If anyone from DDG is watching this thread, thank you for your product and your commitment to privacy. As a privacy-conscious individual, I greatly appreciate your work. Is there a way to donate? I know you already monetize your product through ads, but I use an ad-blocker (among other things) because, well, most of the internet does not operate with the same values that you do. Since you aren't making any money off of me, I am willing to donate/pay for your service but cannot find any place on your site to do so.
They also make money from affiliate links. Next time you buy something online, try searching for it with a !bang. Amazon's is !a, and there are many more: https://duckduckgo.com/bang?c=Shopping&sc=Online
I vehemently disagree with advertising in general, and go to efforts to make sure myself and my wife/kids see ads as little as possible (Pi-Hole, adblock plugins, no TV other than as a NAS screen, etc). I very much believe it is a form of malicious brainwashing.
But, I very much want to reward the people who create the things I use.
So I'll never whitelist any site or service, but I'll absolutely donate or make sure they get paid in other ways (and usually willingly donate more than they'd get from showing me ads).
I agree with your position. I'm trying to figure out how to limit my kid from seeing any ads at all. Where can I get more information for this beyond adblock and host file manipulation?
I'm not sure if complete abstinence is good. I see my parents struggle with ads sometimes. They grew up as farmers in a rural enviroment with only a black and white TV (with 2 state channels). They seem unable to distinguish ads from proper content (unless it's obviously an ad), or they see ads as a kind of honest product documentation.
Just make sure your kids are media savvy. If you train critical thought into them, then ads can be much less harmful. I tend to agree in general but I think the way ads infect non ad content is the danger and you can’t block that.
Let’s be honest, the kids of hacker news commenters are probably going to be fine. It’s the way ads influence the unwashed masses that becomes problematic.
I have Pi-Hole on the network that every device in the house runs through, with extra blocklists and a year or so of manual tweaking, that covers most stuff. I also run ad block plugins just in case, don't allow commercial TV (they only watch Netflix or ABC Kids app), and that pretty much covers everything for our family.
It's also just a thing we keep in mind and work around in life. We won't use any service that has ads, or any site that finds ways around the Pi Hole, or watch shows/movies with heavy product placement, etc etc. It's just part of mine and my wife's core beliefs (privacy in general) so we just guide our kids towards "good" content and taught them from the minute they could understand, that "ads are bad, we don't like ads".
What does the virtual/physical network configuration look like? Are you routing all traffic into a physical server, then through a vnet/VM, and back out some other physical interface on the server?
To be clear: not all traffic has to be routed through it, just DNS.
All that I had to do was assign a static IP address to the MAC address of the VM network interface, and configure my router's DHCP to hand out that static IP for DNS.
It's all done over a singular ethernet connection between my router and the server; the amount of traffic is very minimal.
I'm not sure this is realistic in our modern society. Online, there is some flexibility: you can pay to remove ads for some things, and use ad-block on the ones that don't provide such an option. But in the offline world, I'm not sure what you're going to do. Physical ads are hard to block, you just have to avoid them when you can.
Economically, I'm not sure we're ever going to get away from ads. As I've said before in some of my comments, it's not just about paying for things you use. It's about paying more than the people who are willing to put up with ads, because otherwise companies will just do both: charge, and use ads. That's what we see in TV, in addition to many other places, and there's no reason to expect that not to continue unless there were widespread backlash, and I just don't see that happening. I don't like ads, but most of my friends don't seem to see things the way I do.
> Economically, I'm not sure we're ever going to get away from ads.
Why? Was there no human economic activity before they were ads?
If spaceships appeared in the sky, and shot lasers at all ads, and anyone making new ones, would we find no way to make and sell and buy things regardless? That seems less likely to me than said spaceships.
> I just don't see that happening.
True, and saying "it should be possible" is not the same as knowing how to get from here to there. But I wouldn't say "never ever" in this context.
Correct. I would definitely prefer to always just pay for services that I use so that 1) I know for sure I am the customer and 2) the service that I value has a stable revenue - ad revenue can be extremely volatile. I don't want the service I like to be at risk because of changes to ad-network pay rates or anything like that.
unlike another in this reply thread, I do not "disagree with advertising in general" - however I disagree with much of the online advertising industry. I wrote a comprimise suggestion post sometime ago, turn adblock into fairblock and I'll see your ads without a grudge.
I think end users should have more fine grained control over what they share and see when getting served ads.
I feel some basic defaults are in order which can be sliders and checkboxes for more control, relinquish of control for more trusted sources.
I don't want to see ads about alcohol or gambling, or games that profit from it. I don't want to see ads that move if I am not hovering on them. I only want ads that are self hosted, not third party injected. (don't punt the malware liability to third party, serve it yourself and be more responsible)
things like this are important for security and privacy, and not an issue with ads, but types of ads. If certain publications run certain ads I may not purchase them, or lose faith in them, they can't punt the blame for yesterday's ads.
Some things are limited by laws for billboards and such, I don't agree with all those regualtions, but indeed this is something that is important - and with the web it's easy enough to fine grain limit certain things from appearing in front of children, or people struggling with divorce, or all kinds of things -
So we have the ability to make ads better, in some cases I would gladly share more info than google allows to be shared currently (I don't care if most web sites get the page and keywords I used to find them, it may help them help me.
I do care if third party beacons and trackers share that info with lots of other people I don't know. I should be able to control this on a site by site basis with sane defaults.
Yep - and that leads to potentially unpredictable revenue, especially when there are disruptions in the ad-network revenue models and they force down pay rates. This puts sites/services at risk. I would much rather just pay for the service I value.
