I switched to DDG about two years ago.

A bunch of results (20%? 30%?) are not very good, and it's not an exception. Also I know it's suppose to come down the line, but not having a filter for results of the past year is a PITA.

In my case though, Google is not very good either, I remember getting very random results (mostly focused on popular or local trends, when I'm looking for something specific) about half of the time.

In fine, I see DDG as an alternative giving access to both Google and DDG. Switching to DDG when Google was bad was not simple, the reverse is (just add a !)

Same here tried using DDG, sometimes I get nothing relevant and find myself going to back to Google, I even tired forcing myself to use bing but still the results are not just good enough.

It'd be interesting for the peanut gallery if you went into a bit of detail about what 'satisfactory' and 'unsatisfactory' means to you.

I'm sitting here feeling confused because there is no detectable difference between DDG and Google for me. Search patterns must be very particular to the person and obviously I'm not searching for the right stuff :P.

A very concrete example: I am trying to find a solution for a certain error / warning in AndroidStudio. I try finding it using DDG, not succeeding, while on Google I'd find the solution within the 3 first results. Happened to me already several times. So it is satisfactory to me if the search leads to a solution or at least the right path to finding a solution to my query.

Tbh ddg results are next to useless except the most common of issues. g! Is the only thing that makes it usable.

I have the same experience. I set DDG as my default search engine on all of my devices, and with maybe 10% of my searches I revert to Google. DDG is adequate for common stuff, but for anything obscure, it doesn't really cut it. These days, I have a pretty good feeling for whether DDG will give me what I want before I search.

If you want to move away from Google 100% and expect DDG to fill the gap, it will be a disappointing experience.

What I have been doing successfully for three-ish years now is to use DDG as my default, which handles about 50% of my searches, while the other 50% are !bangs to sites I know I want to end up on.

A lot of the time that allows me to circumvent Google for a few extra searches, and sometimes it's just !g to show Google results, mostly when it's searches I want localized, or the topic is just too specific. For the latter I am trying to use !s more often.

Much like knowing what terms to look up, knowing when DDG results are good enough and when to use !g, !s or when to jump straight to the website you want to go to, is something that gets easier and starts to feel natural eventually.

I'm not 100% de-google-fied, but I'm 95% there in regards to searches, with none of the discomforts people keep bringing up.

I default to DuckDuckGo as my search engine though I use !g for anything it doesn't get right. I was on call with a colleague and we were problem solving and I needed to look up something and I typed it in the search box and a bunch of porn results came up. She just laughed but I knew it was a close shave. DuckDuckGo's image search can come up with porn for rather innocuous terms, e.g., https://duckduckgo.com/?q=search+reddit&t=ffab&iax=images&ia... for "search reddit" gets porn on the second screen for me.

Maybe it's your DDG "safe search" preferences. There are three options: Strict, Moderate, Off. I clicked the link you provided and not any adult content showed up (it's in "moderate" mode by default). Some adult content appeared in results after I changing it to "off".

OK, yea, my filter is set to off. But still, the search I made was regarding completely innocuous programming related stuff, why should adult results come up that quickly? My Google preferences are also set to no filtering and I looked almost 10 pages deep there (just to check), and no adult results showed up.

You asked “reddit search” and there’s substantial amount of porn on reddit.

The majority of NSFW results in DDG comes from karmadecay.com, it’s a reverse image search engine.

Google doesn’t like that domain, you won’t get images from there even if you’ll search for the domain name. Google will only show result from that domain if you limit search to that domain with “site:karmadecay.com”

Have no idea why Google’s doing that. Could be google breaking antitrust laws (they have a reverse image search as well), or could be purely technical reasons.

Personally, I prefer DDG’s approach. If you’re using DDG in work environment and don’t want NSFW result, just set the safe search preference. Google appears to censor the results even if you explicitly asked not to.

>Have no idea why Google’s doing that.

It's duplicate content. That's punished in the SERPs.

Search “karmadecay” on google images. You’ll get zero results from karmadecay.com. Not on the first page, not on the 10-th page, it’s just not there.

Normally, the domain is very strong keyword. Search for “facebook” and the first image will be from facebook.com, search for “duckduckgo” and you’ll see a screenshot image hosted on duckduckgo.com on the 7-th place (not the first I expected but still high enough).

