Google recently launched a desktop redesign. The favicon and URL breadcrumbs were turned into a header for organic search results. Ads had the same design, but were identified using the string “Ad” instead of the favicon. This design wasn’t new. Google’s mobile web search has served this design since May 2019. But users and regulators complained that the desktop version blurred the distinction between ads and organic results. Google reverted the change a few weeks later, citing the backlash.

I experienced change aversion when I tried the redesign. Change aversion is a simple idea: users react negatively to new experiences, but they stop caring as new experiences become normal. Anyways, looking at the Google redesign gave me change aversion. I knew that I wouldn’t care about it within a few days. But I decided to put it to good use: I would try DuckDuckGo. If it was time for Google to experiment, then it was time for me to experiment. I had wanted to try it for a while. This finally gave me the activation energy to switch.

DuckDuckGo’s premise is simple. They do not collect or share personal information. They log searches, but they promise that these logs are not linked to personally identifiable information. Their search engine results seemingly come from Bing, but they claim to have their own crawler and hundreds of other sources on top of that. They do customize the results a little: geo-searches like bars near my location give me results from my home city of New York. But search results aren’t personalized. I’ve always wondered how good the results would be.

Anyways, here are the guidelines that I set for my experiment:

• I would switch all of my browser’s default search engines to DuckDuckGo across all of my devices.
• I would use DuckDuckGo for at least a month. This would give me enough time to learn some of its strengths and weaknesses.
• I would not use any DuckDuckGo poweruser features unless I could guess that they existed. I wanted to understand the out-of-the-box experience on the site.
• I could use the !g operator to search Google if DuckDuckGo failed. Some will point out that this violates the previous rule. But as soon as a discussion changes to DuckDuckGo usage, people can’t WAIT to talk about how often they use !g or g!. Do you need an example? I discussed it in this paragraph and tried to blame it on other people. I’m serious: people can’t talk about DuckDuckGo without talking about !g. It’s the law. So I know about it and I will use it.

I haven’t tried a new search engine since I tried Bing in 2009. It was time to find out how good DuckDuckGo is in 2020. What was the biggest difference that I found?

Google is the king of low-intent searches

Google has a structured understanding of many domains. This is a difficult moat for other search engines to cross. This is evident when comparing low-intent searches. These are searches with an ambiguous purpose. The subject is broad and it’s not clear what the user wanted. The user might not even “want” anything except to kill five minutes before a meeting.

Let’s try a low-intent search. Type harry potter into Google. In response, Google throws everything at the wall to see what sticks. In addition to the organic links, Google serves me:

• A panel on the right with a ton of metadata. This includes oddly-specific structured data like “Sport: Quidditch”.
• A list of five of the seven books in the series.
• Fantasy books from five related searches.
• A news panel containing three articles about Harry Potter actors.
• The harry potter Google Maps search, centered on the New York area.
• A “People also ask” panel with four questions.
• A link to three Harry Potter-related YouTube videos.
• Three recent tweets from @HarryPotterFilm.
• A panel with 7 “Fantasy book series” results.
• A panel with 7 “Kids book series” results.
• 8 other search strings related to harry potter.

This makes sense: what did I want when I searched for harry potter? Google can’t know. So Google returns information from many domains to attempt to satisfy the query. Google returns so much information that something will be close enough. This is a huge competitive advantage. They can serve good results for bad searches by covering as many domains as possible.

This is a departure from how search used to work. When I was in grade school, I was taught how to craft search queries. Someone herded us into a library and explained how to pick effective keywords, quote text, use operators like AND or OR, etc. These days are dead. None of this matters on Google. If you want to know showtimes for “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child,” a search for harry potter will get you close enough.

In comparison, DuckDuckGo’s results for harry potter are relaxing. It serves a small knowledge panel to the right and three recent news articles at the top, some organic links, and nothing else. It’s much easier to scan this page. It’s a more relaxed vibe. But if I actually wanted something, it likely wouldn’t be on this page. You can make the argument that I got what I deserved: I didn’t clearly communicate what I wanted, and therefore I didn’t get it. But Google has trained everyone that broad queries are effective. It feels like magic. It’s not. It’s the result of years of developing a structured understanding of the world and crafting ways to surface the structure. And it’s something that potential competitors will need to come to terms with.

I don’t personally miss most of Google’s result panels. Especially the panels that highlight information snippets. It’s easy to find these. Searching microsoft word justify text provides me a snippet from Microsoft’s Office’s support page explaining what to click or type to justify text. I’ve learned not to trust information in these panels without reading the source they came from. Google seems to cite this information uncritically. I’ve found enough oversimplified knowledge panel answers that I’ve stopped reading most of them. Recently, I was chatting with a Googler who works on these. I asked them if I was wrong to feel this way. And they replied, “I trust them, but I’ve read enough bug reports and user feedback that I don’t blame you.” So my position is wrong, but not very wrong. I’ll take that.

Some of Google’s panels are great. I miss them. I haven’t found anything better than Google’s stock panel for quickly looking at after-hours stock movements. Searching Google for goog stock will show you this panel. I miss you buddy. I hope you’re doing well.

Ultimately, it stresses me out when Google returns many panels in a search. I’m sure that each is a marginal gain for Google. But I don’t like how Google feels as a result. I’m continually glad to see just 10 links on DuckDuckGo, even if this means that I’m not getting what I wanted. This has been training me to craft more specific searches.

