Unfortunately their results are pretty abysmal.
https://www.startpage.com/ or ixquick is a better option in terms of results.
https://www.startpage.com/ or ixquick is a better option in terms of results.
I think people react that way to it because it is more literal, a la Google several years ago. I prefer that; I'm used to it and find that Google frustrates the hell out of me when I'm looking for something specific because of all the 'help' and the heavy bias towards recently changed pages. There have been times when I simply couldn't find things with Google that were much easier to locate in DDG.
Still wish there were an engine with a clone of Lexis-style searching. Yes, you have to learn how to use it. But it is incredibly useful.
And that's all before getting to Google's increasingly invasive behavior, and the reason why I refuse to use Chrome, block a lot of their utility-domains, etc.
Really, I just like using products of companies that try to do "the right thing". Anything from the Mozilla Foundation and DuckDuckGo are two examples.
I'd say I do a Google search once or twice a month.
1. Results close to as good if not better than Google.
2. No tracking.
3. Bang searches. With the "too clever by half" search dialogs many sites are implementing (Wikipedia, Internet Archive, Google Ngram Viewer) it's often superior to the native on-site search as I don't have to set focus 2-4 times to actually type in the bloody search dialog.
4. No tracking.
5. Did I mention no tracking?
6. Proxy bang searches, e.g., StartPage.
7. Search customisations -- light page (good for console and commandline search), night mode, and others.
8. Unmangled URLs. I can copy/paste URLs straight from DDG. No-can-do with Google.
Or even Google.
I've seen comments online about DDG providing only an illusion of privacy. I haven't dug into this deeply. From what I've read this comes down to DDG (including bang searches like !g and !sp) stripping identifying information, which provides protection from tracking by entities like advertisers and social networks, but not law enforcement or agencies like the NSA that may have legal options or extralegal access. Is my understanding generally correct? Any corrections/additions/clarifications appreciated.
But if you're using Google through DDG you're probably missing the point.
It's faster to do that, in further irony, on Firefox rather than Chrome (on Android), because Chrome/Android doesn't allow specifying DDG as a default search engine.
(I prefer Firefox for multiple features including extensions (adblock, hul-fucking-lo), and Reader Mode, but motherlovin' heck is Firefox every laggy and slow on Android...)
I'll run a DDG search, for all the reasons stated above, then re-run it to Google if I must. It's still faster than finding Google's search page and entering a search (and clicking past multiple nags and seeing multiple distracting animations).
Two more reasons for Google:
1. Specific date-bounds on search.
2. Counts of results by domain (Desktop only)