DuckDuckGo has certainly been good enough for my regular use for several years now. Switching the search engine to DDG is part of my standard new-browser setup, along with resetting the "new tab" content to blank and installing uBlock Origin.
I may have had an easier switch because I never used a google account, and thus never had to deal with personalized search results. I also never liked the natural-language style of search query - too fuzzy - and have continued using the same kind of keyword-based searches that worked when the web was young.
Well since this is HN, the overwhelming majority will say DuckDuckGo. I switched to DDG as my default browser search around 3 months ago and it's mostly been fine. However, when I _don't_ find what I'm looking for, I do find myself popping open Google for that specific search (sometimes finding things I didn't find with DDG). So I guess I don't have full faith in DDG just yet.
I started using DuckDuckGo a few years ago. Initially, I would find myself using Google at least a few times a day if DDG didn't turn up what I was looking for.
As time went on this was less and less the case, and now I hardly ever use Google for web search. DDG results are a lot better than they used to be and almost always as good as Google in my experience.
I've been a happy DDG user for about 3 years now. I initially started not because of privacy, but because I think the home page and search results are much cleaner and more minimalist. And I've told myself that if Google ever produces a search result that I couldn't find just as easily with DuckDuckGo then I will switch back. So far that hasn't happened.
Now I use DuckDuckGo as my home page and it's my only search engine. And the search results just keep getting better and better.
I’ve completely switched to DuckDuckGo for search. I used to fall back to Google fairly frequently if the DDG results weren’t good enough, but that has gotten less and less frequent.
The experience is very similar to Google in the old days
My impression is that DDG requires a slightly different choice of keywords. But you'll get used to it and in my experience it currently delivers better results than Google.
When I started using DuckDuckGo I often switched to Google for certain queries, now I do that very rarely because Google's results get more disappointing every year.
I have been using DuckDuckGo for more than 4 years now. I would use google only if DDG does not provide a good result. In the last one year, queries that went unanswered on DDG did not turn up a good result on google either. So for me, DDG has not completely replaced google.
I switched to DuckDuckGo a couple of years ago, and it really does just fine. Besides, if DDG's results aren't good enough, you can just add !g to your query string and search again - this time DDG will act as a frontend for Google search. I used to do this frequently but DDG's results have improved steadily while I've been using it and now I rarely bother.
I've been using duckduckgo exclusively for a year now on all my devices and I'm loving it.
The whole point of a search engine is to give you what you're looking for, and ddg delivers. If I ever need to Google something, I'll use !g query. You can make it look really nice also by changing it from the Default theme to Basic.
I've been using DuckDuckGo exclusively for almost 2 years now. Never had a problem. There were a couple times early on when I was like "these results are bad, lemme check Google", only to find out Google's results were pretty much the same. DDG just buys results from other providers, so their results are pretty much always going to be acceptable.
Edit: Just wanted to say I'm not try to discount your experience, I just don't want to dissuade future people from trying out other search engines, when I think switching search engines is one of the biggest and easiest privacy wins a lot of people can do.
Same exact experience. It’s been fairly recently that I stopped routinely checking up on DuckDuckGo’s search results. On the rare occasion that I do, I’m mostly surprised at how Google’s results are inferior to DDG’s.
Some of this may be the “what I’m used to” factor though. Maybe I’ve just habituated to expect the results I’ve gotten from DDG. Either way, I don’t miss Google. I used to DDG out of principle; now I DDG because it works better.
DuckDuckGo is awesome, I advocate for DDG as much as I can, and I switched completely a few months ago both on my phone and my PC, but I'm genuinely curious about how you were able to completely switch. Unless you also use the !g command?
I'd love for there to be a "permanent !g" option, because Bing (DDG's default engine) just doesn't cut it. Like, at all. And it's not like I do fancy searches all the time, or ever really. But unless I am searching for a very popular, basic term, most of the time DDG's results either show nothing relevant at all on the first page, or there's one or two results that are relevant, often times the most relevant (like, say, a product page for a product I'm searching for) being shown pretty far down on the page, with third party sites being up top.
In either case, I try !g and immediately find what I'm looking for on the front page. Like it's a whole new world. At this point I am using !g 90% of the time and it gets frustrating; I have half a mind of switching back, but I really don't want to do that, because Google needs to go.
Even when I add "site:xyz.com" or (gag) "site:reddit.com", while DDG's results are better in these cases, just in case I'll try "!g" to see if I missed anything and... bam, even more relevant results I never saw before.
I think Apple needs to enter the search engine business. Bing is just not good enough, and Google is evil. I've moved away from Google Maps, Gmail, Chromecast, and anything else Google I can move away from... but it's the best search engine by far and it's the one instance where it really does make me less productive if I use the alternative.
I like DuckDuckGo but Google just indexes way more pages than it, and as a result I am able to find more quality results there... If DDG can index more of the web, I would definitely switch over.
I originally started switching my default browser search results to DuckDuckGo about 18 months ago due to privacy concerns and not wanting to support Google.
A strange side-effect I noticed over this period was being able to find things _much quicker_ than my colleagues. I thought maybe I was just better at picking what words to type in - but after we did some comparisons, DDG really does just provide better results now (and increasingly so) for the kinds of searches we're doing.
The bangs are useful, but honestly I haven't really needed to use them. Occasionally I'll use a !g or !yt, but this is maybe 1% or less of my searches.
I've even taken the rare step of disabling uBlock and some other Firefox extensions because I _want_ DDG to succeed.
For me DDG is still nowhere close to Google, but I wouldn't classify it as terrible in general. Also, DDG doesn't have searching by date range and doesn't have searching for recent results beyond one month.
What I do is use DDG as my default, and then progressively use the bang commands [1] to move to Startpage with !s and then to Google with !g. Sometimes it takes a little longer to find something, but I try to avoid using Google search directly as much as possible.
That used to be true for me but I've used ddg as my main search engine for a couple of years and I find myself using "!g" less and less. Actually you made me realize that I haven't used it in a while, probably weeks (and I've had a very busy couple of weeks with tons of opportunities to look for stuff online).
It's not because duckduckgo finds everything I want, it's because I've noticed that when ddg doesn't find something usually google doesn't either. Also whenever I end up on google now (generally because I forgot to change the search engine after a fresh install) I find the website cluttered which is a shame because it used to be in Google's DNA to keep the search page simple.
What the hell is all of that stuff? If I wanted to browse the stock exchange or google maps I would. "People also search for" well good for them I guess.
Agreed. I've given DuckDuckGo a try a few times in the past, and it never stuck. With the latest rounds of Google-being-Google, I gave DDG another go and so far haven't looked back.
DDG is great, and I use it by preference. The only thing I prefer Google for is when I want to search for something in a specific geographical location. Otherwise, I find DuckDuckGo more useful, and I wonder why others don't. Maybe it's residual search mannerisms I've retained from my Altavista days.
I've started to use DuckDuckGo as my default search engine in Firefox recently, but accuracy of results often falls short of my expectations. So I end up entering the same query again at Google especially when searching for technically detailed Q&A. Is there anyone who only use DDG in everyday life?
I switched over to DuckDuckGo as my default search provider, for about half a year. It was alright for a while... but eventually I would search for things on both DDG and Google and realized how much I was missing... Sadly I've moved back to Google since then.
Another issue that kept coming up for me, was their lack of keyboard controls on search result pages. Although, this isn't really as relevant to most users I would speculate
I may have had an easier switch because I never used a google account, and thus never had to deal with personalized search results. I also never liked the natural-language style of search query - too fuzzy - and have continued using the same kind of keyword-based searches that worked when the web was young.
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