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Comment by bit_logic | Hacker News Reader

It's too late, lasting damage has been done. This redesign made me seriously look at DDG and I'm impressed with what I found.

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I suspect you greatly underestimate how much the average person didn't really care here.

In the moment, yeah, this matters - but Google still beats DDG for certain classes of results and people go where the easiest experience is.

I say this as a user of DDG. ;P

People don’t really compare that hard. If DDG’s experience is intuitively easier than Google’s in the first minutes (because there are no ads and results are good enough), people will switch.

The real problem is the “embedness” level of Google is much higher than any search engine achieved before: a switcher must make a pretty serious effort to change browser settings, change tools etc, and you can bet top dollars that Google will pull all monopolistic tricks in the book as soon as they feel their position is truly challenged. This is a scenario akin to Microsoft vs office open standards back in the ‘00s.

I've just checked the "there are no ads on DDG" and saw half of the content space taken by Wikipedia-sourced infobox, half by ad, searching for "insurance". Interestingly enough, Google shows me no ads for the same query (whole screen of local maps, then related queries, then organic results). "Car insurance" though ;)

Disclaimer: I do work in Google, but nowhere near anything user visible (I'm developing SRE infrastructure).

Did a DDG search and there are no ads. Just the Wikipedia infobox and a list of insurance companies in my country (and the Wikipedia article for Insurance at #3). It makes a very good starting point for someone wanting to get quotes from a range of companies etc.

Google's results is interesting though as it starts with one insurance company only (ad placement? It doesn't show it as a ad tho but it looks and feels like one given it's isolated from the rest of the results after the fold). It is then followed by a map which is an odd choice as generally most people in my country manage their insurance online or over the phone. Then below the fold more companies can be found but with media stories(?!) thrown in as well interrupting the flow.

It's been a long time since I've used Google as my daily driver and I'm gobsmacked at how badly it executes this query. It used to be very good but no longer. I have used DDG for some years now and it generally works just fine for me. This limited experiment in going back to Google has made me happier with DDG as my default search engine.

I didn’t think DDG claims to be ad-free, merely tracking free. They still have to keep the lights on, after all.

With adblockers on, I get no ads on either engine.

With adblockers off, I get 2 ads on DDG and 4 on Google.

I suspect your adblocker is just more targeted towards Google.

That was Google Chrome on Android without any ad blocking.

There's a difference in our indifference, you know.

"People don't really compare that hard" has been demonstrated to be false - if people didn't care that much, Bing & co would've seen much greater success in the past few years. It's not like this hasn't been tried before.

Google is so damn good at search that being "good enough" isn't good enough for the average user. You have to be as good as Google. This is why Apple and Mozilla work with Google to offer them as a default - they're not dumb, they know people expect it.

Bing was really, really bad when it started. Perception was shaped and a lot of people go out of their way to avoid it, even though it's now just fine for most uses. In this sense, DDG has an advantage, because it has had time to improve substantially before its brand hit the mainstream (which has not happened yet).

I'm still convinced the advantage Google has is not fundamentally technical. A lot of people expect it not because it's good, but because it has always meant "search" for them, ever since they got online. Google spent a generation at the top, and that sort of entrenchment is really hard to lose. Even Microsoft didn't really lose their primacy on the desktop - the internet just got big enough to escape their stranglehold.

Local (esp foreign language) results are so much worse on DDG. For many users it's just not an option. And people don't care about text ads, as long as they are relevant. I love DDG but if they can't get results with a quality close to what google offers, I don't think they'll ever become mainstream.

I switched to DDG this year and so far satisfied with about 99.5% of my search done in DDG and 0.5% google (intuitive estimation).

I've set DDG as my default search, but it's frustrating how often I still have to make my way back to G.

Use !s

I switched out to DDG as well today. See how it goes.

Any takers for trying out Bing?

I’ve been using Bing for years with no regrets, but I live in the U.S. (and speak English) where I hear it is best.

Yeah, it really has problems if you tend to search in different languages or look for regional content outside of the US.

I've switched to Bing for images (more filters and less safe-search) and recipes (so many options!) , but for general search I find their index to be smaller and their results less relevant than Google's.

IIRC, if you're using DDG, you're essentially using Bing (base) + other custom engine work layered on top of it.

You don't remember correctly, this is a persistent falsehood I see repeated in all these sort of threads.

https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/du...

https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/so...

“ In fact, 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 also source from a variety of partners, including Verizon Media (formerly Yahoo) and Bing.”

It is not false. The standard 10 links you see come directly from Bing and they don’t even attempt to hide that fact.

Thanks for digging that up. :)

I've seen logs of a few medium sized sites and I've never seen DuckDuckBot really crawling any of these sites. I'm sure they use their own results to supplement some parts but most of the web results still seem to come from Bing.

Is Bing any better (as far as user privacy and tracking) than Google?

Genuine question. Bing is still owned by MS right?

I used Bing maps once, because, guess, Google thought they know better than me what I want.

Namely, I was planning a summer trip that included a mountain road that is closed 9 months per year due to snow. And I was doing that in spring.

Google didn't let me use that road because, right, it was closed. And people shouldn't be allowed to plan their trips 3 months in advance.

Bing gave me the same results without the nonsense.

Me too. So far I haven't felt the need to go back to google. I have found DDG's search results to match my expectations, with a few exceptions.

That's weird since DDG is noticeable worse in this particular aspect. DDG ads icon has much thinner fonts and is placed on the far right, instead of left. Combined, it is more difficult, not less, on DDG to tell ads from organic results quickly. There are many good reasons to switch to DDG but this latest episode is not it.

This design made the results look more like DDG. They also use favicons in their results.

Me too, as of a few days ago. Also I’m switching over friends and family. Fuck Google and their greedy anti web practices.

I’ve also switched to DDG and Firefox since this debacle and will probably end up shifting family over. It matters.

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