DuckDuckGo disables most search filters from Search
Internet search engine DuckDuckGo launched an update recently that removed most search filters, also called operators, from the search engine. Removed search operators include "" to search for exact terms, the "-" and "+" operators to reduce or increase the weight of search terms, and filetype:type, which allowed users to search for specific filetypes using search.
Users of the search engine will notice that DuckDuckGo ignores all disabled filters now, even when specified by the user.
Update: DuckDuckGo has updated the Help page to reflect that search syntax filters are still available. The company admitted, however, that they are experiencing some issues with filters, and that they may not work all the time currently because of that. End
Search operators allow users to add rules to their searches to include or exclude results. Basic search operators include minus to limit results that contain the phrase that is specified, or the site operator to only return results from the specified domain.
DuckDuckGo, like many other search engines, supported several search operators that its users could add to their search queries directly.
When used, DuckDuckgo displayed information about the used filter or filters at the top of the organic search results (below ads).
Now, with the update in place, it appears that only the -site operator remains the only search operator supported by the search engine. In other words, the following operators appear to have been disabled on the search engine:
- Term1 Term1, example cats dogs -- showed results about cats and dogs.
- "Term1 Term2", example "cats and dogs" -- showed results for the exact term cats and dogs, displayed related results if no exact matches were found.
- Term1 -Term2, example cats -dogs -- showed results for cats and tried to exclude results which also contained reference to dogs.
- Term1 +Term2, example cats +dogs -- prioritized results with dogs in the results.
- Term1 filetype:pdf, exsample cats filetype:pdf, showed PDF documents about cats.
- intitle:Term1, example intitle:dogs -- returned websites that had the term dogs in the page title.
- inurl:Term1, example inurl:cats -- returned websites that had the term cats in the page URL.
The only search filter that DuckDuckgo still supports is the site filter. It can be used to limit results to a specific site, or to exclude a specific site from the results.
- site:ghacks.net Firefox, returns Firefox results from Ghacks.
- -site:ghacks.net Firefox, returns Firefox results, but removes any results from Ghacks from the results listing. In other words, the specified URL is filtered from the results.
DuckDuckgo updated its search syntax support website to reflect the change. It lists only the site operator on it and no other operator anymore. Code on the search engine's GitHub project page confirms the change as well.
DuckDuckGo is not the only search provider that is removing or reducing the impact of search filters. Google Search users, for instance, may have noticed that Google may not honor search filters all the time, especially when the "" exact search term filter is being used.
Now You: do you use search filters?
If you were allowed to narrow your search to find only what you were looking for, in many cases that would allow you to avoid ads as well, either intentionally or by accident. The reason you can’t successfully search for any specific term is this: to make certain that ads will always get through, excluding unwanted results from searches has been made impossible. I think it’s been 25 years or more since you could really expect to find what you were looking for online; it started slowly but has become much worse.
Time to stop using DDG, if for some reason you had still been willing to do that after knowing that you are literally only getting Google results even though Google has severely censored all search results for nearly a decade now.
To call ddg a “search engine” is extreme. It is nothing more than a Bing scrapper site. Seriously – compare results – they are vanilla unvarnished Bing.
@ David:
> I do granular searches. Now there’s no reason to use DuckDuckGo.
Sure there is, especially for Tor users.
Visit this if you have javascript entirely disabled (requires Tor):
https://duckduckgogg42xjoc72x3sjasowoarfbgcmvfimaftt6twagswzczad.onion/html
As you can see, the “/html” part is mandatory if you wish to search w/ Tor w/ javascript PROPERLY DISABLED. Most other search engines do not let you search if you have javascript disabled.
It’s a Tor .onion hidden service and it works better than the other search engines who are cowards and won’t host their own Tor .onion service.
Hi, hope we can clear this up. Search Syntax filters are still available on DuckDuckGo Private Search and we’ve updated the help page to reflect that. Nothing has actually recently changed with the way they work. In fact, we recently added functionality to make site exclusion work better as described in https://duckduckgo.com/updates
Last month we temporarily updated our DuckDuckGo Search Syntax help page because we had been getting complaints from some users that they were not working consistently and wanted to get to the bottom of it, but we never actually deactivated the features themselves.