Thanks for the kind comments! We don't accept donations but instead, we really (really really) appreciate it if people spread the word: https://duckduckgo.com/spread
I run https://jivesearch.com, so I might be biased. The single biggest thing they can do to improve their product is open source everything. They've instead decided to move away from that by freezing their instant answers with no explanation as to if/when they will re-open source them. Makes me question their commitment to privacy and transparency.
Personally, I love that DuckDuckGo gives me a usable alternative to Google that is privacy focused. It might be better if they were open source, but I'll take what I can get from the industry regarding advertising practices at this point.
I just DDG and have found !bang shortcuts that are broken or 404 for weeks. I've tried reporting the problems on their feedback forms or Reddit, but never got any responses. If it was open source, I could have submitted a pull request to fix them. I'm surprised they don't have automatic heartbeat queries with expected results for every bang shortcut, at least.
Is there a way to go straight to the first result using Jive Search? With DuckDuckGo searching for "example !" does this. (This is the main reason I don't use Searx.)
You can make the ranking configurable. Once we get our own index built we will go back to doing this. The way we used to do it was by having a PostgreSQL function that is customizable once you get everything set up...I'm sure there are other ways to do it as well.
just open a guest window from chrome, and type the same search terms in the two different search engines, and you would see different results. it's not hard to verify.
In fact, DuckDuck Go gets its results from over four hundred sources. These include hundreds of vertical sources delivering niche Instant Answers, DuckDuckBot (our crawler) and crowd-sourced sites (like Wikipedia, stored in our answer indexes). We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we also source from a variety of partners, including Oath (formerly Yahoo) and Bing.
We continue to partner with more and more sources to bring you the best Instant Answers from the best sources. Our focus is on synthesizing it all together into a superior search experience.
I suppose that's quite different than 'DDG is a frontend to Bing results'?
It depends. For me, a search engine is about the organic search results and they get all their organic search results from Bing, Oath and Yandex. The 400 sources they talk about are used for Instant Answers, boxes and stuff like that.
> We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we also source from a variety of partners, including Oath (formerly Yahoo) and Bing.
Really... You read the last part of that paragraph, but no the first?
>In fact, DuckDuckGo gets its results from over four hundred sources. These include hundreds of vertical sources delivering niche Instant Answers, DuckDuckBot (our crawler) and crowd-sourced sites (like Wikipedia, stored in our answer indexes).
Kinda silly to have a crawler that doesn't index anything.
They have an index but just for their Instant Answers (for which they have 400 sources) and not the organic search results. The last paragraph is what's relevant to the actual search index.
To clarify, we haven't closed anything that was previously open, and all open source Instant Answers will remain open.
For now, we've paused community contributions for new Instant Answers and non-essential changes, until we can find a better way to work with the community and their contributions.
As most business's their internal code is probably a giant ball of mud that runs on caffeine and poor amounts of sleep. It works, but it probably wouldn't be reasonably releasable without refactoring and reworking a lot of the source so that it's componetized in some way.
Personally I just want DDG to make a search API that is free and doesn't require API keys. That way I can setup search in mobile or desktop apps and have it automagically be searching through specific sites like Soundcloud and Youtube and such.
Like if they're reading this, DDG is very unique and if they were to focus upon reducing costs, making efficient software, and better algorithms, DDG could be the service we shove into apps.
Their selling point is trustworthiness, privacy and usefulness. To be useful, they must have quality software/IP. And in their opinion, that should be protected.
If the code was AGPL'd and included contributions for which DDG didn't own the copyright (so DDG would be using the code under the terms of the AGPL), they'd be breaking the licence terms if they failed to disclose any changes.
It wouldn't be proof, but it would be a fairly strong commitment.
Interesting premise... What if they open source some small subset of their code and then track their stock price, usage, and ad revenue as they release more. It could be done in a measured process. I would be more interested in them demonstrating an increasingly distributed, uncoupled, and failure-tolerant infrastructure. I'd like to see them compete with Google's caching too.
Goal #1 should be high quality search results while respecting privacy. Everything else should be secondary. The biggest thing DDG could do to improve their product is make it quick and easy for users to provide feedback about bad search results. I'd be happy to report searches that Google gives better results for but they don't have a mechanism to do so.
For example, search DDG for "odroid". The official domain is hardkernel.com. The first result from hardkernel comes up at #6 for me. I'd love to have a way to suggest the official domain for a product like that so it shows up as #1.
As someone who mainly uses DDG when Google decides to block me for "searching too hard", one thing that would make me switch over to DDG completely is advanced search operators --- boolean expressions, exact match (no, not the stupid sort-of-exact one Google has), etc. Basically features that will let you "grep the Web" the way old search engines do, and what new search engines are even trying to forbid.
Also, if I input n-number of words then search for those words.
Recently DDG has been Googleifying by dropping one or more search words with an explanation "Not many results contain ____". So I have to click a link to search again for the words I entered. Quite annoying when it happens repeatedly each day.
The problem is that isn't how things are indexed, so "grep the web" is a hard problem. Grep on your machine just scans through every byte, doesn't care how long it takes, and doesn't care how much computing resources it uses (preferably, as much as it can).
Their bangs are genius in that they already provide a natural way for you to give feedback without actually having to think about it - rerun a query with !g, and they will redirect you to Google. Good for you, good for DDG, since they can tell which queries provide insufficient results.
Of course, you can't suggest the correct result for a specific search term, because search engines don't do a one-on-one matching of terms and results. But this will allow them to analyse at what types of queries their engine performs badly, and to improve it there.
(I don't know if they actually do this, but the theoretically can and should.)