I’m not sure how your duplicate content remark explains this behavior. karmadecay has original logo image, why it’s not found?

A search for "site:karmadecay.com" brings up some results. (warning: mostly nsfw)

Right, I have wrote that in my first comment:

> Google will only show result from that domain if you limit search to that domain with “site:karmadecay.com”

The question is, why doesn’t normal image search show that site ever, despite tons of content?

I know technical reasons are still possible, but so is google breaking laws, they have quite a history of unlawful behavior and have paid billions in fines for that.

>Right, I have wrote that in my first comment

My mistake.

>I know technical reasons are still possible...

It could be as simple as a penalty for breaking one of their webmaster guidelines.

> could be as simple as a penalty for breaking one of their webmaster guidelines.

Agree. Could also be for not having a mobile-friendly version, or for not using AMP.

Still, even if google does nothing illegal here and acts in good faith, do you think it’s OK to de-prioritize relevant search results based on these technicalities?

As a consumer, when I search stuff in a desktop browser, I don’t give a damn about mobile versions nor webmaster guidelines. I want search results relevant to my search query. Arbitrary limitations imposed on web masters by search engine decrease quality of results.

>Still, even if google does nothing illegal here and acts in good faith, do you think it’s OK to de-prioritize relevant search results based on these technicalities?

I do. That's actually the job of a search engine. If it wasn't choosing ranking factors, then it would just be a directory search.

Search engines are far more useful and relevant because they give more context to their results.

>when I search stuff in a desktop browser, I don’t give a damn about mobile versions

Desktop SERPs are actually different than mobile SERPs. They're crawled and indexed independently. A bad mobile site won't affect desktop results.

Nice idea, I even tried it myself. What happens though is you start putting "!g" before every search, since DDG is unreliable and searching twice adds friction.

for me its about 30% of the searches, not every search. Its fine for very regular stuff, the kind where a Wikipedia page exists but not that great for deep searches.

Before you search, you don't know if it will be in the 30% or the 70%. It is quicker to always add "!g" than it is to search twice 30% of the time.

I have seen the same in other queries too. I have started sending them some feedback. They have an option for results.

Haven’t yet noticed an improvement, but I haven’t been saving the queries I’ve sent to double check those.

I switched a year or so ago. The results are different. They feel less spot on but they provide more depth. Google will typically give me the answer I'm looking for on the first page but if it doesnt the second/third/fourth page will not have it either. They will be very similar to the first page.

DDG doesnt always have the right answer on the first page. But it may be on the second. Or the third. It's worth checking them at least. Realizing this made my DDG experience better.

You can't have personalized, targeted results without being tracked.

Perhaps I am alone in this but but all I want is a really really good crawler that can find the exact subset of results containing all of the keywords I query.

Regional/targeted/personalized results often add noise.

I appreciate that this is what google needs in order to monetize on ads. And that real verbatim searches are likely more resource hungry.

I just wish there was an option to pay some form premium subscription service where I can have really in depth verbatim search without being treated as 'suspicious' activity by the engine.

I would like a service that just keeps an up to date corpus of the web. Or at least the top few terabytes. Then I can pay the few dollars a month to run a giant map reduce grep on it.

For most of my searches, debugging a few specific strings, I really just need grep. It’s too much for one person to crawl the web. But a good distributed network could.

Personalized and targeted results aren't good results.

Didn't say they are, but I have a feeling that this is exactly what the original commenter is missing

I have the same issue where DDG sometimes just doesn't give relevant search results. That's when I use Google. But I also use temporary containers and no google accounts, so I'm not getting personalized results and they're still better.

The fact someone doesn’t have an account does not mean they aren’t being tracked or that google (or any platform) can’t create a profile for you.

Not saying it’s effective with the containers you’re using though.

I beg to differ, they are actually essential in my case.

It's almost like Google is actually good at Search and replicating that isn't easy

I know it's partly snark, but I think Google is not actually that good at it. Not because they are complacent, but because search is a hard problem and there is no objectively 'good' results to any arbitrary query.

There is a tradeoff for any given user between getting the most popular results and what could be the most 'accurate' result. I find myself using several search engines depending on what I want (apart from Google/DDG, you always have the option to go directly to amazon or StackOverflow for instance), and am pretty happy about it.