Instead of removing that information from the help page, even temporarily, we should have said we know users are having problems and we’re working to address them. That’s what the help page says now and we hope to provide an update soon.
DDG have updated their help page.
https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/syntax/
Filters have NOT been removed
Hi, hope we can clear this up. Search Syntax filters are still available on DuckDuckGo Private Search and we’ve updated the help page to reflect that. Nothing has actually recently changed with the way they work. In fact, we recently added functionality to make site exclusion work better as described in https://duckduckgo.com/updates
Last month we temporarily updated our DuckDuckGo Search Syntax help page because we had been getting complaints from some users that they were not working consistently and wanted to get to the bottom of it, but we never actually deactivated the features themselves.
Instead of removing that information from the help page, even temporarily, we should have said we know users are having problems and we’re working to address them. That’s what the help page says now and we hope to provide an update soon.
Then why has DuckDuckGo, since the beginning of it’s existence,
1) always without exception, includes webpages with the word “house” bolded in the snippet, each and every time I searched for
gingerbread -house
2) always without exception, included many results, with words bolded in their “snippets”, but with one or more words in between or with words in incorrect order, included something like “some humans like to eat beef for dinner”, each and every time I search for
“human beef”
3) very very frequently, when I search for “cats eat dinner”, will see many results for “cat eating dinner”, regardless of the fact that neither “cat” nor “eating” was a word I searched for, and I have also never added the permission to include either “cat” or “eating” via a question asking whether these words are acceptable, and I also have not included any asterisks in my search, and I have often EVEN USED QUOTATION MARKS SPECIFICALLY TO HELP ENSURE THAT I WILL NEVER SEE ANYTHING THAT SAYS “CAT EATING DINNER” BECAUSE THAT IS NOT WHAT THE FUCK I SEARCHED FOR…
…..but yet LITERALLY NEVER ONCE has DuckDuckGo returned webpages which say “cat eats dinner” -tuna, in that order, in each and every result, and also ensuring that zero webpages which contain the word “tuna” are displayed, after I searched for “cats eat dinner” in quotation marks.
….Clearly, DDG most definitely does NOT “continue” to use the functionality of operators, and does NOT allow users to make valid, legitimate searches on it’s search engine, because it is obviously impossible to “continue” doing something that you have never done in the first place.
Well, it’s about time for the cycle to start anew – seems every decade-ish there’s a hot new kid on the block. This time around whoever it winds up being won’t even have to come to with something new to encourage us to come to them – just do what the big guys *used* to do. Truly a case of “what’s old is new again.”
I do granular searches. Now there’s no reason to use DuckDuckGo.
Yes, it seems there are other changes which are not mentionned behind the scenes.
For most request, it looks like I get half of the result I got before, around ~75 by query, while it used to be more like ~150 a few days ago.
Big regression if you ask me, and this filters removal just makes no sense.
Unfortunately, I have no alternative right now, so I suppose I will continue to use DDG for most searches, with inferior results than earlier.
For advanced searches, I will have to go back to big G.
Bad times.
Google removed the ability to complete any “advanced search” in approximately 2011.
For all searches, you can use Mojeek.
There are some large changes happening in search-engine land. Just found out old timer Gigablast is gone too.
The crude truth is that Google is the best search engine ever done.
….Yes, it was; literally everyone on Earth knows that. And then, several years later, it quickly became a terrible search engine, and a scant few years after that, because the worst thing ever done due to horrifying abuses of the entire population. And then, less then a decade after that, also decided to make the search engine even worse then the already-worst, by also preventing the ability to get results after inputting some words and/or operaters that were intended to make a web search. Your comment is extremely irrelevant to this article or post, because this article or post was posted in 2023. This article or post is not actually from 2004.
That could have been argued years ago, but since Google f’d up and wiped out those capabilities it’s been annoying trash every since.
Well, worse than annoying trash since it’s been feeding me other searches because it thinks it’s users are to stupid to search for what we want instead of what it thinks is popular.
literally had Yandex give me better results sometimes. Google, like Microsoft, are resting on their laurels and have long ago stopped caring about improving things.
Sure, Google is good, but was it better 5-10 years ago? Yes much better. Sure, Windows is good, but was it better 5-10 years ago? Yes much better. Sad trend, we need innovation.
