It's been my prime search engine for 4 or 5 years now, maybe more. Can't live without the bang searches and started using !bang recently too - to search for relevant bang searches e.g. !bang emacs...
Exemplary
It's been my prime search engine for 4 or 5 years now, maybe more.
Can't live without the bang searches and started using !bang recently too - to search for relevant bang searches e.g. !bang emacs
I also use a firefox keyword search for searching DDG so I can use their query string parameters instead of cookies to for settings.
I almost exclusively use DDG for generic internet searches, and it's my gateway to google via !g. DDG is getting better, and Google search quality is the worst of all time, so I never use Google...
I almost exclusively use DDG for generic internet searches, and it's my gateway to google via !g. DDG is getting better, and Google search quality is the worst of all time, so I never use Google except local stuff which Google used to do better (it's in the process of messing it up these days).
I use !gvb more than !g recently - it searches google, but in "verbatim" mode, where google won't try to "fix" your query for you by changing/dropping words. I'm sure that's useful for some...
Exemplary
I use !gvb more than !g recently - it searches google, but in "verbatim" mode, where google won't try to "fix" your query for you by changing/dropping words. I'm sure that's useful for some people, but I almost always want it to use the actual words that I typed.
Same, I've almost entirely eliminated Google search from my daily life. Eventually I'll use it for reverse image search, but that's it. I'm glad that DDG is doing good, it's a great search engine.
Same, I've almost entirely eliminated Google search from my daily life. Eventually I'll use it for reverse image search, but that's it. I'm glad that DDG is doing good, it's a great search engine.
I hear a lot of people saying its their focus on natural language based questions - for the vast majority of the population it should mean that its easier to search. However, having grown up with...
I hear a lot of people saying its their focus on natural language based questions - for the vast majority of the population it should mean that its easier to search. However, having grown up with search engines, I've tuned my search term choice to suit what it was like in the past. Unfortunately, this style isn't as effective with Google anymore - I've certainly noticed a decline in me being able to find pertinent sites. Google does optimise itself with use, so I suppose some of this is because I haven't been using it as much, so it can't read my mind too well.
I'm pretty happy with DDG at the moment, its proven really good for my usage.
I'm glad to know it's not just me. I've been trying to dig up this old blog I used to follow, and even googling specific phrases that I remember reading is turning up nothing. It's honestly pretty...
I'm glad to know it's not just me. I've been trying to dig up this old blog I used to follow, and even googling specific phrases that I remember reading is turning up nothing. It's honestly pretty strange, I never used to have issues finding things with Google. Of course it's possible the blog no longer exists, but I kinda doubt it since it wasn't that long ago.
Not in my case; Google automatically unquote passages if there is no direct match. Follow-up searches, to a different site/domain/TLD, or with a different date range, inherit this setting. If I'm...
Not in my case;
Google automatically unquote passages if there is no direct match. Follow-up searches, to a different site/domain/TLD, or with a different date range, inherit this setting. If I'm looking for a specific quote, I'm doing it for a goddamned reason, don't fuck with it. DDG does not do this.
Google genericise and/or track results in ways DDG does not, noticeably both under- and over-specifying searches from my spec. Even when searching w/o being logged in, Google seem to skew results toward recent history, very noticeably on YouTube. Since I frequently search across a set of distinct subsets, individually (diffeerent programming languages, operating systems, brands, regions, authors, dates, domains), this actively frustrates my searches. I spend far more time fighting Google rather than DDG on searches.
Google includes far more ads, far less readily distinguishable, in SERPs than DDG. I've got to consciously filter out more crud.
Since quite some time the results from Google are increasingly irrelevant for me. This opinion has been confirmed in many threads on HackerNews, so it's apparently a general widespread phenomenon....
Since quite some time the results from Google are increasingly irrelevant for me. This opinion has been confirmed in many threads on HackerNews, so it's apparently a general widespread phenomenon. For myself, I see more ads for all sorts of searches, more major websites that match partially than other results that match better, and less respect shown to the search string (e.g. Google often---but not always---doesn't care that I wrap sth. in quotes, a single term or multiple terms). I don't think it has much to do with fake news (I personally don't search politic stuff often, if at all; I read my news from email newsletters and RSS). I think that they're just changing their systems so that they cater to the part of ther userbase that's the largest by far, those who make less sophisticated queries about more recent stuff or ask questions. I've read people on HN that claim that they apparently index lesser as the content gets older and even just remove oldest stuff, removing them practically from the internet given their visibility is fundamentallly undermined. In many cases for non-local searches I've obtained better results with DDG, and not only, also worse results with Google (as I perceive, given I've not kept a record of these stuff and compared them across time) progressively over the recent couple of years.
