>Side note, if they get bought out by a big player, I will feel like my use of them for the last year has been for naught.
I completely agree and at this point it's my main issue with DDG. I don't think their business model is sustainable, if they ever make it big the pressure to make more money will eventually corrupt their noble goals. After all Do No Evil used to be a thing at Google too and we see how that turned out.
I'd gladly pay a subscription to a good search engine to remove the need for ads and align the business model to the privacy goals, however I'm probably in a small minority here.
I think you're correct about it being a small minority, but I'm definitely there with you.
Even with their affiliate and advertising model (someone else linked it), I'd rather pay money to just have the site ignore all ad determination, affiliate linking, etc if it sees me logged in and my account paid up.
Of course, most people seem to be heavily trained to look for "free" and chastise anything subscription based, no matter how cheap/fair.
> ...there was little need for the company to raise more money. DuckDuckGo, which had a last known raise of $3 million in 2011, has been profitable since 2014.
It's been decades since you could do that for yourself. It must be something like 20 years ago on Alta Vista that I got burned using search queries as bookmarks and (surprise, surprise) suddenly not being able to find "that page" any more.
I believe the issue OP is addressing is that even given an identical index, two different users might see to entirely different search results, as their individual search history is factored into the query.
You will see this giant network of the same site that tries to sell you on e-pdfs
You could try opening an incognito window, although it could still give different results based on geo location.
Or user agent, or screen resolution, or Accept-Encoding / Accept-Language headers, or installed fonts, or installed browser plugins detected, or Do Not Track settings.
In other words the queries that google has good results for isn't a superset of the queries that ddg has good results for. It's just a different set.
I thought I'd give startpage.com a try (proxied google results without tracking), but besides being slow I realized I couldn't live without bangs anymore (and was also missing DDG's rich snippets).
I wish DDG had some kind of bang that tells it that I actually want to search for the query I entered, not some random query they think I might have wanted :/
edit: I should mention that after complaining about it on their subreddit, someone on the team said they are looking into it.
Also ddg doesn't have anything like Google scholar. Thankfully just a !scholar away, and faster on a slow connection than going to scholar.google.com.
Anecdotally, for every feature I’ve wanted of DDG, I’ve found an old post where someone on their team says they’re looking into it. For some I’ve found multiple posts, going back over a decade! Always the same “looking into it”.
I use DDG, but I put them in the category of companies too afraid to say “no, we won’t do that feature” or “we like that idea, but it’s low priority so we don’t know if we’ll ever get to it”. Whichever features they have, I use; the features they promise, I ignore.
! this is exactly what I want
then a way to keep it enabled by default
Try searching for “!w search engine”: DDG sends you straight to Wikipedia, which sends you directly to the relevant article. (Search “!bang” for more info about bangs.) When DuckDuckGo is your default search engine you can do this straight from your browser's address bar or OS's search field. It's very nice.
(I have no affiliation with DuckDuckGo; I just really like this feature.)
Tip: Type ddg.co/somequery in the address field to quickly get back to DuckDuckGo
Google generally has the best results but for 95% of searches they all find what I need.
But thing is, Google itself seems worse and worse to me. It seems to try harder and harder to decide what I want and only give me that - if X is associated with something topical, only topical links appear. And DDG and Bing follow this problem.
Back when Google started out, they bet the farm on the idea that more links pointing to a document meant that said document was informative.
These days though, i wonder if what we are looking for is more hair. That what we are looking for depends on a context that can't be properly included in the search terms used.
On top of this "naive" metrics like link counts are no longer a viable measure for what to elevate to the top of the search results.
e.g: When I type "pandas" or "kafka", I get the Python library and the streaming framework. I don't get cute black and white animals and a depressed novelist (what the average person would expect).
Never happens with tech jargon though.
DDG gives me a decent mix of results about both Apache and Franz (not only the Wikipedia entry, a variety of books/articles/etc as well).
