DuckDuckGo’s premise is simple. They do not collect or share personal information. They log searches, but they promise that these logs are not linked to personally identifiable information. Their search engine results seemingly come from Bing, but they claim to have their own crawler and hundreds of other sources on top of that. They do customize the results a little: geo-searches like bars near my location give me results from my home city of New York. But search results aren’t personalized. I’ve always wondered how good the results would be.
DuckDuckGo is my default, main search engine on all my computers and devices. Every now and then I do use the g command to tell DDG to do a Google search, but overall, I’m incredibly satisfied with how DDG performs.
If one is reasonably cautious, he wants to avoid giving data to the alphabet soup of various Gestapo agencies.
But if one is indeed reasonably cautious, he is likely to conclude that DDG is just another facet of the Gestapo.
It’s definitely —-not— part of Google.
alec was implying that it was controlled by governmental agencies ala Crypto AG or some such thing. Gestapo was a government organization, not private company.
For what its worth, I don’t think they are willing such, but does that make a difference? Eh…
I’ve been using it for about four years. 1 ½ to 2 years ago I would have not told everyone I know to use it. Now For the past year I’ve been encouraging people to use it and encouraging people to set it up as their default search engine. So far nobody has complained.
I tried to switch to DDG, I know how bad it is feeding my data to the data gestapo – but I just found it too hard not to be able to pull up a history of my searches from any PC (not the paricular PC and browser I used at the time), to remember a page I might have found and then lost the link to in weeks passed.
(Talking ‘My Activity’ on Google)
I wish there was some kind of clean way DDG could log search results for me, but perhaps not to their own servers, maybe to a server _I_ own.
Like a webhook that fires after every search which I can point to a service I have running to archive my search history.
jmorgannz,
I guess maybe you were thinking of maybe a feature that DDG could add themselves? I don’t think they’d be likely to go for it though…
It used to be possible to write a short little browser plugin to do things like that and run them in your own browser, but mainstream browsers have switched to walled garden restrictions making them much less open to user mods. Maybe you could run an unstable developer build or corporate build.
If you have a server, you could do it server side as well, essentially be a logging proxy in front of DDG. It wouldn’t be difficult to parse out the search terms and put them in a database.
I have been using DDG as my only search engine for years now, and I never felt left behind. It finds whatever needs to be found. It’s part of my dream-team: FF ESR, uBlock Origin, HTTPS Everywhere, Privacy Badger, and DDG as default search engine. (and BitWarden as password manager)
I use DDG now on desktop (still not on Android), have been for about a half year, but tbh I end up needing to open Google for about a third of my searches. Not only because integration with maps, videos and images is better, but also because the results from DDG are not as relevant. This is doubly true when looking up programming-related search terms – Google just seems to figure out what I’m looking for a lot better and pin things like Stack overflow answers higher up. How much of this is down to Google “knowing” what I’m likely looking for I’m not sure, though even in a privacy window Google search terms to win out for those kinds of topics. For general knowledge and news they both seem alright. As far as search results go, DDG is better than Bing, but that’s not saying much. I am curious though why (aside from the personalization aspect) it’s not as good as Google, considering I thought it uses Google search as its basis.
Moochman,
I do sometimes when I’m not getting anywhere with DDG, but for me it’s nowhere near third of the time. I might pull up google twice a month.
It’s probably just me, but oh how much I hate the stack overflow bias. The search engine love to treat stack overflow as an authority on every topic, but stack overflow’s moderation regime very frequently shut down the very question I wanted an answer to. So while people like myself and others are asking the question, the topic is closed and nobody’s allowed to answer it, meanwhile the link stays at the top of search engines. Damn it this pissed me off. Either stack overflow’s moderation needs to stop being so oppressive, or search engines should purge results for questions that are “closed” and not accepting answers because these are low quality search results.
I thought so too but someone mentioned it was using bing now…I’m not sure where they’re getting data from.
DDG has never sourced results from Google. They primarily use Bing/Yahoo.
https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/sources/
I have read that for Russian results they used to use Yandex, but I can’t confirm that anymore.
Their own DuckDuckBot crawler disappointingly is not used for creating an independent search index, but rather for eliminating spam and malicious content from the search results.
https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/duckduckbot/
rahim123,
I really don’t think they have the resources to deep crawl the web to build and refresh their own index. I generally don’t see hits from duck duck bot. If their sources were to cut them off, they’d be in trouble.
It’d be neat if we could build an index using all public resources, maybe as a P2P network. It would eliminate our dependence on corporations hoarding the critical data and keeping us dependent on them. Maybe this exists in some form, but I wasn’t able to find one though.
P2P networks have been in decline for some time. In spite P2P’s considerable advantages corporations have invested heavily to promote centralized business models. For better or worse, the internet landscape has changed as well. Consumers are migrating to mobile devices with constricted bandwidth/capacity/power. P2P networks simply don’t work as well as they used to because of all the IP4 NAT going on, which often breaks P2P connectivity. The resurgence of P2P is probably a pipe dream.
One publicly distributed project, SETI@home, is set to hibernate the project this month. Even with donated resources, the entire seti network is probably not as useful as simply renting out much faster GPUs in a data center.
https://setiathome.berkeley.edu/
Anyways sorry about my rambling, I know you’re only here to talk about duckduckgo 🙂
@Alfman
Yes, this does actually exist already, it’s called Yacy. Unfortunately though, the extent of the search indexes is still extremely limited and spotty compared to even a small centralized engine like Mojeek.
