It's not just that DDG is good enough - it seems that DDG has better results than Google for many searches. Any topic where Google engineers and their algorithms believe they know better than you will return "worse" results. I believe they are weighting results by some measure of truth-value for a particular type of information, and this is bad for a couple reasons. First, they might get the measure of truth wrong, either out of ignorance or conflict of interest. Second, you might want a more literal search where the keywords match exactly even though the info might not be very accurate, for instance if you were researching alternate theories.

Examples of where Google search fails to return relevant results because they know better than you are medical, political, illicit/illegal, conspiracy theory, and famous people. Often times the first page of results don't contain the keywords and don't seem to have anything to do with your search query, whereas DDG results do.

Thanks for explaining! It's infuriating to craft a search query containing all the keywords/operators needed to return relevant results - a search query that would return relevant results 24 months ago - only to see Google ignore 75% of keywords completely, extract some commonly-used pair of words from the query, and return 5 pages of results based exclusively on said pair.

What was the motive behind this change? Was the previous algorithm really giving people results so bad that Google felt they had to hamstring their flagship product? It seemed to be getting better and better until this...

This is a long going change. Google has been making their search fuzzier for years claiming it gets better results for most people.

For a while I personally experienced better results on the queries I didn't know the exact name of the thing I was searching for. But those days are gone, because nowadays their search is so fuzzy that it can't extract the correct context from those queries.

Because you aren't supposed to Google search by entering in a bunch of keywords you're supposed to ask Google questions.

Not that your workflow is incorrect, I'm a DDG user and I do the same thing, but that's what Google wants people using their product to do.

Wait, are you saying Google is the new 'Ask Jeeves'?!? :)

Kidding. Anyway, DDG has been my default for months now. Absolutely love it.

The only thing I've really had to change, is to remember to type in a city/ state when looking for local businesses.

Other than that, it feels so great to not be the product!

If you ever want to get a good google result you "have" "to" "enclose" "every" "single" "word" "in" "separate" "quotes".

Very tedious, especially given it's the current year.

That would be a very simple extension. I imagine it already exists. Or even better a greasemonkey script could do it.

The motivation is always the ability to sell ads against the results.

This is true. Thank you for saying it. Made my life much better just to know what happened to Google.

I had a serious impression that 24 months ago Google was absurdly good. So good that I thought no DDG would ever be compared to it. It returned exactly what I wanted all the time with just 2 words in the query.

Today it doesn't ever return what I want, because it seems to ignore what I've searched for more and more. It thinks it knows what I meant more than I do and I can't tell it otherwise.

DDG doesn't have the weight of history that is ruining google. When you google something and can't tell if it's wrong until you click through it reinforces the weighting of that wrong result. It will keep referring you to that 10 year old stack-overflow post that is no longer relevant because it's 6 major versions behind.

I think Google is a bit smarter about that? I.e., I'm pretty sure it detects things like "you click on one link, come back after 10 sec, click on another link and then never come back" and correctly attributes the weight to the link you stayed on.

Possible I'm wrong though. Or could be the heuristics for how long you stay on the page are off. E.g., it can take me a while to realize that some GitHub issue page doesn't help me at all, and I click back, then find another page and get the answer immediately. But maybe Google thinks "well they spent a while on that page, they probably got something useful out of it even if it didn't totally answer their question".

I open anything seemingly relevant in a new tab, run uBlock so they can't track me on the destination page and more often than not forget to close the search tab. So they'd be getting more bad information than good to work with. Even this is somewhat self reinforcing as the quality of search drops I'm more likely to open in tabs.

I think this is very common for developers, but then again the amount of shitty SPA sites that don't work with tabs...

Do you have some example queries?

Sure, if the engine has to guess whether you mean A or B, then whenever two engines make different calls, one of them is wrong.

Even being right 99.9% of billions of queries means being wrong many times.

This calls for statistical analysis, not cherry picking examples or asymmetric sample like "given a bad result from X, Y does better."

