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?
Oldest comments (30)
I've using the Duck for years. I like the instant answers, themes, and the privacy is nice too. If I can't find what I'm looking for there is always the shebang like !g
First, I commend you for taking this major step to protecting your privacy. News like this makes you wonder why Google is aggressively chasing personal data.
I've been using DDG for the past 2 years as my default search engine.
My experience with it so far has been nothing short of great. In the duration I have been using DDG as my primary search engine, I have needed to search on Google only 2 times. This is a testament to how great DDG is as a search engine.
Lastly, DDG supports shortcuts, called bangs, for searching other search engines. Example:
!g test
will search Google fortest
!gh test
will search GitHub fortest
!a test
will search Amazon fortest
More details here: duckduckgo.com/bang
I love the bangs! There's so many as well so I often try to guess new bangs, like
!laravel
or 1 of my most common!mdn
Genuine question : How is using
!g test
to search Googletest
(from DDG) different from directly using Google ?It's not different.
It's just a matter of convenience that you are able to search on other platforms (if you need it) without having to first navigate to other platforms.
A default browser? 🤔
I guess that he meant default search engine :D
I think so too. 🤔
Misspoke, search engine :)
Fixing it now.
Noting that DuckDuckGo is available as a browser as well on Android. I switched all my devices to DuckDuckGo browser as my first choice and it's been a great experience - especially considering that the team is actively reviewing feature requests and implementing them on Github.
I use it as a default search engine on desktop for more then one month, and is better for technical searches sometimes, for snippets and commands.
Often (once a day or so) I have to return to google because some the non-popular searches fails (as in the results quality is weak).
On Mobile I use the Cliqz browser that has DuckDuckGO as default and other privacy features builtin.
Overall its quality is OK, when Google is Excellent. It does its job most of the times.
I like to search github repositories, stackoverflow and other R-18 content(I'm 20 yrs old btw, no FBI pls) on DDG. It does give me a strict search if I'm searching for unfamiliar text to search(Thanks DDG for not giving me R-18 at work).
I've tried it very occasionally, but I know it's been significantly improving over the years. As far as I could even myself tell, it's particularly strong at development-related questions. (I wonder why :v)
I think the news has a lot of us considering the same jump! I just switched my daily driver machine over to Firefox Quantum & DDG from Chrome and Google. Three days in I’m loving it. Thanks for making this thread, learning a bunch of pro-tips I had missed!
I don't know when exactly I make the switch to DuckDuckGo, maybe a year ago, but I agree with Peter Benjamin about being a great experience. Of course, you will find weird the first day and miss a few things about how Google shows the results(like Wikipedia cards and other things for information) but after a while, you should see that you do not need Google that much.
I still learning about some useful bang like
!gten
or!gtes
to google translation or!w
,!yt!
for Wikipedia and Youtube.I also love some Instant Answers like duckduckgo.com/?q=Sublime+Text+3+C... or duckduckgo.com/?q=vscode+shortcuts... and there is more duck.co/ia
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.
BTW duckduckgo_traffic_is_exploding
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.
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.
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.
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.
Thanks everyone for pushing me to make the switch.
I've set DDG as default engine for Firefox on desktop and on mobile.