I keep trying DDG. Year after year I set all of my computers to use DDG. I last a week, a month, but in the end I always give up and set it back to Google.
I was really hoping the title meant like it read. Maybe my hopefulness was reading too much into 'Search Improvements.'
It is also possible that I don't need a search engine. I'm guessing that at least half of the questions/searches result in a post on SO or Wikipedia. There's probably a quarter of them that shoot me to some Medium entry. I guess I could always just bookmark those sites and skip the search engine..
Thats kind of where i was. Now though i'm persevering with DDG. If I'm unhappy with a search i just prefix it with a !g and runs it again via google. I hope that shows something to the DDG guys to know some things we still use Google for, but overall I'm fairly happy with DDG
Same here. I tried DDG years ago and gave up pretty quickly because it wasn't there, then tried again more recently and was positively impressed, but it still lacked some accuracy, then I tried again last year and made the switch.
So is DDG better than Google to me? Nope, and hopefully it will never be, because the only way to get on par with Google, let alone beating them, would imply on DDG side to get as much data as possible about me just like Google does, which would defeat their entire raison d'etre. So I'm okay with DDG being slightly less accurate, and when it doesn't find what I'm looking for I revert to Google for that single search. Currently I use Google on the average from zero to 3 times per day, which is ok.
That's however a choice by someone who values his privacy more than having to press a few more keys or waiting a bit more time to find something; I wouldn't expect the average user to agree with this.
DDG could one day conquer hearts and minds of most technical people, but going beyond that will make an entirely different and much harder challenge.
I'm on the other side of this I think. I've been trying to use DDG for everything for the past month or so, but the number of times I'm having to stop, copy what I just searched for, add a !g in front of it, and search again is just getting silly.
If there were some way I could just use a hotkey to redo the same search in google, this wouldn't be such a big deal, but having to break up my flow with all the extra copy/pasting or retyping is getting frustrating.
Something I just recently noticed: You don’t have to put the bang in front of the search. It can actually be anywhere in there: “!g foo bar”, “foo !g bar”, “foo bar !g” all work.
Every month or two, I run into a query where I don't find anything useful via DDG and expected to, so I try it again with !g...and end up confirming that Google doesn't give me anything useful either. It's been years since I last found a search where Google gave me more useful results.
I'd love to know what those 70% of your queries look like.
(One interesting observation: when first switching, I found that I liked the DDG results a lot better when I styled them to look like Google results; they felt more "right" somehow.)
For me, there are some queries that Google usually gives me better results. I couldn't tell you exactly what (mostly obscure code snippets, I think), and they're a relative minority, but sometimes I do use !g. It's not that often, though, and I'm a happy DDG user on all my computers.
I double-search less than 10% of my queries. I’ve been using ddg for the last four years. I think people that have to double search very often have been trained by google to use queries that aren’t supported by ddg.
Google proper has several value-adds besides the search results. Solving math equations put in the search bar for example. I usually use a dedicated service for things like converting feet to meters instead of typing it into google.
I too developed this habit. Then I forced myself to stop and realized that DDG actually was working fine for the great majority of my queries. I almost wish the bang wasn't there, because it makes it so easy to second guess DDG's results and develop the habit of always using !g when in reality DDG is actually quite good at this point.
Should be pretty easy. Create a bookmarklet that grabs the window.location.href, then appends '!g' to the beginning of the query and changes the location to the appended string.
I'm not sure DDG can actually do much to improve search results with the way they operate. They aren't a first class search engine, they get results from other search engines.
Perform a search on DDG, then do the same search on Bing. You'll notice the first results are the same.
In order for search results to get better on DDG, they first need to get better on their partner search engines (which I believe Bing is the main) so as far as I can tell it's out of their control.
> They aren't a first class search engine, they get results from other search engines. Perform a search on DDG, then do the same search on Bing
You search for the thing and you find the thing. Why do you expect the results, especially the top results, to be different? Is there any other evidence that they are not doing searches themselves?
