DuckDuckGo seems like a significantly worse search engine than Google despite SEO bloat, and I think community discussions mislead people by omitting that
In the recent months I started getting dissatisfied with Google the company in general, but also with its search engine due to privacy reasons, and SEO bloat affecting certain searches. A few weeks ago I switched to Duckduckgo from Google. Some searches are fine but there are three main issues I've been experiencing with Duckduckgo since the switch.
- The search "fails" and shows me results that are tangentially related to the query. Happens quite often and for various topics.
- It shows me a semi-related search results instead of the one I searched for, because it says there are not enough results for my query. Then I have to click again on the small text to search for the actual query.
- The automatic prompts that complete your query are scarce and unsatisfactory.
Because of this I've been switching back and forth between Google and Duckduckgo lately. I don't want to use Google, but Duckduckgo is definitely the worse option in general in my experience. It's better in some searches and shows useful results instead of big site bloat, but my overall experience was one of getting heavily downgraded.
This led me to a criticism about the discussions around this topic. People talk a lot about SEO bloat affecting search results, and it's definitely a real issue. It's especially a problem for some political searches, as it results in you getting propaganda results. However, recommending people Duckduckgo without mentioning its significantly worse search quality seems misleading.
I am of course not against using or recommending Duckduckgo. In fact, I wish them greater success in market share and development, as I think their policies are much better. But I think mentioning Duckduckgo's downsides is important to adequately inform people. I expected a noticeable downgrade, but I didn't expect it to be this worse because nobody mentioned it. As a result, I felt misled, and I definitely didn't know what I was getting into. Being adequately informed would have prevented that, as I would adjust my expectations.
So, this seems to be largely unaddressed in discussions around this topic, and I suspect the echo chamber effect around anti-Google discourse and privacy issues might be to blame.
What are your thoughts? Has anyone experienced something similar?
I use Kagi now but used DDG for a couple of years before switching. I never had to resort to Google for any searches that I can recall where Google provided better answers than DDG.
I did try resorting to Google a handful of times while dealing with cryptic error messages in niche software, but on those couple of times I got no results from either provider.
Can you give some examples of searches that got you better results in Google? I have to wonder if you search differently than me. Most of my searches are for things that have an objectively correct answer - a link to the software documentation.
Kagi is pretty great. The ability to promote and filter sites is killer.
I wonder if this is language specific as well. I just tried looking up statistics about public transport use in a czech city, and Google was more accurate - found more articles and press releases on the topic. However most of my searches are in english and I still find DDG to be worse.
Google image search is nearly always better in my experience. Anything I try to look up, the results match the query more and they're more diverse, whereas DDG sometimes shows 10+ copies of the same image that I'm not really interested in.
Often times when I'm looking for one specific thing, where there's a ton of semi-related results that I don't want to see and one correct one, Google is the one to find it and put it somewhere around the top. Can't remember a specific example right now.
Where DDG is almost always better is searching for torrents. But I don't need that too often.
I use DDG as the default search engine, but I'd say I redo about a quarter to a third searches with !g.
I have used DDG almost exclusively to search in English, and my post is based on that.
I very much agree that image search is definitely much better for Google. It's one of the worst parts of DDG.
This is definitely my experience too.
In my experience DDG is much worse when it comes to queries in Swedish, but for queries in English is about the same as Google.
It's hard to recall specific examples, but I generally don't use it for "precision strike" searches. Here are some broad examples from the last few days.
When I used it to search for mods for games it sometimes didn't even list some sites, even when I added the name of the site to the query. It's very hard to search for artwork or fanart I'm looking for, as it gives too nonspecific results. Often when I search for a specific concept, it gives me the more general results instead of the specific one I want.
Also, call it a crutch, but even when I add reddit to the end of my query, it doesn't list many reddit results, while Google lists a lot of them. Reddit is too good to not properly utilize.