Well, in my experience, the quality of the search results I get from Google overall has fallen quite a lot over the last few years, to the point where for any given search, DDG is far more likely to surface what I'm looking for.

This isn't just about certain cherry-picked examples.

I tried switching my phone and computer's default search engine to DDG a few weeks ago, and the quality of programming-related searches was just abysmal compared to Google. Straightforward searches were basically the same results, but searching for error messages or library-specific terms would have a great result in the top slot on Google but nowhere on DDG. I found that I needed to use `!g` for every other search, and figured that if it was causing this much additional effort it would make more sense to just default to Google.

One idea that I've had is building an extension that monitors Google searches and compares the results you click on to DDG. You could monitor which percentage of your chosen results appear on the first page of DDG. Maybe then I could actually quantify which queries are problematic.

> the quality of programming-related searches was just abysmal compared to Google.

My experience is precisely the other way around, but I've heard other devs say what you're saying.

I wonder what the difference between us is?

Language popularity can make a significant difference. Using DDG for purescript queries gives iffy results often enough that I instinctually add the g!. However, for something like Java, or even Clojure, I find that the top result across both engines is more or less the same

Maybe it's because Google keeps your previous queries and knows more about what you're looking for unless you wipe previous searches, whereas duckduckgo doesn't do that. It just gives you the standard results resulting in a bimodal results curve. For some people those are perhaps better than a concerted AI attempt from Google. Just a hypothesis though, no proof.

I’ve found the same, especially annoyingly ddg often gives me answers to much easier, less specific questions than the ones I search for. Like a keen Stack Overflow user.

That's counter to what i have found. Are you just seeing this on local or location related searches?

No, those are a whole separate thing that I wouldn't expect DDG to match the quality of. It's primarily been software development related queries.

For example, a few days ago I searched for "react dnd expected to find a valid target" on Google, and the first result is a GitHub issue describing the issue. All the results on the first page are related to the react-dnd library. The first result for the same query on DDG is an article titled "11 Prison Truths, Revealed By A Female Guard". None of the results on the first page are programming related.

Don't use react, and it's not in my search set, but regularly and happily search for programming and tech issues on DDG. I find it's far better than Google these days. So I thought I'd try your search without the quotes, as your first result is so far from my experience.

First result: https://github.com/react-dnd/react-dnd/issues/1127

Then a couple more from react-dnd's github, then the other seven on the first page are a mix of relevant SO, and github. Seems quite a few people have opened issues on that topic!

Maybe they fixed it. :)

So this is incredibly bizarre. I went back into my history and clicked on the exact entry corresponding to this search query, and the results are now all programming related. The previous first result ("11 Prison Truths, Revealed By A Female Guard") is now on the second page of results.

Or maybe landed on a different shard if they organise that way.

All searches vary, but generalising DDG does disappear off into the silly and completely unrelated as you hit lower pages, rather than fading into "looks relevant but isn't" of Google. Pages 1 & 2 I find mostly on the money.

What has changed is when I !g out to Google I often don't find the results there either, so it's time to get creative with keywords, or try millionshort for blog hunting. A few years ago a !g felt like a much more reliable escape option. Which feels like a mix of DDG getting better so I'm probably escaping harder queries, and Google simply missing the mark more often.

I use ddg as default search and find it perfectly capable.

I tried that same search query and the first result is https://github.com/react-dnd/react-dnd/issues/236

Strange that the first result you got does not appear at all in my first page of results, although I get plenty of other pages related to the same react issue (and neither do I use or search for react issues).

Even better, recently I started to notice when I have to fallback to Google, that usually brings me nothing new. Still do it out of habit, but that will have to go soon.

I thought this was just me and the esoteric technical issues I've been searching for lately. But...you're right. Even with general searches.

I use Google on my desktop and iPad, and DDG on my iPhone due to Google AMP.

While I find that DDG is pretty good for anything work related (e.g. programming stuff), it’s mostly worthless for things like "best chinese food in [some neighborhood]" or "shop cord knit stockings"… ironically, exactly the kind of stuff I gravitate toward my phone for.

