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Papas Fritas writes:
"There's an interesting read today by John Paul Titlow at FastCoLabs about DuckDuckGo, a search engine launched in 2008 that is now doing 4 million search queries per day and growing 200-500% annually. DuckDuckGo's secret weapon is hardcore privacy. When you do a search from DuckDuckGo's website or one of its mobile apps, it doesn't know who you are. There are no user accounts. Your IP address isn't logged by default. The site doesn't use search cookies to keep track of what you do over time or where else you go online.
'If you look at the logs of people's search sessions, they're the most personal thing on the Internet,' says founder Gabriel Weinberg. 'Unlike Facebook, where you choose what to post, with search you're typing in medical and financial problems and all sorts of other things. You're not thinking about the privacy implications of your search history.' DuckDuckGo's no-holds-barred approach to privacy gives the search engine a unique selling point as Google gobbles up more private user data. 'It was extreme at the time,' says Weinberg. 'And it still may be considered extreme by some people, but I think it's becoming less extreme nowadays. In the last year, it's become obvious why people don't want to be tracked.'"
(Score: 5, Insightful) by visaris on Thursday February 20 2014, @06:40PM
I think most people probably don't care about privacy much, unfortunately. The quality of the search results probably matters more to them. I haven't used DuckDuckGo; how do current users think the results compare to Google, et al.?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by dx3bydt3 on Thursday February 20 2014, @06:49PM
In my experience the search results from DuckDuckGo aren't nearly the same quality as those I get from Google. That said, they are also quite different than those you get from Google and Bing. Sometimes when searching for obscure things that difference comes in handy.
(Score: 4, Informative) by No.Limit on Thursday February 20 2014, @07:20PM
I've had the same experience. However, I just switch to google if I need better results.
That's mostly the case when I want to find out things about 'niche technical subjects'. Like today searched for spaghetti stack.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 21 2014, @11:38AM
It's better to use startpage.com (or ixquick.com - it's the same as startpage) as your backup than google.
(Score: 1) by maxwell demon on Friday February 21 2014, @03:14PM
It's not the same, it's just the same company. Startpage is basically a Google anonymizer, while Ixquick uses several search engines.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 20 2014, @06:57PM
I've used duckduckgo and I find the search results a bit lacking compared to google. Personally, I prefer startpage.com which seems to just act as a proxy between you and google. You end up with google quality results, but google loses the ability to track you. Startpage claims to not be recording IP addresses or using any tracking cookies.
The only issue I can see with startpage is their reliance on google. I'm sure if they got too popular, google would find a way to block queries coming from their servers to shut them down.
(Score: 2) by jcd on Thursday February 20 2014, @07:07PM
I use an instance of searx on a friend's server and I worry about the same thing. It's ultimately meta-search, which relies on Google's infrastructure. I've looked up search alternatives, but they often provide lousy results. I used to use DDG before all of the hubbub about privacy &c (they aren't generally trusted any more by the super-paranoid), but I found myself sneaking back to Google and feeling rather guilty.
Anyone know of any other real alternatives? I've heard of Yacy, but I'm not sure I want to run a p2p search service on my machine. Not only do I have limited internet usage, but I don't trust the security and I'm not confident enough in my ability to code to check the source myself.
"What good's an honest soldier if he can be ordered to behave like a terrorist?"
(Score: 1) by acid andy on Thursday February 20 2014, @07:38PM
I think the Duck Duck Go results aren't bad and like the other person said you can soon get used to trying Duck Duck Go first and only resorting to Google if you can't find what you needed.
Duck Duck Go does seem to give relevant results. I just get the sense that they've indexed fewer pages than Google, perhaps a lot fewer.
I am sick of how bad Google's results seem to have got compared to 5 or 10 years ago. I know they've been fighting an arms race against the SEOers and autoblogs but their algorithm seems utterly dumbed down these days. I hate the way they outright ignore some of the keywords I type in or the algorithm acts like it knows better and searches for different words that are only vaguely related.
I also get pages and pages of commercial stuff that all seems almost identical. Maybe that's the blackhat SEOers again but I'm not so sure. The thing is Google most likely wants these millions of ad laced blogs because they're getting revenue through Adsense.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by TheRaven on Friday February 21 2014, @05:15AM
I switched to DDG around 2008, and I fall back to Google about once or twice a month. I've found that most of the time Google is a complete waste of time. DDG will say 'no results' for a query, Google will say '10,000 results', but none of the ones I try are even remotely related to what I'm looking for. I don't know why Google thinks that I'll be more favourably disposed to them if they give me nonsense and waste my time than if they just say 'no pages contain that phrase, sorry'. The other irritation I find with Google is that they'll provide exactly the same mailing list post on 100 different list archive sites. Their algorithm really ought to be able to group those and say 'see almost identical pages...' as a separate link.
Your AdSense comment is spot on. For Google, there's always a conflict of interest between wanting to avoid spam in the search engine and wanting to promote sites that actually give them revenue. Hopefully they manage to balance this in favour of maintaining their reputation, but there's always going to be pressure towards the long-term game. DDG, in contrast, simply doesn't have this pressure. Their revenue comes entirely from the sponsored links, so their only incentives are to give useful enough search results that people keep using them and to give accurate enough sponsored links that people will want to click on them.