A specific example I can provide is searching for the query "free world lord of the rings". I was trying to remember what exactly Tolkien called the free peoples of Middle-Earth. This is easily answerable in wikis. I had to scroll down significantly in DDG, while the correct answer was the top result in Google.
Edit: u/AaronNight
If I want to search a specific site adding e.g.
site:reddit.com
has always worked, it's not as short or intuitive but it's an explicit filter.Here are the results from Kagi for reference: https://kagi.com/search?q=free+world+lord+of+the+rings&r=us&sh=CKL3JC2EsBGLIyR0f1gBtA
I default to DDG. It gets me results eventually and I've been conditioned to not trust its top results for most things. I notice this especially on terms with heavy SEO like cooking/baking and car repairs.
As an example I tried "when to add oil in dough" on both:
DDG gives me a sea of what looks to be machine-generated Amazon-affiliate sites on the first page before I see a domain I'm familiar with in the middle of results. StackExchange is the fifth result and SeriousEats the sixth.
My Google bubble gives me ChainBaker as the top result, then The Fresh Loaf, the PizzaMaking forums, and Reddit, some YouTube videos and some blogs from actual pizza places before I see the first Amazon affiliate crap on 8th place.
Can confirm that's where it's strengths is, but I don't use a search engine just for the "easy" stuff with an objective answer.
I had to use !g almost daily when I was using DDG.
Since switching to Kagi however, I resort to !g maybe once or twice a month and it doesn't actually end up finding anything Kagi didn't already.
I also recently switched to Kagi. I used DDG for about 2 years and it was okay. My searches were mainly programming related, and DDG was okay but at times I found myself back on google. It was honestly frustrating using DDG at times, since I felt myself constantly refining my query hoping my answer would finally show up. It never would, and then I’d go to google and it would be among the first results. After switching to Kagi I haven’t had to use google at all. 95% of the time it gives me the results I need. The other 5% is just me not searching correctly :)
I also switched to Kagi some months ago. First of all, whenever I search on google now (for example on someone else's device) it looks simply insane to me; so much promotion, SEO and garbage.
Second of all, I just had an interesting moment while using Kagi. I was researching some SMB error message. Putting it in quotes in Kagi gave me a dozen or so different results. Doing the same in google gave me only one result.
I guess Kagi gets a +1 from me too.
Hi
As others have indicated, DDG is great for general enquiries.
I have DuckDuckGo Light as default search in the browser address bar.
Also !bangs use other engines such as amazon, bing, google, reddit, wikipedia etc.
eg...
!a dog washes
Info is here ---> https://duckduckgo.com/bangs
I have no skin in this game, but just wanted to add for anyone that might benefit from it that I do a similar thing by saving specific google queries and other search urls as bookmarks on firefox, e.g. https://www.homedepot.com/s/%s
Then I set a keyword for that bookmark and I can just type "h screws" or "h paint" at the top bar and it will automatically search home depot for screws or paint. I have a bunch of them saved and use them all the time when researching something or shopping for something in a specific store:
a - amazon
r - reddit (not reddit search, mind you, just a google search that starts with 'inurl:reddit' so it only gives me results from there)
h - homedepot
l - lowes
f - harborfreight
s - google scholar
c - craigslist
m - fb marketplace
and a couple of other niche ones for my day-to-day
For completeness...You can set this up in chrome-based browsers too. chrome://settings/searchEngines
This is way more involved than bookmarks and completely overkill, but I do this with the search shortcuts functionality in Firefox without having to go through the terrible UI (where you can't edit the URL after setting it up). I just personally find the "native" integration looks slightly nicer overall, but both options work just fine for site-specific search.