Thing is, bangs are for people who don't use launchers (Alfred, LaunchBar, QuikSilver, Launchy, Gnome Do, Unity Dash, etc.) with web search functions. To redo a search for me: Cmd-Space, Up, Return. To add a bang to a failed DDG search: click in a search bar, make sure the whole search text isn't selected so it won't be replaced, remember which bang I want, type it in, return.
Those who don't use launchers outnumber us greatly, of course. But by virtue of being able to specify an alternative search engine using the same efficient keyboard commands as everything else, bangs aren't much more than a pain in the butt.
Even putting launchers aside, not every DDG user is going to use bangs to get results from another site. I'm sure many, as I, have the muscle memory to bring up google.com in the flash of an eye, whereas awkwardly clicking in a search bar to type in a bang surely can't be used by even the majority of DDG users.
(Of course, I don't have data to back me up, but say DDG became as ubiquitous as Google, this would be unquestioned. All the users' habits in organisations where Qwant is set as the default could make an interesting data set — except, of course, it wouldn't be possible to track who used what)
tl;dr: Bangs are too inefficient and usage must be too inconsistent to use as the basis of improving the results.
FWIW in the cases where my DDG results are insufficient (which is happening a lot less often than it used to), I try to just go up and insert a "!g" before the same query.
I don't know if DDG is looking at their "!g" requests or not, but I'd be surprised if they weren't.
Combined with that they could collect locally relevant information too.
Using DDG from the UK is currently a disappointing experience. You have the choice between US centric search result or "UK" filter that is too restrictive: for example "man cat" with the UK filter return mostly non unix stuff (unlike the default version)
!g is great, but when I use DDG on my iPhone, "!" is not an immediately accessible character.
Thanks for the suggestion. We implemented this earlier in the year for desktop users, so on the right-hand side of each search results page there's a "Send feedback" button which goes straight to the developers.
There's a "send feedback" button in the lower-right corner that does exactly what you're describing (I think it's hidden in the sidebar in the mobile version). I'm not sure how closely they actually pay attention to the feedback, but it's still worth doing.
Send feedback is not a simple process. The link takes you to a generic feedback page with fields you have to fill in. It should be much easier to report bad results.
We're working to improve our feedback process, but as mentioned, we have a "Feedback" button at the bottom right of every search result page.
Clicking this opens a form right on the results page which you can use to specify what the feedback is about (link results, image results, ads, etc.) and why you're happy/unhappy with what you're seeing.
I know I wasn't. Every time I try DDG, I immediately switch back to Google. DDG returns utter garbage when I try to do searches whose terms mix two or more languages; considering I study literary translation and am learning a few languages at the same time, this is fairly common.
I've a feeling that a lot of DDG users must be changing their search habits to suit DDG's engine, but I and plenty of others just can't.
They are as good as Google for me, sometime slightly worse, sometime slightly better, and I didn't even change my searching habits when I switched.
Also you can turn on or off localized results easily if you need to, which is hard with Google.
The only thing I'm really missing is the good completion while typing.
I really don't think that the results on DDG are inferior, but I'm comfortable with the results. If I want something more personalize or near for my location(Venezuela is not available on DDG) I just go to Google directly or with !g
I actually think that breaks it, I like it better when everybody gets the same results for the same queries. People (via algorithms or directly) shaping what others get to see, rather than configuration and user empowerment, is something I reject.
I love duckduckgo and I feel I can almost replace google completely with it. I only have the following comments on it.
1. They're hosted in the US. I wish the company would pick up and move to a country not within the 14 eyes and out of jurisdiction of the cyber super powers(US, China, and Russia). Maybe panama? At least move it virtually with a warrant canary in place.
2. The search results need better contrasting colors for glancing through. Google is noticeable better with it's bolder fonts and better typeface/colors. I feel this would be easy place to innovate in over google.
3. Better site specific searches. Right now you can search a specific site for results. For example right now you can search specific sites using `site:ycombinator.com rust programming langugage` and you will only get results from hackernews. It works great right now and I use daily in my workflows but it would be great to do this from the search bar for firefox or some better way.
Search engines have _alot_ of areas they can innovate in and I feel google with all its controversy(prism program, chinese state surveillance, etc) that many people would prefer to have their searches(and their life stories) in a company that values their users privacy to a fanatical extent.
Is the OP Swiss and wants it hosted where he/she lives? I'd be fine with that as an alternative to US, but do not understand why that would be better than, say, Sweden
For your second concern, did you know that you can change the colors and fonts on DDG from its settings? Once you do, it provides a couple of methods to sync it to each of your devices.
Agreed. Making the user go to effort for the best usability isn't the way to get people to stay, not when what they're already using is perfectly clear and readable.
about 3: I have set DDG as default search engine and I can just type "site:ycombinator.com rust programming langugage" in the address bar and get the results from ycombinator only.
Also lots of sites have !bangs available, like "!hackernews rust programming langugage" will go the the HN search directly.
I wish we had clear/consistent vocabulary for talking about privacy and personal data captured. This seemed pretty clear but it did take a lot of text to explain it and in the end, I still wanted to know if sessions are tagged together such that you can recreate sessions? Can you associate multiple sessions in anyway? You can tell a lot about an individual even if you don't know who they are from information like this.
> All of these requests are all fully encrypted in transit to DuckDuckGo, such that nobody else but us can see them. And like with all other requests to DuckDuckGo, there is no personally identifiable information embedded in them, and we do not store IP addresses associated with them.
They say they don’t Store IPs, but every request presumably has one. So it would be very easy for them to change this if they so wished, at which point their data collection wouldn’t be anonymous. As much as I like DuckDuckGo, I’d really like it if I could trust that they protect my privacy without having to trust them that they are doing so.