The odd thing is, this is how Google used to work: they'd base their ads not on their profile of you, but on their analysis of what you were looking at (the page containing the ads or your search terms). Back then, I clicked on their links a lot, because if I'm looking for information about widgets there's a good chance that I'm interested in companies trying to sell me widgets too. Now, they base it on a profile of me and so are most likely to show me ads for things I've already bought and don't want another one - by the time I do, they've given up and started showing me ads for something else.
sudo mod me up
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Nerdfest on Thursday February 20 2014, @07:39PM
I care about privacy as something I have a right to, but I also appreciate that Google provides some pretty decent services for me for 'free'. So far, Google has a very good privacy and security record. My information is valuable to them so they don't want it leaked. Yeah, if they go evil, it could be bad, but for now, the services provided are worth the information I provide. I also block ads, but when if I unblock them, I'd prefer they be as targeted as possible.
The big problem I see is not with Google search so much as the tracking cookies on all the other sites that affect those that just Google search (as an example). The 'payment' in that case may be a bit high for them, assuming they are aware. I should be easier for those people to opt out.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Cactus on Thursday February 20 2014, @07:54PM
They have a few other neat features, but the !bang commands are easily my favorite. Only reason I don't use it now is I ended up doing a full wipe of my comp, and I (still) haven't gotten around to redoing the about:config.
(Score: 2, Informative) by MrNemesis on Friday February 21 2014, @06:42AM
Haven't you been able to do this in browsers themselves for years? In FF and Opera, you can right-click on a website's search box and use the "Add a keywords for this search" or whatever the Opera version is called; annoyingly it insists on saving it as a bookmark but you can define IMDB as, say, "imdb" and typing in "imdb some film wot I want to search for" will ping you off to IMDB's search page. Much faster IMHO and with zero reliance on a third party, and much more portable than relying exclusively on about:config hackery.
(Score: 1) by pjbgravely on Thursday February 20 2014, @08:03PM
It also seems Google copied DDG's search result showing a photo and description orf the result. Perhaps they both copied Bing, which I have never used.
(Score: 1) by TheRaven on Friday February 21 2014, @05:18AM
sudo mod me up
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 21 2014, @11:46AM
Nice!
I didn't know DDG had a bang for Startpage image search. Thanks!
(Score: 2, Interesting) by pp on Thursday February 20 2014, @10:25PM
They farm out their results from various sources, but unfortunately they pick up some of the quirks and errors from their result sources.
One of the things that bugs me the most about Google, which DDG seems to do too, is the silent dropping of search terms to boost the number of results. It's as if getting two million irrelevant results is better than getting the four results that you actually want.
The worst part is that the search term dropping is silent in DDG. I believe that Google at least tells you when certain terms aren't present in a particular result. In DDG, you can't always tell.
(Score: 3, Informative) by ztoth on Thursday February 20 2014, @10:53PM
I've been using DDG for years (i.e. since the privacy reveals), pretty much exclusively. It gives results good enough, I rarely have to "fall back" to G or other engines.
One killer feature DDG provides is called !bang [duckduckgo.com], which allows you to search for keywords in specific websites very easily, without going to that website first. For example, if you type "!a arduino" in DDG, it will take you to Amazon and search arduino stuff for you. There's a shortcut for every major site and the list keeps growing. You can even do this !bang thing in the URL bar if DDG is your default engine, which has simplified my life a lot...
DDG lacks some features like image search. For that I use startpage, and with DDG's !bang feature it's as simple as typing "!spi natalie portman" in the URL bar :-)
(Score: 1) by MaxiCat_42 on Friday February 21 2014, @01:39AM
I usually use DDG when I want fairly specific answers to technical queries. For example, I bought some ultrasonic range finder modules and wanted details on their use with microcontrollers. Google gave me a page of drell (sorry, I'm watching Farscape ATM), whereas DDG gave specific links to the info that I needed. It's the default on Rasperian too. Simple, basic and uncluttered design: I like it.
Phil.
Lexicostatistical Glottochronology - you know it makes since.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 21 2014, @05:35AM
I use D2G regularly. I find that it is more reliable than Google, in the sense that it won't arbitrarily decide to leave out keywords of your search without telling you so. It enables me to search pretty well.
D2G has some nice features, such as highlighting the "official" site for a product, and putting a short link to a Wikipedia article first. That really speeds up searching.
OTOH, regularly, D2G doesn't find an acceptable answer, when Google (but also Bing) can. This mostly happens to me when looking for something technical, e.g. some aspect of multiple measurements in statistical testing. So I do switch from time to time.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Keldrin on Friday February 21 2014, @10:24AM
I use DDG for about 95% of my searches, and have pretty much since they started up. Their results are much better now than they used to be, but they still aren't quite on par with Google. Every now and then I'm looking for something very obscure and specific, and Google will usually have that answer. But since I can just append !G to DDG, it will send me over to the google results without having to change the little picture in my search window.
I mainly use them because it honestly seems like they are just trying to provide a helpful and useful service, and they are doing much better at the "don't be evil" thing than Google.