But saying Google is good at search is a bit like praising Wallmart for being good at retail. Sure, they are to some extent, but there are clear tradeoffs we need to be aware of.

https://www.startpage.com/ is really good. Google search but anonymized

If DDG results are unsatisfactory, you can add a `!s' to your query and it will take you to the results of startpage.com

I experimented with DDG, but startpage is giving me better results at this time - especially if you are searching for something more local. So I set startpage.com as default search engine on all of my devices. I may try it again later...

Yeah, I switched to DDG, but it didn't give me satisfactory results, particularly for debugging searches. Moved to startpage, and am a happy user since two weeks now.

I've been using DDG for so many years as my sole means of searching the internet (though I thought when I first started using it, it was proxing Google and not Bing) that I'm not sure if I'm getting satisfactory results back or not. It's not like I'm doing a head to head comparison with Google.

> I thought when I first started using it, it was proxing Google and not Bing

It probably was, it proxied google when I first used it, then at some point about 8 years ago or so it switched to bing and for a while I switched over to ixquick, but switched back to ddg and just got used to it proxying bing when ixquick dumbed their page down to match startpage.

I've been using DDG as my primary search engine for around a year now. I've kind of gotten a feel for the kind of searches I do that DDG doesn't handle very well. It's good for probably 95% of my searches but I still occasionally fall back on Google.

I've done the same, few months back. And yes, sometimes (well most of the time) results are not satisfactory if I'm looking for a specific thing (e.g Expecting a relevant result from StackOverFlow).

I'm using Firefox Containers, I hop on to Google Search with a temporary extension

I switched recently and I find general results satisfactory. Google does have some specialised stuff, such as details about stores/cinemas around me, or championship league results, but I just look them up with a !g bang.

I haven't used google to search for several years now. Except by mistake on someone elses computer. And then I get disappointed on the results.

DDG if fine for some things, but I mainly use Startpage.com as a privacy focused Google alternative.

You can precede your query on DDG with !g to get Google results.

duckduckgo is definitely not an alternative for google. you can't even compare.

It is in some use cases. For programming related queries, it oftentimes gives me better results than Google because it's not trying to be clever and guess what I could actually mean.

I second this, notably for programming related queries. I have been using DDG for a year or so now, and never looked back.

I do not quite agree. I found that duckduckgo often returns too many results from the same website, which is for programming related search queries often stackoverflow. The same query on Google leads (for me) often times to more diverse results which include more different base urls.

Neither is Vimeo for YouTube or Apple Maps for Google Maps. Those were pathetic suggestions and in my mind ruin the credibility of the rest of the post. There is enormous value to the end user in the integration between search, navigation and reviews. So I’m supposed to find a place to eat on duck duck go, then find reviews in yelp, and finally go to Apple maps to get directions? That’s not a real alternative for anyone but the most privacy focused users is it?

> I'm supposed to find a place to eat on duck duck go, then find reviews in yelp, and finally go to Apple maps to get directions?

Or you could use yelp for all of it. I just typed "lunch" in and it gave me a list of reasonable placrs nearby, meanwhile Google maps listed every restaurant around me, including places not open for lunch.

Tapping a restaurant on yelp gives me the reviews and there an option in the app to get directions. I'm on Android so I can't check, but from when I used iOS I remember yelp defaults to apple maps for directions.

Seems like a good alternative to me.

I use both. I start with DDG. If I sense it's not finding what I seek, I switch. I end up getting a second opinion from Google approx 15-20% of the time. That's better than give Google 100% of my queries.

I've been using DuckDuckGo for about 2 years now. Absolutely no issues.

There's a viable alternative for every service Google offers. Fuck Google.

Why do you think that?

I switched to duckduckgo about a year ago and never even looked back. The results are perfectly fine and I am pretty satisfied with them. What do you feel is not comparable? One thing I noticed, which is great, that duckduckgo does not filter/censor your search results (except pictures).

edit: The only "bad" thing about it is its name. typing duckduckgo.com into the url bar when I am on some other computer takes kinda long, but I am okay with that

The domain ddg.gg redirects to duckduckgo.com