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DuckDuckGo grew more than 70% this year

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Re: DuckDuckGo grew more than 70% this year

#41

Post by tagawa »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #5
newscracker wrote: post #3

> “Our biggest challenge is that most people have not heard of us,” Weinberg says. “We very much want to break out into the mainstream.” It won't help at all if more people get to know of DDG and then leave it after a single trial because the results are not great. I value privacy a lot and want something like DDG to succeed and become really big, but I get frustrated very often with DDG. I know many people are very…

If you enjoy DDG (I love it!) consider helping create Instant Answers: https://www.gitbook.com/book/talsraviv/duckduckhackdocs/deta... (there's a Slack team for this as well)

If any devs would like to join that Slack team please send a mail (empty body is fine) to quackslack@duckduckgo.com and we'll send you an invite.

Re: DuckDuckGo grew more than 70% this year

#42

Post by stinos »

sundarurfriend wrote: post #19
newscracker wrote: post #3

> “Our biggest challenge is that most people have not heard of us,” Weinberg says. “We very much want to break out into the mainstream.” It won't help at all if more people get to know of DDG and then leave it after a single trial because the results are not great. I value privacy a lot and want something like DDG to succeed and become really big, but I get frustrated very often with DDG. I know many people are very…

FWIW, DDG search in my experience has gotten vastly better in the past year or so. It used to be that 90% of my searches ended up repeated with !g to go to google, but nowadys I'd guess that's like 30%, and even among those, half the time google's answer quality ends up the same. The only cases where Google is predictably and consistenly superior are 1. error/diagnostic messages: DDG still sucks at precision search,…

DDG search in my experience has gotten vastly better in the past year or so.

Had the exact same impression. There are numerous threads on HN involving DDG in the last couple of years and in more than one of them I complained about the results, but slowly yet steadily there are always less reasons to complain it seems. DDG does not yet find everything as quick as I'd want it to but when my go-to would be !g in the past I'm now starting to notice I use it much less (say only 1 out of 20 searches) and when I do chances are high google won't find what I want either, it usually just comes up with the same results but in 'better' order.

Re: DuckDuckGo grew more than 70% this year

#43

Post by bad_user »

I'm trying to use DuckDuckGo, but for now the local search results are really, really poor. I can't blame them much though, because Yahoo and Bing suck as well. But then Bing's index is in fact the only competition Google has and DuckDuckGo cannot improve as long as they depend on Bing.

One favorite example that I've been using for feedback is when I'm searching for "restaurante" (the Romanian word for "restaurants"), in Google Search I'm getting links to nearby restaurants. Which is normal since they've got my location and so on. But they also know that in my country (Romania) the people are speaking Romanian and so they are showing me results in the Romanian language of restaurants from my city.

On the other hand in DuckDuckGo:

1. The instant answer is terribly wrong, mistakenly identifying a plain vocabulary word from at least 3 romance languages (!!!) as being the name of some insignificant 1-star GitHub project that nobody cares about. Ouch!

2. Even though the region selected is Romania, aproximately the first eleven results contain the translation of the word "restaurante" from Spanish, a link to some "el Restaurante" magazine I've never heard about and a link to some latin restaurant named Kuuk from Mexico, plus a "Top 10 Berlin Restaurants" (needless to say Berlin is not in Romania)

3. Out of 30 links I get, none of them is related to Romanian restaurants, Romanian cuisine, or anything related to Romania, even though the selected region is Romania and that word is a Romanian word.

4. OK, lets assume that some users searching for "restaurante" are interested in Spanish results. Well, one problem would be that Mexico is different from Spain, but lets ignore that as well. The biggest problem is that this set of results is completely useless for Spanish speakers as well.