For instance, a certain startup I worked for in the past used a military blog seemingly belonging to a web of Eastern European entities to link to our company website and the CEO advertised it on linkedin....it was pretty fucking embarassing tbh but it was oviously for gaining SEO juice. It worked for a while but now when I search for the same keyword I don't see it in the SERPs.
I don't see them truly competing with big budget search engines, but it's probably easy enough to make decent money from keyword ads and if you can sell the brand, you can get enough users to cover a smaller machine footprint and R&D budget that's orders of magnitude smaller.
The results are probably not awful (I don't use it). Result quality gets exponentially more difficult as you try to push that boundary, so you can probably get 80% of the quality there with 1% of the investment. The results may be good enough for plenty of folks, but I highly doubt they will ever be better than the big budget search engines.
On the other hand, that is not the criteria for them to be successful, because they are already better on a different metric: Privacy.
I find that 90% of my queries are just "who is that person?" or "what is that thing?". Those queries can be answered by DDG just as well as Google. So I'm not giving up anything, but gaining privacy. More importantly, I'm (subtly) sending a signal to the market that I find privacy is important.
Even on the 10% of queries that are complex, DDG does "good enough". I sometimes wonder if Google has the results sorted better, but I'll gladly waste a few minutes here and there in exchange for privacy.
You could do both privacy and good search results without using DDG: startpage.com
You can also have at least as good privacy (better in my opinion) and better search results (again, in my opinion) with other search engines: qwant.com
What is it those two examples doesn't have that DDG does have? The evangelist feel of DDG really turns me off and I'm sure it scares many off from ever looking at it. It is a bit like listening to Apple fans talking about Steve 'The Juice' Jobs.
Sure Google had a vastly superior algorithm but I don't think too many people really grasped that at the time.
That's why I used Altavista before that. Google kept things very simple while other sites loaded on the bloat and garbage.
I don't remember ever feeling like what I found with Google couldn't be found with Altavista or lycos. But a lot of the other companies tried to prematurely monetize to an excessive degree.
I think the difference in algorithms matters even less now, and that google’s modern advantage is not in ranking algorithms but in automated display of structured data, like sports league results, filmography for an actor, etc., and work around knowledge graph methods to automate that stuff.
Early google was unequivocally only differentiated by branding and sparse design.
It wasn't just the simplicity. Google was also a lot faster, and had no ads!
How ironic that advertisement later became their bread and butter.
I think the vast majority of users don't consciously evaluate search engines for accuracy. And most non-technical users just assume that if they cant find it through X, its probably not there.
Google invested in the fundamental from the start and they pushed the limit of what search engines can do.
When I was in my first role as an IT manager, I set the policy that all machines had their default page set to google.com away from Yahoo, because yahoo was an ugly mess.
Google was clean and simple. This was the only reason. I made the edict to set it to google and so some people said "you should go work for google since you like them so much" - man I wish I had tried to do so then.
And this was in 1998 or so...
The main reason? "And" searches. Brilliant.
Then Google showed up, and Google had PageRank. Boom, the top result for any simple query was what you wanted.
I don’t see why I should sacrifice my privacy for google to provide me with a single interface for these few sites, especially when DDG does it without mining all my info.
And I'm just discovering a bunch of other ! commands that make DDG significantly more useful that Google (eg !esen).
sqlite3 ~/.mozilla/firefox/*default*/places.sqlite "select substr(p.url,9,14) as search_backend,count(1) from moz_places p where p.url like 'https://duckduckgo%' or p.url like 'https://%.google.%/search%' group by search_backend;"
duckduckgo.com|14129
encrypted.goog|345
images.google.|1
ipv6.google.co|1
mail.google.co|2
play.google.co|10
translate.goog|2
www.google.co.|1106
www.google.com|2084
www.google.com|6
So... I guess that means I don't really need google for search?
Wikipedia should be able to search itself better than any external entity, but cannot. Wikipedia, in effect, is blind to its own data, and can deliver less insight into it's own content than multiple external Search entities.
