Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

DuckDuckGo grew more than 70% this year

qz.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 188 posts

Re: DuckDuckGo grew more than 70% this year

#51

Post by realusername »

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")…

If it can reassure you, it's about as terrible as this in French, in English it kind of works but for other languages, it's not even worth thinking about for now. I hope they are going to improve this part, otherwise they will never get those users.

Re: DuckDuckGo grew more than 70% this year

#52

Post by tagawa »

antome wrote: post #28
scope wrote: post #23

DDG results have improved tremendously, top stack overflow / github matches are shown partially which is really neat I FULLY switched to DDG (& also away from Chrome) when I found out when I click save password on login forms my password is sent to Google Servers (I must have missed it on the TOC)

DuckDuckGo really is good enough to use on a daily basis now. One big gripe I still have however, is that there seems to be no way to filter by time. I still have to go to google if I want to find a news article or topic which is recent, or within a certain period.

This is a popular request and one we're working on. Admittedly we've been saying that for a while but it's getting close.

Re: DuckDuckGo grew more than 70% this year

#53

Post by contingencies »

temp wrote: post #46
sundarurfriend wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fr…

This could probably be fairly generalized to "90% of Silly Valley lacks internationalisation experience"... I type this as an Aussie/German/Kiwi on a Thai keyboard (desktop; normally I'm on a French Macbook Pro) here in southwest China.

Re: DuckDuckGo grew more than 70% this year

#54

Post by xedarius »

I love DDG but I think as the world turns away from document indexing and more toward intent based search, plus the ever increasing use of implicit data (gps location, speed of movement etc) - I can't see how DDG are going to grow.

Ultimately search will end up with something a bit like Siri (but something that works). The hound demo (if real) is a very impressive glimpse of the future of search.

For those who haven't seen it : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M1ONXea0mXg

Re: DuckDuckGo grew more than 70% this year

#55

Post by bsbechtel »

Most of the comments here are complaining that, while people like the idea of DDG, the search results are poor. Two comments regarding that:

1) the only way DDG is going to improve search results is by you using it regularly. Using it regularly drives not only revenue, allowing them to hire additional developers, but it also drives feedback to help DDG improve search results.

2) I suspect that the difference in search results may partly be conditioned responses. We are accustomed to what we find through Google, so when DDG presents something that looks different (e.g. showing a different answers site that has the exact same result), we feel uncomfortable and think it's not what we want. I think this is just something that takes time to adjust to, but also something DDG needs to think about how try to figure out how to overcome.

Re: DuckDuckGo grew more than 70% this year

#56

Post by tagawa »

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…

DDG staff here. Thanks for sticking with us. The time/date filtering is being worked on - hopefully we can release it soon. That should make a lot of people happy.

For quality of results, I'm biased but I've found they have improved thanks to a lot of feedback from users providing specific queries that could be investigated one-by-one. There's now a feedback button (desktop only) so if you're able to give more examples of bad results that will help improve further.

Re: DuckDuckGo grew more than 70% this year

#57

Post by mikkom »

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…

I don't think people realize that DuckDuckGo is a meta search engine, they don't have their own algorithm. Instead they are using whatever is cheapest at the moment. It's very hard to get better results if you can't modify the algorithms core logic.

edit: okay maybe cheapest is a wrong word, the more correct term would be best price/result ratio.

Some time ago they were using Yandex as their result provider, at the moment I don't know who their provider is but I think that could be found by browsing through the about us pages (or not as now they are so big they can negotiate deal where they don't have to disclose their source).

(edit: this is what they disclose at https://duck.co/help/results/sources)

> DuckDuckGo gets its results from over four hundred sources. These include hundreds of vertical sources delivering niche Instant Answers, DuckDuckBot (our crawler) and crowd-sourced sites (like Wikipedia, stored in our answer indexes). We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we primarily source from Yahoo!, and in some regions and scenarios, Yandex and Bing.

Re: DuckDuckGo grew more than 70% this year

#58

Post by eva1984 »

Tried a few queries with it. Seems like its accuracy has improved greatly over last year, but still throws me a Japanese article for no reason.

Search is really a very hard business, in terms of both technology and market. I don't think they have Google level quality right now, so I won't consider use it seriously.

Re: DuckDuckGo grew more than 70% this year

#59

Post by magicalist »

SignMeTheHELLUp wrote: post #40
scope wrote: post #23

DDG results have improved tremendously, top stack overflow / github matches are shown partially which is really neat I FULLY switched to DDG (& also away from Chrome) when I found out when I click save password on login forms my password is sent to Google Servers (I must have missed it on the TOC)

> when I click save password on login forms my password is sent to Google Servers Does this happen even if a user is not logged in to a Google account?

No.

Re: DuckDuckGo grew more than 70% this year

#60

Post by truncate »

I recently started using DDG as my default search engine. I'm usually fine with searches, however what troubles me most times is the extracted content on result page. For example, when I search "How to make coffee"[1] the result links are good for both, however the extracted text shown in Google results are generally more relevant to my query. In this example, Google shows me instructions to make coffee in each result, while DDG shows the first text it could find which is totally irrelevant to what I want.

So in short, I feel a lag when deciding when and what to click with DDG.

[1] http://imgur.com/a/7jCEH

Post reply on HN