I think Google has hit some sort of inflection point where their further attempts to improve search have made it a less useful experience and are mainly in service of their dual corporate mandate to put al ads in front of all eyeballs and control all access to all information.
For instance, I was feeling nostalgic and wanted to look at the Space Jam website last night, but I couldn't remember the URL, so I searched for "space jam". The first page was all garbage results about a potential Space Jam 2. Okay, that's generating a lot of buzz, I get it. So I searched for "space jam website". The results were hundreds of identical culture blogs talking about the website. Nowhere was the link to the actual website, which turned out to be spacejam.com by the way (I thought it was warnerbros.com/archive or something...)
Same thing with other search terms. I've been playing a lot of Animal Crossing lately. I remember a time when you could search for a topic about a video game and find a website answering the question, or a forum post with relevant information. Now all you get are blogs posted by people who clearly don't have English as their first language, and likely have not played the game. It's keyword blogs and fandom.com/wikia all the way down,
This is definitely one of the curses of the tech/software industry and we keep cycling through certain phases, it seems, building nearly unmanagable complexity in the process.
I regularly do !g, but I think the thing that is reducing that fastest is the declining quality of Google results. If I search for ‘x, y and z’, I then see a load of results with small text underneath saying ‘include z?’. It drives me demented, why wouldn’t I want to include my search terms?
Well, I think the answer to your question is Google is trying to be friendly to the layman. It's not hard to think of examples where the user inputs a something into the search box that a CS major knows will not result in the implied wants of the user. Google tries to do a lot of human to machine translation work, and I think you're seeing the result of it. That being said, you can use quotations to explicitly include terms.
A barely related side rant: my microwave decided it wants to error out when it thinks you're trying to microwave air. i have a bowl in there. stop telling me to open the door to put something in. Whatever engineer at GE thought they would be smarter than the user, you're one of the many reasons your company is going out of business.
The problem is when the warning is a "stop" and it doesn't have an override "I know what I'm doing".
I also hate that "feature".
I don't know how I feel about it, but I feel like this has happened in multiple places now: The dominant option is losing ground to competitors, not because they got better, but because the dominant option got worse. I've similarly argued that the Linux Desktop is now at least as good as Windows (and possibly MacOS), not because our UIs suddenly got more friendly (although they have improved), but because Microsoft shipped the Windows 8 ("who needs the start menu?") and 10 ("we'll merge the old and new control panels any day^wyear^wdecade now") interfaces, so the bar is so much lower. I don't know that this is progress, but it's great if you want FOSS to win. Likewise, it sucks that Google is getting worse, but hey, at least now there's less reason not to use DDG...
Who else here doesn't use !g?
It's been a long time since I used !g for anything. I did for awhile as an alternate search, but eventually it stopped being helpful -- if I didn't find any good results in DDG, then the Google results didn't help either. At this point it's probably been a couple years since I did a !g for anything.
If DDG has an flag to use location info for search relevance, I'd do that instead.
I do regularly use other Google search services, though. In particular, Google Books.
but recently I noticed what seem to be blind spots on many (maybe less popular?) topics. e.g. I can't find how to setup/configure borgbackup on nixos via ddg for any of ~3-5 query variations I tried. For non-logged-in google with uBlock the relevant documentation is the first hit.
So yes, while they do get results from Bing, it's a bit disingenuous to say that DuckDuckGo is just Bing.
> 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.
https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/du...
All the other 400 sources and their own crawler are just used for Instant Answers and widgets.
However they have never done so.
I simply changed my behavior to use a sports website directly for those queries, and DDG has been totally sufficient for everything else.
If anyone knows of other ways to contribute code to DDG I (and probably others) would be interested.
And then there's DDGs option to quickly switch to results in germany and back to international, depending on what I need.
Google is also headquartered in some of the most expensive real estate in America, while DDG is in Pennsylvania. I’d bet that Google is paying a lot more in land cost per employee than DDG is.
This is interesting because it highlights the changing expectation of web search engines from when they were just tools to find relevant webpages for a query.
Search engines have morphed into all-purpose utility and information tools. The bar for what makes a good search engine has been greatly moved forward. Organic web search results are now just one part of the measure of quality and relevance.
It might be helpful to point out that DDG (and other 'alternative' search engines such as Ecosia) get their search results from Bing.
> We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we also source from multiple partners, though most commonly from Bing (and none from Google).
