My understanding is that Duck Duck Go is more or less a non personalized Bing search with paid upranking for Amazon products. As it is Bing is pretty solid, though the privacy boost DDG provides is not worth the drop in quality.
To my knowledge duck duck go uses Bing's search API to get their results. To me Bing and Google have not been sufficient for my searching needs and the needs of a large group around me for a long time now.
On a separate but related issue because DDG is using Bing the overall experience is lackluster, as other user's have noted
things like very slow to re-index new results, new information climbs up to the top very slowly and often times I have to switch off their search with a ! command to get my results because they just aren't working. But if I have to do that I'd rather be on that other search site entirely.
To be fair google also for the last few years has also started providing a very lack luster search experience and using dark patterns around their results to get you to click ads.
They all kind of suck.
My opinion is biased though because I'm currently working on a new search engine to solve these things.
There's more to the services DDG offers than just private search via Bing. DDG has built its own technology around specific types of searches and queries. The main search product is powered by Bing, but it's not fair to say it's just "a Bing frontend".
Not sure about bing, but DuckDuckGo is basically Yahoo with the search spam filtered out. On heavily spammed searches DDG has become noticeably better, IMO.
Isn't DuckDuckGo just a wrapper around Bing search results? I see lots of complaints about DDG search results but those complaints should be directed to Bing, not DDG.
(I understand that DDG does some value-add to the results returned by the Bing API).
I use Bing and DuckDuckGo somewhat interchangeably. Bing is particularly useful at work since I'm usually looking up Microsoft support issues (and they pay you to use their search in Amazon gift cards, which is nice), and DDG is obviously much better for privacy.
"DuckDuckGo gets its results from over one hundred sources, including DuckDuckBot (our own crawler), crowd-sourced sites (like Wikipedia, which are stored in our own index), Yahoo! (through BOSS), Yandex, WolframAlpha, Yelp, and Bing."
I also don't see "we don't track" as a liability, given that Google themselves get relatively little by way of relevance from profiling (though it may contribute to ad sales). Rather (and this is straight from a Google engineer): "It's really hard to do much better in search advertising than current query + location."
Aside from a limited set of head queries where they've added their own custom stuff, DDG is a wrapper around Bing. The results are identical and any webmaster can tell you that Duckduckbot is not crawling the web like Google/Bing.
In the same way that "Google is an advertising company", I see DDG as a marketing company. They've done a good job marketing Bing results with a privacy wrapper. I recognize the value, but it's different from competing directly on search.
I'm sorry but I have big problems with calling DDG a real search engine. Their page states "DuckDuckGo is a search engine like Google." BS. It's a meta search engine that relies on other real search engines, such as Bing, to get the results. If ever becomes a threat to Bing, they'll cut them off in a second. DDG doesn't do the hard and resource-intensive work of crawling and ranking the pages, they just tweak the results of others in ways that gets them publicity on tech blogs.
This article prompted me to do likewise. For the past 24 hours and running, I have used Duck Duck Go exclusively instead of Google. It is like a breath of fresh air. I tried DDG a few months back and it was a bit on the rough side. It has made tremendous strides in the intervening time.
As for Google, they have gone past their prime. As the other comments note, 2008 was the peak. Yahoo is in the midst of what may be the longest running identity crisis ever to hit a company. And the name of the game for both Google and Bing is to keep you on their site with their advertisements for as long as they possibly can. Like some tentacled monster, they don't want to just serve you and let you go. The cheap tricks masquerading as a flashy UI ruin the user experience and make me not want to go back. Duck Duck Go actually keeps you coming by serving salient information (aka 'value') and then lets you get on with life. Kinda reminds me of the difference between the personality ethic and the character ethic from Covey's 7HHEP.
This was a great post. Thanks for putting it forward.
The reason that Bing and DuckDuckGo have such similar results is that DDG uses Bing's search API, so the comparison here is only really between Bing and Google.
DuckDuckGo does not have its own index. They are pretty much layer over Bing plus some customizations for query parsing and head queries for trusted sources which they do index. If Bing decided to block DDG tomorrow, they will be toast. The only impressive thing for me about DDG is that they are able to turn privacy thing in to marketing for geeks and get tiny trickle of traffic to stay alive in hope someone would buy them out.
DuckDuckGo's results are a compilation of "over 400" sources, including Yahoo! Search BOSS; Wikipedia; Wolfram Alpha; Bing; its own Web crawler (the DuckDuckBot); and others. It also uses data from crowdsourced sites, including Wikipedia, to populate "Zero-click Info" boxes – grey boxes above the results that display topic summaries and related topics.
Can't use duckduckgo. It's just dreadful. If it's a wrapper for bing, then it's a shit wrapper because they're actually worse than bing. I get different results for the same search and ddg is by far the worst. Right now I'm using a searx endpoint. Waaaaay better.
DDG is essentially Bing made more private, with a little Yandex. I use it, because I like the privacy, but I don't think they deserve the credit for search result quality.
I like that DuckDuckGo uses Bing as a source and DDG acts as a proxy to Bing. Bing is a huge personal-data grab by Microsoft and all their recent AI is just cruft I will never use, personally.
I don't think it's relevant to answering the question "Should I use DDG". I do think it's relevant to know DDG doesn't provide diversity in search results.
I'm pretty sure DuckDuckGo has a contract with Bing.
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