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DuckDuckGo vs Google

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Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#101

Post by sd8dgf8ds8g8dsg »

Fiaxhs wrote: post #70
benbenhu wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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... )

www.google.com uses encryption too these days.

You are linking to a ~5 year old thread that is discussing the state of things well before google switched everything over to ssl.

Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#102

Post by Flow »

cbcoutinho wrote: post #45
robin_reala wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right-click / Inspect element / Delete

genius - thanks for this

A better solution is to enter the Reading mode of your browser.

Some sites popup dialogs and even if you delete all the elements they have set some of the elements in the original page to not allow scroll. With reading mode you just bypass all that crap.

Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#103

Post by pault »

FabHK wrote: post #68
mattmanser wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 lik…

If you use chrome, check out the vimium extension. It maps most browser actions to vim keys and makes mouseless navigation super easy.

Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#104

Post by otakucode »

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…

Perhaps rather than thinking in terms of material mass, he was thinking in terms of subjective conceptual 'weight' of each in the minds of his audience. Mosquitos are annoying and can be quite dangerous due to carrying parasites and pathogens, so the 'weight' we give them in the messy associative matrix of our brains is far larger than their raw mass. In other words: maybe he didn't mean it precisely.

Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#105

Post by r3bl »

jondubois wrote: post #29

DuckDuckGo is OK but they seem to be penalising single-page apps so my project websites rank low on DuckDuckGo but high on Google. So I can't support DuckDuckGo.

How are you doing on Bing and Yahoo? Maybe your SEO is too Google-specific?

I wouldn't blame you, mine is too (since the majority of readers use Google), but I rank exceptionally higher in alternatives than I do on Google.

Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#106

Post by neals »

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…

Might I suggest using the bounding-box of both specimen to try to make the equation work?

Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#107

Post by djsumdog »

Does anyone remember how back in the day, we had Lycos, Hotbot, Yahoo, Dogpile .. a whole host of search engines. You'd go to two or three to get an idea of what was out there. People had different indexes and there were a lot of players.

Today, it's just Google. I've been using DDG for a few years, but about 1/3 of the time I add an !g because I don't find the results I need on DDG.

The cost of entry to the search market is exceedingly high right now. This is a pretty good article of detailing how one person was able to come up with an idea and challenge the behemoth in very niche areas (privacy/the nsa leaks were probably the reason I started looking at/using it around 2013).

Yet I still miss the days of using multiple search engines; seeing a variety of results. I hate the de factor standard of Google. When a company controls that much of search, they get to define the narrative. They literally shape the way many people perceive the world.

I wonder if tech will get to the point where indexing will be easier and we'll see more solutions that are cheaper and that can crawl larger datasets with lower processing requirements. Maybe the next step will be distributed search with shared indexes?

In any case, Google can't remain on top forever (at least I hope not). It'd be nice to see more tech in this space, but it's an incredibly difficult problem. There is reason Google climbed to the top like it did.

Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#108

Post by otakucode »

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 had DDG as my primary search engine for I'd guess at least 5 years if not more. It's extremely rare that I ever need to use anything else. I do wish there was a way to tell Yummly to go to hell whenever I search for recipes, though.

Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#109

Post by hnlmorg »

r3bl wrote: post #98
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.

I mean, a probably more relevant summary of what DDG offers would be: Bing/Yahoo/Yandex mashup stripped out of personalized results + bangs + [until recently] community maintained instant answers. Edit: Worth pointing out: as far as I am aware, they're using all the other search engines with an agreement with those companies, which makes it completely okay in my book to credit them as the one. I credit my operating s…

> I credit my operating system to Canonical, even though the heavy lifting and behaving nicely on hardware is done by people contributing to Linux. Linux out of the box doesn't mean a thing to me. Bing out of the box doesn't mean a thing to me. DDG and Ubuntu do mean a lot to me.

That's a dangerous comparison to make because there isn't really any consensus* on which part of the stack to name the OS. For example, Linux is technically just the kernel. So most of the UX you deal with will be GNU and other user space tools. Depending on the DE you use, you might not even deal with much of Canonical's code. And Ubuntu does owe an awful lot to it's parent distribution, Debian.

In short, I get the point you're attempting to make but unfortunately your comparison is more contested than the original subject you were discussing.

* though many do advocate GNU/Linux

Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#110

Post by anc84 »

romo5 wrote: post #89

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…

You vastly underestimate the amount of knowledge in random blogs and small websites. If you are only after the "mainstream" sites, sure, but that's quite the bubble. I want and need access to all the blogs, forums, wikis.
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