I have been using DDG for roughly 2 years now and I always search for things technical or non-technical there first. If it does not give any result or when I know it's very technical I simply add !g to the end (but you can add it anywhere) and it automatically searches the same thing in Google.

Some examples of things I personally thing DDG could improve / is different then Google:

- DDG gives the feeling they prefer wikipedia over stack overflow. Stack overflow ranks often second.

- GLSL shaders. DDG does not index websites such as shadertoy. Example search for "Gold Noise Uniform Random"

- indexing Youtube and other videos. It takes up to 2 days before new youtube videos show up if you search for a video. Example a mcdonalds burned down in my city a few weeks ago so I searched for videos and photos. It did not find any videos only photos and articles. Google found a few videos including once on a dutch news website.

- Visual search and reverse image lookup is not that great. Only in Bing you can search for a video based on a image DDG and Google both can not do that. So both could improve that.

- DDG sometimes gives the feeling not enough people have searched for something, This feeling is more a feeling then a real thing. This is mostly because Google finds a lot of spelling / typo's in your search query and DDG appears to only repairs it until it contains valid words. Example search for "A apple a day keps the", Google corrects AN and KEEPS but DuckDuckGo only corrects KEEPS.

- Old websites are not indexed that well. Example if you are developing a gameboy advance game it takes a while before you find Tonc (one of the best resources regarding GBA development). With google this experience is terrible as well but it takes less time to find some good things.

> Example search for "A apple a day keps the", Google corrects AN and KEEPS but DuckDuckGo only corrects KEEPS.

Not just spell check but Google understands natural language queries, too, better than duck.com.

Ex A:

https://html.duckduckgo.com/html/search?q=the%20movie%20wher...

https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=the%20movie%20where%20...

Note that the comments regarding indexing should be attributed to Bing, the underlying search engine that DDG uses currently. I too switch to !g occasionally when searching particular niches.

I use !sp (Startpage). It's basically a Google proxy, if I understand correctly.

As far as I know, not anymore.

What happened to it? edit: nvm, found answer below

> - indexing Youtube and other videos. It takes up to 2 days before new youtube videos show up if you search for a video. Example a mcdonalds burned down in my city a few weeks ago so I searched for videos and photos. It did not find any videos only photos and articles. Google found a few videos including once on a dutch news website.

If I know that I am searching a YouTube video, I usually search directly on youtube.com. I use Firefox search keywords for this, I just type "yt Rick Astley Never" in my top bar and instantly see the results. Pretty sure Chromium et al. should have something similar...

One problem with this approach is that Youtube's search just feels so bad (at least compared to what you expect out of Google) and what's worse, they limit the number of search results. So you get around 10 somewhat related results and then they just instantly stop and you get some "you might like these videos as well" results. Frustrates me to no end and I think there could be a great opportunity in somehow indexing videos properly and creating a search engine around it. Then again you'd think Google would've done this but maybe they aren't able to. But in any case I'd prefer an endless stream of semi-related videos compared to their 10 results.

> I have been using DDG for roughly 2 years now and I always search for things technical or non-technical there first. If it does not give any result or when I know it's very technical I simply add !g to the end

I am the same, but i default to !sp (startpage.com) first.

They claim:

> You can’t beat Google when it comes to online search. So we’re paying them to use their brilliant search results in order to remove all trackers and logs. [...]

you do know that startpage.com "is now owned by an ad company" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21371577

You say this as Google isn't an ad company x).

But yes, i know. I still use it, because i trust those guys to have a good-enough judgement on this. https://blog.privacytools.io/relisting-startpage/

Maybe they're not perfect, but i'm convinced they are a hell lot better than submitting my data to Google. ;)

don't use !g use !sp which is startpage, a proxy for google searches that won't tell google what you're searching for

The key to technical questions in ddg is to be very verbose. From tracking you Google knows you're a programer who works in Java, ddg doesn't do that by design.