Re: DuckDuckGo grew more than 70% this year

#44

Post by pixard »

sundarurfriend wrote: post #19
newscracker wrote: post #3

> “Our biggest challenge is that most people have not heard of us,” Weinberg says. “We very much want to break out into the mainstream.” It won't help at all if more people get to know of DDG and then leave it after a single trial because the results are not great. I value privacy a lot and want something like DDG to succeed and become really big, but I get frustrated very often with DDG. I know many people are very…

FWIW, DDG search in my experience has gotten vastly better in the past year or so. It used to be that 90% of my searches ended up repeated with !g to go to google, but nowadys I'd guess that's like 30%, and even among those, half the time google's answer quality ends up the same. The only cases where Google is predictably and consistenly superior are 1. error/diagnostic messages: DDG still sucks at precision search,…

I last tried DDG a few years ago and couldn't get anything done at all as the results were simply not what I needed (PHP / Laravel / WordPress development).

Your comment made me try it again today and after several hours of using it I can definitely say it has vastly improved in results for my particular use case.

While a few hours are obviously not a huge metric it's still satisfying enough so I have switched it to default for now and we'll see how it goes.

Thanks for sharing your experience.

Re: DuckDuckGo grew more than 70% this year

#45

Post by infbtag »

adrtessier wrote: post #26
lesdeuxmagots wrote: post #15

FYI: DuckDuckGo primarily leverages the Yahoo BOSS api in the US.

I'm curious: who will they turn to if (when) Yahoo shuts the service down? Bing?

Their only options are Google, Bing, Yandex, Exalead, Gigablast, and Mojeek, and most probably in that order as the last two need to grow considerably first. Unless there's any others that have their own index?

Re: DuckDuckGo grew more than 70% this year

#46

Post by temp »

sundarurfriend wrote: post #19
newscracker wrote: post #3

> “Our biggest challenge is that most people have not heard of us,” Weinberg says. “We very much want to break out into the mainstream.” It won't help at all if more people get to know of DDG and then leave it after a single trial because the results are not great. I value privacy a lot and want something like DDG to succeed and become really big, but I get frustrated very often with DDG. I know many people are very…

FWIW, DDG search in my experience has gotten vastly better in the past year or so. It used to be that 90% of my searches ended up repeated with !g to go to google, but nowadys I'd guess that's like 30%, and even among those, half the time google's answer quality ends up the same. The only cases where Google is predictably and consistenly superior are 1. error/diagnostic messages: DDG still sucks at precision search,…

>FWIW, DDG search in my experience has gotten vastly better in the past year or so.

Unfortunately, I can't say the same.

As someone from a smaller and non-English-speaking country, I doubt there'll ever be an effort to improve their results for my language and considering that even Bing does an absolutely terrible job at it, Google is my only choice for when doing local searches.

It's like all search engines apart from Google are stuck 20 years in the past with how bad they are.

Re: DuckDuckGo grew more than 70% this year

#47

Post by temp »

bad_user wrote: post #43

I'm trying to use DuckDuckGo, but for now the local search results are really, really poor. I can't blame them much though, because Yahoo and Bing suck as well. But then Bing's index is in fact the only competition Google has and DuckDuckGo cannot improve as long as they depend on Bing. One favorite example that I've been using for feedback is when I'm searching for "restaurante" (the Romanian word for "restaurants")…

I can only reiterate those same experiences for another locale. Google provides an almost seamless experience when I do searches in English and in my local language. I don't feel like I've downgraded when doing a search locally. None of the other search engines even bother.

Which means that despite being incredibly privacy-conscious, and trying to avoid Google services like a plague, there's literally no alternative for me whatsoever to Google when searching online.

Re: DuckDuckGo grew more than 70% this year

#49

Post by jaredsohn »

antod wrote: post #38
douche wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Am I nuts, or has DDG been around for a very long time? Wikipedia says it started in 2008, but for some reason it's lodged in my mind along with Excite, Alta-Vista, AskJeeves and the other pre-Google search engines.

You weren't thinking of Dogpile were you? That was a pre Google meta search engine that sent your query to multiple search engines.

metacrawler was another and was what I used prior to Google. Amusingly, it now forwards to a site powered by dogpile.

Re: DuckDuckGo grew more than 70% this year

#50

Post by cJ0th »

msh wrote: post #30

I love ddg for english searches. For non english searches it is still behind google. For example "pizza name-of-my-town" lacks half the pizza places google lists.

In case you are from Europe you may want to try https://www.qwant.com/web

It certainly doesn't match google when it comes to local searches but I find it a bit more pleasant than DDG.

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