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DuckDuckGo vs Google

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Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#331

Post by iainmerrick »

jxcl wrote: post #298
graphitezepp wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

I didn't know about that! Strange interface, though -- why isn't the first response just "2.27kg"?

Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#332

Post by saimiam »

thinkMOAR wrote: post #230

"If I do the same with Google, you get over 11 billion results!" Yes i have this often, and then when i click for example from page 5 to page 6 it suddenly says NO RESULTS and im always left flabbergasted with the thought "But google.. you just told me i got 11 million results to search through myself..."

I've had the same experience even with the 2nd or 3rd pages. Makes you wonder if google isn't suffering from grade inflation.

Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#333

Post by conjectures »

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…

Nice point, but the real question is: are we talking about an unladen goose? ;)

Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#336

Post by cosarara97 »

mattmanser wrote: post #31
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.

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…

> Also, I have Bing on my phone's Chrome to avoid AMP, and it's actually quite good

You can also use google on Firefox for Android. No AMP there.

Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#337

Post by Kluny »

What's with this person's writing style? I've never seen so many literary tics in one place. "In short", 14 usages. Almost every sentence starts with a prepositional phrase like "In fact...", "Yet...", "However..." Confusing sentence structure like "How would have the net looked like?" It's so irritating to read.

Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#338

Post by Kiro »

fredsir wrote: post #227
crummy wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think search is as simple as grepping a ton of files. Search Google for "movie where people can't have babies" and the #1 result is Children of Men. I think that's one area where Google pulls ahead of its competition is accurate results to vague queries like that and I think you need a lot of collected data from searches to provide that.

FYI: For that exact query, DDG shows Children of Men as the top two results.

For me it's #6. Another movie called Baby Mama is #1.

Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#339

Post by Acalyptol »

kllrnohj wrote: post #321
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…

According to https://www.noppanit.com/how-to-index-all-wikipedia-english-... a search index for wikipedia's english site comes in at around 40GB. Laptops generally come in 128GB or 256GB capacities. So we're talking roughly 20-50% of an average laptop's storage just to hold the search index for wikipedia alone. Meaning it is not feasible to store a useful index of the web today on a laptop unless you want to dedicate…

Those are laptops with SSD. Laptops with HDD come in with 1TB+

Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#340

Post by reaperducer »

StavrosK wrote: post #251
tallanvor wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a fan of moving away from Google where possible as well, but Fastmail would cost me $500/year with 10 accounts. My G Suite account is one of the original, so I can have up to 200 accounts for free. Granted, it's only 15GB of storage, but even after about 10 years, I only have about 1GB in my inbox, so I'm ok with the lower amount of space.

Wow, what do you do with 10 accounts? Isn't checking all of them a hassle? I have multiple domains and aliases, and Fastmail is much better at those than Google Apps ever was (I also have the free plan but you can never change your initial domain), so I'm much happier.

I have six. Some of my clients ask me to manage their AdWords for them. Plus, I occasionally need to log in to my wife's Gmail account. (To confirm logins when paying bills, for example. Anything personal, she's smart enough to keep on her own domain.)
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