The important file on Windows is at
%APPDATA%\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\<your profile>\search.json.mozlz4
. I main Nightly so I keep this backed up in case a build wipes out the search engines or something.It's essentially a compressed JSON file with some magic headers, you'll need to open it up with an extension like mozlz4-edit
My sample setup for PCGamingWiki and Reddit (bound to pcgw and r) looks like this:
Yeah I used to need to fall back on !G a lot but I can’t really remember the last time I’ve needed to. In my experience Google and DDG at this point have problems in different ways but I don’t see one as being better than the other. Google is better at trying to infer what I’m actually looking for, but the stuff it pulls from the inference are still kinda bad. DDG is a bit more straightforward, a bit more deterministic. So if you’re used to Google just letting you type in whatever instead of fine tuning your query I can see it not being as good for you, but I always found Google’s inferences annoying.
One of my bigger gripes right now with all search engines is that it seems like online shopping is basically just Amazon now with a little bit of Etsy thrown in. Any search for stuff surfaces Amazon listings almost exclusively and the landscape of reviews is low-effort slop that is either AI or so badly written it may as well be. Wirecutter is there but Wirecutter has specific ideas about how much to weight things like “niceness” or “ease of use” so I’d like to have multiple opinions I can synthesize but everything else just seems to be recommending whatever gets the highest affiliate rates on Amazon. The HiFi world still seems to have real websites that do real reviews, but nothing else.
Have you tried using the minus sign and then website for your search? It filters all websites from that domain out of search results. I frequently use -amazon.com (same with ebay and etsy) when I'm trying to get information and research about a product rather than a place to buy it.
Honestly I’ve just switched to going directly to specific non-Amazon sites off here or a few other sites.
Though I think I failed to really articulate what my actual gripe is. Yes all shopping is Amazon now, but what’s worse is that the search engine always assumes you’re shopping. If you have a query that adjacent to anything that’s a consumer good it always pushed you to storefronts. If, like me, you’re interested in menswear and specific cuts and styles and tailoring it can be very hard to find anything that’s most just shopping listings for fast fashion garbage.
I’m sure many hobbies must suffer from this. Especially hobbies that aren’t much about consumption/purchasing stuff.
Oh I 100% agree. Any product adjacent search results in product prices and checkout buttons directly on the SERP. You have to wade through so much auto generated crap to find someone who actually bought the product, used it at their home, and wrote an actual, real review. YouTube is particularly bad for this, certain searches yield auto generated videos of a clearly scraped Amazon listing with an text-to-voice speaker reading the body text from the website over a slideshow of the photos from the listing.
I would love a ublock, but the blacklist is all the SEO blog spam sites and YT channels. I'd so much rather browse a poorly designed geocities site if the creator actually bought, used, photographed, and published their real thoughts on things. I know they're out there, but you have to sift through mountains of search-optimized trash to find them.
I require the bangs now that I know about them. I can't leave DDG/Bing because of it..
Plus as already mentioned, !g is an option too.
I think you are right when you say that discussions of search engines often leave out some details. It seems to me that often such discussions come down to talking about general and non-specific use cases. For example, people mean queries like “what to cook with eggs,” “what movie was this actor in,” or “why do wombats poop in cubes?”
Most people likely consider their usual profile of queries while discussing this topic. For instance, as a programmer, I evaluate search engines based on how easily I can find information related to computer science. For me, it turned out that the best search engine was Kagi.com, although it doesn’t know much about wombats. And during my university years I was an active user of Wolfram Alpha, but I wouldn't recommend it in general discussions now because it's too specific.
Based on my experience using DDG, it is a fairly good search engine for general queries. It's probably not perfect, but it found what I needed. I absolutely couldn't find rare or specific information with it, but it was enough for me to find out, for example, the director's filmography. I still think it is a good option if you don't want the search engine to track your geolocation or search history.
What topics do you usually search? How do you evaluate the quality of results?
Have you tried using the results summarizer for things like “why do wombats poop in cubes?”. I can't share this query for people without accounts, but I'm satisfied by the summarised explanation: https://kagi.com/search?q=why+do+wombats+poop+in+cubes%3F
Actually, you can share the query for people without accounts! If you look in the triangle menu on Kagi, there is a "share this search" option which gives a link like this: https://kagi.com/search?q=why+do+wombats+poop+in+cubes%3F&r=us&sh=M7pYwDzNOvx53vfjb5mAFA
Yep, I've used that feature before! Unfortunately it doesn't include the quick summary though.
