FWIW, I prefer DDG's UI and instant answers over Google's (and DDG's !bang searches). I dislike how Google will frequently disregard words in my search queries. I only fall back to Google for extremely narrow searches for technical topics or recent events.

The frequency with which google chooses to leave out critical keywords is insane. A huge amount of my experience now with google is: search, search again with quotes because I know what I want, thanks google. Get the results, they are full of garbage.

DDG's image search beats the pants off of Google's, too.

Really? How so?

They certainly don’t have related/similar images, which I find useful.

Google Image Search has been intentionally crippled ever since the Getty vs Google lawsuit. GIS now seems to prefer showing me 'maxresdefault.jpg' YouTube thumbnails for at least 50% of results, presumably because the uploaders of those videos gave Google a license to use/distribute the work. Even for copyrighted works that still gives Google another party to blame.

Could you go into more details? What exactly were the ramifications of the lawsuit?

My understanding of it as an outsider is that Getty Images filed a suit against Google seeking money for their images being displayed in GIS results. They later announced a settlement, and the 'View Image' button disappeared and the search result quality plummeted (my judgement) at exactly the same time. Here's some more reading:

https://venturebeat.com/2018/02/09/getty-images-and-google-d...

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/02/internet-rages-after...

By the way, DDG image search is just Bing

I agree, aside from the 'Color' filter. I've found DDG's is very picky about choosing images that are _only_ comprised of your chosen color, instead of predominantly comprised like Google seems to do.

At least it still has a View Image button.

I did a hard cut to DDG almost 4 years ago now, when I last changed jobs. I honestly haven't missed Google as a search engine, with the exception of maps/directions. If anything I've found it easier to get what I want from DDG search than Google, especially on technical subjects.

If you're looking for a maps alternative that's not Google, I like HERE WeGo [0] and Transit [1] (if your city is supported).

[0] https://wego.here.com/ [1] https://transit.app/

I was you a few months ago. I had tried DDG on and off for years. It is significantly better now, though I can't say it's quite as good at google. For example, searching reddit is much better done with Google.

But in general, it is good enough that I switched and stayed switched. The most eerie thing, actually, is that so many ads have become de-contextualized. I no longer see ads for things I've recently searched for and it's so obvious that it's a little weird.

This is all that matters. For most users, privacy is simply less important than the quality of search results. DDG is toast unless they can figure out how to match or beat the quality of Google's results with 1/100th of Google's engineering capacity. They've been around for over 10 years and haven't really made much of a dent, so I don't see it happening.

DDG uses Bing I believe - take that for what it's worth.

> In fact, DuckDuckGo gets its results from over four hundred sources. These include hundreds of vertical sources delivering niche Instant Answers, DuckDuckBot (our crawler) and crowd-sourced sites (like Wikipedia, stored in our answer indexes). We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we also source from a variety of partners, including Verizon Media (formerly Yahoo) and Bing.

https://help.duckduckgo.com/results/sources/?redir=1

That page basically confirms this. It says

> To do that, we've developed an open source Instant Answer platform called DuckDuckHack,

which links to https://duckduckhack.com/ which says "DuckDuckHack is now in Maintenance Mode".

And the "four hundred sources" link links to 400 special case replies. They are probably useful, but fire rarely. It's basically Bing, and that page is a bunch of spin.

Yeah, it's interesting to do comparison searches between ddg and bing. On a few random searches I found I got identical top results - things start to differentiate after the first four or five.

So it's like a metasearch engine which also includes crawling of their own. Similar to dogpile[0],

> Powered by Metasearch technology, Dogpile returns all the best results from leading search engines including Google and Yahoo!, so you find what you’re looking for faster. [1]

[0] - https://www.dogpile.com

[1] - https://www.dogpile.com/support/aboutus

As far as I know they don't do any crawling on their own. It's also not meta: it's just bing and some special cases.

I was about to be like "ummmm no, that's silly"...

Then I looked it up(using Google - haha)

Well I'll be dammed, DDG does use Bing. Wow.

How can you claim "DDG is toast unless..." when they have hockey stick levels of growth? They're obviously doing something very right: https://www.revenuewire.com/performance-blog/duckduckgo-expe...

I don’t look at it as all or nothing. I set DDG as my default search and find what I need the vast majority of the time. Occasionally I’ll add !g to my query if I’m not having luck with the results.

With this ~95% of my searches avoid google and as DDG keeps improving that percentage will get higher.

With regard to UI, it’s quite nice that DDG supports dark mode automatically.

I must have pedestrian needs; DDG hasn't ever really left me with nothing when I search.

Same here. The big areas where I find DDG lacking and Google to really shine are technical questions (e.g. "what's wrong with my code, I'm getting stack trace X"), live sports coverage, and of course anything to do with maps.

It's funny you put it that way, because I've found that for certain technical questions, specifically with exploit related stuff, I'll get a watered down PG13 version with Google.