> To be clear, this means we cannot ever tell what individual people are doing since everyone is anonymous
Nope. This means that they tell us that they cannot tell what individual people are doing. But as they said right in the sentence before that, we are supposed to believe that they don't store IP addresses.
> And like with all other requests to DuckDuckGo, there is no personally identifiable information embedded in them, and we do not store IP addresses associated with them.
That is an outright lie even. HTTP Headers contain enough data already to make individuals distinguishable. Add some data science and you got some fancy profiles of your users.
I don't know what's going on with HN and DDG, but seriously is everyone just buying into this marketing bs? Why should I trust DDG with their claims about privacy instead of Google, Bing, or any other company?
if you are willing to pay for private email, why not any of the dozens of existing ones? e.g. protonmail or fast mail? there is little differentiation available for them here.
I love “private by design”. It was easy to switch and results are good enough. As a publisher I do NOT like the cash donations model - too feudal for me.. I think donating time to improve product - as they are asking - makes more sense. Not sure I see value in them open sourcing their software. In short, I think DDG is great and should keep doing more of what they do.
DDG sells your attention, just like all of them. It’s nothing about privacy, or selling your profile. You search a term, you get ads. When they say ‘We don’t sell your data’, it is a distraction, they are selling your immediate attention.
DDG is part of the yahoo-Microsoft search alliance. To advertise on DDG, use Bing Ads.
i tried to change google to duckduckgo. it was not sustainable. immediately noticeable poor search results. Searching an address brings me to a subpar open map site,
I don't know why you're being downvoted, because your experience is as valid as anybody else's. I'm with you, I can't switch to DDG because my productivity tanks with the poorer results than Google.
I tried Startpage as a sort of in-between solution, but that site's so dang slow.
HN users use the downvote to show disagreement. Ideally it would only be used to bury comments that were off topic, spam, etc, but the only system I've seen with a correct implementation of this is https://lobste.rs.
Edit: This comment is a case in point since I've been downvoted less than 30 seconds after posting it. Ha. I challenge someone to prove me wrong.
I'm waiting for DDG to integrate dates in the search results. Date is crucial to understand how new or old the content is. This is one of the reasons why I'm not using it.
thanks ddg for improving user experience and privacy unlike other search engines. No wonder folks are not only blocking but using things like adnauseam - https://github.com/dhowe/AdNauseam
If anyone from DDG is watching this thread, thank you for your product and your commitment to privacy. As a privacy-conscious individual, I greatly appreciate your work. Is there a way to donate? I know you already monetize your product through ads, but I use an ad-blocker (among other things) because, well, most of the internet does not operate with the same values that you do. Since you aren't making any money off of me, I am willing to donate/pay for your service but cannot find any place on your site to do so.
They also make money from affiliate links. Next time you buy something online, try searching for it with a !bang. Amazon's is !a, and there are many more: https://duckduckgo.com/bang?c=Shopping&sc=Online
They make money off ads (based strictly on the search terms) so they should be just fine.
If you'd like to chip, you can donate to the various privacy initiatives they support here:
https://www.crowdrise.com/duckduckgoprivacychallenge
(and here)
https://duckduckgo.com/donations
White list their page.
I vehemently disagree with advertising in general, and go to efforts to make sure myself and my wife/kids see ads as little as possible (Pi-Hole, adblock plugins, no TV other than as a NAS screen, etc). I very much believe it is a form of malicious brainwashing.
But, I very much want to reward the people who create the things I use.
So I'll never whitelist any site or service, but I'll absolutely donate or make sure they get paid in other ways (and usually willingly donate more than they'd get from showing me ads).
I agree with your position. I'm trying to figure out how to limit my kid from seeing any ads at all. Where can I get more information for this beyond adblock and host file manipulation?
> limit my kid from seeing any ads
I'm not sure if complete abstinence is good. I see my parents struggle with ads sometimes. They grew up as farmers in a rural enviroment with only a black and white TV (with 2 state channels). They seem unable to distinguish ads from proper content (unless it's obviously an ad), or they see ads as a kind of honest product documentation.
Just make sure your kids are media savvy. If you train critical thought into them, then ads can be much less harmful. I tend to agree in general but I think the way ads infect non ad content is the danger and you can’t block that.
Let’s be honest, the kids of hacker news commenters are probably going to be fine. It’s the way ads influence the unwashed masses that becomes problematic.
Indeed. There’s little precedence for the children of the wealthy and privileged to cause future social problems.
I have Pi-Hole on the network that every device in the house runs through, with extra blocklists and a year or so of manual tweaking, that covers most stuff. I also run ad block plugins just in case, don't allow commercial TV (they only watch Netflix or ABC Kids app), and that pretty much covers everything for our family.
It's also just a thing we keep in mind and work around in life. We won't use any service that has ads, or any site that finds ways around the Pi Hole, or watch shows/movies with heavy product placement, etc etc. It's just part of mine and my wife's core beliefs (privacy in general) so we just guide our kids towards "good" content and taught them from the minute they could understand, that "ads are bad, we don't like ads".
Even PBS is "commercial", given the growing practice of underwriter ads.
They probably meant TV shows with commercial break. Not sure about ABC but Netflix you can watch uninterrupted without ads.
I'm guessing they mean the other ABC: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Broadcasting_Corpor...
Can a pi-hole run without a raspberry-pi? I have a machine kept on all the time at home. Tried setting up pi-hole on docker with no veil.
Did you try rolling your own or did you use https://hub.docker.com/r/pihole/pihole/ ?
It sure can. I have piHole running inside a virtual machine (Ubuntu 18.04).
What does the virtual/physical network configuration look like? Are you routing all traffic into a physical server, then through a vnet/VM, and back out some other physical interface on the server?