Which keywords? I just searched (as posted above) for "extent space taco secure". It breaks bing. Yahoo returns results that are closer (including some shared oddities like storage units in Nashville), but they're still very distinctly unique.
You know there's something weird. You could prove your little hypothesis here wrong in less time than it took you to write it. So why state something that's wrong?
I tested this by choosing to search for something completely random that would return unusual results and give a decent indicator of whether or not DDG was just copy-pasting results, so to speak. I searched for "extent space taco secure", no quotations. Bing seems to have exploded when I searched for this. The results are completely nonsensical and seem to have nothing to do with what I searched for. The first two hits are to Google, the first about webhp (apparently some virus?) and the other to their chrome page. Other links include things like links to fidelity.com, americanexpress.com, and the huffington post front page.
DDG's results are [mostly] reasonable and populated mostly by things like some recent event where the head of NASA mentioned space security. Though it does have a link to the SF bay area craigslist alongside a couple of other really weird ones. In any case, you can see for yourself. Suffice to say they're definitely not just replicating results, at least not from Bing.
Where, after you get past a bunch of stuff about their "instant answers" gets to the root of it:
> 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.
So yes, maybe I was wrong saying results come only from Bing. But they definitely source their search results.
I'm not knocking DDG here, I use it as my daily search driver. If you were to try and build a search engine today with limited resources would you really try to start from scratch? The way DDG has approached the problem (by sourcing results from other search engines) seems like the only reasonable way to be even remotely competitive.
Yes, they source their results. This is not the extent of your claims. You were stating that they directly rip from other engines meaning that, in your words, "In order for search results to get better on DDG, they first need to get better on their partner search engines".
That is simply completely wrong, as my example showed extremely clearly. The one and only weakness of sourcing from third parties is that if they are not indexing some site, you also will not be indexing it. You were implying they are directly dependent on the ordering and quality of the other engines, which is obviously and provably false.
First of all, I never claimed that DDG results were exactly the same as Bing's. I said the top results were the same. Admittedly, I used less random terms than you did.
However, I did try your experiment, same terms. The top results from DDG were indeed found in the top results of both Yahoo and Bing. You are right though, not in the same exact order. Then I tried the same terms on Google. There is only one shared result on the front page (the Nasa chief one). I went through 4 more pages of Google, none of the results that both DDG, Yahoo, and Bing all seem to share were on any of them. This aligns more with the point I was trying to make:
DDG is going to have a hard time improving their results if the information they're getting is from inferior sources to begin with. It's like working on incomplete information. No matter how good their algorithm is that ranks and filters results from other search engines, if those other engines suck, there is no way their results can be that much better. If, for a given term, Yahoo returns site A, B and C, and Bing returns Site D, E and F, is there a way for DDG to determine that actually site G is the better result? The results can't appear out of thin air.
Also, you claim with emphasis, that the only weakness of sourcing from third parties is the indexing problem. That's absurd.
Obviously, a huge weakness on sourcing from other search engines is that DDG are bound to the terms of those partnerships. Or a complete severance of them. No partners, no search results.
One result of the terms in these partnerships is that DDG can't provide a search API. There was a time I thought perhaps I could write a developers search engine with DDG as the backend. Turns out you can't, and as a small search engine popular with HN types, I feel like that is a huge weakness.
Obviously yes it is possible for DDG to determine that result G is "better", and prioritize accordingly. "Better" of course is subjective, but this search is a pretty clear example that they're doing something right. They do source results from Bing yet their engine determined, quite accurately, that Bing's results are really quite bad.