Try searching for something random like "woxioai" on DDG and you will see that the search results are identical to Bing (albeit a slightly different order but I presume they do some internal sorting at least), while the search results are completely different on Google.
Also, how is this not a problem? If DDG ever becomes popular enough to be a threat, Bing just stops providing them search results.
It's totally a problem and disingenuous of the article to talk about the "Business Model" of DDG and not mention this.
I use google almost exclusively to improve search on other websites or for special syntax based searches that are far easier to implement than good general purpose search.
Site:reddit.com , site:stackoverflow.com are my most common search queries. Otherwise, it use it to open Maps, YT, HN as a landing page. Research and news both are usually acquired from a curated list of sources I visit directly, with no involvement from google. If it is something specific then I will use "quotes" to find that exact thing. Outside that, google scholar and maps are amazing, but I don't think DDG is trying to compete there.
The idea of searching for something with only a vague sense of what it is, has almost completely stopped. For generic searches the 1st page results of medium pages and single pager MSM articles are both useless and shallow. It isn't Google's fault that popularity and quality are orthogonal to each other.
If I genuinely cared about my privacy, I would seriously consider trying DDG out. However, I have surrendered all my data to corporate overlords and don't think there is much point in struggling anymore.
You could probably use bangs for that...
https://duckduckgo.com/bang?q=reddit
https://duckduckgo.com/bang?q=stackove
just prepend your searches with them, e.g. the following is equivalent to your SO search:
!sod something to search
Unfortunately, SEO sites like Medium that “democratize” writing seem to be a big contributor to this problem. The lowest common denominator there is not very high, yet shallow articles seem to get tons of exposure to search engines. Not to say there’s nothing good on Medium, I follow the people whose writing I like, and I like them quite a lot. It’s just lost in the noise.
I’m curious if you’ve found alternative sources (except HN, of course). Is DDG any higher quality?
I feel like the ideal for me would be something balanced between a search engine and content aggregator - I would like to search for what I want and get high quality results, but avoid the echo-chamber effect emerging from the use of upvotes as a ranking method as much as possible.
I believe there's a tipping point after which software quality doesn't scale at all; in fact, it only starts getting worse. People confuse quantity (roughly: number of features) for quality and they think they're improving quality by throwing more and more developers at it.
Same, my problem is that whenever I search for something that isn't english DDG can't find even the most basic stuff. Aside from that the migration has been pretty painless for me though so I have my hopes up.
I'm reminded of how AMD's graphics division is a fraction of the size of nVidia.
* WA: You'll get a correct result, but it takes 4 seconds.
* Google: 0.185806 square meters, obviously (instantly)
* DDG: Search results
Curiously, I find Google's to be the most helpful. I see the obviously incorrect result and instantly fix it. DDG gives me nothing. WA is too slow to e.g. play around with numbers.
My last computation was trying to figure out which bolt to get for a hole (with McMaster's selections for both bolts and, at some level, holes). I was converting hole sizes / bolt sizes between metric and imperial, and between fraction and decimals, playing around until I found a combo which worked. Once I had Google giving the right answers, I could play around until it worked. With WA, I would have had to wait 4 seconds each time.
By the time I'm doing anything beyond that, it's generally in numpy. There isn't really a spot for WA in between.
My, how far we've come.
$ time units -v '2 feet + 2 meters' feet
2 feet + 2 meters = 8.5616798 feet
2 feet + 2 meters = (1 / 0.11679951) feet
real 0m0.009s
user 0m0.005s
sys 0m0.004sI used to use google for this too, until I discovered GNU units [1]. GNU units is vastly superior to Google for complex formula and runs quietly in my command line.
Some examples:
Q: What's 72°F in °C?
A: $ units "tempF(72)" "tempC"
22.2
Q: How many teaspoons are in a tablespoon?
A: $ units "1 tbsp" tsp
3
Q: What is the total energy content of 1 kg or uranium, burned completely in a breeder reactor?
A: $ units "1 kg /(238 g/mole) * 200 MeV * 6.022e23 / mole" "MW*days"
938 Megawatt-days
Q: How many femtobarns are in a square teraparsec?
A: $ units "teraparsec^2" "femtobarn"
9.5e99 (very close to a google)
Q: How many hectares are there in a baker's dozen of mm^2?