To be clear: not all traffic has to be routed through it, just DNS.
All that I had to do was assign a static IP address to the MAC address of the VM network interface, and configure my router's DHCP to hand out that static IP for DNS.
It's all done over a singular ethernet connection between my router and the server; the amount of traffic is very minimal.
I'm not sure this is realistic in our modern society. Online, there is some flexibility: you can pay to remove ads for some things, and use ad-block on the ones that don't provide such an option. But in the offline world, I'm not sure what you're going to do. Physical ads are hard to block, you just have to avoid them when you can.
Economically, I'm not sure we're ever going to get away from ads. As I've said before in some of my comments, it's not just about paying for things you use. It's about paying more than the people who are willing to put up with ads, because otherwise companies will just do both: charge, and use ads. That's what we see in TV, in addition to many other places, and there's no reason to expect that not to continue unless there were widespread backlash, and I just don't see that happening. I don't like ads, but most of my friends don't seem to see things the way I do.
> Economically, I'm not sure we're ever going to get away from ads.
Why? Was there no human economic activity before they were ads?
If spaceships appeared in the sky, and shot lasers at all ads, and anyone making new ones, would we find no way to make and sell and buy things regardless? That seems less likely to me than said spaceships.
> I just don't see that happening.
True, and saying "it should be possible" is not the same as knowing how to get from here to there. But I wouldn't say "never ever" in this context.
https://www.troyhunt.com/mmm-pi-hole/
A link posted on HN a while ago. Long story short it uses a raspberry pi as a DNS server which blocks all requests for ads.
OP might prefer to give them money directly rather than seeing ads.
Correct. I would definitely prefer to always just pay for services that I use so that 1) I know for sure I am the customer and 2) the service that I value has a stable revenue - ad revenue can be extremely volatile. I don't want the service I like to be at risk because of changes to ad-network pay rates or anything like that.
unlike another in this reply thread, I do not "disagree with advertising in general" - however I disagree with much of the online advertising industry. I wrote a comprimise suggestion post sometime ago, turn adblock into fairblock and I'll see your ads without a grudge.
I think end users should have more fine grained control over what they share and see when getting served ads.
I feel some basic defaults are in order which can be sliders and checkboxes for more control, relinquish of control for more trusted sources.
I don't want to see ads about alcohol or gambling, or games that profit from it. I don't want to see ads that move if I am not hovering on them. I only want ads that are self hosted, not third party injected. (don't punt the malware liability to third party, serve it yourself and be more responsible)
things like this are important for security and privacy, and not an issue with ads, but types of ads. If certain publications run certain ads I may not purchase them, or lose faith in them, they can't punt the blame for yesterday's ads.
Some things are limited by laws for billboards and such, I don't agree with all those regualtions, but indeed this is something that is important - and with the web it's easy enough to fine grain limit certain things from appearing in front of children, or people struggling with divorce, or all kinds of things -
So we have the ability to make ads better, in some cases I would gladly share more info than google allows to be shared currently (I don't care if most web sites get the page and keywords I used to find them, it may help them help me.
I do care if third party beacons and trackers share that info with lots of other people I don't know. I should be able to control this on a site by site basis with sane defaults.
We tried. There are not enough of people like you to matter.
White listing only helps them if you then actually click on ads, since advertising networks usually pay per click, not per view.
Yep - and that leads to potentially unpredictable revenue, especially when there are disruptions in the ad-network revenue models and they force down pay rates. This puts sites/services at risk. I would much rather just pay for the service I value.
Thanks for the kind comments! We don't accept donations but instead, we really (really really) appreciate it if people spread the word: https://duckduckgo.com/spread
I run https://jivesearch.com, so I might be biased. The single biggest thing they can do to improve their product is open source everything. They've instead decided to move away from that by freezing their instant answers with no explanation as to if/when they will re-open source them. Makes me question their commitment to privacy and transparency.
Personally, I love that DuckDuckGo gives me a usable alternative to Google that is privacy focused. It might be better if they were open source, but I'll take what I can get from the industry regarding advertising practices at this point.
I just DDG and have found !bang shortcuts that are broken or 404 for weeks. I've tried reporting the problems on their feedback forms or Reddit, but never got any responses. If it was open source, I could have submitted a pull request to fix them. I'm surprised they don't have automatic heartbeat queries with expected results for every bang shortcut, at least.
I had the same issue with them back when I was a user. If you find any broken !bangs at Jive Search feel free to submit a pull request.
Is there a way to go straight to the first result using Jive Search? With DuckDuckGo searching for "example !" does this. (This is the main reason I don't use Searx.)
I've opened up an issue: https://github.com/jivesearch/jivesearch/issues/83
I didn't see the "!" documented anywhere but it seems to work at DDG. (We'll also add "\example" to do the same). https://duck.co/help/results/syntax
Just got done adding it. Let me know if there are any issues.
Won't open sourcing the code make sites get to cheat their ranking by trying to make it rank logic friendly?
They could open source everything else. I'm pretty sure they don't do their own ranking anyway.
You can make the ranking configurable. Once we get our own index built we will go back to doing this. The way we used to do it was by having a PostgreSQL function that is customizable once you get everything set up...I'm sure there are other ways to do it as well.
No, they get their search results (and rankings) from Bing and Yandex so it wouldn't matter.
No because DDG is a frontend to Bing results. The ads are different (DDG shows Yahoo ads, which also shows Bing ads) and Bing shows Bing ads only.
just open a guest window from chrome, and type the same search terms in the two different search engines, and you would see different results. it's not hard to verify.
What are you saying? That DDG is not getting their search results from Bing and Yandex?