I've been using DDG for about six months. A couple thoughts:
I specifically switched off Google because the mix of SEO and sponsored results meant I would search for something and get the literal exact opposite - eg look up "Android" and get a sponsored Apple result. Look up Lowes, get Home Depot. Look up vanilla, get chocolate etc etc. It's under the guise of "well HAVE you CONSIDERED" - no, and based on my search result I'll consider for my fucking self, thank you. Never had this with DDG. Until that's fixed - and you know this won't be "fixed" - I do not see how results could possibly be worse for most people on DDG.
That said, sometimes the first couple results are muddled from what I'd see on Google. It won't get a phrase that has two meanings and buckle down on a particular interpretation, so I need to clarify with another keyword - eg looking up part numbers for my BMW that breaks all the time. Hasn't really bothered me that much.
The thing I do switch back to Google for is restaurant or location results and info. I find it doesn't give me stuff like a Call button with the right number all the time, or menu image results. My wife has Celiac, so maximum info about a restaurant menu or the review search it Google pulls from Maps for "gluten" is really important and DDG just doesn't have as powerful of a dynamic type of search result. When I DO want sponsored results - mainly shopping or to glance at prices between Amazon/Wal-Mart/Lowes/etc, eBay prices for old media, local results of things in stock - it's not as powerful.
Generally I'm finding it's good enough for like 99% of my searches, and it's worth it to not get irate at Google trying to deliberately misdirect me. Fuck that.
My privacy is worth it, (and yours is too) and the more you use it, the more you learn the ins and outs. It will likely never be as good as google 10 years ago but google is also not as good as google 10 years ago.
I've been using DDG for a year or more now and maybe 1 in 50 searches I'll need to switch to google. And only about half of those google searches get me anywhere near what I'm looking for. But at least DDG makes it easy to just add the command !g to the
start of thesearch to query google instead.I tried the kagi demo but so far haven't had any better results. Likely if what I'm searching for isn't on any engine then it's probably long faded from the net.
One extra tip,
!g
can be anywhere in your query as long as there's a space after or it's the end of the query. So something likefoo bar !g
orfoo !g bar
also works. Same goes for!gi
for Google Images,!gm
for Google Maps,!yt
for YouTube, etc.For info purposes: DDG is essentially Bing. That's where the bulk of their results come from. They tack on some of their own stuff and have long promised to do their own crawling and indexing but at the end of the day they're still mostly Bing.
This is relevant to the thread because Bing is unlikely to ever be as good as Google. Microsoft has always been great at cloning other software and marketing it, they've never been good at building the best of anything.
Which isn't to say that DDG isn't a good choice for privacy reasons. As others have said, though, Kagi seems to be the clear winner among Google alternatives on everything but cost.
I switched to Kagi. It seems pretty good. The quick answer feature is nice because it summarizes many pages at once.
Also pretty sure DDG is just Anonymous Bing (they get the majority of their results forwarded from Bing).
I’m trying to figure out how to use the web without “traditional” search engines. They have the impossible task of sifting through a mountain of internet waste that is constantly growing and the little shit results are getting smarter at tricking the search engine. I can get good results by searching, refining the search based on a good result and then searching again. I may add reddit to the search if I think someone may have had the same problem.
Google Maps is good for reviews and recent photos of places. YouTube has repair guides, Reddit is a good source, but you have to use a search engine to get good results. Twitter can get you links to news as it happens. ChatGPT takes care of a lot of questions nowadays, at most answers well but at a minimum provides a better starting point for resources.
Maybe if there was a search engine only for forum boards, that may be a way to remove the bloat. Or maybe it’s time to always limit the search to a list of trusted domains because most websites are trash.
I know my points are anecdotal to yours, but I share your frustration. DuckDuckGo also was offline for me a few times so I had to switch to Google/Bing.
