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DuckDuckGo vs Google

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Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#71

Post by FabHK »

nextlevelwizard wrote: post #59
unicornporn wrote: post #18

I'm sure DDG works great if you're an American. As someone who has tried a region specific version of DDG though, I can say the results are downright terrible. Some say the DDG bangs are a solution. What do I win by doing that? It only made me resort to !g all the time, because the results were so bad. Now I use https://www.startpage.com/ with region set to Swedish. It's practically a proxy for Google search, so it g…

As Finn I rarely search for Finnish specific stuff. Sometimes I check prices or if something ships here or not, but that is exceedingly rare and for that DDG works fine. As for bangs, I love skipping clicks. Most of the time I know what I want and can use bangs accordingly. I'm guessing my most common tags are !a, !yt, !gh, !wiki, !wolf and then some game(s) specific bangs.

Also big fan of skipping clicks.

BTW, for wikipedia, !w is enough. Wolfram Alpha is !wa.

Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#72

Post by afsina »

shp0ngle wrote: post #69

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.

AFAIK it is the second.

Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#73

Post by FabHK »

Svip wrote: post #23
unicornporn wrote: post #18

I'm sure DDG works great if you're an American. As someone who has tried a region specific version of DDG though, I can say the results are downright terrible. Some say the DDG bangs are a solution. What do I win by doing that? It only made me resort to !g all the time, because the results were so bad. Now I use https://www.startpage.com/ with region set to Swedish. It's practically a proxy for Google search, so it g…

I must say I'm having the reverse experience. I very seldom use its Danish regional setting, but even for Danish searches DDG is fine. It's only 4-5 times a month I need the !g bang. But knowing about Startpage, I now use the !sp bang instead of !g. Indeed, due to the bangs, I know use DDG as my proxy to a lot of other search engines, like Wikipedia (!w/!wda/!w..) and Wiktionary (!wikt), and even obscure ones like Me…

The wikipedia-in-certain-language bangs are very useful, indeed.

Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#74

Post by Derbasti »

Write a whole article about DuckDuckGo, and don't mention bang searches. !py searches the Python documentation, !w searches Wikipedia, !g searches Google, !a searches Amazon, and better yet, !gde, !wde, and !ade search the German Google, Wikipedia, and Amazon.

For natural language queries, I use !g, because Google is better at this sort of thing. For local queries I use !gde, because Google has better map integration. For most everything else, I prefer DDG, because it doesn't "did you mean DickDickGo?", and it doesn't "I don't know what you're looking for, but here are five ads instead".

Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#75

Post by naibafo »

unicornporn wrote: post #18

I'm sure DDG works great if you're an American. As someone who has tried a region specific version of DDG though, I can say the results are downright terrible. Some say the DDG bangs are a solution. What do I win by doing that? It only made me resort to !g all the time, because the results were so bad. Now I use https://www.startpage.com/ with region set to Swedish. It's practically a proxy for Google search, so it g…

As a German user, results have been good whenever I use regional search.

Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#76

Post by [deleted] »

Catalyst4NaN wrote: post #66
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

[deleted]

Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#77

Post by afsina »

Catalyst4NaN wrote: post #66
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

Most of those sources are search engines of some web pages, answer pages, cheat sheets and help documents. They even list tiny unit conversation services there. Give me a break.

Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#78

Post by SCHiM »

sethrin wrote: post #62
jstanley wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why? Maybe he/she wants to bypass data collection in his/her country. Or desires more privacy, or something else.

How?

ssh -D 8080 digital-ocean-vm-here.tld

Now port 8080 on your local machine is a socks proxy for your vm.

Google is really tor/proxy/anonymous user unfriendly. Requiring users to solve as many as four or five CAPTCHAs (seriously fuck you google).

Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#79

Post by Acalyptol »

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…

I think this analogy is misleading as we tend to visualize animals by size and not by weight.

Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#80

Post by alexasmyths »

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…

That was one of the most HN comments I've ever read.

Hey, it's just a metaphor.

Scales and ratios not needed.

edit: Wasn't meant to be negative ... as I could see myself writing something like that and my GF giggling at me for a week ...

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