From your source:
In fact, DuckDuck Go gets its results from over four hundred sources. These include hundreds of vertical sources delivering niche Instant Answers, DuckDuckBot (our crawler) and crowd-sourced sites (like Wikipedia, stored in our answer indexes). We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we also source from a variety of partners, including Oath (formerly Yahoo) and Bing.
We continue to partner with more and more sources to bring you the best Instant Answers from the best sources. Our focus is on synthesizing it all together into a superior search experience.
I suppose that's quite different than 'DDG is a frontend to Bing results'?
It depends. For me, a search engine is about the organic search results and they get all their organic search results from Bing, Oath and Yandex. The 400 sources they talk about are used for Instant Answers, boxes and stuff like that.
Essentially it's Bing for the web results. The other 399 sources seem to be for non web things.
Source?
Not available. DDG is closed source.
https://duck.co/help/results/sources
> We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we also source from a variety of partners, including Oath (formerly Yahoo) and Bing.
They do not have their own search index.
Really... You read the last part of that paragraph, but no the first?
>In fact, DuckDuckGo gets its results from over four hundred sources. These include hundreds of vertical sources delivering niche Instant Answers, DuckDuckBot (our crawler) and crowd-sourced sites (like Wikipedia, stored in our answer indexes).
Kinda silly to have a crawler that doesn't index anything.
They have an index but just for their Instant Answers (for which they have 400 sources) and not the organic search results. The last paragraph is what's relevant to the actual search index.
Easy way to verify this, right-click on the ads, paste link
I agree.
There is also searx: https://github.com/asciimoo/searx
It has a couple of instances, like: https://searx.me/
Hey there,
To clarify, we haven't closed anything that was previously open, and all open source Instant Answers will remain open.
For now, we've paused community contributions for new Instant Answers and non-essential changes, until we can find a better way to work with the community and their contributions.
A better way than open sourcing it?
They've got to protect their IP somehow.
Do they? Their selling point is trustworthiness and privacy, not the software.
As most business's their internal code is probably a giant ball of mud that runs on caffeine and poor amounts of sleep. It works, but it probably wouldn't be reasonably releasable without refactoring and reworking a lot of the source so that it's componetized in some way.
Personally I just want DDG to make a search API that is free and doesn't require API keys. That way I can setup search in mobile or desktop apps and have it automagically be searching through specific sites like Soundcloud and Youtube and such.
Like if they're reading this, DDG is very unique and if they were to focus upon reducing costs, making efficient software, and better algorithms, DDG could be the service we shove into apps.
That won't happen as every API call to DDG would result in an API call to Bing/Yandex/Yahoo which they have to pay for.
Their selling point is trustworthiness, privacy and usefulness. To be useful, they must have quality software/IP. And in their opinion, that should be protected.
I much rather trust a product that is open source, which makes me slightly uncomfortable and concerned about DDG.
So let's say they release their source code - how can they possibly prove that their servers are running that same code?
If the code was AGPL'd and included contributions for which DDG didn't own the copyright (so DDG would be using the code under the terms of the AGPL), they'd be breaking the licence terms if they failed to disclose any changes.
It wouldn't be proof, but it would be a fairly strong commitment.
at least for some functionalities, you can run it on your computer and observe the same behavior
Will they protect my IP somehow?
Interesting premise... What if they open source some small subset of their code and then track their stock price, usage, and ad revenue as they release more. It could be done in a measured process. I would be more interested in them demonstrating an increasingly distributed, uncoupled, and failure-tolerant infrastructure. I'd like to see them compete with Google's caching too.
Goal #1 should be high quality search results while respecting privacy. Everything else should be secondary. The biggest thing DDG could do to improve their product is make it quick and easy for users to provide feedback about bad search results. I'd be happy to report searches that Google gives better results for but they don't have a mechanism to do so.
For example, search DDG for "odroid". The official domain is hardkernel.com. The first result from hardkernel comes up at #6 for me. I'd love to have a way to suggest the official domain for a product like that so it shows up as #1.
As someone who mainly uses DDG when Google decides to block me for "searching too hard", one thing that would make me switch over to DDG completely is advanced search operators --- boolean expressions, exact match (no, not the stupid sort-of-exact one Google has), etc. Basically features that will let you "grep the Web" the way old search engines do, and what new search engines are even trying to forbid.
Also, if I input n-number of words then search for those words.
Recently DDG has been Googleifying by dropping one or more search words with an explanation "Not many results contain ____". So I have to click a link to search again for the words I entered. Quite annoying when it happens repeatedly each day.
The problem is that isn't how things are indexed, so "grep the web" is a hard problem. Grep on your machine just scans through every byte, doesn't care how long it takes, and doesn't care how much computing resources it uses (preferably, as much as it can).
How can possibly things be indexed so that exact grep is slow but "intelligent grep" is instantaneous?
These are pretty good tools for 'grepping' on file systems:
Exact match: "quote words"
Not: -word
Site: site:example.com
Any of terms: (term1|term2|term three)
Putting the search term in quotes for an exact match seems to work fine for me, not sure about the other one though.
Their bangs are genius in that they already provide a natural way for you to give feedback without actually having to think about it - rerun a query with !g, and they will redirect you to Google. Good for you, good for DDG, since they can tell which queries provide insufficient results.
Of course, you can't suggest the correct result for a specific search term, because search engines don't do a one-on-one matching of terms and results. But this will allow them to analyse at what types of queries their engine performs badly, and to improve it there.
(I don't know if they actually do this, but the theoretically can and should.)
Thing is, bangs are for people who don't use launchers (Alfred, LaunchBar, QuikSilver, Launchy, Gnome Do, Unity Dash, etc.) with web search functions. To redo a search for me: Cmd-Space, Up, Return. To add a bang to a failed DDG search: click in a search bar, make sure the whole search text isn't selected so it won't be replaced, remember which bang I want, type it in, return.
