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DuckDuckGo vs Google

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Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#81

Post by tallanvor »

StavrosK wrote: post #60
Lifesnoozer wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I started feeling like I had all my eggs in the same basket. Google has my email, it knows where I want to go and when (Google Maps), it translates stuff for me, and it knows what I search for. While it doesn't really affect me that Google has all this information, I've become more and more uncomfortable with the fact that they do. So I figured if I had a choice of two search engines, where I get satisfying results i…

I made the jump to Fastmail.com and couldn't be happier. The UI is very snappy (much faster than Gmail's), the actual notifications and delivery is faster, and it's a better experience overall, for me. Plus, Google doesn't get to see my mail any more. Ditto for Firefox vs Chrome.

I'm a fan of moving away from Google where possible as well, but Fastmail would cost me $500/year with 10 accounts. My G Suite account is one of the original, so I can have up to 200 accounts for free. Granted, it's only 15GB of storage, but even after about 10 years, I only have about 1GB in my inbox, so I'm ok with the lower amount of space.

Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#82

Post by morganvachon »

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"

Do you mean using a DO VM as a VPN, or via X11 forwarding to your desktop over SSH, or actually browsing on the DO VM's desktop using VNC? I've done all three in the past as experiments in private browsing, and the latter is too laggy to be comfortable.

Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#83

Post by mda »

losvedir wrote: post #58

Isn't DDG basically Bing + bangs? Doesn't seem fair to credit it at beating Google without highlighting the billions of dollars that MSFT has invested.

Ahh. the uncomfortable truth that DDG is just a meta search engine with a few shortcuts.

Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#84

Post by staticelf »

DuckDuckGo has really, really improved on their results for me who do not live in USA. Before, it was pretty much unusable. But today I use DDG as my main search engine on all my devices.

You should too.

Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#85

Post by newbear »

StavrosK wrote: post #60
Lifesnoozer wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I started feeling like I had all my eggs in the same basket. Google has my email, it knows where I want to go and when (Google Maps), it translates stuff for me, and it knows what I search for. While it doesn't really affect me that Google has all this information, I've become more and more uncomfortable with the fact that they do. So I figured if I had a choice of two search engines, where I get satisfying results i…

I made the jump to Fastmail.com and couldn't be happier. The UI is very snappy (much faster than Gmail's), the actual notifications and delivery is faster, and it's a better experience overall, for me. Plus, Google doesn't get to see my mail any more. Ditto for Firefox vs Chrome.

Did you consider protonmail? If so, why fastmail?

Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#86

Post by mda »

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.

Second, they might crawl a few things, what percentage of the queries are answered by their index, that information they will probably not say.

Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#87

Post by notspanishflu »

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 better to use the '!s' bang. Is like using '!g' but with more privacy because uses startpage.com

Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#89

Post by romo5 »

People are conditioned to think Search has to work online.

This was true when Google was created.

No one had the processing or memory available on their desktop to search an entire index of the "useful" web.

Not anymore.

How large is a "useful" index of the web today? And can it fit on your laptop? The answer is yes.

Can the entire thing be queried fast? The answer is yes.

As an example take the entire stackexchange and wikipedia dumps in their entirety(including images). Compressed it comes to 50-60 GB range. Think about that number. That's an rough approximation of all known human knowledge. It's not growing too fast. It has stabilized. To query the content you need an index.

So how large is an index to a 100 GB file? Generally around 1 GB. Let's say you use covering indexes with lot of meta data and up that to 5GB to support sophisticated queries.

With today's average hardware you can search the entire thing in milliseconds.

So why aren't we building better local search?

Because everyone is conditioned to believe, thanks to Google's success, we need to do it online. Which means baking in the problem of handling millions of queries a second into the Search problem. Guess what? This is not a problem that local search has.

Every time a chimp or a duck needs to build a protein in it's cell it doesn't query the DNA index stored in the cloud. Instead every cell has the index. Every cell has the processing power to query that index in the nanosecond time scale.

The cloud based search story is temporary.

If you want to index every reference to Taylor Swifts ass that every teenager in Norway, Ecuador and Cambodia are making, then yes you need a Google size index. But for useful human knowledge we are getting to the point where we don't need Google scale.

If you don't believe me look at what is possible TODAY in Dash/Zeal docset search for offline developer documentation search or Kiwix or with Mathematica.

Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#90

Post by notspanishflu »

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…

When I don't like the DDG results, I use the '!s' bang instead of '!g'.

That means more privacy because uses startpage.com

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