and "improved" results by constantly knowing better with synonyms and other semantically linked results. It rather broke code searches and led to more of the wrong language turning up instead. Language reference and standard library type searches they do just fine at.

Google spoiled it for the obscure and code when even + and - modifiers and advanced searches became optional. They felt able to give a page of results with only one result having my must-have term. Makes searching for a specific release hellish - not everyone integrates latest and greatest v9 the week of its release. No, I really do want v7. I never fathomed the rationale of that change for anyone.

DDG do the least additional messing with my search terms with helpful expansion, pluralisation and so on. DDG got a little worse at obscure error searches when they started on some "oh you also meant" games fairly recently. They still do the least of this. There's still occasional cases where the content simply isn't there - but they're far better than say a year or two ago.

When I first tried DDG a few years ago I was !g or !sp all the time and it was barely worth the effort. Now I very rarely go near Google and don't feel I'm losing out.

I've had DDG set as default for maybe a year now, across desktop and mobile. As time passes, I find myself using !g less and less, probably less than 10% of the time now. Most of my queries are technical or for common-ish topics, and it's been great.

I switched very early on and had the same issue however it has improved a lot for me lately. I use Google for maybe 1 out of 100 searches I do now, a lot of those 1 in 100 are maps related.

I'd recommend giving it another try if you haven't recently.

!osm for OpenStreetMaps is amazing if you're just looking for a dumb map without the "reviewed businesses" and streetview hoo-ha.

This rings so true. I’m currently at #4. :( I really tried for six months... but at this point can’t remember the time I didn’t add !g.