311–320 of 558 posts
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 used to use ddg, then startpage, but I've been using a self-hosted searx for a while now. It's a meta-search engine that scrapes other sites. Results are always great, and it's nice being able to enable specific engines for different sites. Check it out: https://searx.me
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Safari at the moment but thinking about going to Firefox
Firefox on Android is vastly superior experience due to one simple thing - extensions. microBlock origin makes web actually usable again on mobile platforms.
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…
Your idea doesn't go far enough. What good are a couple of stale indexes of Wikipedia and Stackoverflow going to be? Instead, I am wondering why there isnt a federated open source search engine. It would be a cloud of nodes, each node spidering and indexing a small hash bucket of urls. With a million such nodes we could have a live updated, distributed search engine to replace Google. We could run millions of queries…
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 !'
Now if I type "h my-search" into the omnibar, it goes to google.com/search?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+my-search which gives me only Google search results from HN.
This is using google's algorithm (not the search bar built into whichever website like DDG) which is still the best, especially if you constrain it to one domain name. I also don't have to type the "!"
The prefix messes up google's text prediction. I guess no one from the chromium team is using this feature, since it would be trivial to fix.
I used to use ddg, then startpage, but I've been using a self-hosted searx for a while now. It's a meta-search engine that scrapes other sites. Results are always great, and it's nice being able to enable specific engines for different sites. Check it out: https://searx.me
I use DDG everywhere except at work, where (for some reason) it's blocked. The one silly thing I miss about not having DDG at work: in DDG, I can type "new guid" and it gives me a new random guid. If there's a way to do that in Google, I haven't figured it out. (And yes I know there are a million other ways to get random guids. It's just convenient for me to get them this way.)
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 s…
I remember when Google looked that way too. The lack of other links, gif animations and backgrounds, the prototype-style primary colors . . .
They also had the luxury of entering the market before there was a dominant player. Not to mention the brilliance of the pagerank algorithm.
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…
Your idea doesn't go far enough. What good are a couple of stale indexes of Wikipedia and Stackoverflow going to be? Instead, I am wondering why there isnt a federated open source search engine. It would be a cloud of nodes, each node spidering and indexing a small hash bucket of urls. With a million such nodes we could have a live updated, distributed search engine to replace Google. We could run millions of queries…
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.