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Comment by newscracker | Hacker News Reader

> “Our biggest challenge is that most people have not heard of us,” Weinberg says. “We very much want to break out into the mainstream.”

It won't help at all if more people get to know of DDG and then leave it after a single trial because the results are not great.

I value privacy a lot and want something like DDG to succeed and become really big, but I get frustrated very often with DDG. I know many people are very happy with the results from DDG. For most of my searches though (on technical and other matters), I end up doing a second search on Start Page or Google because DDG still does not have search by date and the search results are nowhere close to Google.

I do have and use DDG as my default search engine in the hope that DDG keeps analyzing the volume of !s or !g queries as an indicator of how much DDG is lacking and takes action to improve it.

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FWIW, DDG search in my experience has gotten vastly better in the past year or so. It used to be that 90% of my searches ended up repeated with !g to go to google, but nowadys I'd guess that's like 30%, and even among those, half the time google's answer quality ends up the same.

The only cases where Google is predictably and consistenly superior are 1. error/diagnostic messages: DDG still sucks at precision search, and quotes are not always the answer; 2. queries that require Natural Language Processing: Google understands stuff like "the bad moustache guy from XYZ series" where I myself have only a vague idea of what I'm looking for.

And oftentimes the Instant Answers end up offsetting somewhat poorer quality of results, so kudos to DDG for coming up with those.

(None of this is meant to disqualify your experience though, just expressing my own joy at their results having improved for my use case.)

DDG search in my experience has gotten vastly better in the past year or so.

Had the exact same impression. There are numerous threads on HN involving DDG in the last couple of years and in more than one of them I complained about the results, but slowly yet steadily there are always less reasons to complain it seems. DDG does not yet find everything as quick as I'd want it to but when my go-to would be !g in the past I'm now starting to notice I use it much less (say only 1 out of 20 searches) and when I do chances are high google won't find what I want either, it usually just comes up with the same results but in 'better' order.

Hey Stinos,

Thanks for the feedback - part of the changes you've noticed are simply due to the fact that we do read threads like this, and we do encourage users to send/share their feedback and examples of where we haven't hit the mark for them; and then actively try and improve that experience.

We've recently streamlined this process by adding a feedback tool on the bottom right of the results page. If you feel we don't quite show the results/experience you were expecting (or if we really really nail it) then we encourage you to share that feedback with us! You can opt-in to how much detail you provide, and as always we don't collect, store and share personally identifiable details.

Thanks for your continued support!

by adding a feedback tool on the bottom right of the result

Shame on me, didn't notice this. But thanks for pointing to it: I'll definitely put this to use.

I last tried DDG a few years ago and couldn't get anything done at all as the results were simply not what I needed (PHP / Laravel / WordPress development).

Your comment made me try it again today and after several hours of using it I can definitely say it has vastly improved in results for my particular use case.

While a few hours are obviously not a huge metric it's still satisfying enough so I have switched it to default for now and we'll see how it goes.

Thanks for sharing your experience.

Thanks for your feedback pixard, glad to hear you've seen the improvements. While you're right a few hours does not a huge metric make, it's also awesome to hear that the changes were that noticeable.

We've added a new feedback tool in the bottom right of the results page, we encourage you to let us know when results aren't up to snuff (or when we really nail it!)

Also be sure to check out the bangs (https://duckduckgo.com/bang) and settings which can be saved to the cloud or via URL using the bookmarklet tool button (https://duckduckgo.com/settings). Those are some favorite features of a lot of our long time users that we feel really add to the experience.

>FWIW, DDG search in my experience has gotten vastly better in the past year or so.

Unfortunately, I can't say the same.

As someone from a smaller and non-English-speaking country, I doubt there'll ever be an effort to improve their results for my language and considering that even Bing does an absolutely terrible job at it, Google is my only choice for when doing local searches.

It's like all search engines apart from Google are stuck 20 years in the past with how bad they are.

This could probably be fairly generalized to "90% of Silly Valley lacks internationalisation experience"... I type this as an Aussie/German/Kiwi on a Thai keyboard (desktop; normally I'm on a French Macbook Pro) here in southwest China.

Hi Temp,

Can you share the region/language you're using and a few sample queries? Feel free to email me at adam@duckduckgo.com if you don't want to share them publicly. We're always looking to improve, and get an understanding of where we're lacking.

We know in this industry there are a lot of challenges surrounding localization and so concrete examples really help!

> 2. queries that require Natural Language Processing: Google understands stuff like "the bad moustache guy from XYZ series" where I myself have only a vague idea of what I'm looking for.

I suspect that Google has been trained by a bunch of people who just don't know how to search, and that's why natural language works and the + operator failed. Have a look at Reddit's "Tip of my tongue" subreddit for examples.

https://www.reddit.com/r/tipofmytongue/comments/3xbpmp/tomt_...

