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DuckDuckGo vs Google

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Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#281

Post by SubiculumCode »

bitL wrote: post #38
NaliSauce wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of interest: what is the reason/are the reasons that made you switch?

In my case it was this annoying Google's insistence on telling me what I was actually looking for instead of searching exactly what I wanted, including ignoring "" etc. It became too much hassle, I felt like fighting with windmills, then tried DDG, it did what I told it, results weren't terrible, so now I use it by default and only a few times a week I need to try Google. Maybe for regular folks Google's way is a lif…

I like the suggestion functionality for typo correction, but dont like it when Google assumes something other than I wrote. This is bad. It often happens when searching technical stuff. I am not regular Joe and I don't search regular stuff.

Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#282

Post by striking »

dx034 wrote: post #183
SCHiM wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, people like to try and crawl Google. So they're keeping robots out.

But it's actually really nice to be able to pull a result or two from ddg by crawling, or to be able to use a VPN without having to solve a zillion captcha.

Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#283

Post by FabHK »

akvadrako wrote: post #119
FabHK wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Or rather I've given up the assumption that Google has significantly better results.

Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#284

Post by seanalltogether »

AdamSC1 wrote: post #224
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.

DuckDuckGo uses multiple sources for our results, as well as our instant answers and bangs. But the most important feature is that DuckDuckGo is the search engine that doesn't track you. We don't store your personal information and we don't sell you out to advertisers. Our goal is to raise the standard of trust online, and so at DuckDuckGo you are not the product, search is. We think that's an important difference. D…

When do those other multiple sources come into play? When i do searches for general information I just see bing results.

https://imgur.com/P1akOab

Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#285

Post by thisacctforreal »

sd8dgf8ds8g8dsg wrote: post #101
Fiaxhs wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For a while I believe the difference was specifically that encrypted.google.com exclusively used PFS SSL cipher suites

Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#286

Post by puzzle »

AdamSC1 wrote: post #265
puzzle wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since when search metrics include YT, Maps and... Gmail?!? Unless you're talking about universal search results, I've never seen the numbers for all those products conflated.

If you look at the most recently public posted qSearch report on Feb 2016[2] you'll notice it talks about "Explicit Core Search" and "Powered By Reporting." Powered By Reporting is listed as any search that is handled by Google or Bing. "Google’s “powered by” share is composed of searches conducted at "Google entities", as well as searches on AOL and Ask’s MyWebSearch "[3] In Comscores qSearch product that you can su…

Those are third-party numbers. The "trillions" statement came from Google, where nobody conflates searches on Gmail with those on Web search. Your original message implied that Google inflates search numbers; I'll only say that that's a major assumption to make. (I used to know the exact numbers.)

Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#287

Post by viridian »

sandov wrote: post #216
daurnimator wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe he was using a scale other than weight/volume? Though looking at size, an african elephant is 4m tall, while a small mosquito is 2mm. this is a ratio of 2000:1.

>this is a ratio of 2000:1. In which case he would actually have been generous to DuckDuckGo while not being wrong by orders of magnitude. Conclusion: OP meant linear size, not mass. He could have stated it explicitly though, because one would naturally think that he was referring to mass.

This actually isn't true. Based on the numbers we have, and have been posted in this thread this is unfair to DDG by a factor of almost 2.

Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#288

Post by AdamSC1 »

FanaHOVA wrote: post #280
AdamSC1 wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DuckDuckGo uses multiple sources for our results, as well as our instant answers and bangs. But the most important feature is that DuckDuckGo is the search engine that doesn't track you. We don't store your personal information and we don't sell you out to advertisers. Our goal is to raise the standard of trust online, and so at DuckDuckGo you are not the product, search is. We think that's an important difference. D…

> at DuckDuckGo you are not the product, search is. So... who's paying?

Still advertisers. It's a nuanced but important difference.

Case A - if you type in "Car" we show an ad about cars. Advertisers are paying to appear at the top of that page. They do not know who you are or what you previously searched.

Case B - if you type in "Car" you are shown an ad about cars. Advertisers are paying to target based on your interest in cars, and possibly other websites you've visited, online actions you've taken, re-marketing pixels from third-party websites, or your affinity to other demographic groups.

In "Case A" the search page is the product.

In "Case B" you are the product.

Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#289

Post by ballenf »

I've had more than one family member uninstall DDG thinking it was malware. DuckDuckGo, imo, implies some degree of arbitrariness in whether they'll take your search query seriously. The article mentions he came up with the name before he had a product. It's just too bad he didn't think of a kids game just before this search engine.

It's my default search engine and without fail when a non-tech colleague is over my shoulder for an internet search they bust out laughing at the name and are insistent that it's a prank website. I persist and calmly explain. They relent and give that look you give a crazy person you don't want to argue with.

Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#290

Post by ianai »

shpx wrote: post #190
anc84 wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I’m glad I’m not the only one to think that. I wonder what a good way to measure that signal to noise ratio is?

This feels like an application of the 80/20 rule. I might not always find what I need in just that offline index, but the times I do would seriously disrupt google.

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