Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

DuckDuckGo vs Google

fourweekmba.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 558 posts

Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#121

Post by Freak_NL »

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 !'

    !ud → Urban Dictionary (what do you mean, she's 'office cute'?)
    !wen → Wikipedia English
    !w.. → Wikipedia (two letter language code, e.g., 'nl')
    !wikt Wiktionary
So many useful bangs.

Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#122

Post by kdamken »

I really, really want to like DuckDuckGo. But every single time I’ve switched from Google, I’ve found them to be much worse at returning the best results for what I’m looking for.

For example, let’s say I want to look up “ear infection”. Google will spit out a bunch of info right on their results page, often saving me the trouble of even going to another site. DDG however will just give me 10 webmd links.

If they want to compete, the privacy angle isn’t enough. They need comparable functionality as well.

Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#123

Post by thanatropism »

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'd say bangs are the whole product. When you fail to use bangs, it presents, as a plus, medium decent results. (Good for stuff like error messages on stack overflow and forums, not so good for vaguer queries).

Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#124

Post by smt88 »

alexasmyths wrote: post #80
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 ...

The author went out of his way to say that the scale of the metaphor was wrong. I don't find it that pedantic for someone to point out that the opposite is true, especially when it makes a huge difference to the reader understanding the scale of DuckDuckGo's accomplishments.

Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#125

Post by grepthisab »

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 here. Tried a while back and didn't really take. I found myself Googling most things after DDG'ing them. Tried again recently because I love the mission, and it's working much better. Usually what I want is in the top few results, although Google still does a bit better with search result quality. I see myself using it as my main search engine at this point.

Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#126

Post by grwthckrmstr »

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…

*starts slow clapping....with increasing intensity"

Video if you're unable to visualise - https://youtu.be/o0u4M6vppCI?t=2m42s

Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#127

Post by r3bl »

Derbasti wrote: post #74

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…

> Write a whole article about DuckDuckGo, and don't mention bang searches.

Ummm... yes it does. It's literally the very first point the author discusses once he starts comparing the search results. Here's a link to the relevant subsection: https://fourweekmba.com/duckduckgo-vs-google/#Search_DuckDuc...

Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#128

Post by smt88 »

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?

In this case, employee count is very relevant.

It might tell us how realistic scaling to the size of Google is, for example. I don't think it does, but it's an interest thought: could DDG manage Google's search traffic with ~1,000 employees (scaling linearly)? Could it do the same with fewer than that?

Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#129

Post by karussell »

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…

Great analysis. Still I see two problems. First, the company name Google comes from "Googol" and so it cannot be overestimated and second, why are you mixing lbs and kilogram in your analysis!? And using lbs is in general uglier than the wrong metaphor ;)

Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#130

Post by skizm »

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…

The reason sites like Google and YouTube are good is not because you can search the larger sites well, but because they can search the long tail of the web well. Any search engine can index the top 5-10k sites and build something workable for that. The money maker is returning lesser known sites because, despite not being popular, they contain the best answer for the search query. YouTube got popular not because it has the most popular videos on the web (all video sharing websites have the popular videos) but because it contained and stored an insane amount of videos with like 100 views and would return them if you searched for something oddly specific.
Post reply on HN