If I use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search for anything, I get weaker results, than if I use search engines to locate wikipedia articles according to the same input string.
There's something wrong with that.
But, contrast that to Facebook, and the concept becomes more interesting. Facebook's search utilities are similarly unsatisfying, despite the massive resources of the company. This is probably not a blind spot, but more about the level of quality provided, for free-tier, unprivileged user utilities. Advertisers probably gain better reach, but perhaps without knowing exactly who they reach. Facebook's search tool can't be used to discern the capabilities or qualities of one or more of the indices Facebook uses to negotiate the landscape of their data.
I disagree, I think Wikipedia is akin to a collective blog where people just dump information to. Indexing is hard enough that it becomes a full-time job to do it well, and that takes time and money.
Search is so hard that external search is necessary for many websites to exist outside of a void. If we expect blogs to have their own searching functionality, we end up with a collection of disjoint webs, and that would basically kill the web as we know it.
Definitely my favorite feature of ddg.
!mdn regexp
I was in the same boat with !gi but DDG image search is increasingly relevant, and is not infested by Pinterest results. DDG increasingly feels like home the way Google Search did years ago.
I hope DDG can keep improving, and I do feel like it's a worthy alternative now. I do wonder how they can keep making money with no advertising or paid services, but if they were to be bought out by a big player, I think they would quickly lose much of their user base.
As I'm German, that's actually where DDG has the advantage over Google. Most of my searches are in English, but sometimes I want to search for something here, with DDG that's just a single press of a button and I get German results. With Google I'd have to do multiple clicks.
Not as handy as the DDG location switch, but still a sometimes useful hack.
Also they have advertisements, but unlike Google they are not targeted to you, hence making them less competitive for advertisers. Hopefully, this will not prevent them from growing in the future.
In fact, many, many times DDG gives me better results than Google.
Guess it's logical because even if the search algorithm of DDG is pretty neat, they can't compete yet with Google army of crawlers that probably use every idle computing power of their massive cloud.
Its maintainer stopped using it, and when it recently broke he started recommending a random fork from a user with no open-source presence that hasn’t made any update since. As for the live version, it’s now working thanks to some other random twitter user. The whole transition was a rush job.
I’m not saying those people aren’t trustworthy. What I am saying is that we don’t know, because the maintainer of DuckDuckGoog did not care enough to make sure the project would be left in good hands.
See https://github.com/mikecrittenden/duckduckgoog/issues/11.
I've also been using DDG as a main search engine for a while and feel the similarly. Even more, for some queries I subconsciously assume that DDG won't find the result I want and resort to Google before I even search. Examples of such queries are complex programming questions etc.
This might be more energy than you're willing to expend, but just in case you were not already aware: there is a feedback icon in the bottom-left(!!!) corner of the page through which you can let them know about your bad experience. My interest in doing that is that in my life it is unreasonable to expect change without letting the other party know of your discontent.
I gravely wish it was just a one button sad-face, but at least it exists. I also would have previously guessed they could have used the presence of `!g` as a proxy for the sad-face, but that's certainly not true if users are preemptively `!g` based on an assumption about the results instead of trying the search first.
I've been using this greasemonkey script[1] as a workaround, but I'd love to have an official solution.
[1] https://gist.github.com/m5/247631d8258ff6f52383b417acd8516f
You might want to try Bing as well. Sometimes it can surprise you, although I haven't used it as extensively as the others.
BTW, those bangs are great anyway! Can't live without !hn, !sr, !a, !w, !@
Or !s for Googling with less Google?
On mobile, typing "!g" takes 7 actions (including the focus, space and enter). DDG should make a button for it, below the search results, so you can easily revert to Google if you didn't find what you were looking for.
Honestly, without this button, I doubt if I will ever start using DDG much.
Having this button will make me use DDG more, not less.
"!g" is a fallback, not a default action. Seems to me pretty reasonable. Using it you're actually skipping ddg, not using it.
Side note, if they get bought out by a big player, I will feel like my use of them for the last year has been for naught.