I don't have a ton of experience with it personally, but this sounds a lot like what Kagi does with lenses and promoting/blocking certain sites.
Yep, here's Kagi's Lenses explanation. It's pretty handy sometimes because you can toggle it on to only see search results from specific types of websites (forums, cooking sites you select, blogs, fediverse, etc).
I have a similar experience, when trying to use DDG I found myself switching to Google often.
Now I use DDG for trivial searches (which are most of them), and I pay for the cheapest Kagi plan for anything not very straightforward. Sometimes I still use Google, in particular when looking for something very local, or to find where to buy something.
I use DDG myself, and I would agree that it is generally inferior to Google. That said, it's good enough for maybe 90% of the queries I make. If it's not good enough, I simply add "!g" to the end of the query, and off I am to Google.
But I agree with the general premise of your message. Telling people to use DDG without telling them that is misleading at best, and not useful to anyone.
I think one reason for your experience might be that search results on both Google and DuckDuckGo are heavily dependant on the person making the searches. Google personalises results if you let it, and at least based on my personal experience DDG stumbles more often with searches that are done using smaller languages, or that target products or services in regions that use those languages. So, for instance, DDG's results may look much better for someone who has always blocked Google from following them online, while DDG's results may look much worse for someone who searches for things that DDG isn't particularly good at finding.
Another reason why you might be seeing people talk about the quality of these search engines in a way that doesn't align with your perceived reality may be that neither Google Search nor DuckDuckGo are entirely stable products, but ones that evolve and change over time. Most people probably aren't comparing search results on a daily, weekly or even monthly basis, so when they are saying that one search engine is better than the other, they aren't necessarily telling you what the situation is now, but rather what it was when they last checked, which may well have been a year or two ago when they made a decision about what search engine to use.
My own observations were that Google's results started to get quite bad sometime in the mid-to-late-2010s, and for a few years I tried to find a working alternative without much success, until DDG's search results got better sometime around 2020. I was actually reasonably happy with DDG for a year or so, but then its results suddenly started to get much worse again, at which point I tried to return to Google, saw that it was a bit better than I remembered it to be but still bad enough to make me miserable, looked around some more, and finally came across another search engine that I have been quite happily using ever since. My point being: had you asked me ten years ago which was better, Google or DDG, I would have said Google, a few years after that DDG, then perhaps again Google, and nowadays... well, I would probably say DDG, but my opinion shouldn't really count since I haven't used either for over two years.
I’ve also found that DDG can be a bit less than ideal when searching for specific things and have been looking around for a few other options. I have not tried Kagi which a lot of people seem to really like.
I have tried Startpage and find it works quite well for my searching. It tends to give you the most literal interpretation of your query which can be a good thing or a bad thing depending on what you’re looking for.
I've been using DuckDuckGo (DDG) more since 2015. Initially, the results weren't that great, so I would use the "!g" bang to go to Google. However, I rarely use that anymore.
Nowadays, you have plenty of options for web searching. You can use tools like ChatGPT or Perplexity. DDG has significantly improved compared to a few years ago. Additionally, you can filter out a lot of the unnecessary results from Google by adding "&udm=14" to the URL, or even set up a redirect.
For those interested in more control, you can self-host or use instances of SearXNG, which I find to be like searching on steroids. You can also integrate it with AI tools like OpenWeb-UI, Perplexica, or LibreChat.
I've been using DDG as my default for several years now and, honestly, it's good enough for me to suit that purpose. The only time I will resort to Google is when I specifically need some local results as DDG still sucks at that, however, nowadays I often find just sticking ", ireland" or "ie" at the end will get the job done there.
Looks like I might be going against the tide when I say I generally agree. Maybe it's because I search for fandom- and media-related stuff more than the average person, but DDG tends to be kind of dodgy for me.
