DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

Note: The Duckduckgo site is the first result for "Duck Duck Go", you mean the string "DDG" in particular I'm presuming.

Now, it's not Google's obligation to make Duck Duck go a primary result for the DDG abbreviation - DDG the artist is apparently quite popular.

It would be nice, yes, if Google didn't just guess the best meaning for DDG but instead gave a spectrum of the common meanings (though Duck Duck Go might still not deserve to appear unless it's search became better imo).

The way that Google has degenerated over the last 5-10 years is in more aggressively showing you what they think you want rather than what you ask for (and limiting how you ask for things to boot). But after using Duck Go Go for two years, it seems they have exactly the same problem and that situation explained by them being a meta-search engine leaning on Bing (which in turn clones Google). At least Duckgogo features themselves on a search for DDG but they lean more heavily on battleship with the name.

This drives me insane. In the early days you only got exact matches, now in an effort to sell more ads, or be more “helpful” you get random crap. I would pay for a search that only returned results with the words you entered.

Every single company I've ever worked for that advertised online had a "cost of doing business" ad budget just for buying their own keyword on Google (and Apple iOS Store/Google Play Store if they had consumer apps). Bigger international companies often have someone from an ad consulting firm tracking the major search engines and buying keywords for all of the big ones like Google, Bing, Yandex, etc.

It's one of those "the sky is blue" type of things in advertising. You NEVER want a competitor to have a shot at advertising to your potential customers, especially when they've gone to the point where they're typing in your name into Google so their conversion rate is likely significantly larger than your average site visitor.

Very strange timing on what is unfortunately a horribly inaccurate title based on my personal experience.

I tried swapping to DuckDuckGo yesterday on my iPhone as the primary search tool and reverted unfortunately back to Google after only two hours.

It’s hard to define all of the reasons the ‘mobile’ experience is so unbearable, but I’ll try:

1) No video or image results at the top of the page when that is most relevant.

2) No IMDB/overviews for movies, music, books, etc.

3) I am used to one of the first results in my search consistently being Wikipedia. This was the case about 1/3rd of the time vs. Google.

4) Results often appeared extremely out of order in terms of relevancy vs. Google, with the actual relevant like often being on the second(!) page.

5) Personal taste, but super relevant - In terms of UI/UX, the interface feels dated, actually harkening back to the days of AltaVista - I’m unfortunately honest when I say I feel like I’m using something designed 10-15 years ago.

6) Autocomplete seemed to have significant issues, and, for some reason, sometimes even taking several seconds to appear.

I couldn’t express my disappointment enough. I really wanted to give up the ghost, and just move on from Google - but I am so used to so many of the apparently fantastic nuances of Google, I believe it will unfortunately take 4-5 years before I can even get past enough of these significant issues to make it worth using.

On Desktop - the experience seems to be significantly better. I can’t even point out enough reasons why it’s so poor on mobile, it could unfortunately fill several blog posts and I don’t have time to point out the myriad of issues and inconsistencies here at this time.

If there’s jobs available at DDG - I’d love to help, in all seriousness.

I never log in to Google’s services in the browser[1]; clear my cookies on browser close; use several other blocking methods for privacy; and have been using DDG as my main search engine for years.

Yet, I’ve used `!g` more in the last months than ever before. In my usage, DDG’s results are getting noticeably worse. It’s unlikely I’ve forgotten “how to use it”.

[1]: I only log in to a Google account for Gmail, and always on an app.