This is the sort of low-effort post I expect on reddit. And I come here to avoid that.
Let's start using DuckDuckGo more often
41–50 of 198 posts
Re: Let's start using DuckDuckGo more often
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
And DuckDuckGo is not really comparable when you don't live in the US. Google is far more superior, even without your info.
We have the chicken and egg problem there. Google have that results because it has terabytes of information on everything and that's because millions use it. If more and more people start using DDG, their results will also improve.
> If more and more people start using DDG, their results will also improve.
Let's say everybody stops using Google right now and starts using DDG with its anonymous, proxied queries to Bing. How does this in any way improve search results? You could maybe argue that heavy direct use of bing.com would give Microsoft some useful training data. But none of that changes the fact that Bing's crawlers aren't that good, and neither is its search engine.
Re: Let's start using DuckDuckGo more often
#43DDG 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 resul…
this is why DDG is my default search engine. I use !g a lot because the native search is only okay at best, but there are so many handy !bang shortcuts that I can't walk away. !emoji !dict !w !gi
Re: Let's start using DuckDuckGo more often
#44I've been using duckduckgo as my main search engine for about 2 years but I never recommend it to anybody. It just feels like a homeopathic remedy to me. What's the business model? I don't allow them to show me ads and they don't allow me to pay for the service. I just can't imagine how that can scale.
Search engines are such an important tool that I would be more than willing to pay $10 a month for a good quality one with strong commitment to privacy and maybe additional premium features.
Re: Let's start using DuckDuckGo more often
#45Every time I try to use DDG I ended using !g which kills its purpose, I just use Startpage[0]
Re: Let's start using DuckDuckGo more often
#46I 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…
Really? I've been using DDG exclusively for a few months, and whenever I get unsatisfactory results, I retry with !g. Invariably, I get equally unsatisfactory results with Google. Maybe in some rare cases where I'm searching for something esoteric, Google will return an extra page or two, but that's not very frequent.
Re: Let's start using DuckDuckGo more often
#47> I'm getting a feeling that some day in future, DDG is going to become as big as Google, if not supersede it. Well, no, they don't even have their own search engine. > a search engine's results are only as accurate as the number of users who search and contribute to it That makes no sense. Anyway, we don't use DDG because its results are shitty.
> Well, no, they don't even have their own search engine.
Really? I've never heard this, do you have anymore information about it?
Re: Let's start using DuckDuckGo more often
#48I switched to DDG a few months ago and have found it just as good as Google at least for my usage, at the very least I haven't felt the need to use Google as the results I have been getting have been just fine, and that's without the bangs functionality.
Re: Let's start using DuckDuckGo more often
#49> I'm getting a feeling that some day in future, DDG is going to become as big as Google, if not supersede it. Well, no, they don't even have their own search engine. > a search engine's results are only as accurate as the number of users who search and contribute to it That makes no sense. Anyway, we don't use DDG because its results are shitty.
While I understand your point, please.
> Anyway, we don't use DDG because its results are shitty.
These kind of comments are a bit unnecessary, especially on Hacker News, I believe.
Re: Let's start using DuckDuckGo more often
#50DDG is great; what it currently lacks (for me) is not search quality but reach; it has trouble indexing less visited corners of the internet. Google did not become huge because of the search engine alone . AFAICT two things, based on related technologies, made Google oodles of money: AdWords and SERP ads. (AdWords used to be so unobtrusive I never tried to block them.) I don't know how DDG currently pays its bills. T…
How poorly targeted can an ad be when you've told them exactly what you're looking for? It doesn't get much more targeted than "car dealerships Florida".