Do you or anyone else understand the legality of DDG using google's search, and I assume.. without paying them? I mean is scraping Google results and reselling the results legal? I know Google has...
Do you or anyone else understand the legality of DDG using google's search, and I assume.. without paying them?
I mean is scraping Google results and reselling the results legal? I know Google has the CSE API which you can use, and pay for... how does DDG do it legally?
Another related question, what about Google News results? I see them in apps like Inoreader, is that legit?
Using a bang search doesn't show another search engine's results in the DuckDuckGo search page, it takes you to that search engine's results page. Searching "!g test" in DDG brings you to...
Using a bang search doesn't show another search engine's results in the DuckDuckGo search page, it takes you to that search engine's results page. Searching "!g test" in DDG brings you to https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=test. It's perfectly legal :)
Oh, derp. Thanks! I've barely used !g and forgot about that. When I want to use Google search, I still use it natively a lot of the time. I guess I was thinking of startpage.com that bills itself...
Oh, derp. Thanks! I've barely used !g and forgot about that. When I want to use Google search, I still use it natively a lot of the time. I guess I was thinking of startpage.com that bills itself as "Startpage search engine, the new private way to search Google" - and shows google results right in their pages. But startpage has a contract with google. So someone feel free to label by previous comment as noise... I feel dumb now.
How does DuckDuckGo makes it money? Having recently read that article about how whatsapp started with such good intentions and then got sold, I'm wondering if the same will eventually happen to this.
How does DuckDuckGo makes it money? Having recently read that article about how whatsapp started with such good intentions and then got sold, I'm wondering if the same will eventually happen to this.
DuckDuckGo sells ads and it optimizes them to cater to you based on you search, and they are pretty technical and transparent about what they collect and how.
DuckDuckGo sells ads and it optimizes them to cater to you based on you search, and they are pretty technical and transparent about what they collect and how.
I'm five years in with DDG, and absolutely prefer it. I still test !g or !s SERPs periodically (they're rarely an improvement), and make use of !ngram, !gbooks, and !scholar. Date-ranged Web...
I'm five years in with DDG, and absolutely prefer it.
I still test !g or !s SERPs periodically (they're rarely an improvement), and make use of !ngram, !gbooks, and !scholar. Date-ranged Web search still requires Google -- I'm often searching for specific dates or long-ago year ranges.
I've been using DuckDuckGo on all my browsers for a while now. Almost never needed Google/Startpage for a search, and bangs such as !ddgi are extremely helpful.
I've been using DuckDuckGo on all my browsers for a while now. Almost never needed Google/Startpage for a search, and bangs such as !ddgi are extremely helpful.
I just wish there was a way to have the search suggestions enabled without that god awful INSTANT text replacement. It's an absolute arseache to use on a laptop since it keeps on ruining my...
I just wish there was a way to have the search suggestions enabled without that god awful INSTANT text replacement. It's an absolute arseache to use on a laptop since it keeps on ruining my searches all of a sudden.
It's hard to imagine how annoying it is until you've ran into like 5 unique variations of it ruining your searches. I get searches with what it assumes would be the most common !bang for my search, or the cursor will touch something after I've finished typing and now poof - my somewhat specific term is gone. Something else that happens is that I'll be typing something only for it to be overwritten with a generic search term halfway through, but because I'm too busy typing; what I'm left with is a really confusing half gibberish search.
I feel really petty even complaining about it because it doesn't sound that annoying but damn, all it takes is a few incidents to make you seriously wanting to raw-dog it with 0 search suggestions, even when you're REALLY terrible at spelling. I just wish I could remember the more specific examples that really ticked me off.
Until they get that sorted, though, I'm just sticking to using the address bar in firefox since it displays them in a way I'm not deathly allergic to.
I've switched a couple months ago. Unfortunately I still find myself using !g far more than I would like to. Maybe I need to change the way I write my queries? I've really gotten used to Google...
I've switched a couple months ago. Unfortunately I still find myself using !g far more than I would like to. Maybe I need to change the way I write my queries? I've really gotten used to Google reading my mind. It's true that Google's search quality is getting worse, though.
Yes, breaking the habit takes some time with DDG - you are no longer in a bubble, so you can't expect it to magically know what do you mean when you enter the word "Tomato", you have to specify...
Yes, breaking the habit takes some time with DDG - you are no longer in a bubble, so you can't expect it to magically know what do you mean when you enter the word "Tomato", you have to specify "Tomato router firmware" - for me Google would just assume that if I am searching for "Tomato" it's most likely to be tech-related, but DDG assumes nothing of you. I've managed to re-learn to use search by blocking Google on my phone and my PC for a few months.
