DDG is really great for easily doing specific types of search, eg. adding "!w" to your query will search for something on Wikipedia. For that feature, it's extremely useful and I don't like to be without it. But its own search results (which I think are actually anonymized Bing search results?) are nowhere as near what google manages by personalizing your search. So I'll often add "!g" to my query to get google results rather than ddg ones.
Let's start using DuckDuckGo more often
21–30 of 198 posts
Re: Let's start using DuckDuckGo more often
#22I use DuckDuck go as my default search on my machines, but I think the fact that Google is not anonymous does give them a big advantage. An obvious example of this is when I search for "Django" (I am primarily a Django developer). DuckDuckGo will return results about the film as the top hits, whereas Google already knows that I mean Django Web Framework and will return those as the top hits. I appreciate the fact tha…
I find myself often doing a two- or three-step search with DDG. First I search for a thing on DDG. Then if I get something back like Django the movie instead of Django the framework, I'll search the thing again on DDG with some sort of specializing term, e.g. "python." Lastly, I almost always end up searching with "!g thing + specializing term(s)."
I love the idea of DDG, and I'm delighted on the rare occasion that I get better results than google. But most of the time I get results that are inferior to El Goog. Still, I keep trying.
Re: Let's start using DuckDuckGo more often
#23I find duckduckgos results quite bad though, i've given it many shots over the past year but often have to keep switching back to Google.
Re: Let's start using DuckDuckGo more often
#24> But a search engine's results are only as accurate as the number of users who search and contribute to it
Are there not privacy concerns about this for DDG?
Re: Let's start using DuckDuckGo more often
#25I use DuckDuck go as my default search on my machines, but I think the fact that Google is not anonymous does give them a big advantage. An obvious example of this is when I search for "Django" (I am primarily a Django developer). DuckDuckGo will return results about the film as the top hits, whereas Google already knows that I mean Django Web Framework and will return those as the top hits. I appreciate the fact tha…
May be use DDG as the primary search enigne, and switch to Google when you don't get what you want in the first go on DDG. Atleast more traffic to DDG, and hence better results in future.
Re: Let's start using DuckDuckGo more often
#26At DuckDuckGo, no cookies are used by default.
>Yet they do store a cookie by default - this cookie is called "user_segment" and is valid for 1 month after it is first set.[1]
They have removed it but this kind of behaviour doesn't exactly raise trust. Also they are based in US so 'privacy' is just PR.
I would recommend to use startpage.
[1]https://archive.is/qntuk [2]https://8ch.net/tech/ddg.html
Re: Let's start using DuckDuckGo more often
#27I use DuckDuck go as my default search on my machines, but I think the fact that Google is not anonymous does give them a big advantage. An obvious example of this is when I search for "Django" (I am primarily a Django developer). DuckDuckGo will return results about the film as the top hits, whereas Google already knows that I mean Django Web Framework and will return those as the top hits. I appreciate the fact tha…
And DuckDuckGo is not really comparable when you don't live in the US. Google is far more superior, even without your info.
True, but that could also be because they have other people's info. My primary search engine is still Google, but sometimes for fun i do use DDG and it serves way better pages than bing or yahoo.. It's just way too awesome.
I'm not against data collection until it's for the benefits of the user, and duck duck go might be doing just that and anonymously. Google too, but they have way too much information about us than they should (which is kind of their business model, adsense).
But i hope to see this project grow, for the healthy competition sake. :)
Re: Let's start using DuckDuckGo more often
#28But DDG still goes to Google (as well as the other providers).
And I see it returns less relevant results compared to Google itself.
Where it might be shining is in avoiding the search per unit of time throttling done by Google, and less content tailored by user IP which I see an intrusion into ones privacy.
Re: Let's start using DuckDuckGo more often
#29I use DuckDuck go as my default search on my machines, but I think the fact that Google is not anonymous does give them a big advantage. An obvious example of this is when I search for "Django" (I am primarily a Django developer). DuckDuckGo will return results about the film as the top hits, whereas Google already knows that I mean Django Web Framework and will return those as the top hits. I appreciate the fact tha…
>* the fact that Google is not anonymous does give them a big advantage.*
What if DDG allowed us to manually tell them information about our demographic in a way that wasn't stored on their servers and could be changed at will? If you want convenience, maybe there could be an optional client-side preference detector script that only offered possible configurations.
Re: Let's start using DuckDuckGo more often
#30The "bangs" make all the difference. Just this morning I used !ups to track a package. I use !w (wikipedia), !gm (google maps), !gi (google images), !yt (youtube) and !a (amazon) all the time. Less often I use !so (stack overflow), !gsc (google scholar), and others. Sometimes I even use !g (google) or !b (bing) if the search results are inadequate. But that's very rare for me.