For example, if I'm looking for technical information on a bug Google will probably give me pages worth of Krebs On Security articles while DDG will give me POC repos on Github which I prefer.

The paranoid in me wants to believe this is deliberate by Google. That they selectively disseminate certain information and withhold others.

>I can rarely find what I need with DDG and usually always find it instantly with google.

Example?

I spent a winter weekend in Portland, Oregon and was surprised by thousands if crows in the sky in the evening.

The top result in a Google search for [crows in portland] is a snippet that answers my question with zero additional clicks required. If I want more info, I can click through the top result to a perfect, in-depth explanation.

It's the Audubon Society, a source I consider authoritative on this topic.

https://imgur.com/a/BajTXjV

The top result on DDG requires me to click through to a shitty local news site with an extremely lightweight story.

https://imgur.com/a/4aUZuEz

I'd have to click multiple DDG links to find what Google presented as the top result, and summarized nicely so I probably don't even need to click through.

Advantage: Google

To be fair, the perfect google result was the #2 result in DDG. If the worst impact of using DDG is that you might have to look over and select from the first 5 results to get the same answer google gives as the first result I'm perfectly fine with that. I'm pretty used to scanning over a list of results to pick the best sources before clicking anything.

I was using a "Duck" device today for the first time, and I wanted to look up some information about it online. I typed the first words that came to mind ("duck rope pro") on Google.com, and the #1 hit is an Amazon.com page that lets me buy it. Now I know the manufacturer and full name and basics specs, and it's now easy to find the manufacturer's webpage and user manual.

I typed the same terms on DDG, and clicked "more results" and scrolled down. The first relevant hit is #84, which is a link to a generic product listing page on an Australian online store. So DDG found 83 incorrect interpretations of "duck" before the rope fall protection one that I intended. The one it did find is pretty obscure. It's located neither in the country I live in, nor the country the device is made in.

Curiously, hit #80 is for google.com itself, so it seems even DDG gave up and pointed me to Google before finding a directly useful answer.

I like DDG's principles, but as a search engine, it's just not practical for me.

>I was using a "Duck" device today for the first time, and I wanted to look up some information about it online. I typed the first words that came to mind ("duck rope pro") on Google.com, and the #1 hit is an Amazon.com page that lets me buy it.

That is a good example. However, if I may...

You used a device and wanted to learn more about it, you searched using some general terms, as you say Google's top result was the product...but it was the Amazon page that "lets you buy it." Now you could have skipped the Google middleman if you wanted to buy the product and just gone to Amazon (you will find their search isn't much better than DDG based on your search term). All in all you didn't say you wanted to buy it you wanted to learn more, and yet we see Google's biased results is: 1) pushing the sale of the product; 2) their #1 result is Amazon which is loaded with fake results about the product (and honestly would you really trust buying your climbing equipment from Amazon)? All in all they got you a relevant result as the #1 result, but beyond that IMO its a terrible result.

I just tried this search myself; and what I think you're after is the 2nd, 3rd(ish) and 4th result. https://imgur.com/HSnq77P.png

No, the Kong Duck is completely different than the SafeTec Duck. Its manual even has a warning that it’s not to be used for fall protection.

Same here.

I finally took the plunge and replaced google with ddg in my browser omnibar last week.

After a couple of days I switched back after having to search on google too many times.

I switched to DDG a few years ago. I think what I found was that I started being more specific in my search terms. I think its because Google has a profile about me that it applies to my searches but DDG doesn't know as much about me.

So for example, I might search for a class name and Googole will know what language / environment I'm working it, but I'll need to tell that to DDG when searching.

True !

Recently this has become pretty annoying in some cases : if I search the name of a sports team even though I mean something totally different, Google will start sending me notifications about that team. To make it worse, how to remove that team from your 'interests' is a bit convoluted.

I also have to go out of my way to make google understand that I am sometimes looking for a result in my native language (I live abroad).

Most of the time it is on point though. It does indeed seem that it taylors dev questions to the languages I use or more generally my interests.

If this kind of logic could be somehow stored on device instead of being something that Google (or Apple or whatever other company I don't have infinite trust in) owns, that would be a killer search product.

I use Qwant. Then google.

It’s a pain, but I’d say Qwant works about 60% of the time, usually for basic stuff. I find DDG to generally be more relevant than Qwant, but Qwant to be a bit more novel, which is part of why it’s my mobile default.

But take that with a MASSIVE grain of salt. I can’t say I’ve done any thorough analysis or paid close enough attention to judge that well. I’ll probably switch to DDG again regardless, as Qwant thinks I’m a bot fairly regularly.

This is all YMMV. I find DDG to be much better than Google.

I used to have to revert to Google for programming issues, but for the last few years or so DDG has worked every time. Vastly prefer it to Google and their annoying ads and, for me, inferior search.

