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Duck Duck Go = Perfect search engine for programmers

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Re: Duck Duck Go = Perfect search engine for programmers

#31

Post by woodson »

cookiecaper wrote: post #20

When I tried out DuckDuckGo about a year ago, I noticed it was really good for general queries, but always had to go back to Google when I searched for compiler error messages or other programming-related things. Because of this, I eventually slipped back into full-time Googleage, despite giving DDG a try for about a month and a half.

That's why I like the !g option. If for whatever reason DDG does not seem to "get" what I want (probably because of me being trained to "google it") I can easily search with Google while leaving DDG as default search. Granted, I'm using it as default only since about a week, but this is quite alright when considering that I came from 100% Google. My previous attempts ended very similar to yours..

Re: Duck Duck Go = Perfect search engine for programmers

#33

Post by jacquesm »

nkurz wrote: post #19
jacquesm wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They already allow you change your preferences to see 100 results per search instead of the default. How does this fit with your logic? That nobody except for a few geeks do it. Just like the 'I feel lucky' button. > Certainly Google is very concerned with click-through on ads, but I'm not sure they'd be losing much if they allowed continuous scrolling. What percentage of their revenue do you think they derive from…

Great statistics, thanks! That's much higher than I would have guessed. While I agree that very few people change the default number of results, I would have also guessed that few click through to a second page. Personally, I don't like the AJAX update approach. I'd much rather that a site just give me a long list of results, and allow me to scroll through them without loading delays. If I could set Google to return…

> I'd much rather that a site just give me a long list of results, and allow me to scroll through them without loading delays.

I think that is a balance between server load and user convenience.

On ddg it is already pretty fast, if you aren't in a real hurry it is hardly noticeable and faster than clicking through to a second page.

Re: Duck Duck Go = Perfect search engine for programmers

#34

Post by epi0Bauqu »

zackattack wrote: post #32
techiferous wrote: post #12

Perfect for programmers? I was skeptical. Then I searched for A* (which doesn't work on Google). Perfect indeed!

Nice. I will switch when it handles mathematical expressions well.

What kind? It might already or might be an easy fix.

Re: Duck Duck Go = Perfect search engine for programmers

#35

Post by plq »

ddg is quite nice when you're searching in languages with a relatively simple morphology. For English, I'm not using google any more unless ddg tells me to do so :)

It is very easy to perform shallow parsing operations on English, because of its relatively simple morphology. However, for agglutinative languages like Turkish, (Finnish, Hungarian and Japanese are also in the same family) where stems can appear under too many forms to enumerate, basic shallow parsing algorithms would not produce as interesting search results.

My anecdotal experience with DDG in Turkish seems to go in line with that assumption. So, I think DDG has a lot room for improvement in processing languages with complex morphology.

==================

A famous illustrative Turkish word is: uygarlaştıramadıklarımızdanmışsınızcasına

...which decomposes to suffixes as follows: uygar+laş+tır+ama+dık+lar+ımız+dan+mış+sınız+casına

...and translates to english as follows: behaving as if you(plural) are among those whom we could not cause to become civilized

Re: Duck Duck Go = Perfect search engine for programmers

#36

Post by y0ghur7_xxx »

epi0Bauqu wrote: post #34
zackattack wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nice. I will switch when it handles mathematical expressions well.

What kind? It might already or might be an easy fix.

personally I often use google to do stuff like

http://duckduckgo.com/?q=120mph+in+km%2Fh

or

http://duckduckgo.com/?q=1%24+in+€

Re: Duck Duck Go = Perfect search engine for programmers

#37

Post by ErrantX »

adrianwaj wrote: post #22

Is DDG completely independent or does it pull in results from other search engines, like a meta search engine? Does it do its own spidering?

Both. Gabriel has disussed this before (I'm on my iPhone so no links sorry). But basically he does his own spodering and also uses yahoo boss and the bing api.

Re: Duck Duck Go = Perfect search engine for programmers

#38

Post by nfnaaron »

bouncingsoul wrote: post #24
epi0Bauqu wrote: post #23

It's not perfect yet, but I'd really like to get there: http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/03/hack-hack-go.htm... Here's what's coming: --Stack Overflow, man pages & programming documentation in 0-click. --More programming !bangs; I've already added a bunch but would love more suggestions: http://duckduckgo.com/bang.html --More goodies; I've added a lot recently (color codes, regexp, more advanced math to wolfr…

I use !bangs a lot, but I wish they worked at the end of your search terms instead of just at the beginning. I often don't think about the specifics of what I want until I've started typing, then I realize, "Oh, I actually want the wikipedia page of this." So I have to Ctrl-A to the beginning and type !w [space]. It's not a big hassle, but it'd be great if I could skip that step.

"I use !bangs a lot, but I wish they worked at the end of your search terms instead of just at the beginning."

In addition to, not instead of. (And why not just allow it anywhere in the terms?)

I like seeing that my previous search was a ! search in my ff search bar. If it's a long search term I wouldn't see it at the end.

Re: Duck Duck Go = Perfect search engine for programmers

#39

Post by epi0Bauqu »

epi0Bauqu wrote: post #27
bouncingsoul wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use !bangs a lot, but I wish they worked at the end of your search terms instead of just at the beginning. I often don't think about the specifics of what I want until I've started typing, then I realize, "Oh, I actually want the wikipedia page of this." So I have to Ctrl-A to the beginning and type !w [space]. It's not a big hassle, but it'd be great if I could skip that step.

Easy fix--will do tomorrow as it's getting late :)

This is now fixed. I also made them case insensitive.

Re: Duck Duck Go = Perfect search engine for programmers

#40

Post by epi0Bauqu »

timr wrote: post #13
jacquesm wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd rather see 10 more articles about DDG than one more about the ipad or fakestevejobs.

"I'd rather see 10 more articles about DDG than one more about the ipad or fakestevejobs." ...because clearly, those are the only choices. As long as we're throwing around false dichotomies, I'd rather see 10 more articles about the internals of a search engine than one more rah-rah post about DDG.

What would you like to know? For starters: http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2009/03/duck-duck-go-arc...
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