A: $ units "10 bakersdozen mm^2" "hectares"
1.3e-08
I felt the same way for a while and even switched the default engine to DDG... but lately, I've stopped finding things and I was increasingly searching with "!g" to get something relevant, so I just switched back.
and this is where the !bang shortcuts are useful, and I like to think that DDG analyzes which requests were made with those bangs to hopefully refine and tune their systems to provide better results over time.
I don't think evil or benevolence needs a threshold. Size of the company is absolutely irrelevant. Marketshare is absolutely irrelevant.
DDG's redeeming quality is that they've focused their entire identity on privacy. Should they fail at privacy, then a lot of their users will bail. On the other hand it's not like some open source app or distributed protocol that users can inspect. It's still proprietary technology using a centralized model and you have to trust their word for it.
And in fact, for me their small size is actually a red flag. This is because big companies are also big targets for law enforcement. The EU has been historically trigger happy when applying fines to big companies, since it provides a valuable source of income (I imagine). Google is in fact under a lot more scrutiny than DuckDuckGo or other smaller companies.
And you can see this for example when interacting with Google's platforms, Adwords / AdSense, versus other smaller players in the "real time bidding" space. Google exposes a lot less about the user's profile, they leak a lot less, leaving a lot less opportunity for building your own user profiles.
They have also been transparent with their users about what they collect, even before the GDPR forced companies in the EU to be transparent. You can also opt out of logging app activity and profiling. Or more recently you could opt for a deletion of your history every 3 months.
Of course, you could say that you don't trust Google to do that. That's fine. But why do you trust DuckDuckGo then? They survive, after all, with the same business model. They say they don't give out your searches and info to Bing Ads, but you basically have to trust their word for it.
And given Google's history, how seriously they've handled security, plus they've always projected a certain maturity in handling user data (compared with Facebook), it seems to me that we are in conspiracy theories land. I was a DDG user, but seeing anti-vaxxers in the news recently led me to the conclusion that on the topic of privacy, my views are not evidence based. And I'm going to guess that a lot of other privacy conscious people did fall into the same trap as I did.
Going forward, for me there's only one way to ensure privacy and that is via technology (end to end encryption, open source, etc). And if I have to trust service and app vendors, I first need to identify my threats. Whom am I afraid of? What am I protecting against? Yes, I still fear Google, but now that fear is very contextual and task driven.
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> "c) Unsurprisingly, I find DDG's search results good enough. I rarely go to Google, and only when DDG fails me."
DDG fails horribly for me on two kinds of searches:
1. local searches — it's completely useless for local searches — imagine that I'm in Romania and if I want Romanian results for "restaurants", DDG gives me results in Spanish, from freaking Spain
2. software development searches — I would have expected DDG to be better, with their integration with GitHub and StackOverflow but isn't. It's actually really really bad, many times completely ignoring my words, giving me results for words I did not type, so there's this annoying back and forth where I try refining my searches with extra words and syntax, to force it to search what I want; this rarely happens with Google and when it does, it's because there are no results available
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That said, I would like for DuckDuckGo to improve and I am glad to see them doing well, because I'm a firm believer in competition. I would not like for Google to remain the sole option available.
On the other hand I really hope they divorce themselves from Bing. If Bing goes offline, or if Microsoft closes their API, it might kill DuckDuckGo. They do have integrations with other sources and their own partial index, but AFAIK Bing is their main source, which makes them effectively a Bing shell.
This is also why your operating costs are misleading. Because it's not an apples to apples comparison. Maintaining your own web index, apparently, is not that cheap. If it were, they wouldn't be using Bing.
a) DDG needs about 1/1000th the revenue of Google to survive at its current scale.
b) Software quality does not scale linearly with manpower. A 50-100 person team can do /almost/ as well as a 10,000 person team in the same domain. You spend a lot to go from 90% to 99% or 99% to 99.9%.
c) Unsurprisingly, I find DDG's search results good enough. I rarely go to Google, and only when DDG fails me.
d) If DDG can't target advertising as well as Google, they'll still have enough revenue to survive at their current level of quality. Their CPM is likely lower than Google's with less data and optimization, but I'd guess at worst 2x lower, not 1000x lower.
I'm glad they're doing well. On paper, it seems like a sound business model, and it's a heck of a lot more customer-friendly.
Curiously, I'd say 90% of the time I use Google is for math. If I'm typing a complex math expression (especially with units), Google tends to do much better than DDG.