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DuckDuckGo vs Google

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Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#181

Post by AdamSC1 »

blisterpeanuts wrote: post #46
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.

Ditto, for the past month or two. I'd love to get off of Gmail and Google drive, as well, but that's a longer term project. Main reason: concerns about tracking and privacy. Secondarily: politics. DDG so far has been acceptable. As long as they keep their political opinions to themselves, the honeymoon will continue. My love affair with Google, on the other hand, is over. :(

Email is a tough one, but I've been using FastMail.

No advertising, strong privacy policy, based in Australia (a country with a decent privacy track record that we know of).

It's $3/month which is a decent price for liberating a lot of data from advertisers.

The spam filter is playing catch-up to Google so that's a bit of a shock at first, but you can train it up well or use second layer measures like Sanebox.

Disclaimer: DDG staff - but personal opinion.

Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#182

Post by simion314 »

I switched to duck duck go recently and for me it is good enough, when I feel I get bad results or not what I need I search with !g and for my surprise google returns same results most of the time. It would be good to have more duck duck go like sites/projects in case ddg fails or goes evil.

Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#183

Post by dx034 »

SCHiM wrote: post #78
sethrin wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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).

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

They're like this for a reason. They didn't implement complex detection of proxies to annoy users. Just to keep everyone out who's not supposed to use their search.

Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#184

Post by user68858788 »

projectant wrote: post #149

But how good can a search engine be if it does not track its humans, and therefore cannot use browsing / search history as contextual clues for query ranking / semantics ? It might be very good. But can such a system compete with one that does use search history as context?

There used to be a concept of google-fu, where writing search queries was a skill in itself. I got quite good at finding what's needed. Then, over time, search results became less and less useful. I noticed that search results seemed to be weighed more on my history than the query written. I'd get results with words synonymous to web page titles I'd recently visited, but otherwise no connection to my search. To get decent results now I have to use incognito or change the search settings to be "verbatim." I hoped things would get better, but years later things are the same.

DDG gives more predictable results. It reminds me of why I started using Google over other search engines decades ago.

Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#187

Post by nothrabannosir »

projectant wrote: post #144
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 find it funny that engineers ( on HN ? ) put on their I'm-a-rigid-logic-thinking-only-engineer cap when it suits them, and their I'm-an-imaginative-open-eyed-creative-rebel cap when it suits them as well. Traits of the first cap include: can't think outside the exact parameters given them, can't 'fill in the blanks' or inference laterally, take words and numbers to be exact limiting things. Traits of the second cap…

Maybe he didn't mean the metaphor was the problem, but the sentence following it (about making things look better for ddg)? Depending on interpretation, that could be undue discredit to ddg...

That would make this a bit of an ironic comment, no? :p

Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#188

Post by [deleted] »

xiaoma wrote: post #179
alexasmyths wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ...

> " That was one of the most HN comments I've ever read." You know, that's just a gratuitous swipe. So was this in the blog post: "First, DuckDuckGo didn’t start as a nerd attempt to find the ultimate algorithm." It really looks like you want to put down nerds to make yourself feel more sophisticated or popular. This isn't high school, though, and you're pissing in the same pool you're posting in. Turning "HN" into a…

[deleted]

Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#189

Post by dx034 »

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…

That would mean blogs are either excluded or suddenly get thousands of bot visits per hour.

Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#190

Post by shpx »

anc84 wrote: post #110
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.

Sometimes, it feels Google is increasingly useless at finding those niche websites because all the noise has time to do search engine """optimization""".

I use https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/personal-blocklist... but it should come with pre-compiled lists, like uBlock Origin.

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