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DuckDuckGo vs Google

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Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#111
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, Lin…

That's precisely my point.

Canonical did a good thing of mashing it all together into a single product. DDG does the same for search in my book.

They've both outsourced the heavy lifting to some third party.

In DDG, Bing/Yahoo/Yandex does all of the heavy lifting. In Ubuntu, it's the Linux kernel. They would be nothing without those products they depend on. But they bundle that with like hundreds of different, smaller in scale products to offer a nice experience out of the box.

For smaller in scale companies that are trying to compete with big players (like Microsoft and Google), this does seem like a winning combination in my book.

Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#112
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…

[deleted]

Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#114
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…

So, practically speaking, how would one go about setting this up for local use? I would this would also work very well for locally stored books and docs.

Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#115

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.

You can exclude keywords by using the minus sign, e.g. “-yummly”. This excludes all search results that contain yummly.

Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#116
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…

Or to put it in Edward Tuft's "Lie Factor" terms using a 5000 lbs elephant and 5mg mosquito I get a lie factor of 454046 (if someone can check out the math).

Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#118
I see DuckDuckGo as an improved search bar more than as a search engine, though it's admirably fast at the latter.

DDG's bangs are effectively a CLI interface to web searches. !g does google, !yt does YouTube, !w does Wikipedia, !wa does Wolfram Alpha, !scholar does Google Scholar...

Huge timesaver.

Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#119
post #68

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…

You always find what you are looking for, except twice a month? That means you aren't looking for very difficult things.

I don't ever find what I want a few times most days and need multiple sources/queries quite frequently.

Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#120
post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is true, although if you do want to fix that particular issue then unticking overflow:none against body usually does the trick :) But yes, reader mode is simpler.
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