Overall, I’m pretty happy with SearX, as described in my blog article, configured to pull queries from Google, Startpage, DuckDuckGo, Wolfram|Alpha, and Mojeek.
I recently did an extensive comparison of DDG against pretty much all the alternative and mainstream search engines:
https://libretechtips.gitlab.io/detailed-tests-of-search-engines-google-startpage-bing-duckduckgo-metager-ecosia-swisscows-searx-qwant-yandex-and-mojeek/
(I submitted it as an article here, but I guess it wasn’t approved.)
In short, DDG has demonstrably worse results for my needs, and has actually regressed considerably since the last time they made major strides in 2014.
Of course, this is purely from a performance perspective. I obviously root for the more ethical providers, but I personally prioritize relevancy and depth of the search index above all else. So obviously YMMV.
rahim123,
Don’t take it personally, most of the articles I submit don’t get accepted either. Although I’m sure it’s more frustrating when you’re the author.
I started going over your article, wow you did a ton of work on that. It’s just hard to consume in it’s current format. If you ever want to do it again, I’d suggest reorganizing it into a concise table providing a 10,000ft overview, followed by supporting charts/graphs/spreadsheets. IMHO all that raw data should be linked separately for anyone who wants to see or reproduce it themselves, but it’s a bit overwhelming for a casual reader like me, haha.
Anyways, I could only read the tip of the iceberg, but here are some of my comments…
Where do you get this from? Because in my experience, unless you have a high ranking site, google takes ages to refresh it’s index especially for new sites. It’s torment. It sometimes takes google weeks or even months between the time they crawl the pages and actually start listing them. You can even confirm this with google’s webmaster tools. Bing on the other hand is consistently much faster at updating it’s index regardless of one’s rank. Usually within the week all site changes will have already propagated to bing.
This is a fair criticism, last year someone posted the idea of making google’s index public. This won’t happen of course, but it would unquestionably lead to more innovation by 3rd party companies and communities that can’t realistically crawl the web themselves at google scales.
Hmm, your criteria for not including yahoo is in conflict with your criteria for including duck duck go, why?
Just now I tested a search on both yahoo and bing and found that while results are mostly the same, they aren’t identical and begin to diverge after the top results. So I don’t understand why you chose to exclude yahoo.
Yes, this is so frustrating. Stop second guessing me, I typed all the criteria in on purpose!
I was going to say this doesn’t always work and that google will ignore quotes, however I tested it just now and I couldn’t get it to happen. It works exactly as expected. Hmm, I’m pretty sure it was ignoring my quotes as recently as last year. It’s great to see this works now though!
Hi there Alfman, thanks for the reply.
You’re right, on a given site, especially new ones, Google can take its time. But as for picking up on events and new bits of information that appear online (new version of an application released, new corporate or open source news, etc.) I always get the freshest and most relevant results from Google (or SearX).
Because DuckDuckGo at least has the advantage of a better privacy policy, much better aesthetics, and better instant answers. Yahoo is sort of a has-ran in my mind, all too well known, largely dependent on Bing, and nothing unique to like or write home about.
Very rarely I believe I’ve seen Google ignore even quoted terms, but it generally seems to work. When it alerts you “We’re also showing you results for X, or search only for Y” and you click on “search only for Y”, it puts “Y” in quotes for you.
Once every year or two I really try to make DDG my search engine. But every time the results suck (especially with non-English queries).
To make Google less of a worry, I use a separate browser for my gmail+keep (and thus my google ID), and another one which is purposefully terrible in keeping cookies and other fingerprinting mechanisms for the rest of my browsing. I never do a search or watch youtube on my gmail+keep browser.
The new Firefox can apparently provide containers for cookies, and thus eliminate the need to use two browsers, but I have yet to migrate to it. Long live procrastination!
btw, google images suck, hard, terribly hard.
yandex images is the king of that domain now.
After all that effort, If you’re using Chrome, your data is allegedly collected ANYWAY. I just wish Firefox wasnt the ONLY browser player out there with a robust enough privacy infrastructure. maybe DDG should foray into that market.
spiderdroid,
You mean the browser market?
I suppose maybe they could fork of an existing open source browser, but an all-out independent browser is probably not viable. Even mozilla itself sometimes has trouble threading the needle between user interests and corporate sponsorship. The real issue is that while so many users say they want strong privacy protections, time has shown that they aren’t willing to pay for it with their own wallets. Making a privacy conscientious browser isn’t profitable unless you build off the work of others.
https://www.srware.net/iron/
https://brave.com/
https://www.waterfox.net/
As most are already aware, even microsoft itself gave up on it’s own browser, the edge browser is now a clone too.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/chromium-based-edge-hands-on-with-microsofts-new-browser/
@Alfman
That’s completely agree. I know that I’m personally NOT financially independent enough to sponsor such a project. I dont have the skills to code such an initiative for myself. As DDG appears to be their own, freestanding ecosystem, I believe a start to get that project off the ground is viable, But to traverse the jungle o privacy, DRM, performance, etc., it’s definitely a daunting task a s I’d “like” to see a browser and, (I’ll go even further… complete OS environment) to accompany the ideals of DDG, to round everything out. But alas, we can dream. That’s about the only thing left that’s free of cost. LOL
I’ve been using it exclusively now for about two years. With the minor exception of some photo searches (which google still has pretty robust reverse lookup for those), I do not touch google.
It is indeed a great engine, and they really pay attention to UI.