About the same here. I always at least start with DDG. I've been slowly weening myself entirely off of Google and search was one of the easier ones to get off. E-mail will be the hardest,...
About the same here. I always at least start with DDG. I've been slowly weening myself entirely off of Google and search was one of the easier ones to get off. E-mail will be the hardest, especially in a field that requires so much networking. I may have one foot over there for quite a while after moving to a paid service.
The other big one is Google Drive. The price and speed is unbeatable for a small timer like me. I used DropBox for a while, but it is super slow and many times more expensive.
The comments here have convinced me that I should at least give it a try, as Google searches for me have indeed become frustrating. Their results are so generic, and their interpretations of my...
The comments here have convinced me that I should at least give it a try, as Google searches for me have indeed become frustrating. Their results are so generic, and their interpretations of my queries are often presumptuous. For example, the other day, I was trying to find instructions for how to make winter boots (my wife was having a hard time finding winter boots for our 14-month old son, so I'm interested in researching if they'd be easy enough to make). I searched for something like, "homemade winter boots," and what did Google show me? A bunch of Pinterest pages about how to turn shoes into boots. Not at all helpful. I'm sure I could've figured out how to use Google to get the results I wanted--I was on my phone, so gave up quickly--but an alternative is worth a shot.
I hope you'll like it, but if you wouldn't you can check out Qwant and findx as well. Some people prefer StartPage, but IMO it's not a good solution, since it's still Google, just declawed. Not...
I hope you'll like it, but if you wouldn't you can check out Qwant and findx as well. Some people prefer StartPage, but IMO it's not a good solution, since it's still Google, just declawed. Not only Google can end StartPage at any time, you are still using Google by proxy.
It's safer, but just by the nature of how it works: Google don't know if you search for something, but it sees all your searches regardless - this allows them to still train their search AI, and...
Exemplary
It's safer, but just by the nature of how it works:
Google don't know if you search for something, but it sees all your searches regardless - this allows them to still train their search AI, and potentially even link anonymized queries made in succession with someone - it still happens on their servers
You still rely on Google for your search, so basically StartPage slows down the development of independent search engines like DDG or others by taking away concerned users, and that is like putting a band-aid over a wound. They can stop StartPage at any time, but in the meantime more privacy-aware and not evil search engine are not getting the audience, in a long run that benefits Google and hurts the consumer
StartPage can only make Google more private, but they can't make it less biased or less manipulative - if Google wants some websites to appear first in a search it would affect the StartPage. Any optimizations or censorship that comes from Google trickles down to StartPage
StartPage is not as transparent as DDG on how they are making their money
So, while using StartPage over Google is still better for your privacy it still has a lot of other flaws that make it less desirable
StartPage is my go-to search engine (for those not in the known, it uses Google search results anonymously). I do like DDG bangs, so I made my own as Firefox keywords. What I dislike about DDG has...
StartPage is my go-to search engine (for those not in the known, it uses Google search results anonymously).
I do like DDG bangs, so I made my own as Firefox keywords.
What I dislike about DDG has been brought up often, but things haven't changed in years: the lack of a date for their search results. Half of the time it makes their results worthless, when I'm looking for a technical information I need up-to-date informations. I don't have time to check link after link.
Otherwise, their search results are decent, but in my case it's just an annoyance.
PS: Yes, I know I can make DDG only show me links from yesterday/last week/last month, but that's not what I'm looking for.
I switched about a month ago as my default search engine on the heels of that story about Google's pushing of AMP. I had been feeling vaguely nauseated about relying on Google for much of...
I switched about a month ago as my default search engine on the heels of that story about Google's pushing of AMP. I had been feeling vaguely nauseated about relying on Google for much of anything, and so I was more than happy to make the switch. I'll still find myself using google for its native translating, but for just about everything else DDG does fine.
Bang searches make using DDG as a default perfectly simple, because I just use the bang for google if I ever come across some search that I'd prefer to use on google (which is the rare circumstance where I need something translated from French because this novel I'm reading has a shit ton of untranslated French).
So yeah, switched and haven't looked back. Google can suck it.
It's been my prime search engine for 4 or 5 years now, maybe more.
Can't live without the bang searches and started using !bang recently too - to search for relevant bang searches e.g. !bang emacs
I also use a firefox keyword search for searching DDG so I can use their query string parameters instead of cookies to for settings.
