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DuckDuckGo grew more than 70% this year

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Re: DuckDuckGo grew more than 70% this year

#151

Post by wila »

mrspeaker wrote: post #147
wila wrote: post #144

DDG has been my search engine of choice for the past few years and in my experience it is pretty rare that I have to use google for better results. In general I'm quite happy with it. One thing I would love to see as a feature is the ability to add under settings a list of sites I'd prefer not to see any results from. For example experts-exchange where they want you to sign up to see the answer. There's also a bunch…

I'd love there to be a "I'm a developer" mode: I know it goes against the point of not tracking people but there are so many tech words that are common nouns etc, and providing a bit of context would prevent a lot of g! searches from me (see example: https://twitter.com/mrspeaker/status/672115832772784128/phot... )

You could use the bangs for that:

https://duckduckgo.com/bang?c=Tech

Re: DuckDuckGo grew more than 70% this year

#152

Post by wila »

_dark_matter_ wrote: post #148
wila wrote: post #144

DDG has been my search engine of choice for the past few years and in my experience it is pretty rare that I have to use google for better results. In general I'm quite happy with it. One thing I would love to see as a feature is the ability to add under settings a list of sites I'd prefer not to see any results from. For example experts-exchange where they want you to sign up to see the answer. There's also a bunch…

They could also use this as another signal of the quality of a link for other users.

That is not my main motivation for asking this, but yes you are correct.

If DDG wants to use such a list as a signal then they would have to check it a bit for potential abuse. For example to only count the excluded sites that are in active accounts used for searching, but it could indeed have other potential search improvements.

Re: DuckDuckGo grew more than 70% this year

#153

Post by dheera »

wila wrote: post #144

DDG has been my search engine of choice for the past few years and in my experience it is pretty rare that I have to use google for better results. In general I'm quite happy with it. One thing I would love to see as a feature is the ability to add under settings a list of sites I'd prefer not to see any results from. For example experts-exchange where they want you to sign up to see the answer. There's also a bunch…

> There's also a bunch of scraping websites that don't have actual answers which just pollute the results. Being able to suppress that kind of site would be wonderful.

The funny thing is, Google's targeting algorithms actually do a wonderful job of alleviating this problem just by studying what you and other people click on. It depends on whether you see it as a privacy invasion or as a prerequisite for machine learning and providing better results.

Re: DuckDuckGo grew more than 70% this year

#154

Post by hueving »

Rainymood wrote: post #71
netcan wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think an unavoidable conclusion is that while people may like privacy or some other benefit/function, they are rarely willing to take a hit on the main benefit/function (search results) to get it. It think this is an important thing to learn here as it applies in many cases. Maybe everyone complains about bad behaviour of their insurance company, but that does not mean they'll take a higher premium. Some people car…

>Maybe everyone complains about bad behaviour of their insurance company, but that does not mean they'll take a higher premium Exactly. >There's something here about "consumer" psychology and choices that is hard to capture in the concrete terms economists like to formalize using. That some/most economists like to use. There is a huge field in economics (and econophysics and stuff) that focused on actual irrational b…

Actually people not switching products because they still like one of the major features (being cheap in the insurance case or having personalized results in the Google case) is perfectly compatible with old school economics and the rational agent model.

The reason people complain is simple. They don't actually want to switch to any of the alternatives so they want their current choice to be fixed.

Re: DuckDuckGo grew more than 70% this year

#155

Post by wila »

dheera wrote: post #153
wila wrote: post #144

DDG has been my search engine of choice for the past few years and in my experience it is pretty rare that I have to use google for better results. In general I'm quite happy with it. One thing I would love to see as a feature is the ability to add under settings a list of sites I'd prefer not to see any results from. For example experts-exchange where they want you to sign up to see the answer. There's also a bunch…

> There's also a bunch of scraping websites that don't have actual answers which just pollute the results. Being able to suppress that kind of site would be wonderful. The funny thing is, Google's targeting algorithms actually do a wonderful job of alleviating this problem just by studying what you and other people click on. It depends on whether you see it as a privacy invasion or as a prerequisite for machine learn…

Privacy invasion yes in a way, can't say I appreciate them tracking every search result I click on.

What is even more annoying that google gives you a link to the search result and pretending it to be http://www.example.com but when you copy & paste it to use it elsewhere it suddenly becomes a urlencoded parameter to their tracking mechanism.

They do display the link itself as text, but shorten it if it is over 20 or so characters.

Duck duck go doesn't do that (thankfully)

Re: DuckDuckGo grew more than 70% this year

#156

Post by johnsonjo »

AdamSC1 wrote: post #121
forgetsusername wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the only way DDG is going to improve search results is by you using it regularly. For what company or product is that not the case? Unfortunately, most people (myself included) aren't interested in integrating inferior products into our lives with the hope that "one day" they might be as good. I decided to default to DDG last year to see how it was, and because my online privacy is worth something. I found the resu…

Hi forgetsusername, The results have come along way over the past year, and we've also added a feedback tool that lets you share with us when you feel an answer was lacking. If you are interested in trying us again sometime I know we'd love to hear the feedback as we aim to provide a great search experience without sacrificing your privacy. We also have our "!Bangs" ( https://duckduckgo.com/bang ) which allow you to…

Bangs are honestly one of my favorite parts of Duck Duck Go and I actually found out about it from a friend a while after I switched from Google. It completely changed how I used DDG.

Re: DuckDuckGo grew more than 70% this year

#157

Post by wutbrodo »

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,…

> 1. error/diagnostic messages: DDG still sucks at precision search, and quotes are not always the answer

Wow _this_ is interesting to hear. I would've thought that this would be the main area where the quality gap would be smallest, since there's such little wiggle room and most results are likely to be relevant. I wonder why this is the case.

Re: DuckDuckGo grew more than 70% this year

#158

Post by newscracker »

AdamSC1 wrote: post #114
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…

As some folks have mentioned we're constantly improving our results but one of the best things is when we have a specific results case. So if you have a result that didn't work for you - share the specific case in our feedback tool or by shooting our team an email (mine is adam@duckduckgo.com). One thing that separates us is the fact that you can get involved in our community, build out instant answers, give us feedb…

Thanks for the information about the feedback button. I had never noticed it at all!

When people search, they look at the search box and then at what's below it, which tends to be always on the top and towards the left of the screen. Whatever's in the middle or bottom as well as on the right tends to get ignored.

I'd suggest putting the Send Feedback button right below the search box when you display the results so that more people notice it. I've just sent a feedback about this through the Send Feedback button.

Re: DuckDuckGo grew more than 70% this year

#159

Post by qwertyuiop924 »

rlv-dan wrote: post #21

I've been using DDG for many years now, and I think the search results are excellent in most cases. Sometimes I'm not satisfied, and try the same seach on Google. Most of the time though, I get the same results there. My only gripe is that the last half year or so, w3schools has been getting at the top of the search results. (Previously w3schools did not show in the search results.)

Use !mdn or !devdocs. Both are awsome sites.
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