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?
Top comments (30)
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 testwill search Google fortest!gh testwill search GitHub fortest!a testwill search Amazon fortestMore details here: duckduckgo.com/bang
I love the bangs! There's so many as well so I often try to guess new bangs, like
!laravelor 1 of my most common!mdnGenuine question : How is using
!g testto 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.
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.
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.
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 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
!gtenor!gtesto 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
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.
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 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.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).