I didn’t say that Google is the best browser actually, I said that Google is the best browser “ever done”. When Google arrived to the web it become the absolute king in less than one year due its amazing algorythm. All modern search engines are trying to do the best they can learning from the best of all times. Probably DDG and Yandex are better than Google for some tasks like time based searches.
It used to be, but not anymore. DDG gets more relevant results for me. However, without the operators, I think I will “shop around”.
The crude truth was this, over decade ago, and I doubt it no longer is :
“Google policy is to get right up to the creepy line and not cross it… We don’t need you to type at all. We know where you are. We know where you’ve been. We can more or less know what you’re thinking about.”
— Eric Schmidt, former chief executive of Google, October 1st, 2010
“We can suggest what you should do next, what you care about. Imagine: We know where you are, we know what you like.“
— Eric Schmidt, former chief executive of Google, September 7th, 2010
“I actually think most people don’t want Google to answer their questions…They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next… We know roughly who you are, roughly what you care about, roughly who your friends are.“
— Eric Schmidt, former chief executive of Google, August 14th, 2010
“Your digital identity will live forever… because there’s no delete button.”
— Eric Schmidt, April 23rd, 2013, speaking to Stephen Colbert on the Colbert Report
Find out much more at [https://www.googlewatchdog.com/]
Personally, should Google Search be free of privacy intrusion I still wouldn’t use it given I deeply dislike the way it displays results. I mustn’t be the only one given dedicated scripts exist to bring some air to the display, for instance :
Google Search: interface cleanups [https://letsblock.it/filters/google-search-cleanup]
Google Search’s interface is, IMO, a total mess. As it goes they’ll soon include a soft-drinks distributor.
I use the *HELL* out of search operators (boolean logic). That the major search engines no longer allow them AND that they’re doing this without any explanation is thoroughly unacceptable. Also note that DDG is based on Microsoft’s Bing search engine.
….Then why did you wait approximately 17 years after the removal of Boolean to make this comment?
I’m guessing that the removal of search operators are being replaced by some kind of AI/ML, and they are confident that it will results in proper search results. Who knows….
Since the AI is not literally hooked into my brain by a wire, that claim makes absolutely zero sense. It’s pretty obvious that there is literally no situation whatsoever when “AI” that exists solely outside of my body only, and who’s only input is text, can magically know that if I write geocities “cats are great” mms it means that I am looking for one specific webpage only created by former friend Goshin, viewed by a total of 45 people since the day it was created, which has “cats are great” written by me in the “signatures” area, and also has a “visitor” with the screen name “mms”. That’s why I have literally never once ever, OBVIOUSLY, found the specific webpage I was looking for after the time when search engines decided to stop completing searches by moronically ignoring quotation marks. Even when it is an extremely large webpage with tens of millions of daily views or more, which is extremely easy to get certain “general topics” in Google-type search results. Because removing the ability to complete searches results in all users being unable to complete searches. Obviously.
Is this limitation just for DuckDuckGo, or is this a Bing limitation that’s going to affect all Bing-based search engines?
Search engine all suck now. I was a long time user of Startpage and loved it, however they’ve just started A/B testing a new version too and the new version (when it appears) also sucks as well. For example:
1) They used to stand out from all the other search engines, as they used Google for their search results – which I prefer over Bing-based search engines, particularly when doing more advanced searches. However, Startpage use Bing as well now, so they’ve just lost their unique advantage.
2) Article dates are now often missing from the left-hand side of the search results in the new version, so it’s not possible to see how old the article is.
3) In the new version, the search results pages are now jammed with junk, instead of just search results. So now we have to scroll through a bunch of “Images”, “News”, “Videos” sections for every search, just to get to the actual results. Web developers suck.
I was planning to move to DuckDuckGo, but not being able to use operators to narrow searches is going to be a major PITA. So, if as per the article suggests, DuckDuckGo are removing the ability to use double quotation marks (“”) to search for an exact phrase, how would someone search only for search results that contain the exact phrase, like the below hash for example?
“2d8bd7d9bb5f85ba643f0110d50cb506a1fe439e769a22503193ea6046bb87f7”
Around 2011 when the possibility to use a search engine to search for webpages was removed from Google, as well as having never existed in the first place on all two other search engines that existed, the result included every search engine that existed, because saying so is redundant.