Those who don't use launchers outnumber us greatly, of course. But by virtue of being able to specify an alternative search engine using the same efficient keyboard commands as everything else, bangs aren't much more than a pain in the butt.
Even putting launchers aside, not every DDG user is going to use bangs to get results from another site. I'm sure many, as I, have the muscle memory to bring up google.com in the flash of an eye, whereas awkwardly clicking in a search bar to type in a bang surely can't be used by even the majority of DDG users.
(Of course, I don't have data to back me up, but say DDG became as ubiquitous as Google, this would be unquestioned. All the users' habits in organisations where Qwant is set as the default could make an interesting data set — except, of course, it wouldn't be possible to track who used what)
tl;dr: Bangs are too inefficient and usage must be too inconsistent to use as the basis of improving the results.
FWIW in the cases where my DDG results are insufficient (which is happening a lot less often than it used to), I try to just go up and insert a "!g" before the same query.
I don't know if DDG is looking at their "!g" requests or not, but I'd be surprised if they weren't.
Validating that user feedback is legitimate and not from a bad actor sounds pretty hard.
Combined with that they could collect locally relevant information too.
Using DDG from the UK is currently a disappointing experience. You have the choice between US centric search result or "UK" filter that is too restrictive: for example "man cat" with the UK filter return mostly non unix stuff (unlike the default version)
!g is great, but when I use DDG on my iPhone, "!" is not an immediately accessible character.
Thanks for the suggestion. We implemented this earlier in the year for desktop users, so on the right-hand side of each search results page there's a "Send feedback" button which goes straight to the developers.
There's a "send feedback" button in the lower-right corner that does exactly what you're describing (I think it's hidden in the sidebar in the mobile version). I'm not sure how closely they actually pay attention to the feedback, but it's still worth doing.
Send feedback is not a simple process. The link takes you to a generic feedback page with fields you have to fill in. It should be much easier to report bad results.
We're working to improve our feedback process, but as mentioned, we have a "Feedback" button at the bottom right of every search result page.
Clicking this opens a form right on the results page which you can use to specify what the feedback is about (link results, image results, ads, etc.) and why you're happy/unhappy with what you're seeing.
This feedback is reviewed daily by our team.
Are DDG users comfortable knowing that their search results are always going to be inferior?
I know I wasn't. Every time I try DDG, I immediately switch back to Google. DDG returns utter garbage when I try to do searches whose terms mix two or more languages; considering I study literary translation and am learning a few languages at the same time, this is fairly common.
I've a feeling that a lot of DDG users must be changing their search habits to suit DDG's engine, but I and plenty of others just can't.
Qwant did better, but still not close enough.
They are as good as Google for me, sometime slightly worse, sometime slightly better, and I didn't even change my searching habits when I switched. Also you can turn on or off localized results easily if you need to, which is hard with Google. The only thing I'm really missing is the good completion while typing.
I really don't think that the results on DDG are inferior, but I'm comfortable with the results. If I want something more personalize or near for my location(Venezuela is not available on DDG) I just go to Google directly or with !g
Search is significantly better when it can consider previous search history.
I'm more than happy with a slightly worse search in order to avoid being pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed, or numbered.
While I can see some difference, in practice it's not significant enough to make me switch back to Google.
I actually think that breaks it, I like it better when everybody gets the same results for the same queries. People (via algorithms or directly) shaping what others get to see, rather than configuration and user empowerment, is something I reject.
I used to think that but now I see very little value in it to the current searcher. Why would you ever care what other people get?
To have that be part of the common world. Just like I wouldn't want Wikipedia to show a different version of the world to every visitor.
The times DDG does not find what you want, add a !g to the query.
I consider results that are not ordered by who gave the search engine the most money to be superior.
They're not, and frequently exceed Google search quality.
Specific instances vary.
Very hard to achieve considering they don't have their own search index. They are under the mercy of Bing, Yahoo and Yandex.
DDG has had its own crawler for a long time. It combines its data with 3rd party data.
Their own crawler is only used for Instant Answers, not organic search results.
They do provide this for map results, I wish they did it for others too
I love duckduckgo and I feel I can almost replace google completely with it. I only have the following comments on it.
1. They're hosted in the US. I wish the company would pick up and move to a country not within the 14 eyes and out of jurisdiction of the cyber super powers(US, China, and Russia). Maybe panama? At least move it virtually with a warrant canary in place.
2. The search results need better contrasting colors for glancing through. Google is noticeable better with it's bolder fonts and better typeface/colors. I feel this would be easy place to innovate in over google.
3. Better site specific searches. Right now you can search a specific site for results. For example right now you can search specific sites using `site:ycombinator.com rust programming langugage` and you will only get results from hackernews. It works great right now and I use daily in my workflows but it would be great to do this from the search bar for firefox or some better way.
Search engines have _alot_ of areas they can innovate in and I feel google with all its controversy(prism program, chinese state surveillance, etc) that many people would prefer to have their searches(and their life stories) in a company that values their users privacy to a fanatical extent.
> a country not within the 14 eyes
I hadn't heard that term; in case anyone else hadn't, this page explains it pretty well:
https://restoreprivacy.com/5-eyes-9-eyes-14-eyes/
Is the OP Swiss and wants it hosted where he/she lives? I'd be fine with that as an alternative to US, but do not understand why that would be better than, say, Sweden
For your second concern, did you know that you can change the colors and fonts on DDG from its settings? Once you do, it provides a couple of methods to sync it to each of your devices.
The defaults should be the best contrast/readbility.
