Hmm, I wouldn't call them histrionics. It's their marketing. David v Goliath.

You don't use DDG because it's better than Google. You use it because it's not Google. So of course they remind people of that constantly. And... Google can take it.

I do think it's fair to complain that duck.com redirects to google.com if you're DDG. It's also fair for Google to do it anyway! Both sides are playing their part and that's okay. (Google did sell it to DDG, though, so good on them.)

I used to work at Mozilla, and it's crazy how easily a large company can crush you by... just existing. Google can funnel people to Google Search from Android, Chrome, Gmail, etc. Google is the defacto default, and DDG has to fight desperately for anyone to care.

I use DDG because it's better than Google in my scenarios. Yes, Google is often better for "hard" searches, but actually DDG tends to give me what I want, not some SEO monstrosity, on my normal searches.

Even on my hard searches, Google gives me a bunch of useless SEO and ads. It's like we're past peak search and we're slowly going to stop being able to find things on the internet.

Everyone has anecdotes, I’m a DDG user and the results are nearly always worse/more stale than I got before ditching google two years ago (still have to !g a lot) but hey, at least it’s not google all the time.

Google having a decade of my search history just makes for really relevant results, even if I don’t like the company’s practices.

Bangs are the killer feature for me and I'm surprised google hasn't stolen it yet. Just kinda illustrates how entrenched Google's search engine is that it keeps removing features rather than adding them and still is number one search engine in the world.

Chrome supports fully customizable bangs (and I assume Firefox does too) so why should Google search bother with them?

Chrome is one of those cases where i think it could be an open and shut case of monopolistic abuse, exploiting their search monopoly to promote chrome at zero cost and then also using chrome to promote google.com.

> exploiting their search monopoly to promote chrome at zero cost

And gmail, and YouTube, and gsuite, and google meet, and blogger, and in the past bundled in other installers as a drive-by installation (Flash for instance), and ... the list probably goes on.

Clearly monopolistic abuse.

True, most non-technical people I know don't know that a search engine and an Internet browser are two separate things. They only know internet browsing as Chrome+Google search. If they are given Microsoft Edge at work or something, they'll search Google on Bing, go to Google, bookmark it and use it :D

I use Qwant primarily and DDG on mobile. But that's a personal choice and it works for me. I think with Chromebooks given away at schools to kids, Google will become synonymous with internet. Heck, I think Chromebooks will be synonymous with computers to them. It's what it is.

DDG is attacking the weakness in their strength, a pretty classic technique for a lower tier player to attack the leader.

By redefining privacy as "we don't know you" instead of "we keep your stuff secure" their doing a clausewitz style offensive.

There's limitations to this technique and that's what they keep hitting. They're not going vertical on their beachhead, so yeah, this is what happens.

Eh, whatever, it's not like I work there so best of luck to them.

Please don't redefine privacy as "we know everything about you and we're going to exploit that information for profit but won't give it to anyone else except governments whatever their purpose may be because they only ever use it for a good cause." That's not what it is.

My (and your) personal definition isn't at play here.

When companies offer you privacy they usually mean privacy from others, not from the company itself.

This is the hard reality of what these companies mean when they use the word privacy.

Okay, but "hard reality" isn't the same as "the newbie is redefining things".

Huh? I don't understand your point here. I've been doing business building for 20 years, I hope I'm not that green.

This is a business purposing claim and that's it.

Really? Does my bank inspect the contents of my safe deposit box and auction off that info for ads?

That's a ridiculously unprofitable business model, of course they don't but almost entirely because that idea is unsound and not at all practical.

When a hotel offers privacy for instance, they aren't saying they'll wear a blindfold to check you in - their data retention policy is identical - they're talking about privacy from others.

When a plane offers privacy in first class, they're not saying they'll shred your fight record after landing, it's privacy from others.

When uber is offering privacy, they're not saying you can anonymously book and crypto pay the amount, no, it's privacy from others - they know the same amount about you as any other user

I have a friend here in LA that does privacy centric medical services (hiv, drug rehab). The target demo is celebrities who are shying away from paparazzis and gossip columnists. He still has the customer list however

They 100% sell your transaction information, as does Visa and MasterCard. Google buys that, as do Amazon and Facebook and many other companies.

> By redefining privacy as "we don't know you" instead of "we keep your stuff secure" their doing a clausewitz style offensive.

You mean they know the difference between privacy and security?

I'm actually not sure I see the difference here when your information and access to you are the only things a website can secure at all. If you're selling my information, or access to me, that's by definition terrible privacy.

Granted this isn't the definition of "privacy" that corporations will use, but that's hardly an accident.

Privacy is "we don't know you".