I almost exclusively use DDG for generic internet searches, and it's my gateway to google via
!g. DDG is getting better, and Google search quality is the worst of all time, so I never use Google except local stuff which Google used to do better (it's in the process of messing it up these days).I use
!gvbmore than!grecently - it searches google, but in "verbatim" mode, where google won't try to "fix" your query for you by changing/dropping words. I'm sure that's useful for some people, but I almost always want it to use the actual words that I typed.Wow, TIL! Thanks a lot, that's useful!
I didn't know these features existed. I guess I'm going to finally make the switch, immediately.
Same, I've almost entirely eliminated Google search from my daily life. Eventually I'll use it for reverse image search, but that's it. I'm glad that DDG is doing good, it's a great search engine.
That's the first I hear about Google getting worse. Maybe it's a side effect of their attempts to hide fake news and conspiracy theories.
I hear a lot of people saying its their focus on natural language based questions - for the vast majority of the population it should mean that its easier to search. However, having grown up with search engines, I've tuned my search term choice to suit what it was like in the past. Unfortunately, this style isn't as effective with Google anymore - I've certainly noticed a decline in me being able to find pertinent sites. Google does optimise itself with use, so I suppose some of this is because I haven't been using it as much, so it can't read my mind too well.
I'm pretty happy with DDG at the moment, its proven really good for my usage.
I'm glad to know it's not just me. I've been trying to dig up this old blog I used to follow, and even googling specific phrases that I remember reading is turning up nothing. It's honestly pretty strange, I never used to have issues finding things with Google. Of course it's possible the blog no longer exists, but I kinda doubt it since it wasn't that long ago.
Not in my case;
Google automatically unquote passages if there is no direct match. Follow-up searches, to a different site/domain/TLD, or with a different date range, inherit this setting. If I'm looking for a specific quote, I'm doing it for a goddamned reason, don't fuck with it. DDG does not do this.
Google genericise and/or track results in ways DDG does not, noticeably both under- and over-specifying searches from my spec. Even when searching w/o being logged in, Google seem to skew results toward recent history, very noticeably on YouTube. Since I frequently search across a set of distinct subsets, individually (diffeerent programming languages, operating systems, brands, regions, authors, dates, domains), this actively frustrates my searches. I spend far more time fighting Google rather than DDG on searches.
Google includes far more ads, far less readily distinguishable, in SERPs than DDG. I've got to consciously filter out more crud.
Since quite some time the results from Google are increasingly irrelevant for me. This opinion has been confirmed in many threads on HackerNews, so it's apparently a general widespread phenomenon. For myself, I see more ads for all sorts of searches, more major websites that match partially than other results that match better, and less respect shown to the search string (e.g. Google often---but not always---doesn't care that I wrap sth. in quotes, a single term or multiple terms). I don't think it has much to do with fake news (I personally don't search politic stuff often, if at all; I read my news from email newsletters and RSS). I think that they're just changing their systems so that they cater to the part of ther userbase that's the largest by far, those who make less sophisticated queries about more recent stuff or ask questions. I've read people on HN that claim that they apparently index lesser as the content gets older and even just remove oldest stuff, removing them practically from the internet given their visibility is fundamentallly undermined. In many cases for non-local searches I've obtained better results with DDG, and not only, also worse results with Google (as I perceive, given I've not kept a record of these stuff and compared them across time) progressively over the recent couple of years.
Do you or anyone else understand the legality of DDG using google's search, and I assume.. without paying them?
I mean is scraping Google results and reselling the results legal? I know Google has the CSE API which you can use, and pay for... how does DDG do it legally?
Another related question, what about Google News results? I see them in apps like Inoreader, is that legit?
Using a bang search doesn't show another search engine's results in the DuckDuckGo search page, it takes you to that search engine's results page. Searching "!g test" in DDG brings you to https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=test. It's perfectly legal :)
Oh, derp. Thanks! I've barely used !g and forgot about that. When I want to use Google search, I still use it natively a lot of the time. I guess I was thinking of startpage.com that bills itself as "Startpage search engine, the new private way to search Google" - and shows google results right in their pages. But startpage has a contract with google. So someone feel free to label by previous comment as noise... I feel dumb now.
As do I. The growth they've had is crazy.
How does DuckDuckGo makes it money? Having recently read that article about how whatsapp started with such good intentions and then got sold, I'm wondering if the same will eventually happen to this.
Advertising (but not tracking) and affiliate affiliates :edit: doh! affiliate partnerships, not affiliate affiliates.
DuckDuckGo sells ads and it optimizes them to cater to you based on you search, and they are pretty technical and transparent about what they collect and how.
I'm five years in with DDG, and absolutely prefer it.
