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DuckDuckGo vs Google

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Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#61

Post by kowdermeister »

StavrosK wrote: post #55
kowdermeister wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By hit counts, maybe, what about financially? What about employee count?

Do you care if one company has two employees and one has a million to produce the exact same end result?

> exact same end result

Not really, but "exact same end result" is far from the current situation. And I'm not saying they shouldn't do it, rather that they really need to catch up.

Google (not counting other Alphabet companies) does a lots of things. I think the original analogy is mostly right.

Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#62

Post by sethrin »

jstanley wrote: post #4
Lifesnoozer wrote: post #3

Recently switched over to DuckDuckGo on all my devices. Tried to do the same thing several years ago and found it didn't really work out, but this time around it is so much better, both when it comes to speed and results. If anyone has doubts because they tried it years ago, I'd say go for it again.

Same story here. And since I regularly browse via a Digital Ocean VM, the lack of CAPTCHAs on DuckDuckGo is refreshing as well.

> And since I regularly browse via a Digital Ocean VM

If you don't mind my asking, why? And by which method do you usually accomplish this?

Edit: Thanks for explaining the CAPTCHA issue.

Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#63

Post by tiffanyh »

Isn’t DDG just using Yahoo on the backend to perform the search (which in turn is using Bing)?

What prevents Yahoo from (a) offering a competitive search to DDG or (b) Yahoo from shutting of DDG from using its search engine?

Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#64

Post by dreen »

logan5 wrote: post #35
Lifesnoozer wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Safari at the moment but thinking about going to Firefox

I switched from Chrome to Brave a few months ago. https://www.brave.com/

Been using Brave on mobile and it's great, but the UI layout on desktop is awkward so I don't use it there.

Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#65

Post by zizek23 »

The thing with Duckduckgo is the choice has to be ideological or you will do a search again on Google again just to ensure you are not missing out.

This is Google marketing and brand perception at work because Google results of late, 3 years, have been unimpressive and you have to sift through pages of useless links and content to find any relevant information beyond the usual suspects one already knows, so their intensive spyware operations doesn't seem to help search quality.

It's surprising there are not more experimental search projects. One would have expected a steady stream of regular attempts but not a single credible effort exists. There was once an alternative search project called Cuil that just seemed to fizzle off.

Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#66

Post by Catalyst4NaN »

tiffanyh wrote: post #63

Isn’t DDG just using Yahoo on the backend to perform the search (which in turn is using Bing)? What prevents Yahoo from (a) offering a competitive search to DDG or (b) Yahoo from shutting of DDG from using its search engine?

DDG is using over 400 sources apparently, of which one is Yahoo https://duck.co/help/results/sources

Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#67

Post by chrisweekly »

BerislavLopac wrote: post #49
laser wrote: post #28

"Google would be an elephant while DuckDuckGo is a mosquito (this is not to emphasize; I’m actually making things better for DuckDuckGo)." Why would this guy go out of his way to say this metaphor is actually literally informative and generous towards DuckDuckGo while apparently having exerted no mental effort and being incorrect by orders of magnitude on his own data? If you're most generous to the writer, you get 1…

So a... duck? ;-)

2 ducks

Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#68

Post by FabHK »

mattmanser wrote: post #31
Lifesnoozer wrote: post #3

Recently switched over to DuckDuckGo on all my devices. Tried to do the same thing several years ago and found it didn't really work out, but this time around it is so much better, both when it comes to speed and results. If anyone has doubts because they tried it years ago, I'd say go for it again.

I've been using it for the last 6 months. The problem is, whenever you can't find something in DDG, you assume it's because it's DDG, and search again with !g. Meaning I end up requerying 40% or so of my searches using !g (prefixing your query with !g redirects your query from DDG to encrypted google) Here's some example queries I ended up !g yesterday that had much better results in google than DDG: reduce kendo jav…

Weird, I find myself reverting to Google (or rather Startpage, !s) maybe once or twice a month, when I don't find satisfying results on DDG. And I'd say that in many if not most cases, I don't find good answers on Google then, either.

And I quite like using bangs, e.g. !w for Wikipedia or !i for images, rather than having to go to the initial search results on the search engine and then clicking again.

Finally, I like that on DDG, you can just arrow up/down through the search results, and then open one with enter (or cmd-enter to open it in a background tab), without reverting to the mouse.

Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#69

Post by shp0ngle »

I still don't understand - does DDG have its own crawler and index, or is it outsourcing all that to third parties?

If the second, as I suspect, it's not really long-term viable anyway, is it.

Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#70

Post by Fiaxhs »

benbenhu wrote: post #54
Lifesnoozer wrote: post #3

Recently switched over to DuckDuckGo on all my devices. Tried to do the same thing several years ago and found it didn't really work out, but this time around it is so much better, both when it comes to speed and results. If anyone has doubts because they tried it years ago, I'd say go for it again.

And don't forget to use the bangs that can allow you to check other engines results fast if you need. For people afraid of getting off google, you can always search something like '!g my-search', it works the same for youtube(!yt), google image(!gi), or even hackernews(!hn) And of course the best bang is the 'I am feeling lucky' one (!), i.e.: 'hackernews !'

It's worth noting that the !g bang redirects you to encrypted.google.com, it's more secure but results are often different from a regular www.google.com search. It bugged me for a while not knowing why some queries returned unusual results. ( more here https://duck.co/forum/thread/2880/remove-the-encrypted-subdo... )
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