“Not far from Valley Forge, around the corner from Bravo Pizza, up the road from Paoli Auto Body, there is an odd-looking office building that resembles a stone castle. An eye doctor is on the first floor. On the second floor is a search engine. The proprietor of the search engine is Gabriel Weinberg, who is 33. A few years ago, when Weinberg told his wife about his new business idea – pitting him against more established outfits such as Google and Bing – he admits that she briefly thought he was nuts.” What a success story.
I like DuckDuckGo. The idea of no tracking is a relief. However, I have found the search results are not as good as Google’s from my experience. Still more than adequate most of the time.
It depends, I do occasionally run into queries where DDG gives a more relevant set of results than Google. I agree that, most of the time, they’re good enough.
However, I can actually go into detail on where DDG falls short: Forum posts. Google beats the pants off DDG for relevance when you’re searching for something like an error message and the best answer is in some out-of-the-way forum site.
That’s very true, but I have noticed a disturbing trend on Google lately specifically regarding forums. More often than not, Google will rank those annoying and useless “forum reader” spam sites much higher than the actual content.
And on the topic of forum posts, Google also seems to have a lot of false positives with their safe browsing feature. While I was setting up my Mac mini as a Plex server the other day, I tried Googling an error message and the top hits were in the Plex forums. But, Google blocked me from visiting those forum posts accusing it of being a known hacker site. I searched the same issue in DuckDuckGo and was given the same links with no hostile takeover.
While I’m sure Google’s web sanitation project has protected a lot of people, it’s nothing but an annoyance and even a hindrance to those of us who already practice safe browsing.
I find it to be very good at finding things outside of where I normally go. Google is better at the second, but only because they track me. So Google is for finding bookmarks by keyphrases, while duckduckgo is for actual searching to find new things.
I use it as a default now. If I’m not finding what I’m looking for, it makes it easy to continue searching on another engine. You can also easily use specific search engines with the ! syntax.
More often than not, Google will rank those annoying and useless “forum reader” spam sites
It was enough for me a year ago to move over to duckduckgo for good. It works well enough 98% of the time. My only gripe with it is its layout, or should I say the style attributes set on its layout. I don’t like the hover crap on the results, makes it hard to select text.
Edited 2012-11-10 11:59 UTC
For certain items Baidu is much more help full. It’s unaffected by U.S. censors and can at many times deliver great results you won’t find on U.S. based search engines.
I never knew this place was so close to me. I am right over the river. I cannot relieve Google at this time, but I wish them a lot of luck.
I think that they are in a good position right now. There is really no competition for Google, not even Bing, so no one will really be looking for them until it is too late.
They do seem to log at least one thing: the link in the search result you click on.
This is what Google does too, it is to see if what people clicked on to move the more popular higher.
And possibly log other things, probably not very user specific though.
However they could log per IP-address and browser string too which can be very specific.
It’s still a big improvement above Google of course:
They don’t communicate a referer to the site you visit (because of HTTPS) and they don’t have a free analytics service for websites which tracks movement on websites, or own 2 ad-services and or an embedded free video service. And no Facebook-button competitor and no free enbeddable Javascript-libraries and fonts- service for webdevelopers.
DDG is my main search engine now, and the only one I use regularly.
I wonder whether Google’s overwhelming success can be seen as a technical advantage for DDG. I know as a web author that every job is bent around the perception of Google’s algorithms, and every page is tweaked to hell until it starts to rise up their ranking.
There’s only so much Google can do to counteract that, secret algorithms or no. DDG, on the other hand, can be damned sure that not a single site on the web is trying to cheat its way to the top of its particular rankings, and so when they change the formula, the sites don’t fight back.
“Weinberg is plugging away. He’s working on improvements to his site’s crafty !bang searches. Typing “Michael Rosenwald !washingtonpost†into DuckDuckGo instantly searches The Post’s search engine for Michael Rosenwald. The same principle applies if you type “comic books !amazon†or “meningitis !NIH.†Weinberg has a hard time believing Google would ever allow users to easily search another Web site and then leave directly from its homepage.”
I guess he never heard that Google also has a web browser that allows the user to do exactly the same thing, without going to any search site before that.
http://support.google.com/chrome/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=95655
Firefox and Opera have a similar option.
With this trend, using standalone search engine websites will go the way of the dinosaur.
Edited 2012-11-12 17:24 UTC
The only thing i dislike is that is so much easier to enter google.com instead of duckduckgo.com in the browser. Anyone knows if they have a shorter url?