Doesn't mention that it's a live action movie; doesn't give any clue about time; doesn't mention that it's (probably) an American film; doesn't mention genre of the movie; etc.

https://www.reddit.com/r/tipofmytongue/comments/3xbpsu/tomts...

It's a pop song. About moving west. Maybe from Georgia.

https://www.reddit.com/r/tipofmytongue/comments/3xbqxu/tomt_...

> I remember this guy who went out to the woods for the day. The guy was pretty young, I want to say late teens. He made some lunch for himself and then got lost on the way back. I found the video on reddit 1 or 2 years ago. The video production style is very Survivorman-esque if that helps at all.

I haven't carefully selected these. I just grabbed a few from New.

About the + operator. Check my math, but only 1 in 600 searches used it correctly. Another 2 in 600 searches used it, but used it incorrectly.

http://insidesearch.blogspot.co.uk/2011/11/search-using-your...

> In the past, we provided users with the “+” operator to help you search for specific terms. However, we found that users typed the “+” operator in less than half a percent of all searches, and two thirds of the time, it was used incorrectly. A couple of weeks ago we removed the “+” operator, encouraging the use of the double quotes, which are more likely to be used correctly.

I'm not sure what DDG is supposed to do here. Are they supposed to target "power users"? People who know what AND and OR and + and "exact phrase" mean? Because that's a niche audience. It would mean DDG is loved by a small group of people, but never breaks into mainstream use.

> I suspect that Google has been trained by a bunch of people who just don't know how to search, and that's why natural language works and the + operator failed. Have a look at Reddit's "Tip of my tongue" subreddit for examples.

I get where you are coming from, but I'm 99% sure it's not just this. I've searched for extremely vague things such as "that movie where there's one guy that shouts funny catchphrase all the time" and was amazed when the first result was the Wikipedia entry for the specific movie I was looking for, even though the Wikipedia entry didn't mention the specific trait being searched. Google really does do natural language processing on the queries.

> 1. error/diagnostic messages: DDG still sucks at precision search, and quotes are not always the answer

Wow _this_ is interesting to hear. I would've thought that this would be the main area where the quality gap would be smallest, since there's such little wiggle room and most results are likely to be relevant. I wonder why this is the case.

I use DDG for 100% of searches, and never end up using !g anymore. (It took a while to disentangle how much I'd equated result quality with "formatted exactly like Google results".)

But unfortunately, I still end up using !maps for all my map searches, because 1) DDG defaults to Bing, so no, and 2) DDG doesn't automatically parse anything like "$ADDRESS1 to $ADDRESS2" and provide directions. It'd be nice if DDG managed to get sensible first-party maps and routing, either via OSM data or direct map data licensing.

The issue with DDG : 90% of my queries ends with '!g'.

Most of DDG is awesome[1], except for the results, they set you back to the copernic era.

Very often Google suggestions are already part of the answers I'm looking for. DDG first page is often off point.

I feel tangible frustration every time I use it. Just using a browser not configured with DDG makes me feel calmer.

[1] business reality check, so often I complain about Google UI, layout and stuff. DDG has all of this, lean ui, settings, shortcuts ... but it doesn't matter.

DDG staff here. Thanks for sticking with us. The time/date filtering is being worked on - hopefully we can release it soon. That should make a lot of people happy.

For quality of results, I'm biased but I've found they have improved thanks to a lot of feedback from users providing specific queries that could be investigated one-by-one. There's now a feedback button (desktop only) so if you're able to give more examples of bad results that will help improve further.

I use DDG because of custom search 'bangs'. I have gotten rid of a whole bookmark sub folder of custom keyword searches.

When I want google, which is less and less often, I just add a '!g' to my search. I doubt DDG will ever catchup to the Big G, but It works.

Is that similar to Chrome's "search engines"? They work really well, and I tend to use google's "site:" filter to search sites that have awful search capabilities.

The "!Bang" feature allows you to redirect your searches. For example:

"!w Sam Altman' would instantly return you to the wikipedia page on Sam Altman.

And, "!Amazon shoes" would instantly return you to the Amazon search result page for shoes.

We've got over 7500 !Bangs currently and users can request to add them for any site https://duckduckgo.com/bang - just like our community efforts in 'Instant Answers' on our duckduckhack.com platform, this community driven experience allows you to get involved and shape a search experience you want to see.

Yes, and also similar to Firefox bookmark keywords.

e.g. a Chrome search engine or Firefox bookmark with URL "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=%s" and keyword "wp" will return the Wikipedia page for Hacker News if you search "wp Hacker News".