The only search engine that I am aware of that exists now, which did not exist in 2011, and which therefore is likely to add functionality in the future if they have not been able to include it yet, is Mojeek.
It’s really strange that you “had planned to begin using DuckDuckGo instead of StartPage”, but yet you also claim that “It will be annoying to not be able to use the search engine to complete searches if you begin using DuckDuckGo”, even though StartPage also ignores minus signs and quotation marks and therefore prevents the ability to complete searches.
If you would like to search for a long string of random characters with no spaces, of course, then you can obviously do that unless the results show the need to exclude something, because nobody searches for “word”, with no other words in the box whatsoever besides “word”, yet still using quotation marks, unless they are either a) an idiot or b) are using Google during that extremely small period of time about 1-2 years when Google would add “words” and “wording” into that search if you don’t use quotation marks, but would not force you to view results that contain the latter two words.
Google removed “search by image” from it’s search engine, and also removed ability to specify custom time-frame for image results (I think it only exists for web results now) – whenever great features are taken away, I can only imagine it’s because they’re looking to sell it at a premium somehow. Is that the case here somehow? Or just incompetence?
My guess is legal exposure from piracy. Allowing a search for “{latest hot movie)” filetype:mp4 might be exposing them to more legal trouble than they care to deal with.
SanctimoniousApe
Not correct, because you can still do that… Only the final “custom” time frame is gone – you can’t specify for results from 01/01/2000 to 01/01/2010 for example – that stuff was useful and nothing to do with piracy.
I think I agree with “Anonymous” on this one…
I feel like it’s the AI boom. They want to restrict what people can look up to make harder to make databases to train neural networks. Same reason imgur removed nsfw ocntent and reddit is charging huge prices to use their apis. These companies realized they are sitting on a goldmine.
I often use filters, mostly the “exact” filter.
Playing around with my search engines I also noticed Peekier.com is gone. It now redirects to Kagi.com
Quoting the article, “DuckDuckGo is not the only search provider that is removing or reducing the impact of search filters.”
Surprising. What to expect from a search engine if not as many tools as possible to fine tune a research?
Most engines squeeze news, images and videos, may be shopping as well as maps inserts within Web results when the user wants Web results only, the other topics being available in the menu. Some engines are adding holy AI when the user expects plain, clean fine-tuned search results. What the heck is going on with search engines? Are they in the trend of making simple things complicated, adding nonsense and removing good sense?
Concerning DDG (which I call occasionally) I know that from now on I’ll have to avoid it when deep serching the Web.
“Now You: do you use search filters?”
Perhaps only the “exact terms” and the “:site” filter. The former is in DDG’s removal list, the latter still alive.
Looks like I”ll visit DDG even less than before and call increasingly SearXNG instances.
This is an extremely strange comment, because of the fact that it was posted in 2023 instead of approximately 2011 when all then-existing search engines removed the functionality of quotation marks and the minus sign, or before then when Google removed Boolean search and all other search engines went out of existence.
It seems DDG is becoming less and less of an viable option. What are your preferred alternatives nowadays?
The only search engine I am aware of the existence of which actually provides valid results is Mojeek.
how you want your search engine fam?
just fxck my shit up
Time to stop using DDG, if for some reason you had still been willing to do that after knowing that you are literally only getting Google results even though Google has severely censored all search results for nearly a decade now.
The above comment is not a reply. Please delete this comment and the one above it.
I -like the proposed change but the negative operator (the one I rely on most) is still functioning now.
…Incorrect. This article literally directly states that the minus sign was never functional on DDG in the first place.
Never used operators except for site and file type occasionally
For the love of everything dear, why, indeed, hamper a perfectly useful and often used (at least by me) feature like filters? There must be either a technical or a legal issue causing such grief…
Same. Damn!!
Well, wouldn’t “why” be the most natural question to ask here? Any thoughts on why these modifiers are being eliminated?
Searx seems better for then.
On a different note, looking at daily VPN spams reminded me of these two articles. ExpressVPN/PIA/Zenmate/Cyberghost all are owned by Kape, and Nord/Surfshark are owned by Nord.
https://www.ghacks.net/2021/09/15/is-kapes-acquisition-of-expressvpn-cause-for-concern/
https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/expressvpn-cio-among-three-facing-1-6-million-doj-fine-project-raven/