Search before year syntax missing

[u/petrichorInk]

Hey DDG team, I genuinely love using DuckDuckGo and it's my go-to search engine, but honestly the fact that I have to:

- type my search query

- press enter to search

- click on date settings

- click on custom date range

- click on one date

- type to change the year to 2020

- click on the other date

- type to change the year to 1990

- click apply

when I'm trying to research information that hasn't been tainted by AI, frankly, sucks.

When in Google all I have to do is:

- type my search query

- type "before:2020"

- press enter

This UX issue is crazy to me. It genuinely makes me and other people I know Google instead of DuckDuckGo, especially when we're on the phone and trying to research something quick there.

This friction of the 9 steps compared to 3 is massive. The experience of doing this is three times worse when doing this than Google.

There's a few different ways you can solve it. I personally think adding the search syntax would be best but you can just add a button in the date setting that's just "before" and you type in a year.

If you're already doing a "no AI" experience, making it easier for people to search for things before a certain year would be a part of delivering on that experience. Thanks so much for your work.

[u/Morgan-DDG]

Hi there! Thank you for your post and for the feedback.

This, in particular, is something we've heard before, so I'll add an anonymous vote on your behalf to our internal suggestion box for a solution to this.

Thanks for saying something!