DuckDuckGo is good enough

Let’s move away from Google’s competitive advantages. How does DuckDuckGo perform for most of my search traffic? DuckDuckGo does a good job. I haven’t found a reason to switch back to Google.

I combed through my browser’s history of DuckDuckGo searches. I compared it to my Google search history. When I fell back to Google, I often didn’t find what I wanted on Google either.

Most of my searches relate to my job, which means that most of my searches are technical queries. DuckDuckGo serves good results for my searches. I’ll admit that I’m a paranoid searcher: I reformat error strings, remove identifiers that are unique to my code, and remove quotes before searching. I’m not sure how well DuckDuckGo would handle copy/pasted error strings with lots of quotes and unique identifiers. This means that I don’t know if DuckDuckGo handles all technical searches well. But it does a good job for me.

There are many domains where Google outperforms DuckDuckGo. Product search and local search are some examples. I recently made a window plug. It was much easier to find which big-box hardware stores had the materials I need with Google. I also recently bought a pair of ANC headphones. I got much better comparison information starting at Google. Google also shines with sparse results like rare programming error messages. If you’re a programmer, you know what I’m talking about: imagine a Google search page with three results. One is a page in Chinese that has the English error string, one is a forum post that gives you the first hint that you need to solve the problem, and one is the error string in the original source code in Github. DuckDuckGo often returns nothing for these kinds of searches.

Even though Google is better for some specific domains, I am confident that DuckDuckGo can find what I need. When it doesn’t, Google often doesn’t help either.

Sample of times when both Google and DuckDuckGo failed me

• I tried to write a protobuf compiler plugin using the official PHP protocol buffer bindings. I now believe that writing a protobuf compiler plugin in PHP is impossible due to several arbitrary facts, but I needed to piece this information together myself. My searches sprawled over Google and DuckDuckGo across several days before I concluded that it could not be done and that I could not find a workaround. This isn’t DuckDuckGo or Google’s fault. Some things just don’t have answers online.
• I often fell back to Google for gif searches. It turns out that I’m bad at finding gifs. Sometimes I get exactly what I want, like searching for gritty turning around. But I had a lot of trouble finding a string that gave me this. Eventually I found it by remembering a Twitter user that had posted it and scanning their “Media” posts.
• Trying to find a very specific CS:GO clip that I had seen on Reddit years ago. I found it via a combination of Reddit search and skimming the bottom of Reddit threads for video links.
• What is australian licorice? Is it a marketing gimmick? Stores sell it. It’s tasty. But I can’t find an explanation anywhere.

If you’re thinking of switching to DuckDuckGo because of the Google redesign, I’ll save you the trouble: DuckDuckGo’s inline ads are formatted similarly to the Google redesign that got reverted. If anything, DuckDuckGo’s ads are harder to spot because DuckDuckGo’s (Ad) icon is on the right, while Google’s was on the left where my eyes naturally skim.

It turns out that I care about privacy, but I still use Google Analytics on my blog. I haven’t been thinking about digital privacy for long enough to have a consistent and principled opinion. Sorry about that.

Let’s go back to the original selling point of DuckDuckGo: they don’t track you.

I have been reading my DuckDuckGo searches in my browser history for this post. It’s wonderful that all of these searches remained private. Some of them should remain private for stupid reasons. I don’t want anyone to know that I searched for what is the value of a human life because it makes me sound like a killer robot. Other searches are much more sensitive. One is the name of a medication I’m on. Others are searches about pains and fears that I have. DuckDuckGo allows me to perform these searches without building a profile of me. I’m sure that advertisers pick up the scent as soon as I click a link. But I appreciate the delay. I didn’t think about the traces I left online when I searched on Google. But now that I know I have the choice, I’m actively comforted by reviewing my DuckDuckGo search history and reading everything that they didn’t track.

I also noticed that many searches show trends. I knew that this was true in theory. But it’s different when you see it in your own search results. A month ago, many of my searches related to vacation planning. But now they don’t anymore. The coronavirus scrapped my plans. But there are many life events that could have also caused this: health reasons, family problems, etc. These are things that ad networks could piece together as I visit sites. It’s possible to imagine even darker versions of this – imagine the months of searches that relate to a pregnancy with a miscarriage. Many companies could profit from a couple going through that process, if they showed the right ads in the right places at the right time. There is a lot of trend information that you just want to keep to yourself.

What happens moving forward?

I will continue using DuckDuckGo. I don’t see a reason to switch back to Google. I’m going to continue to fall back using !g when I need to. I’m going to try to avoid talking about the fallback (but let’s be honest, I just did it again).

I still use lots of Google products. I’m not in the process of porting away from any of them. I still use Chrome in addition to Firefox and mobile Safari. Google Docs still holds a place in my heart. Etsy is hosted on GCP and uses Google Apps. Google Photos is still the best place for me to store and share my photos.

I liked the exercise of reading a month of my search history. You should do it, too. It became clear that I broadcast lots of information by having these very personal conversations with search engines. I’d like to understand more about the digital traces I leave online.

I don’t want to turn into a digital hermit. But I would like to become more deliberate about the traces that I leave around the internet. Even as a developer, I’m not sure what will happen if I disable third-party cookies across the internet. But I’d like to start reading more about digital privacy to understand what tradeoffs I am making.

Disclaimer: I worked at Google from 2010-2015, but did not work on search.