I still test !g or !s SERPs periodically (they're rarely an improvement), and make use of !ngram, !gbooks, and !scholar. Date-ranged Web search still requires Google -- I'm often searching for specific dates or long-ago year ranges.
Favourite Bang searches: !w !worldcat !ngram !rationalwiki !dict !etym !hn !noaa !scholar !img !wikisource !b-ok !libgen
And of course: !bang
I've been using DuckDuckGo on all my browsers for a while now. Almost never needed Google/Startpage for a search, and bangs such as !ddgi are extremely helpful.
I just wish there was a way to have the search suggestions enabled without that god awful INSTANT text replacement. It's an absolute arseache to use on a laptop since it keeps on ruining my searches all of a sudden.
It's hard to imagine how annoying it is until you've ran into like 5 unique variations of it ruining your searches. I get searches with what it assumes would be the most common !bang for my search, or the cursor will touch something after I've finished typing and now poof - my somewhat specific term is gone. Something else that happens is that I'll be typing something only for it to be overwritten with a generic search term halfway through, but because I'm too busy typing; what I'm left with is a really confusing half gibberish search.
I feel really petty even complaining about it because it doesn't sound that annoying but damn, all it takes is a few incidents to make you seriously wanting to raw-dog it with 0 search suggestions, even when you're REALLY terrible at spelling. I just wish I could remember the more specific examples that really ticked me off.
Until they get that sorted, though, I'm just sticking to using the address bar in firefox since it displays them in a way I'm not deathly allergic to.
I've switched a couple months ago. Unfortunately I still find myself using
!gfar more than I would like to. Maybe I need to change the way I write my queries? I've really gotten used to Google reading my mind. It's true that Google's search quality is getting worse, though.Yes, breaking the habit takes some time with DDG - you are no longer in a bubble, so you can't expect it to magically know what do you mean when you enter the word "Tomato", you have to specify "Tomato router firmware" - for me Google would just assume that if I am searching for "Tomato" it's most likely to be tech-related, but DDG assumes nothing of you. I've managed to re-learn to use search by blocking Google on my phone and my PC for a few months.
About the same here. I always at least start with DDG. I've been slowly weening myself entirely off of Google and search was one of the easier ones to get off. E-mail will be the hardest, especially in a field that requires so much networking. I may have one foot over there for quite a while after moving to a paid service.
The other big one is Google Drive. The price and speed is unbeatable for a small timer like me. I used DropBox for a while, but it is super slow and many times more expensive.
The comments here have convinced me that I should at least give it a try, as Google searches for me have indeed become frustrating. Their results are so generic, and their interpretations of my queries are often presumptuous. For example, the other day, I was trying to find instructions for how to make winter boots (my wife was having a hard time finding winter boots for our 14-month old son, so I'm interested in researching if they'd be easy enough to make). I searched for something like, "homemade winter boots," and what did Google show me? A bunch of Pinterest pages about how to turn shoes into boots. Not at all helpful. I'm sure I could've figured out how to use Google to get the results I wanted--I was on my phone, so gave up quickly--but an alternative is worth a shot.
I hope you'll like it, but if you wouldn't you can check out Qwant and findx as well. Some people prefer StartPage, but IMO it's not a good solution, since it's still Google, just declawed. Not only Google can end StartPage at any time, you are still using Google by proxy.
Thanks! I'll check those out, too.
Yes but if it's Google declawed then isn't that fine?
It's safer, but just by the nature of how it works:
So, while using StartPage over Google is still better for your privacy it still has a lot of other flaws that make it less desirable
StartPage is my go-to search engine (for those not in the known, it uses Google search results anonymously).
I do like DDG bangs, so I made my own as Firefox keywords.
What I dislike about DDG has been brought up often, but things haven't changed in years: the lack of a date for their search results. Half of the time it makes their results worthless, when I'm looking for a technical information I need up-to-date informations. I don't have time to check link after link.
Otherwise, their search results are decent, but in my case it's just an annoyance.
PS: Yes, I know I can make DDG only show me links from yesterday/last week/last month, but that's not what I'm looking for.
Just switched yesterday, haven't run into trouble yet! 😁
I switched about a month ago as my default search engine on the heels of that story about Google's pushing of AMP. I had been feeling vaguely nauseated about relying on Google for much of anything, and so I was more than happy to make the switch. I'll still find myself using google for its native translating, but for just about everything else DDG does fine.
Bang searches make using DDG as a default perfectly simple, because I just use the bang for google if I ever come across some search that I'd prefer to use on google (which is the rare circumstance where I need something translated from French because this novel I'm reading has a shit ton of untranslated French).
So yeah, switched and haven't looked back. Google can suck it.