When I search "transformer" in ddg I get the movie franchise, when I do it in Google I get the ones you see hanging on utility poles. Google knows I look at power electronics. When I search "voltage transformer" in ddg I get the same quality results as google.

I use DDG as well but I went further and told Firefox to use a dedicated container for google domains. I also did it because they made Youtube really annoying to use when you're not logged in, so I made a burner account but it's only active inside this container and they can't track me around the web (at least, not with that).

You might enjoy invidious. It's a frontend for youtube that cuts 99% of the bloat and show videos directly in your html5 player. It even supports subscriptions without a google account!

FWIW you can also subscribe to YouTube channels / Playlists (IIRC) via RSS feeds. I think they removed the official buttons, but the links still work and are easy to forge by hand.

Is it still running ok. Didn’t the main instance shutdown or something? Sorry, I forget the specifics.

The instance of the original dev has shut down because he seized developement, but the project ist still doing fine. There's multiple public instances, but those are often unable to handle all user requests and get rate limited by google every now and then. I'm currently using invidious.tube, it has a good "real" uptime in my opinion (the site is up the whole time but might have issues like described above). I'm considering just self hosting should things get worse.

I see. Thanks for your reply.

I haven't had success with using Invidious. I'd love to ditch the YT frontend and tracking though.

I have extensions that remove suggested videos on the sidebar, homepage, and during the video; as well as ads, comments, and product recommendations. I use YT in a Firefox container without an account that is separate from my other Google container.

You can run your own instance; that’s what I do. Public instances tend to be overloaded or their external IP becomes temporarily banned by YouTube (since its traffic is obviously more than what a typical home would use).

How do you specify what sites to be put in a container? What I want to be able to do is anytime I click on my bookmark link, it'll open it up in a new container. I haven't figured out a way to do this without some manual process.

The official "Multi-Account Containers" extension does that. Honestly I don't understand why it's not built-in, because as you mention without it it's hard not to "leak" outside of the containers.

With it you can associate domains with containers and tell Firefox to always open them in a container. It will also automatically un-containerize if you follow a link to a third party domain. Basically how I expect containers to work.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account...

Holy crap thank you so much for this! This was the primary thing I complained about for containers and why I never bothered to use them. I completely agree this should've been integrated with it and it makes no sense to me why. Containers as it is are pretty tedious.

The Enhancer for YouTube extension cuts down on the annoying things when not logged in. I was able to move to YouTube to temporary containers using the EfYT extension to set my preferences.

I use ublock origin, I don't get ads on youtube.

I pay for YouTube's premium service and I don't get ads either.

I do the same. I am a little annoyed that I can’t pay for ad-free Youtube without also buying YouTube Music, which I didn’t need.

Content costs money, and if I don’t want ads, I need to pay the difference. I where a little surprised to see Linus Tech Tips break down they income and showing that Youtube Premium as significant source of revenue.

I think it’s they’re intrinsically baked together as YouTube has had to license music for all those YouTube music videos, which are hugely popular as you could imagine.

Yeah. I don't use YouTube Music and don't care about downloading or background playback, so I'm not ready to pay $11.99/month just to hide ads.

As a music listener I love YouTube music app, it's great being able to listen to almost anything I want in high quality any time.

I tried a couple years ago, but didn't like it that much. Ended up going back to spotify.

I remember trying to get the Guardians of the Galaxy awesome mix, and it only had a youtube video with all songs glued together. Also, it was a bit weird experience overall because they matched so many random videos

When I tried it, I couldn't deal with it auto-generating a 'related' playlist whenever I played anything. (I pay for YT Premium, so if I could use YT Music then I wouldn't have to pay for Spotify.) How did you deal with that problem?

To get around that go to the artist and start a song from their top playlist or an album and it will just play their songs.

It is great, I just didn’t want it originally, but now that I paying for it I’ve started using it a fair bit.