But beyond that, consider the bias in your statement. You're claiming, by definition, that anything that doesn't match Google results is "inferior". I found Google's results here to be much better than Bing (not a high bar to pass) but much worse than DDG. Here are the results I get for Google, though I think it's also worth mentioning the hassle. For the privilege of being able to search I was required to go through a captcha. This is presumably because I prefer to use TOR when directly using Google. Then there's some giant "privacy reminder" at the top that requires me to agree to have all my data hoovered up and combined across services to generate a profile on me. Presumably a GDPR related thing since each time this happened it was on an EU exit node, though it used dark patterns to coerce consent which was supposed to be unlawful to my knowledge. Anyhow, after that nonsense I get:
- 4 monetizable links (Amazon 'space taco' lighter, 2x space taco restaurant facebook pages, some soundcloud 'space taco' band)
- 4 nonsensical links of google linking to its own books.google service
- 1 link to FT.com where Neumann raised $700m through share sales.
I changed my IP a couple of times and got similar results - the monetizable ones were always the same (order varied - though always at the top), so I expect this is probably at least similar to what you got. Of course it's silly to debate what results should be returned for an intentionally nonsensical query, but nonetheless I think this inadvertently ends up emphasizing what each engine's priorities are. DuckDuckGo tries to return whatever results are likely most appropriate for what you searched for. Google tries to return whatever it can make the most money from. And Bing... well Bing is "special."
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I do fully agree with you that being tied to the partnerships is potentially exploitable by the partner. And as DDG continues to grow this could become an issue if, for instance, Microsoft decides they have more to gain by undermining DDG than they do by continuing to partner and profit alongside them. My "only" was in reference to the quality of the search, which is what we were discussing.
I always end up missing Google's operator behavior.
"Kubuntu" OR "KDE" -gnome site:forums.ubuntu.com
It's really powerful to require that every result must contain either "Kubuntu" OR "KDE" exactly, especially when searching technical projects that have variant spellings / brandings.
Google actually honors that for you? It seems for me that no matter how hard I try to tell it that I _absolutely_ want an exact search term, it tells me to go fuck myself and returns results that don't include it. DDG seems to do a much better job at honoring this.
Look Google, if you can't find any pages with my search term, it's OK to return nothing! That's valid! It means I need to change my query! Stop trying to make a square peg fit a round hole!
It may work for that query but it doesn't work for the query in general, especially with multiple words.
I run into this frequently when searching error messages. Quoting the error is useless, it still returns pages that contain parts of the quoted string.
Putting terms in double quotes works perfectly for me on Google, forcing results to contain the exact term. I use this very often and never have problems with it. So it's puzzling to see comments that it doesn't work.
I've had many cases where I put exact terms in double quotes, but the Google search results still contained pages that do not contain the quoted text at all. It doesn't happen often, but it's often enough to be frustrating.
When I first started using DDG, I had a similar experience but every time I went back I'd read some tech news that showed that I really needed to take privacy more seriously. So I'd be back on DDG again. Then I'd use the google bang for stuff that didn't seem privacy sensitive and where I was getting results that didn't seem all that great.
Ultimately though I'm a lazy person and once I figured out how to get DDG to return the results I was really looking for (e.g. the wiki bang and weather thing) I eventually quit using google for almost everything.
DDG is fine for me, even if it's not perfect and even if occasionally I have futz with search parameters or very occasionally fall back to a google bang. I guess I'll take good enough with better privacy than occasionally better with privacy baggage on the scale that I can only guess about.
I found it inferior back in 2015 for programming but not general use. Nowadays I don't ever get frustrated looking for things, whether for work or personal use. What deficiencies are you finding?
Interesting. I've been using DDG exclusivley for about 2-3 years now and I forget that I'm not using Google half the time. It's just my normal state at this point.
I always had the impression Google is pretty good at guessing what you want even if you try your best to enter crappy search terms, whereas you have to tell DDG more 'exactly' what you want, pre-Google era-style. But if you do the results are usually spot on. But I've been on DDG for years so I'm not sure if this distinction is still there.
I was really hoping the title meant like it read. Maybe my hopefulness was reading too much into 'Search Improvements.'
It is also possible that I don't need a search engine. I'm guessing that at least half of the questions/searches result in a post on SO or Wikipedia. There's probably a quarter of them that shoot me to some Medium entry. I guess I could always just bookmark those sites and skip the search engine..