I feel like one of the appeals to using DuckDuckGo is that it simply isn't Google and, therefore, doesn't come along with all the ethical baggage. That's true now, but who's to say that will continue to be true in the future? At the end of the day, the same forces still drive large businesses to cut corners, costs, and creeds if they want to compete effectively with one another.
DuckDuckGo vs Google
291–300 of 558 posts
Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google
#292Earlier quoted context omitted.
Did you consider protonmail? If so, why fastmail?
I can only speak for my own decision-making process, but I like to pay for my email so that I have greater confidence that the provider will still be in business 10 years from now, and more confidence that my data is my own. Really like Fastmail.
How does paying ensure the data is your own?
Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google
#293Is there any practical decentralized alternative search engine? YaCy seems dead.
Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google
#294Recently 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 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…
Same problem here! For development searches Google typically blows ddg out of the water but I still love ddg for general search. I didnt know about the !g :D
Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google
#295Earlier 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 !'
!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.
So many bangs for you duck!
Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google
#296Isn'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…
Can you give us a breakdown of percentages of queries answered by each backend / source?
Do you have specific contracts that allows you to use their indexes anonymously or are you at their mercy?
Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google
#297I'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 s…
I remember when Google looked that way too. The lack of other links, gif animations and backgrounds, the prototype-style primary colors . . .
Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google
#298Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I only miss google as a DDG user when DDG doesn't have a tool google has to give you an automatic result, i.e. when trying to look up some unit conversion ratio like lb to kg. But when you know that is what you want there is always !g.
Do you know about the `units` command?
$ units
Currency exchange rates from www.timegenie.com on 2017-08-24
2980 units, 109 prefixes, 96 nonlinear units
You have: 5 lbs
You want: kg
* 2.2679619
/ 0.44092452
You have: 100 furlongs
You want: meters
* 20116.8
/ 4.9709695e-05
You have: 100 miles/hour
You want: meters/second
* 44.704
/ 0.022369363
You have: 2 kiloisraelnewshekels
You want: picodollars
* 5.5271109e+14
/ 1.8092635e-15Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google
#299Earlier quoted context omitted.
Did you consider protonmail? If so, why fastmail?
I can only speak for my own decision-making process, but I like to pay for my email so that I have greater confidence that the provider will still be in business 10 years from now, and more confidence that my data is my own. Really like Fastmail.
Protonmail has paid plans.
Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google
#300DuckDuckGo is great.
Also, the HBS case study prose style is annoying enough in itself. To have the style emulated by a non-native writer is fun. And weird.