I do too and pay everywhere I can for the services that I use. The world would be a far better place if it didn’t need ad support, and the only alternative that so far works at all is direct payment.

Along these lines, why doesn't google introduce a paid search service without ads? My hunch is that no matter the price point, it would be a huge revenue hit compared to actual advertising payments.

My other hunch is that it would make the non ad-free experience greatly cheapened in the eyes of the consumer, in the same way youtube with ads feels different after experiencing youtube premium.

Because if you allow a paid option, all the people worth advertising to switch to that, and now the advertising portion of the business is worth a lot less.

They’re betting they can get more out of advertisers than paying subscribers.

They have Google Workspace, which is pretty similar, but more focused on small businesses.

Pro tip: on iOS most adblockers will block YouTube ads so long as you use youtube.com in the browser, not the YouTube app.

YouTube in the browser has almost all features of the app now, so there's no compelling reason to use the YouTube app.

+1 to this. I haven't seen ads for years until I switched to M1 macs and had to use safari for a while.

There are content blockers for safari.

There is on mobile and there's so much nowadays that I had to stop clicking video links on my phone.

You can use Youtube Vanced (Youtube Advance without the Ad) on your phone. I can not recommend it enough. It also supports "Sponsor blocker". It's the best app for youtube addicts.

I was fine with a small amount of ads but yeah I guess I'll have to try it now.

The irony is that I was a Google Play Music subscriber until its death but in my country you still had the Youtube ads.

You can have ublock origin on firefox mobile.

I use it to but I use a manual blocker with my own lists. I can't find a way to block YouTube ads.

I use unlock origin, I didnt eve know there were ads on YouTube.

> they have noting to do with anything I care about

Why is this good? For me personally, both FB and Google figured out that I'm into home renovation and all they keep recommending me is relevant stuff. So I consider it free research done for me :) Contractors, webshops, pretty images are all over my feed.

I even press accept cookies for webshops I want to see more of their competition :)

Eh. I don't really want to be sold to even if the thing I'm being sold might be interesting to me. I don't need more stuff and I really don't need my brain thinking I need more stuff. To each their own.

> Why is this good?

Saving money instead of being manipulated to buy something I otherwise wouldn't is good for me and the environment.

I use DDG as well. I use FF as my primary personal browser, I have installed uBlock Origin and Enhancer for YouTube, https://www.mrfdev.com/enhancer-for-youtube, and I now never get any ads on YouTube.

I don't understand what's the issue with the technical queries.

Are they ambiguous? Are they paraphrasing the error description?

Because for me, most of the time, I just paste the error message into DDG, and the relevant Stack Overflow answer, not question page, the actual answer, is in DDG search results for me to use and fix my problem.

This is actually one of my favourites DDG features, along with currency conversion.

Out of curiosity, do you use the "Send Feedback" in the bottom-right(!) corner of the results page to let them know? I have almost zero belief it does anything, but without even attempting to provide feedback I don't think it's reasonable to expect any change

As the person who just read through feedback today, I can assure you that each piece of feedback sent is received, read and logged by real humans who care and more importantly deeply appreciate the fact that users take time to send feedback :)

Foremost, thank you for your service! I really, really want DDG to be successful and I'm glad to know the feedback doesn't /dev/null. If I might be so bold as to suggest that hiding the "Send Feedback" in the bottom right is a very opaque location for what is arguably a vital interaction DDG has with its users.

While I have an insider: I see a lot of mentions in the threads about folks who use "!g" or "!sp" -- are those counted as votes of suboptimal DDG results? I could see it going either way: it's a bad metric for those users who just default to doing it, but it's a good metric for searches that end in the frustration of a series of bad DDG results

Could you consider making a list of common feedback items that already have resolutions? I imagine it would make a popular HN submission in addition to a useful FAQ.

I have the same experience - my two major issues with DDG are the results for technical searches, and I wish that it showed more basic info for businesses like phone number/address/hours without me having to click around a bunch.