Been seeing lately a lot of good posts about DuckDuckGo(DDG). I used it maybe 10-20 times in past x years but never thought to give it a try as a Default SE. Today I switched all my browsers and Devices to DDG and if I like it I’ll peovabl stick with it.
Major reason for me to switch is the privacy but non the less is to compare it to Google.
What’s your experience with DDG from Dev/Ops experience?
Latest comments (30)
I have been using DDG as my primary search in Firefox for around 5 years. I search a lot of dev queries every day, and generally only have to fall back to google (generally using the
!gbang) about twice in a week of work.You get better results in DDG if you re-learn how to do a search query. Google lets you ask very question-like queries but in DDG I find you have to go more oldschool and be very specific about words and "exact phrases".
The only Google service that is really hard to live without is maps. The data of business locations and hours is too good, so I still use
!mapsquite a lot. YouTube and Translate are not too hard to boycott.Many people have mentioned the bangs feature, which I love duckduckgo.com/bang. But I also love how the first search result will show a little preview card of the content, like StackOverflow posts. Handy!
Yeah I just noticed that on my phone. and does the tab with [Q/A]
Been using DDG for over a year exclusively and had no reason to go back to Google. I switched for no other reason than just trying it out and comparison (and rooting for underdogs is always fun). The search results are seemingly more consistent and at least as accurate and yes, it's better at answering or highlighting answers for dev-related searches.
How do you research local things and get maps and hours of operations?
Got me there. Got to admit I still use Google Maps on my phone for hours of operation. But again, I'm not trying to quit Google altogether. If I was, I could opt for other map apps and Facebook (for better or for worse) for hours of operation.
Thanks everyone for pushing me to make the switch.
I've set DDG as default engine for Firefox on desktop and on mobile.
You won’t be disappointed. DuckDuckGo even integrates with sites like StackOverflow and Mozilla Developer Network to answer your question. It’s also easy to do conversions. For example, ‘6374 binary' will give you 1100011100110. The quality of the results are also quite good, and in some cases even better than Google.
You should also try Jive Search, since they are open source. The entire platform is open source and duck is moving away from open source since they closed their instant answers to contributions. jivesearch.com
Jive Search seams a bit bare at this point.
Superb! I always get better results than Google, especially on programming results, and the bangs and cheat sheets are incredible. I've been a loyal DDGer for over six years now, and I'm never going back.
I've been using it for a few years (I think?) now. In the early days I used to have to go back to Google for certain results or to more easily choose a time range, but DDG has caught up and overtaken google for that stuff now. It's all good.
I love DDG. But I feel that Google provides better search results than DDG. And that's the major reason why I'm not making DDG as default search engine.
BTW duckduckgo_traffic_is_exploding
It's always worked pretty well for me. Once or twice a month I resort to Google for something when I'm not getting good results.