Over the past 5 years I’ve tried DDG several times. Each time except the last I wanted to stick with it but the results simply didn’t stand up to what I’d see on Google.
About 6 months ago (a year? I can’t remember) I switched and haven’t looked back. Now, when I look at google, the results actually look less relevant. As well, the ads on Google have become very obnoxious. I don’t feel like I’m being served the best results but instead results of companies who paid the most.
I think I mentally give DDG a harder time than it deserves. When I search something and don't see the result I want I think "Wow ddg is shit, I'll try this on google" And then I still don't see what I want and think "The info I am looking for doesn't exist or my search was wrong"
Despite both failing I tend to be a lot more lenient to google.
Bing and Yandex are worth trying too. I just had a total failure from a Google search yesterday, where the official site for a piece of software wasn’t on the first 3 pages. I went over to bing and it was #1. I’m getting to the point where I predict a search will fail on google and I go to another engine. This never happened before, even in the Demand Media content farm debacle where horse shit ehow ranking for millions of major keywords.
I’ve been using the web since the best option was Yahoo’s hand curated directories. Google is in really serious trouble. These search engine switches happen very quickly, as soon as one of them is showing better results, the switch happens abruptly and it’s one way.
Try "what is my ip" and you will see that DDG displays 207.46.13.131 in the cached snippets, which is Microsoft Bingbot and also the same IP that Bing shows in their cached snippets.
I think this is a great mentality to have. If I look back to the "Before Google Days", I was using Yahoo Search, AOL Search, whatever other search engines that existed. And not to sound like a cranky old man not hip with the kids these days, but having to shop around for what you're looking for doesn't seem like a bad thing to train the kids these days to do... now get off my lawn.
I have similar experience. Upon reflection, when searching, I had some preconceived expectation about the result, maybe a stackoverflow answer, maybe a wiki article, that made me "think" google result was better. But in reality, it was because I was expecting the result, in particular the result from google, before having the result. The longer you use DDG, the less google-specific result I expect. Of course, DDG's search is improving, but I think it is my own search result expectation that leads to the impression that google's search was better.
Google's results have definitely become more quirky. Just now I was writing some SQLite database code and was wondering how the sum() aggregate handles integer overflow. So I searched for "sqlite integer overflow" in DDG and Google. To my surprise the first result in Google is someone's random blog post[0] from 2011 describing their experience which doesn't answer my question at all. I am very surprised Google decided to put this as the first result. Both DDG and Google gave me results on Stack Overflow, but only Google managed to give me the official documentation of aggregate functions on the sqlite website, with the snippet highlighting the relevant fact: "Sum() will throw an 'integer overflow' exception if all inputs are integers or NULL and an integer overflow occurs at any point during the computation."
Overall I still believe for sloppily constructed queries for which I want specific results Google seems to read my mind better and produce better results than DDG, but Google is very quirky.
This is a particularly interesting query, as both SO and the query itself share the word overflow, which probably is throwing off DDG from the result you were looking for.
For me, on DDG, it's the first result on the 2nd page, on Google, it's the third result.
It would appear that DDG and Google's results differentiate in a way, that the sequence of words probably don't matter on DDG, but do matter on Google.
Same, when I first tried DDG (2 yrs ago) the results were horrible. Now I've switched to DDG permanently 2 weeks ago as the results are good enough. Later I'm gonna change my parent's default search engine to DDG in a few days of more testing.
I love that DDG has almost no spam and the fact that it's so on point to the queries and doesnt perform the wide search. My dad has a few websites that he's visits daily, and he just goes to them directly. Since Google and DDG cant differentiate themselves much any more, I feel like the next direction for every tech company is a larger emphasis on user privacy and it's only going to be more important for already established markets as a differentiator.
Once DDG grows by 2x more, it'll become a significant competitor to Google. At the point, that additional data advantages likely approaches diminishing returns. Remember, network effects arent exponential in real life, they follow an "S" curve.
I've had very similar experiences, I'd tried DDG several times over the years but around ~12 months ago I found DDG's usability and quality of searches to jump significantly.
I completely disagree on the quality front. I really wanted DDG to be good and I tried sticking with it for a while. I found usability (reads keyboard shortcuts, special keywords, etc.) a breath of fresh air compared to Google. But it's no substitute for the significant lack of quality results. For when you don't really need search it works great.
DDG is terrible at any location type search and extremely US centric.
You can switch to country mode but then it stops including loads of results.
A perfect example is when you search for a product or book or something. Without the switch, it returns the company website and amazon.com, the latter being utterly useless and irrelevant to anyone outside the US.
But if you turn the switch on, the company website disappears, but you get amazon.co.uk.
Or another example, I was searching for a butternut squash soup recipe. Oddly DDG had no BBC food results. Until I clicked the switch, then it did, but loads of good other recipes completely disappeared.
As for bar, restaurant, etc. names, ugh. DDG is useless.