The most recent (and bizarre) example: just last night I wanted to look up the character Kyros from One Piece. I typed in "One Piece Kyros", and the top result was the OP wiki's page on the Riku family. Then videos, then his page on MyAnimeList, then an article from Sportskeeda, and then... the wiki's article on Episode 675? Kyros's page on the OP wiki just doesn't show up on the first page of the search results at all. Or the second. Honestly I have no clue what's up with that, because that doesn't happen with any other One Piece characters I've looked up.
Fandom results are the easiest example for me to mention, but I'm used to adding the "!g" bang because Google does bring up more relevant results. There have been multiple cases where I was trying to jog my memory about some event or information, and DDG just never brought it up no matter how I organized the search terms. As soon as I'd add the !g bang though, it would be in the top five results, if not the top result. I don't have any specific examples off the top of my head, but it happens fairly often.
On the one hand, I find google with something like ublock a lot more tolerable.
On the other hand, while I can't cite specific examples, I certainly felt much the same about DDG for some period of time. I use Kagi now, and would probably go back to duck duck go if I had to, but it certainly isn't as smooth as some seem to think it is. Or maybe it just depends on what you're looking for and how.
I feel like I've had the exact opposite experience since switching about 2 months ago. I still go to Google map for location based searches, but for general searches DDG has been pretty spot on for me. I switched my default search engine on my devices to DDG after finding myself consistently making 3-4 queries on Google because so much bloat was turning up in my Google searches. I have had much better luck finding what I'm looking for on my first search with DDG than with Google. I've had to add a Google search on a rare occasion, but at least in the way I form queries, DDG has been much better at turning up what I want on the first search. And if not, I was doing multiple modified searches with Google anyway for all most every search before, so I'm still coming out ahead.
Like you, I have noticed it's not as good at incorporating adjacent and relevant tangential keyword information in the results, but adding a couple of my own keywords and doing a second search hasn't felt burdensome lately because Google's results have felt like 100% ads and not a true answer on my first search
I agree with this post and I have moved away from stock google and now use searxng. It is very easy to set up (have a hostname, run docker container) basically for free with the free allocation on the oracle cloud infrastructure.
Just thought i would mention it as it is a pretty good solution for me and wasn't posted at the time of writing.
I've actually moved away from DDG lately, to Brave. There was a period a few weeks ago where I just wasn't getting the results I expected to and after a quick comparison, Brave seemed better. The Discussions feature is nice and it's good to still be able to use !bangs. I know some people will say it's just the same as browser search shortcuts/aliases but these don't need configuration!
That said, I'm not sure on the AI features (at least you can turn them off) and I don't trust them as much (I'd never use the browser). I'd never go back to Google though - it looks horrible to use now, to an extent actively dangerous, and I haven't used it on my own devices except by mistake for probably 7 years now.
I use Startpage and haven't had to resort to google searching for years really. It was a bit rough in the beginning, but they have slowly been adding things like the convenient calculators for conversion and arithmetic. Might be worth a look. Disclaimer: I have never used DDG, so I don't really have a basis for comparison.
I have tested lots of alternative search engines over the last few years. Today I am quite satisfied with the results offered by qwant
Also, as an internet user you can use some of the geopolitical struggles to your advantage and go to the russian search engine Yandex for things that might be cordoned off by the intellectual property mafia in the US. Yandex reverse image search function is great.
Duckduckgo has bought into the whole 'disinformation' phenomenon and becomes an overt tool of political bias itself. It is my understanding that in a democratic system it is up to the citizens themselves to decide what is dis- or misinformation. I can sift my own disinformation thank you very much: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/guide-understanding-hoax-century-thirteen-ways-looking-disinformation
Though, can you really? Sifting through disinformation takes a lot of time:
Already a few paragraphs down we are led to believe the russian election interference wasn't real by quoting the at the time safety officer of twitter:
Whereas the same person at a hearing in 2023 unanimously confirmed it happened.
I tried a bunch of those alternatives and i'm still more comfortable sticking with Google.
To be honest, I use it on the basis: