[GeorgeOrr]

Am I the only one who actualy finds DuckDuckGo's search results overall better?

The main reason, I believe, is that Google's personalized search seems to get in the way.

Add to that the ! commands in DDG, and the fact that they aren't eliminating things from search in the same way google is and I find DDG the better choice for search as well as privacy.

YMMV of course, as the word "better" is so subjective, but I'd be interested if others have that experience as well.

[crdb]

I switched due to being frustrated with many Google results being SEO'ed to death. Sometimes one has to dig 3-4 pages to find a decent result. I got the feeling that if what I was searching for was commercialised, I should expect it to be quite hard to find neutral or deep results (kind of how when you're looking up a company, all you'll find in the news are PR releases disguised as industry articles).

My subjective and anecdotal experience has been that DDG filters the signal out of the noise much better in 80% of situations. In both personalised searches (e.g. for restaurants, which should be geo-localised, a recent search from Singapore sent me to Connecticut...) and for some specific items where Google has built some custom extra logic, such as movies or "site:", the added keystrokes of !g is not much effort. So I haven't switched back. It does feel like Google is a little smarter on some searches but - and I can't think of an example straight off the cuff - sometimes too smart for its own good and stuck in local optima. DDG offers a less noisy, more generalised view on the world which I prefer most of the time.

One nice thing about personalisation is the integration if you use a lot of Google products. For example, when my brother sent me his flight details, the flight was automatically added to my calendar, and Google Now showed me details on the day including the terminal and luggage belt, reminded me to leave on time and estimated the Uber wait time and even the fee (not to mention Maps can send you straight on to the Uber app with the start and end points entered). These things are either incredibly creepy or, if you trust Google and can't afford humans to do the same job, very useful.

[digi_owl]

Thing about Google's services is the eternal dilemma between tech and business.

I suspect the techies that implemented the services initially had the best of intentions with them.

But then comes the suits further up the chain, that has as their primary motivation to maximize ROI.

[crdb]

I think it's simpler than that: there's a war on between the SEO lot and Google. As SEO teams get better and better at mimicking a signal, Google needs to keep upping their game to let the valuable stuff get through without being drowned in about.com spam (sometimes the same text can be found in 10 successive clones of about.com) or companies upping their ranking. Then you get feedback loops as people's expectations adjust to the new reality.

Right now, if I type "!g clothes" my top result is missguided.co.uk; if I go to google.com and type "clothes", my top result is nastygal.com (ironic that both of these companies have "naughty" branding, when they are so good at spamming search results). Clearly both of these fashion companies have excellent SEO teams, but there might also be a factor of people expecting shops when they type a non-brand keyword.

DDG is also filled with shops (presumably affiliate links, since that's their business model) but the top/separate result is the Wikipedia article for clothing, which is actually informative if I wanted to read about clothes.

It's a good business decision for Google to have high quality search results. The problem with the previous search companies is that they sucked. Most/all of the top results were paid. There was little thought about relevance. Google won so hard because it allowed people a way to browse the enormous amount of information on the web in a structured way taking into account relevance. The ads need people to keep coming, which won't happen if other search companies are more relevant. The dynamic will be that whoever wins the search battle will end up being the new target for SEO spam and eventually develop the same problems.

[cpeterso]

DDG supports site: searches too. :)

[crdb]

Not as well or fast* in my experience. I keep trying the DDG features and switching when they get good enough...

* in fact speed is my main gripe with DDG. After years of getting used to almost instant results, waiting a few seconds is frustrating...

[aqme28]

I find the results worse, especially for the technical stuff I have to deal with most of the day.

However the ! commands are what keep me using DDG. They're a gamechanger.

[newscracker]

I find the results worse too, especially for technical stuff. DDG has outdated or poor results and still does not support search by date (this is something I use heavily). I do have DDG as my default search engine, but I often find repeating the same searches using Startpage. It will take a lot more work on DDG's part to have me use it without getting back to Startpage/Google.

The only times I resort to Google are for recent news searches, search by image and times when even Startpage does not provide adequate results (I don't understand why that happens since Startpage is a proxy for Google). The "site:" searches still seem to work better with Google.

Additionally, I also don't like the way the search result links in DDG get selected when using the arrow keys (similar to caret browsing mode) instead of scrolling the page. This becomes more of an annoyance when the mouse cursor is already somewhere on the screen and a search result gets highlighted unintentionally. I found this behavior can be changed by turning off the "Keyboard shortcuts" setting (under "General" settings), but I don't like saving search engine settings, and feel this default is not a good choice. Not sure if others find it extremely useful.

[hliyan]

I switched today. I actually find the results to be better in my case. For example, I don't have to groan every time I search for something web related and get w3schools as the first result.

[_delirium]

I'm seeing w3schools more often on DDG. :/ For example the query [css font-face] returns them as the #1 result on both DDG and Google. But Google at least has the Mozilla developer network as the #2 result, while DDG's #2 result is... another w3schools page. As are results #4 and #7. You have to go down to #11 to get the Mozilla result.

Overall I find DDG good enough most of the time, though. The main thing Google still seems to do better is heuristically figuring out vague queries or queries for not quite the right term, as well as word-sense disambiguation.

[foiboitoi]

While I've moved on from DDG and prefer going directly to resources... you can use DDG to redirect searches to Mozilla developer network usign !mdn

[hliyan]

I guess it's based on context. I search mostly for JavaScript and HTML5 related things.

[lugg]

Its certainly one of those things you have to get used to.

I try to pick it up every few months in hopes its better but fall back on google bang too much and revert.

I'm disappointed they took the privacy route so hard and disabled / didn't implement bubbling for results. Bubbling is a pain sometimes but overall I think it provides much better results especially for those in certain fields (e.g. IT)

[baddox]

On the other hand, I seem like I'm the only one who finds bang commands almost completely useless. For the vast majority of bang command queries, I'm confident I could just type the query into Google (without the !foo) and get what I want.

Based on my last attempt to use DDG (which, admittedly, was a few years ago) I found myself needing to add !g much more often than finding uses for other bang commands.

[puranjay]

Totally. Sometimes, when I'm researching something for work, I keep getting results from sites I frequent - sites I don't want to see in my results. I want objectivity and for that, I have to go to DuckDuckGo

[imakesnowflakes]

>Am I the only one who actualy finds DuckDuckGo's search results overall better?

At least for vague technical queries, I still find googles results vastly superior, consistently .

[mirimir]

Same here. But I use Google via https://search.disconnect.me :) So there's no personalization.

[teaneedz]

I also love the !bang syntax. I generally find DDG results not only more useful than Google, but presented in a more appealing way. However, I use DDG primarily because it respects user privacy and is not targeting me with pervasive tracking techniques.