I'm rather torn on this point. On one hand, yes, DDG for example feels some years behind Google in its relevance ranking. On the other, Google itself has been degrading the quality of its own results with ads, etc. so badly that they've seriously degraded their own "above the fold" relevant results.

There's still some things they miss, and my main complaint with DDG is it's too aggressive in taking the search you asked for and substituting in results it thought you meant. I suspect that problem comes from their upstream providers like Bing, which has similar issues.

Google removed that after pressure from the copyright lobby (they got sued by Getty). It'll happen to DDG too if they ever become big enough.

Middle-clicking or control-clicking will load the original images.

Bing direct links images as well so they'd probably go after Microsoft well before DDG, so I think we're safe. But I can always do the same for DDG if need be.

These days, I'm getting a sense of deja vu, because Google is slowly getting worse and DDG is slowly getting better. Most of the time, I'll get the desired result right away, regardless of the engine I use. But sometimes, I'll be surprised at how bad the results are on one and then I have to try the other. And although it's not happening very frequently, I have to do it more and more often.

I guess that's good, in a sense. Sure, it's nice when things just work and you don't have to think about them, but we've all seen that lack of competition is, in the long run, bad for the users.

Nowadays, I still use !g when out of luck with DDG, but 90% of the times, Google don't give me the answer I'm looking for either. And I don't feel it's because DDG improved that much but because Google declined.

The page I was after was not to be found.

Well at least on the first page, I didn't bother checking beyond. Did the !g thing and got the page I wanted straight up first hit.

Here are the searches for reference:

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=maker+pro+install+tensorflow

https://www.google.com/search?q=maker+pro+install+tensorflow

I've tried DDG so many times, but it just doesn't find relevant stuff. Sad, because I don't want to rely on Google.

In any case, I just connected to my work PC and did a search from a clean VM there, we don't do anything remotely Raspberry Pi or TensorFlow related there. The link you posted was the first hit at work, but the one I wanted[1] was the third hit.

Yet for DDG the results were the same, no hits. I even tried pressing "more" once, still nothing. I even tried "maker.pro install tensorflow" (without the quotes), and similar result. I tried "maker.pro tensorflow raspberry pi", still not finding it.

Maybe I just need to learn what DDG focuses on in a search string, and I've been trained to what Google weights.

But the reason Google got big was because it was the first search engine where, for 99% of the time, I didn't have to spend several minutes optimizing search terms just to find the right thing.

I don't want to go back to that.

[1]: https://maker.pro/raspberry-pi/tutorial/how-to-set-up-the-ma...

I use DDG as main search engine since a while. It usually works, but occasionally (less than 10% of searches however) I have to repeat the search using Google. The point being that even if I had to revert to Google for half of my searches, this would mean for Google 50% less information about my search habits, and exposure to their injected ads/information, which wouldn't be a trivial figure at all.

One doesn't use DDG because it's superior to Google (it's not and won't be for a long while) but rather to send a message to corporations making profits out of user information. I'm convinced Google doesn't give a rat's ass if ten thousands users like me don't use their search engine and services as we're already flagged in their database as users with adblockers, therefore immune to advertising (including ads that manage to defeat the blockers), but they would surely panic in terror should DDG use become somewhat trendy among Joe Users after some media coverage, social media campaign etc. The reason being that "normal", usually non technical, users are the ones providing Google mostly with real numbers because they allow webpages to analyze their habits and don't obfuscate their online behavior. Should a big number of those users make the transition to DDG or alternatives, we would likely hear of flying chairs at Google headquarters.

I've been using DDG, finally, for a little less than 1 year. For most part my DDG searches have been sufficient, in the sense that I generally find what I'm looking for and my need is met.

On few occasions where my need is not met, I do a !g and sometimes Google gives me what I want, but not in all the cases. I have to refine my search query in many, if not most, of those cases.

One area where Google is definitely better than DDG, for obvious reasons, is where Google shows better YouTube videos and I believe also Image results. But for regular searches, DDG has been satisfactory.

https://www.startpage.com

You can change this in Settings, but it's stored in a cookie which my devices clear from time to time. (Not that I'd rather they store it a different way, the situation is just unfortunate.)

In other words, I went from Google to DDG because of privacy. Why should I move from DDG to say StartPage, does it provide any additional benefits?

To clarify, I'm totally open to other search engines, just an trying to understand more.

I don't understand the stuff too much at a really high level to know which is more private, DDG vs Startpage.

>On 29 March 2016, Ixquick.com was officially "merged" with the same company's Startpage search engine[3] (a search engine with the privacy features of Ixquick, but using only Google search results[4]). Users entering ixquick.com are now automatically re-routed to startpage.com. Ixquick had long declared on its sites, that it operated in compliance with European Union privacy standards, and it retained its original European search engine, Ixquick.eu,[8] until about April 2018, when it was also redirected to startpage.com.

>Prior to the release of Tor Browser version 4.5, Startpage.com was its default search engine.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Startpage.com

I started using DDG, believing that "it shows me inferior results, but privacy-wise, it is worth it." Yet I've come to learn that DDG's results are often on-par or better than Google, and inferior only a small fraction of the time.

Often when I "!g" a query, I find that I get pretty much the same results with Google too. There are maybe 10% of cases where the results significantly differ.

My perception now is that Google performs better on programming-related queries, and much better on giving me local results (especially results related to my city). But when searching for content that you'd often find on blogs, or looking for reviews of products, DDG almost always beats Google by showing less SEO-heavy, more authentic results.

Edit: typo

If having Google as the default search is so important, couldn't they just make it the default without the deal?

(Of course, if Google didn't want to pay it, it might cause a crash in the 'market value' of such a placement anyway).

There's a monthly option right there

I've read about this before I think, for some reason donations cannot be used for development and has to be used for outreach etc?

If on top of that, they manage to do it using Google's dough, I say bravo and hope they'll remain smart enough to feed from the vampire for a long time

AFAICT, the situation is not so different from the days where Microsoft was paying Apple to avoid a defacto finding of monopoly.

Googling a paper or article, skimming it, then searching for something that's in the text makes Google appear like magic. When I enter the first word of my follow-up question, Google will often suggest a complex 10 word query exactly like I would have entered it.

Apparently, many people have the exact same follow-up questions that I have after reading the same text.

That doesn't require a whole lot of tracking. It does require a session cookie, but that's not the sort of tracking I'm opposed to at all.

Another thing that Google does well is searching for local content. I think this is very difficult to replicate for DDG.

But for context free and non-local queries, Google is usually no better than DDG in spite of all the wealth of data they have on me. For some niches DDG is actually better than Google and they don't fill half of their result pages with ads.

Sometimes I wonder whether the entire ad targeting thing is a fraud. Maybe Google doesn't actually track us after all ;-)

I'm 100% sure that's why they give me better results.

The options seem to be:

(1) Don't use the web,

(2) Give up decent search results and engage in a (probably only with limited success) tedious eternal war to prevent Google from tracking me,

(3) Relax and let Google track me, but still give up the good search results, or

(4) Take the payment Google is offering in exchange for tracking.

Right, like from 2014 to 2017 when Google wasn't the default search provider for Firefox. It was such a shame to see their income go from 300 million to 500 million.

Sadly I agree. I use DDG almost exclusively but when ever I use "!g" I often get better results there.

I prefer DDG and I almost never Google, except out of curiosity, but I see this sentiment a lot.