> it needs a gradient mode

add !g somewhere in your ddg query to search google

Yeah that’s the problem. If I need to add that to all my queries why use it at all?

Because you can also add "!b" for bing, "!w" for wikipedia, "!a" for Amazon, etc. Unless you think typing URLs in google's search box is easier.

You don't have to route all your searches through DDG to achieve that. https://support.mozilla.org/sv/kb/assign-shortcuts-search-en...

https://www.startpage.com/ works. DDG does not.

The thing i really like about bangs is that i can often just assume one exists, with zero setup, across all my devices. I don't search IMDB frequently enough to bother manually adding it in a menu somewhere, but on both desktop and mobile i can do `!imdb Brad Pitt` and get directly where I intended. It also works with less common sites, like I've been using `!stardew` lately to search the Stardew Valley Wiki directly.

The most I've had to do is search the bangs documentation if i can't find the search engine i want. (for Terraria stuff i sometimes wanted `!terrg` rather than `!terraria`, and ended up searching to find the former)

With a good search engine you would just omit the exclamation mark and type "imdb brad pitt" (without quotation marks) and the first result would be as good here: https://www.startpage.com/do/search?query=IMDB+Brad+Pitt

As here: https://www.imdb.com/find?s=all&q=brad%20pitt

No bangs needed.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=imdb+brad+pitt - the first link is to https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000093/

I can type 'ama' + enter and get Amazon instantly. If I need something on wikipedia I can just search for it and the wiki page will generally be in the top 10 results from Google. As for bing... I have never knowingly or consciously used it to search for something.

You are missing the point.

The point is that with DDG, you have a uniform syntax for searching multiple services that doesn't require any special cooperation from your browser or those services, doesn't require any setup apart from using DDG and only requires you to learn one new concept.

And this will work anywhere where webpages work (like, say, lynx), and will work consistently. There are thousands of !bangs, from things ranging from amazon, to wikipedia, to maps, to dictionary definitions... You aren't limited to a handful of hand picked services that your browser decided to support out of the box, or that you decided to manually configure.

Also, there is generally decent support to switch languages and regions for services that support it. For example, "!w" gets you "wikipedia", "!wsimple" gets you the "Simple English" version and "!wpt" gets you the Portuguese version.

IMHO, this is all extremely convenient.

I don't need to apply it to all my queries, maybe only 5-10% of them. It's a big win if I can easily complete 90-95% of my online queries without needing to worry about Google. Plus I'm used to all the other bang patterns at this point.

At the end of the day, though, it's a personal choice I make. I put in a small sliver of extra effort and get in return a big boost in privacy. It's worth it for me, but perhaps not for everyone.

For privacy.

if you sign in using your google account (or perhaps use chrome) they still know and record your searches. typing "!g" in ddg just sends the query to google. everything else applies i think.

Privacy is useless if I can’t do my job.

You can do your job and type two extra characters, or you could just use it for personal use and not at work. DDG is actually better than google in many cases when it comes to searching for code related things. After a month or so you start to have a sense of what sort of searches need to fall back to using !g (which is pretty much only obscure questions/answers, I find).

If you don't care about your privacy and don't want to dealing with learning a new search engine to the level you've learned google, then this article probably isn't for you.

The idea you wouldn't be able to do your job or that it would be impacted in a nontrivial way by switching to a different search bar in your browser seems ridiculous, correct me if I'm wrong.

> The idea you wouldn't be able to do your job or that it would be impacted in a nontrivial way by switching to a different search bar in your browser seems ridiculous, correct me if I'm wrong.

Personally I would absolutely consider this to be wrong.

There is only so much cognitive energy we all have during the day. You have to spend it wisely. There are certain groups of people on the fringe (early adopters, Linux desktop folks, the people who run their own mail servers, etc...) who have the willpower (and can afford!) to trudge through the transition from one tool to another. Sometimes you can see the value of that transition before you make it, and so it's easier to push through. Other times, there is no light at the end of the tunnel or it's not very bright. The same thing happens when people switch operating systems or programming languages.

So there is always a cost to switching tools. That cost is either going to pay for itself in the end or it's not. I do not see DDG ever paying for itself.

Because you shouldn't need it for most queries.

for the gradient mode.

Have you tried bang searches? If DDG doesn't find what you want, just add !g to the end of your search.

Can you please provide a list of at least 10 examples where ddg doesn‘t work for you but google does? Ideally write an additional line per item what the problem is. I use ddg and have no problems whatsoever but maybe we have a different query profile?

Quit searching like you're using Google and start searching like you're using WebCrawler or AltaVista or Lycos or Yahoo!

Never had a single issue finding even the obscure stuff I look for when I get rid of Google habits and use habits of web 1.0

I would pay not to have to do that. That sounds completely horrible.

> I can rarely find what I need with DDG

Me neither. That's why I use https://www.startpage.com/