It's not so much about what's "fair", it's about what's right. Fabricating some baseless headline about how Google is intentionally hoarding duck.com to overplay the "David v Goliath" story is just lame. I do agree this is their marketing, but twisting the truth and the facts to forcefully drive a narrative should be called out.

Google happened to own the domain via an acquisition. They own a lot of domains via acquisition. It’s one of the only ones they redirected to Google.

People don’t take kindly to gigantic corporations punching down on tiny little companies whose sole existence is to highlight the big corp’s lack of privacy. It’s not a good look.

It's not a fabrication.

Using an 'auction' model is a very easy way for Google to undermine the credibility of the anti-trust legislation.

Any upstart that would theoretically 10x better wouldn't ever be able to get any material market share.

Imagine if there were only 4 car dealerships allowed in America and everyone had to 'bid' on the distribution. There would be no Tesla.

And upstart would have much more chance to win an auction than magically get enough market share to get onto the list. This method is actually much better for newcomers than the other.

An upstart would have 0 chance of winning the auction.

It's tantamount to a wireless spectrum option - enormous costs involved.

I use DDG because it’s better than Google. Any search engine that actually allows me to use it is better than one that doesn’t:

https://lee-phillips.org/byeGoogle/

I set my default search to DDG and I find myself using G! in my queries a lot more than I want to.

I'm genuinely curious about the examples where you didn't find the result on ddg and found via !g

I've noticed that if I don't find something on ddg and go to google I usually don't find what I'm looking for there either.

Have the same, really want to like ddg for over a year but I almost hit !g every time

In practice ddg is great for everything except searching for programming related things. I guess Google knows I'm a programmer and filters my results accordingly. Sadly about 60% of my searches are programming-related.

Programmer here. I've been using DDG for about 2 years and only find myself desperately going to google about once per month. And that's usually for image search. Google's results now seem to me too "commercial" as if all the spots were just sold, offering me something they want to sell, not what I want to search.

DDG is great for me for almost everything (including programming) besides very long tail results, specifically rare error messages.

I use ddg exclusively on all my devices for over three years now and can‘t complain. I had no reason to switch to g! for any topic I needed results. So I wonder if I would solve issues in programming faster or not using google. I never had the feeling my programming related searches are not spot on.

What does that do?

It’s called a “bang command”, [1] and DDG redirects that search to another site. You can set DDG as your default search engine but rely on these commands to search on other sites. Just put the bang command anywhere in your search term or phrase.

In this case, “!g” means search on google.com. So you get redirected to Google for that search. You can search on Startpage with !s, Wikipedia with !w, IMDB with !imdb, Amazon with !a, Google Images with !gi and so on. There are thousands of bang commands.

[1]: https://duckduckgo.com/bang

Redirects you to a Google search (try it here: https://duck.com?q=!g%20test)

A google search

with less bubble/tracking I think. but I only !g a few times a year so not an expert on it

Why would there be less tracking? It's a regular google search, accessed directly from within your browser window.

Ironically, your website doesn't actually allow me to use it.

I appreciate the sentiment about having a fact-based debate but it’s difficult to engage in an argument about the facts when the issue you raised is that you’re annoyed about something. What exactly would we be debating here?

We can start at why this is filed under 'Privacy Research' - pure FUD.

I was slightly annoyed and impressed that their 'histrionics' managed to finagle a high-value domain, for zero cost, from Google. When you're a fiesty up-and-comer, you do what you can.

On the other hand, Google seems to be now playing the old Microsoft game of keeping competitors alive so as to keep the regulators at bay.

Please don't break the site guidelines like this, regardless of how wrong someone else is or you feel they are.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> What they are doing is very little different than what Google did when Google was the plucky underdog.

I don't remember to be the case. Google won because the existing search engines at the time (altavista, excite, etc) paled in comparison to its search results. Same for its other services like Gmail that offered 1gb space when Hotmail offered only 2mb.

I can understand the Google hate but they did many things right also to capture the top spots.

You imply that google did the same when they were the underdog, but I don't see any clear parallels between their practices.

What did google do when they were the underdog?

Launched a clearly better product that everyone flocked to because it worked so much better than the competition. I'm not sure how that relates to DDG though.

They ranked based on relevance, not who paid the most. That was new.

They are the underdog anyway.

What do you suppose them to do? To somehow magically grab the surveillance capitalism profit with just a search engine?

Without that profit, they'll have to play some silly moves.

For anyone who has even just superficial understanding of the market mechanism behind google, you'll see that there is no space of another search engine, as long as Google still needs a search engine.

> how they just need a free spot in the Android setup wizard and their market share would be 20%, and they should be the one blessed search engine who doesn't have to pay.

It worked when Microsoft had to implement browser choice. No reason why the spots should need to be auctioned this time.