They need to figure out how to do local searches with privacy, a way I can set a rough location and they remember it.
At the moment their location centric searches are a decade behind Google.
Well, as DDG doesn't track you, you'll have to provide it a bit more context, such as the city you'd like to conduct the search for (or language or country), either in the search query itself, or using the switch displayed conveniently on top of every page of search results. I don't find that too onerous.
Conversely, I find it annoying when Google gives me Swedish results, just because my VPN happens to route through Uppsala today.
I've searched for books, bars, restaurants, opera, and plenty more in many countries (with VPN routed to plenty of other countries) in the last several years on DDG without any issues, and with no need to switch to other search engines.
And you way under estimate how much work it takes to make and maintain a proper dark mode across a site. If it was truly 3 lines of CSS, every single website out there would have native dark mode.
It's the cycle of search engines. We saw this with AltaVista et.al. back in the Web 1.0 days, which crufted up their user interfaces only for a neat new upstart to come along: Google. What set Google apart was that it had a simple, effective, and above all clean user interface, with minimal cruft.
Inevitably, Google has succumbed to the same temptation that AltaVista did, and now there's a neat new upstart to come along, with a clean user interface and minimal cruft: DuckDuckGo.
> and now there's a neat new upstart to come along
DuckDuckGo is 12 years old. They're far away from being a new upstart.
To put that into perspective, AltaVista's prime years only lasted six or seven years (~1996-2002; sold off in 2003). DDG is now one of the oldest independent search engines in Internet history.
Their very long-term, very slow, grinding upwards is one of the most amazing aspects of what they're accomplishing. It's incredibly difficult to do versus an entrenched monopoly (and one of the most powerful brands and corporations in the world at that). You almost never see it happen in tech once a monopoly is stable.
Microsoft could decide to terminate their access to Bing APIs at any time resulting in DDG’s immediately losing most of their users. DDG does not have their own crawler or index.
They seem to only use their crawler for Instant Answer type results while all their "traditional links" come from "a variety of partners, including Verizon Media (formerly Yahoo) and Bing".
The text in their help is confusing, but it kind of implies that their crawler is for answers only, and that web results come from Bing and yahoo (which is powered by Bing).
I don't know why they would, though.
They get paid and it doesn't steal traffic from them.
Unless Bing releases its own anonymous mode and DDG becomes a competitor.
Then they could charge more or force DDG to display "powered by Bing" in the logo. That would be the end of DDG.
Details of their deal with bing is unknown. It could be that Microsoft is giving it for free or they may have even better terms. There is zero transparency.
The only thing I prefer about google at this point is that occasionally if I search something where I just want an answer and not a result link, google will just give me the answer in that little box at the top of the result page. Something like "when are the oscars". It's a nice little convenience that saves me from having to click some article and scan for the info. If DDG had something like that, I'd never even miss google.
Keep trying it though, it's getting there. They have the Wikipedia box on the right of the page for most results. They bring up a calculator if you search for an equation (e.g. 4+4), there's a currency converter summary and typing weather + zipcode brings up a short summary of the local forecast. I'm sure there are lots of other examples as well. But yeah, "when are the Oscars" just brought up links to go.com, an ABC TV web presence if IRC.
As others have shared I've used DDG off and on for a few years. In the beginning if I didn't see what I wanted I switched to google for that search but left DDG as the default. It's been quite a while since I last had to to this, DDG's results seem to be on par with G these days, at least in my experience.
> 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.
> 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.
Hmm I think the Bing is overemphasized if we say that "DuckDuckGo uses Bing underneath so the company whom you should really be complaining to is MSFT."
The explanation is fluff and has no meaning if they don't give which percentage of queries is answered by which source. e.g. it is probably all bing for any non trivial query. To me, it seems they just want to create an illusion that it is more than a glorified proxy / meta search engine.
They probably do a different ranking on the bing index, not directly proxying. If you try non trivial searches, you can see that ddg does not have a different result than bing, only order and representation differs.
Try various "what is my ip" queries and you will see that the cached IP on results which show it in the snippet is the same on DDG and Bing (and Ecosia), while different on Google.
Agree 100%. I recently switched all my devices to DDG as default search because the quality of Google search results has declined significantly. The same 5 sites are at the top of every search in a given problem domain. It's turning the Internet into a monoculture.
I've had the same experience with me basically tossing in the towel with DDG because my need for efficiency outweighed my need for privacy. It seems like Google is systemically showing more crap in advertisements, making it harder to distinguish between ads and genuine search results, and their advantage is dwindling. That and it's just annoying to be sending information to Google as a default from a privacy point of view.
About 6 months ago (a year? I can’t remember) I switched and haven’t looked back. Now, when I look at google, the results actually look less relevant. As well, the ads on Google have become very obnoxious. I don’t feel like I’m being served the best results but instead results of companies who paid the most.