Some surprising things about DuckDuckGo

oritron

A surprising fact I /do/ know about DDG: they don't update bang searches anymore, which was one of my favorite differentiators. This feature adds a lot of utility to DDG as a browser default search engine.

You can search "!w Gabriel Weinberg" and it will open the Wikipedia article because of the leading exclamation mark and w. If a site changes their search url, you can submit the precise new pattern they should use for a redirect. If a new service pops up, you can use the same form to request a new search prefix. These form submissions could give someone at DDG an easy interface to verify quickly and approve or reject them.

These form submissions get ignored and have been for years at this point.

yegg

A primary problem is we get overwhelingly spammed with submissions. They are not completely ignored. We have maintainers, but as a relatively small team given the surface area of what we're working on, they have been de-prioritized. That said, I think some better tooling could probably get be put in place at this point to help us.

foresto

Are you aware of Firefox's search keyword feature? You can bookmark the URL of a web site's search result page, replace the search text query parameter with %s, and enter a keyword in the bookmark details. From then on, entering that keyword followed by some new text in the address bar will perform the new search.

You can choose keywords that don't start with !, so typing them is easier than using Duck Duck Go's bang feature.

nxtbl

This functionality has always been available in Firefox: Just add a keyword to a bookmark.

throwawayonduck

But not in Firefox Android, without a third party add-on

nunobrito

They've never allowed a third-party to audit the "privacy" inside their code/platform that is claimed.

Suspicious as heck to have enough money for supporting +300 employees plus all other operating costs without an obvious money cow for those costs.

Rather use Qwant, Brave or even Ecosia.

yegg

We actually have, as part of https://natlawreview.com/article/nad-examines-privacy-statem... "The NAD found the claims supported by the evidence which included a third-party expert confirming that the company’s measures (encryption, tracker blocking, and private searches) protect against the three largest categories of personal data collectors."

In terms of money, as the article notes we have 3% of U.S. search market share. That's a lot if you consider how much Google makes. Now, in part because of our search privacy, we make way way less, but it is still enough to be profitable. That said, that means we could be way way more profitable if we tracked people, which we don't.

nawtagain

This is particularly important as Mosad is _everywhere_. They run all the largest proxy / VPN networks and no reason to believe they haven't compromised DDG given the tribe connections. Verification needed.

ValveFan6969

I found it interesting that they have an article saying "we don't censor search results".

Who is "we"? Don't they get their results from Bing?

yegg

We = DuckDuckGo. As the article notes, we are increasingly relying on our own search technology. For example, our Search Assist (our version of AI overviews), local results (maps, business listings, etc.), knowledge graph stuff (wikipedia, answers, etc.) don't come from Bing. That said, if Bing happens to removes something, we can add it back, which we do. We do not censor anything ouselves.

mark_l_watson

I use the DDG browser about 80% of the time. Duck.ai is an interesting product, like Proton’s AI chatbot - both privacy preserving.

verdverm

I went to DDG to get away from all the Google AI stuff being shoved down my throat.

While it seems DDG is on the same path of AI / chat centric search UX, at least they allow me to turn off all that stuff. But... search has gotten so bad in general, DDG is having the same results issue I had on Google. I don't see DDG as a player in the Ai space so I think my usage will only decrease as search result quality continues to decrease.

I am hopeful in the long run that search index / results will become better as the core UX for most people becomes chat, search result pages become low human traffic (meaning ads are worthless), and search becomes one of many research tools for to the agents

zeech

If you don't like all the fluff on the results page, DDG provides two alternative interfaces [0] [1] with much simpler layouts.

[0] https://html.duckduckgo.com/html

[1] https://lite.duckduckgo.com/lite

coffeefirst

You might like Kagi. The ability to upvote/downvote/block domains completely transforms the product.

verdverm

It looks like just another search engine trening towards Ai UX. Do they have an API?

I'm now looking for APIs to integrate with my custom / personal agent setup. I'm done outsourcing my UX to Big Ai/Tech. I don't think we should repeat the same mistakes of outsource a core human/digital UX to Big Ai/Tech. We (HNers) complain so much about all the bad stuff the prior iterations (social media, saas out the wazoo), are we going to repeat it again by defaulting to whatever they give us, misaligned incentives and all?

Dwedit

Brave has a much better AI search than either Google or DuckDuckGo.

shevy-java

I did not know you can actually find good results with DDG. :>

All search engines got so much worse in the last years - it is so sad. We lost some of our knowledge that way.

This already started before AI, but AI further reduces the quality now.

lapcat

Here's something surprising about DuckDuckGo: it has a setting to turn off advertising!

throwawayonduck

DDG bangs is a nice feature. But feels neglected. No way to see a changelog and lots of old broken bangs. There is a form to submit new bangs suggestions but unclear if anyone reads the submissions or how the acceptance process works. No forum or other channel where users can discuss or upvote suggestions for new or changed bangs.

yegg

We do, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46259412 -- that said, I take the point and will circle up with the team.

xnx

I don't think Google, Bing, or anyone else plan to syndicate their AI results the way they did their search results, so DuckDuckGo will go from being unnecessary to obsolete.

postepowanieadm

duck.ai is nice

t0lo

Brave search is far better. It does it's own indexing which is better than google or bings, and lets you up rank or down rank websites without having to set up an account

ranger_danger

Ever since I started getting captcha prompts on DDG I had to stop using it (same for google).

https://0x0.st/K4kE.png

yegg

Human traffic really shouldn't be seeing that -- if you want to email me I can try to sort it out to improve our systems.