I suppose it's not surprising that DDG is weaker in areas where Google has leveraged their products from other markets to enhance their search results. Well "markets" loosely since advertisers are the actual market, but I mean discrete products.

Google has Google Maps. That's why Google can find the best Chinese food in your neighborhood, it's learned to interpret that as a semi-map query right? They also have ads, which means cleaner data on who sells what right?

DDG to me seems to be great for when I need to search for keywords rather than a concept or multi-dimensional query for which DDG doesn't have the other n dimensions of source data.

For me, on iPhone Siri handles these kind of contextual questions for me while DDG takes care of other generic stuff.

I'll second this. DDG has been my default for 2+ years.

Google is better for obscure topics that lack good keywords to find them by. I usually know when I need to '!g'.

What's great about this is that we're still telling DDG what searches we need to do on Google, so they have plenty of diagnostic data available to better their searches (as opposed to skipping DDG entirely).

I do have one nitpick though: I clear all private data, and recently I was forced to get along with 16 kbit bandwidth (yes, slower than 56K, and yes, I spent a lot of time on HN for obvious reasons), and DDG definitely loads more data than Google for a query. Google needed maybe 20 seconds to load a page, DDG IIRC just timed out after some point. I'm guessing it's JS-frameworks?

DDG does have a lite HTML version of their site that is much faster.

https://duckduckgo.com/lite

And ddg can improve its results by slurping in Google's #1 result for every !g query, like Bing got caught doing.

Absolutely.

They're only really worse at localized results for me (Swedish).

I have mixed results, sometimes DDG is pretty good, a lot of times its about the same, but reasonably regularly it leaves me high and dry on an entire page of results and then usually the top hits on google give me what I want. However, I always go DDG first, then !g if I don't get what I want.

this is when you use !sp instead of google :)

Can someone explain the DDG business model? How does this company make money? How am I as a user being monetized? At least I understand Google’s approach.

As others have said, we get revenue from contextual advertising as opposed to behavioural advertising. In other words, if you search for "car" you'd see a car-related ad rather than an ad based on your search history or personal profile (which we don't have anyway).

There's more info about our business model here: https://spreadprivacy.com/duckduckgo-revenue-model/

Disclaimer: DuckDuckGo staff

Advertising.

Untargeted advertising.

There are some ads there. I don't think they have been very successful selling them, but it looks like search is cheaper to provide than it used to be.

I have had the same experience. Over the years I tried DDG and gave up a few different times. A year or so ago I gave it another try and never left.

How often do you use !g or other bangs?

I use alternate bangs all the time, which is a major win for DDG, as it skips the "go to the site first, or specify "site:<host> <search>", which actually is NOT equivalent as bang searches use the site or service's native search.

Fave bangs:

!w wikipedia

!wikisource WikiSource

!etym Online etymological dictionary

!ngram Google Ngram viewer

!trends Google Trends

!gbooks Google Books

!scholar Google Scholar

!tineye Image match search

!so stack overflow

!hn Hacker News

!twitter Obv.

!thread Threadreader App, Twitter thread presentation, preferred to above ;-)

!img Image search (now DDG, Google Image is !gimg)

!worldcat Worldcat union catalog

!osm Open Streetmap

!wayback Internet Archive Wayback Machine

!archive Internet Archive global (non-Web + web) search

!dict & !define Word look-ups

!s startpage (proxied Google search)

!bangs will give you a list of bangs / search form for patterns.

I use !g for specific types of searches. Like when I want to compare things, Google handles "vs" queries much better than DDG.

I use them all the time. !wt for Wiktionary, !forvo for forvo, !ji for jisho.org, !w for Wikipedia, !ud for Urban Dictionary, !clojuredocs, and a load of others.

In 5 years, I used !g maybe once. I use !pg, !wen and others very frequently.

Ones I use frequently are

!g google

!maps google maps

!yt youtube

!mwt merriam-webster thesaurus

!images ddg images

Even though I only regularly use these few I find them very useful.