Agreed. Making the user go to effort for the best usability isn't the way to get people to stay, not when what they're already using is perfectly clear and readable.
about 3: I have set DDG as default search engine and I can just type "site:ycombinator.com rust programming langugage" in the address bar and get the results from ycombinator only.
Also lots of sites have !bangs available, like "!hackernews rust programming langugage" will go the the HN search directly.
https://duckduckgo.com/bang
Maybe that helps.
That's great feature but I would prefer to see search within duckduckgo as it's usually better at finding what I want and for privacy reasons.
There are so many ways these search engines can still innovate.
I wish we had clear/consistent vocabulary for talking about privacy and personal data captured. This seemed pretty clear but it did take a lot of text to explain it and in the end, I still wanted to know if sessions are tagged together such that you can recreate sessions? Can you associate multiple sessions in anyway? You can tell a lot about an individual even if you don't know who they are from information like this.
One request I have is to be able to filter results by longer time ranges. If that was added I could switch over.
Yeah agreed. As a js dev any search that isn't limited to 1 year is pretty much useless, but 1 month isn't enough.
+1. An arbitrary time range would be even better, but I guess there might be technical limitations.
I frequently run into this limitation. I really wish there were 3, 6, 9, and 12-month options in the limit dropdown.
> All of these requests are all fully encrypted in transit to DuckDuckGo, such that nobody else but us can see them. And like with all other requests to DuckDuckGo, there is no personally identifiable information embedded in them, and we do not store IP addresses associated with them.
They say they don’t Store IPs, but every request presumably has one. So it would be very easy for them to change this if they so wished, at which point their data collection wouldn’t be anonymous. As much as I like DuckDuckGo, I’d really like it if I could trust that they protect my privacy without having to trust them that they are doing so.
It's hard for Duck Duck Go to deliberately put themselves in a position where they're unable to collect IP addresses.
You could, however, use them via their Tor onion service: https://3g2upl4pq6kufc4m.onion/
It took me a while to find out somewhere where this is really run by them rather than a third-party proxy, but this seems to confirm it: https://www.reddit.com/r/duckduckgo/comments/1hdqs6/weve_upd...
> To be clear, this means we cannot ever tell what individual people are doing since everyone is anonymous
Nope. This means that they tell us that they cannot tell what individual people are doing. But as they said right in the sentence before that, we are supposed to believe that they don't store IP addresses.
> And like with all other requests to DuckDuckGo, there is no personally identifiable information embedded in them, and we do not store IP addresses associated with them.
That is an outright lie even. HTTP Headers contain enough data already to make individuals distinguishable. Add some data science and you got some fancy profiles of your users.
I don't know what's going on with HN and DDG, but seriously is everyone just buying into this marketing bs? Why should I trust DDG with their claims about privacy instead of Google, Bing, or any other company?
DuckDuckGo should start an email service.
How are they going to make money from that?
Charge a monthly / yearly fee?
if you are willing to pay for private email, why not any of the dozens of existing ones? e.g. protonmail or fast mail? there is little differentiation available for them here.
The same way that other legitimate email service providers do: they charge a monthly or yearly fee for service.
I think someone from say MailChimp would be more qualified to answer this question than I would... :)
They make money from sending emails to lists. Very different business model to Gmail or the like.
I love “private by design”. It was easy to switch and results are good enough. As a publisher I do NOT like the cash donations model - too feudal for me.. I think donating time to improve product - as they are asking - makes more sense. Not sure I see value in them open sourcing their software. In short, I think DDG is great and should keep doing more of what they do.
I used to use duckduckgo and liked it, till the Chinese government blocked it to protect me from the evils of the internet :-)
DDG sells your attention, just like all of them. It’s nothing about privacy, or selling your profile. You search a term, you get ads. When they say ‘We don’t sell your data’, it is a distraction, they are selling your immediate attention. DDG is part of the yahoo-Microsoft search alliance. To advertise on DDG, use Bing Ads.
Glad to see they built their product-use data tracking tools in house.
Proudly using DDG search over the competitor!
i tried to change google to duckduckgo. it was not sustainable. immediately noticeable poor search results. Searching an address brings me to a subpar open map site,
I don't know why you're being downvoted, because your experience is as valid as anybody else's. I'm with you, I can't switch to DDG because my productivity tanks with the poorer results than Google.
I tried Startpage as a sort of in-between solution, but that site's so dang slow.
> I don't know why you're being downvoted
HN users use the downvote to show disagreement. Ideally it would only be used to bury comments that were off topic, spam, etc, but the only system I've seen with a correct implementation of this is https://lobste.rs.
Edit: This comment is a case in point since I've been downvoted less than 30 seconds after posting it. Ha. I challenge someone to prove me wrong.
If anyone from DDG is watching this thread, please stop "auto-correcting" my queries!!!!! "you" "know" what I mean
Google does the same thing, and it even leaves out words if it believe that is won't give you (enough?) results.
But I agree, it's rare that auto-correcting helps me, more often than not it changes my search to something wrong.
I'm waiting for DDG to integrate dates in the search results. Date is crucial to understand how new or old the content is. This is one of the reasons why I'm not using it.
While we have a duckduckgo thread going, does anyone know when duckduckhack is coming back?
could you determine who somebody is by evaluating the decision tree at each split?
I would buy a router with Adblock filters enabled.
Very nice ideas. I'll stay on ddg
Seems completely reasonable to me.
Amazing, how do I invest in this company?
How about you not have a relationship with Yandex? Since Russia is ...well.. you know..
thanks ddg for improving user experience and privacy unlike other search engines. No wonder folks are not only blocking but using things like adnauseam - https://github.com/dhowe/AdNauseam