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Comment by jeswin | Hacker News Reader

I have tried to use DDG several times, but Google is just better. For instance, if you search 'Serena Williams' on Google you see her recent US Open results nicely presented. Similarly, if you search for GOOG (on Chromium-based browsers [1]) you get a stock chart. The point is, Google saves me time due to the domain-specific customization they've done.

The bigger issue for me is that if DDG becomes popular, they might chart a path similar to Google in terms of privacy. It's another ad supported search engine after all.

[1]: They show dumber results on Firefox and should be in anti-trust territory, but that's a different discussion.

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Even if DDG starts invading privacy it will still be better than google. Google has access a lot of my data already.

It is better multiple companies have parts of my data than one company that knows where I am , who I meet , what I search , use , and even say in my house

RE: [1] They show the exact same page for me both on Firefox and Chrome when I search for GOOG. I use Firefox as my main browser, and am logged in to my Google account on Chrome.

Google shows a less powerful search interface on Firefox for Android. If you change the user agent to Chrome, Google then shows the same interface it shows to Chrome.

This has been such a noticeable problem that a Firefox add-on (Google Search Fixer) was created to fix it:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/google-search...

Google Search Fixer is currently available on Firefox Nightly for Android.

Sorry I forgot to mention I was talking about FF Android, as commoner mentioned. I use it as my main browser and many Google sites downgrade the experience; merely changing the user agent gives me the same result as Google Chrome. I don't particularly like doing that since it reduces FF Android user count in Analytics.

DuckDuckGo "instant answer" infrastructure used to be open-source and community-contributed until a few years back. (But to be fair, searching for GOOG on DDG still gives you a little blurb about stock prices)

https://github.com/duckduckgo/duckduckgo

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