Also works for stuff other than searches, e.g. "https://www.reddit.com/r/%s" with keyword "rr" to quickly navigate to the Hacker News subreddit with "rr hackernews".

Chrome automatically adds search engines, while Firefox requires a bit more manual work: https://support.mozilla.org/kb/how-search-from-address-bar

If you enjoy DDG (I love it!) consider helping create Instant Answers: https://www.gitbook.com/book/talsraviv/duckduckhackdocs/deta...

(there's a Slack team for this as well)

If any devs would like to join that Slack team please send a mail (empty body is fine) to quackslack@duckduckgo.com and we'll send you an invite.

As some folks have mentioned we're constantly improving our results but one of the best things is when we have a specific results case.

So if you have a result that didn't work for you - share the specific case in our feedback tool or by shooting our team an email (mine is adam@duckduckgo.com). One thing that separates us is the fact that you can get involved in our community, build out instant answers, give us feedback on searches that actually gets integrated and shape a great search experience.

Thanks for the feedback though!

Thanks for the information about the feedback button. I had never noticed it at all!

When people search, they look at the search box and then at what's below it, which tends to be always on the top and towards the left of the screen. Whatever's in the middle or bottom as well as on the right tends to get ignored.

I'd suggest putting the Send Feedback button right below the search box when you display the results so that more people notice it. I've just sent a feedback about this through the Send Feedback button.

I sometimes use !g to fallback to google. But the vast majority of searches, I don't do that. And when I do, I'd estimate that probably 80% of the time, Google doesn't have any better results.

Google usually only has better results when I'm searching for some highly-specific tech thing that is still esoteric enough for DDG to not find it, and I credit that largely to the fact that Google has the filter bubble (which I explicitly try to avoid by using DDG). Beyond that, Google typically has better results for topical searches than DDG does, but I don't do those very often.

> I end up doing a second search on Start Page or Google because DDG still does not have search by date

!gday, !gmonth and !gyear are my main 'exit path' from DDG. I also have a good deal of "site:foo.com !g". Otherwise, I've been reasonably happy with it for the last eight months.

I don't think people realize that DuckDuckGo is a meta search engine, they don't have their own algorithm. Instead they are using whatever is cheapest at the moment. It's very hard to get better results if you can't modify the algorithms core logic.

edit: okay maybe cheapest is a wrong word, the more correct term would be best price/result ratio.

Some time ago they were using Yandex as their result provider, at the moment I don't know who their provider is but I think that could be found by browsing through the about us pages (or not as now they are so big they can negotiate deal where they don't have to disclose their source).

(edit: this is what they disclose at https://duck.co/help/results/sources)

> 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 primarily source from Yahoo!, and in some regions and scenarios, Yandex and Bing.

Why use DDG at all if you're using Startpage/Ixquick?

I get frustrated very often with DDG

I get frustrated with Google (I don't use DDG much, so I'm not that familiar with the limitations). Google has repeatedly crippled search, made it worse than it was.

E.g. you used to be able to say +yesIwantthis and your results definitely included that word. Now, not so much. It's now something to do with Google+. Now, you can't force Google to truly include particular words. You can try, but I don't think it always works. E.g. you can say "yes" "search" "all" "these" "words", and maybe it will and maybe it won't.

Advanced search has definitely gotten worse. Frankly its at the point that I'd be willing to pay someone $10/mo to get a search engine that's a) good and b) truly gives me control.

Meet the new Google, worse than the old Google.

They added a "Verbatim" mode to force all search terms to appear (in the "Search Tools" bar, click "All results" and change it to "Verbatim"). But it's all-or-nothing; it can't be applied to individual terms. It also can't be combined with the timespan searches; changing one resets the other. The old syntax with + was definitely more useful.

Am I nuts, or has DDG been around for a very long time? Wikipedia says it started in 2008, but for some reason it's lodged in my mind along with Excite, Alta-Vista, AskJeeves and the other pre-Google search engines.

https://duckduckgo.com/about says "DuckDuckGo began as an idea" on February 29, 2008, and on September 25, 2008 "DuckDuckGo was announced to the Hacker News and reddit communities".

FWIW, here's the original HN announcement - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=315142 .

You weren't thinking of Dogpile were you? That was a pre Google meta search engine that sent your query to multiple search engines.

metacrawler was another and was what I used prior to Google. Amusingly, it now forwards to a site powered by dogpile.

I was planning on moving to the DDG on my phone because Google Search it's unbearable (or Now or whatever the heck that app is now) and their mobile app sucks. It tries to be a web browser when I just wanted a search engine, I'm perfectly content with my mobile browser. It surprised me that MS Bing also suffers from this (yes, I was that desperately to stop using google search on my mobile). It's ridiculous.

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