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.
Just for anyone else who isn’t aware, the bang commands can be anywhere in the search string, and need not necessarily be at the beginning.
All these queries will take you to Wikipedia for the term:
"!w Gabriel Weinberg"
"Gabriel !w Weinberg"
"Gabriel Weinberg !w"
Many a times when I find the default DuckDuckGo search results inadequate and want to go to Google search, I just put a “!g” as a separate term anywhere within the search string and hit enter. This is especially useful on mobile where the search string may be a lot longer than the visible text box and I can’t be bothered to move the cursor.
You can choose keywords that don't start with !, so typing them is easier than using Duck Duck Go's bang feature.
So if, for example, you wanted to make
> x <search_term>
and
> y <search_term>
both work the same, x and y being letters from 2 different alphabets but mapped to the same keys, you couldn't, without some JavaScript. If you just added those 2 keywords, even if you manually edited or created your bookmarks, one bookmark would override the other and the other would appear empty with no keyword.
The workaround I found was using a bookmark with this code in it (instead of the usual URL):
javascript:(function(){var keywords="%s";var mainURL="https://<URL>/";var searchURL="https://<URL>/<params>-"+keywords;if(keywords==""||keywords=="%"+"s"){window.location=mainURL}else{window.location=searchURL}})();
Where https://<URL>/<params> is something like https://example.org/search/q-.
It's slower and sometimes doesn't work if you type "y" and then the query too fast, especially if you're pasting the query. So sometimes it doesn't work and searches with the browser's default search engine for "y <query>".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=%s
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?&search=%s
Each of those can have a different keyword.
Like till now If I wanted to search something on reddit from duckduckgo, I would search "<search query> reddit"
But it was also an hit or miss sometimes so you are telling me that snaps can just @r <search query> and guarantee its from that is amazing!
Your list of resources feel good too, https://time.fyi and other tools are good too!
I would love it if your resources also included open source resources similar perhaps as I prefer open source tools mostly but even these resources are good too so thanks!
Hmm, when I added !mt more than a decade ago it went live almost immediately...
Is a version of DuckDuckGo without Javascript. Very fast and compatible with minimalistic web browser like lynx.
Awesome stuff.
I was able to run modern firefox on that 1 gb puny laptop too but it took 800 megabits of ram but I was able to run https://pomodorokitty.com/ on it.
Although I occasionally have to use google for https://images.google.com/
Is there any way that duckduckgo can have something similar or perhaps there already is and I am not aware of it, either way, I would love to know more about it and have a nice day!
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
I would prefer if there was a way to have dark mode or similar things in it tho. It was really really fast.
I would pay DDG if they gave me an API for search, ideally pay-per-request. I'm not paying them for Ai, I can get that much better elsewhere
Agreed that a DDG API would be pretty great, though.
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?
For about first 5-10 years of its existence DuckDuckGo also promoted their use of Perl, and afaik they contributed to Perl development.
I really like Kagi, becuase I can pay for the search and my searches aren’t being leaked to third parties.
I don’t like the duck.ai interface much (choosing a different LLM is not easy once you’re already in a conversation), but I use it a lot more than I use the DuckDuckGo search engine (the results from the latter aren’t great).
Just like with DuckDuckGo search, where I start a search and then use the !g bang command to go to Google for better results if needed, I try duck.ai and then move to ChatGPT (without any account) when even the best models in duck.ai aren’t good enough.
For most simpler queries though — where I’m just looking to learn a bit about something as opposed to finding a solution for a specific (more complex) question or problem — duck.ai with its GPT 5 models are more than adequate (even the 4o mini is fine).
Its just the right amount of AI with all the other things and I can have a lot of freedom/customizability/block AI and they provide subdomains for a lot of things (I found out about noai.duckduckgo.com from here and other things too) and overall feel like its one of the best search engines.
I wish if they could create their own index tho because I do not trust microsoft so much.
I wonder why people still use google when there is duckduckgo. I suppose monopoly might be the answer but I wish if there was more awareness about duckduckgo.
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.
As someone using Duckduckgo a lot, I feel the opposite sometimes regarding google :>
I still use google occasionally for its google search image option but yea thats about it
Do you have plans to build an email service without the tracking? Would love to hear thoughts about this. There may be users willing to pay a small monthly fee for this.
It isn't full email, but removes trackers in your email before it gets sent to you, which is the most privacy-invasive part of email. More info at https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/email-protectio... and
we don’t censor search results
They don't do that. That is a story that comes from a case of Bing, their upstream results provider, doing that, before quickly reverting the block.
Bing is just one of their sources. They run their own crawler. They source data from multiple 3rd party providers.
I use DDG browser for work and mobile and Firefox on Guix.
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.
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.
That is not a serious review.
There is no way you are supporting +300 people per month, which equates to a minimum of 36 million USD per year without even counting infrastructure expenses, fancier salaries for management and associated costs for business building.
By all means feel free to present more detailed documentation about your expenses and sources of income. I'll wait, will even grab a chair to avoid getting tired after waiting a few more years.
All dodgy.
Who is "we"? Don't they get their results from Bing?
Eg, DDG always fail the "watch (specific movie or tv show) online" search query test. Many other search engines like Bing and Google also fail. It's a quick censorship influence test as DMCA takedown requests have a clear track-record of being abused.
One search engine that succeeds is Russia's Yandex. I'm sure they censor plenty of things (eg, material sensitive to Russia), but that censorship set may not intersect with the Google, Bing and DDG sets.
DDG results are mostly Bing results, so if a page doesn't show up on Bing, it probably won't on DDG either. That doesn't mean DDG themselves censored the results.
Funny how people are still making jokes about yahoo search, when it works better than google.
Anyway the DDG html search site is next to useless now, and I'm fed up of the AI nags, so I'll be right behind you once I have searched for my coat.
yes, yes, I know why it's named like that
Either that is completely bullshit, or it’s technically-bullshit.
1. They don’t have to censor because their sources censor for them. “Oh we’re just an aggregator of censored results” doesn’t mean “this is an uncensored search engine” like the claim would have you believe.
2. Proof of this is evident in by comparing Russian yandex.com, my now go to for anything related to hacking, pirated anything, topics of censorship or controversial discussion, even “legit” but rarer information like how to train or use X or Y AI model, etc. The domains that appear on yandex remind me a time gone by. Like image search before Pinterest, unreliable but not sterilized.
3. I use DDG everyday. In the last year or so, I have found myself going to Google, Bing, Brave, Yandex, SearX, and other more than ever. The quality of DDG has for me, unquestionably slipped. I have a strong distaste for Google, and have used them this year more than ever.
They are not uncensored, although maybe they allow that burden to be done for them to keep their nose high in their air on the topic.
However, I fear it may be a moot point as I find myself looking elsewhere often now.
If you see results missing, I'd be happy to look into them. My email is in my profile.
I mean… that’s exactly my issue. That’s just another way to say “we present censored results”.
To be fair… my real issue is the last year or so the results have been noticeably sub-par for me.
I knew there would be no point discussing a subjective matter like that. So I brought up statement that I found misleading.
Why do you feel that the actions of a search provider(s) should be reflected so negatively and angrily on the aggregator?
It’s not like anyone can go and see the CCP scoresheet for DDG.
If the source has not put something on the web... how is anyone supposed to get past that? Or am I misunderstanding your statement?
Please don't post like this on HN. It breaks multiple guidelines. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Maybe you meant to type "fluff piece"? That could be a matter of opinion.
