> # Where do DuckDuckGo search results come from? // Most of our search result pages feature one or more Instant Answers. To deliver Instant Answers on specific topics, DuckDuckGo leverages many sources, including specialized sources like Sportradar and crowd-sourced sites like Wikipedia. We also maintain our own crawler (DuckDuckBot) and many indexes to support our results. Of course, we have more traditional links and images in our search results too, which we largely source from Bing. Our focus is synthesizing all these sources to create a superior search experience
DDG massively oversells their own contribution to the search results.
If you look at their marketing material, they claim to "use a variety of sources, 500+ to bring you your search results". This is of course technically correct, but the truth is they are a relatively thin wrapper on Bing results.
"Bing but without copilot" alone would be a product worth having. But I think DDG has a few more things on top of that, like the `!bang` stuff and the bit where they don't send tracking data on you to Microsoft.
I really don't understand why any technically literate person would be impressed by the "!bang" stuff on DDG. You know your browser already provides this feature, right? Just configure some custom search keywords in your search settings. What does DDG offer that's better than this?
They already set them up for a ton of sites, though, and often you can guess your way to a bang on the first try. I have only looked at the actual list once or twice. Plus it seems to match the closest one in cases of using one that doesn't exist. I can also go to a machine that isn't my own and take advantage of them there right away. I heavily use the quickmarks in qutebrowser, but also the ddg bangs. I just hit O for open in new tab and can put in a bang right there.
I might not be impressed, but as I get older, I skew toward out of the box experience over configuration. I rather learn, and then apply that knowledge everywhere the thing is used, than configure, and lug my configuration around. Therefore, I value an opinionated feature like the bangs in DDG, even though as a professional, I know that there are many alternatives to it. If I know how to do it with DDG, I can use it everywhere I load DDG: my personal computer, my work computer, my phone's browser, my phone's other browser, the browser in the VM, the browser in the VM in the cloud, on the freshly installed computer with its default settings, everywhere.
Exactly. You can't except by setting DDG as the default search engine. Chrome, Brave, and FF for iOS also don't directly support this sort of feature either.
They proxy the !bang things so that whoever provides the search gets less info about who you are. Less isn't nothing, but it is still better than your browser can do without the proxy.
Yes it is one of many metasearch sites and not actually a search engine. Other engines include Kagi, Yandex, Brave, Mojeek, Quant, and something called Google.
As someone who uses Kagi, I think it is absolutely not accurate to say they are a search engine rather than a meta search engine. Most of their results come from the other engines you listed.
As per the first sentence on that page, they do. It's just not their only source, and from my experience it is far from the main source. You can see "% of unique Kagi results" on each search; these are the results from their own index.
Kagi's main results come from Google actually.
(edit: see https://help.kagi.com/kagi/why-kagi/kagi-vs-google.html - Kagi really shows how good Google could be, since it's mostly using the Google index and then doing user-friendly things instead of user-unfriendly things on top)
I could be wrong, but I think they're playing to their early adopter audience, that being tech workers.
Google is terrible at tech searches, without verbatim and now "web" search. Kagi spending work in this area, and indexing this area, might bear good fruit.
Just tried it and it led me to a 403 error page: “Sorry your network appears to be sending automated queries so we can't process your search at this time.”
Are you sure about that? It doesn't completely rely on it but didn't it use bing as one of the search providers? I'm probably completely wrong and my info is outdated but I'm asking because it would be pretty special (in a good way!) if they use their own index exclusively.
Qwant was not usable yesterday during the Bing outage so that pretty much shows they cannot function without Bing (even if they do have some auxiliary indexes of some sort)
If they branded themselves as what it is, anonymized bing search with better features, I would be totally fine with that. As is, even if they don’t go with that branding, I have no problem using the service under those terms.
Do they? Or have they just not had that "history" yet? I don't see anything fundamentally different in Brave that protects your and my privacy better than on DDG. I don't know Mojeek enough.
Last time i checked, Brave was insisting on convinving me to use certain cryptocurrency platforms and it was more intrusive with it than typical web ads, which seemed really twisted, as the same Brave claimed to give ad-free experience.
No, they're not. I've been using Brave almost since its inception and I still have no idea what its cryptocurrency features are. Nor have I ever seen an intrusive ad from Brave, or anywhere else since Brave has an ad blocker built in.
Why does this same conversation happen every time Brave is mentioned on HN? Have any of the people complaining about Brave's crypto-whatever "problem" ever actually used it?
It literally never did that. There's some crypto wallet button that you get in the address bar that you can disable with a right click, and that's pretty much the extent of it. All crypto and other related functionality is completely opt-in.
Brave Search [1] is 100% independent. There's also Yandex [2] which also works excellently, but is biased towards more Russian language results. The image search is second to none though.
Brave search is only very recently independent, and not, as far as I can tell, 100% of the way there. While they are building out their own index, they only recently stopped augmenting their own results with Bing, and are still augmenting them with Google.
That is not fully accurate. Brave Search is fully independent - the last dependency on Bing was dropped more than a year ago, but even at the time the dependency would not have prevented Brave Search from functioning during an event like yesterday’s Bing outage - it would have resulted in a drop of quality on a subset of complicated queries, though.
The “augmentation with Google” that you mention is an optional feature that only works in Brave browser and doesn’t mean Brave Search is less independent than in other browsers (but it might mean that the quality is increased for some queries; or at least closer to Google results in these cases).
I think when talking about independence it is important to make a distinction between “dependent” which means “cannot work at all if the provider goes down” (e.g. yesterday’s outage) and “dependent” meaning that the service would continue to operate but with some amount of degradation of service. It’s a spectrum. Yesterday we saw that some services could not operate at all when Bing was down.
What would lead you to believe that in the last 13 years MS would make the titanic investment of reimplementing their (alleged) Google-based search backend?
