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DuckDuckGo vs Google

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Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#341

Post by mattnewport »

nickpsecurity wrote: post #269

The comments on this article mostly talk about the privacy benefits DDG brings. Yet, we've known since the Orange Book (TCSEC) that system integrity is a prerequisite for confidentiality/privacy. As in, the DDG servers and network need some strong security to ensure they're doing what the staff and users think they're doing esp with all the press it gets. Example attacks: 1. Root the search servers. Gradually leak ou…

I imagine most people using DDG over Google for privacy reasons are concerned first with what Google does with the data it collects on them and only secondarily with the potential for other actors to get access to that data.

Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#342

Post by spektom »

I'd like to act as devil's advocate for a bit.

Showing ads according to a search term is totally possible, but having no attribution attached to a "click" or to an "impression" give very little advantage for the marketer who is paying for the ads. There are cost models allowing to pay for the actual action (like installing an advertised application) not just for clicks or views. Re-targeting people who had expressed their interest in a product is a useful tool for marketers as well. Having some kind of link back to the advertising campaign, which your users came from along with their LTV allow you to measure campaign productivity, which helps optimize future campaigns. And much more.

I really like the idea of not being tracked on the Internet, but it's seems like currently it's not feasible to remove a tool many marketers get used to.

Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#343

Post by iainmerrick »

skizm wrote: post #130
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…

The reason sites like Google and YouTube are good is not because you can search the larger sites well, but because they can search the long tail of the web well. Any search engine can index the top 5-10k sites and build something workable for that. The money maker is returning lesser known sites because, despite not being popular, they contain the best answer for the search query. YouTube got popular not because it h…

I don't think search has much to do with YouTube's success. Just having all those long-tail videos is the main thing, and it has those videos because it's popular.

I've heard that a key early advantage of YouTube was that uploaded videos appeared immediately, not after a long processing delay. That helped it become popular, and once it was popular, it stayed popular and crushed the competition due to the network effect.

Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#344

Post by RUG3Y »

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.

Same here. Two years ago DDG just wasn't cutting it. Today, I'm just fine with it.

I especially like how programming questions usually provide a top result from Stack Overflow, a lot of times I don't even need to click the link to see the answer I'm looking for.

Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#345

Post by boramalper »

visarga wrote: post #252
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…

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…

> Instead, I am wondering why there isnt a federated open source search engine.

Not sure if federated by they call themselves decentralised: https://yacy.net/en/index.html

Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#347

Post by jxcl »

iainmerrick wrote: post #331
jxcl wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"?

Because a kg goes into 5 lbs 2.2679619 times, and 5 lbs goes into 1 kg 0.44092452 times.

Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#348

Post by grimgrin »

Those who use DDG, do you miss dates in results? Having a date present definitely helps me think about the results:

https://www.google.com/search?q=dcss+branch+order

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=dcss+branch+order

This isn't a case where I _know_ I only want 2017 results, and so I do the syntax to filter it down automatically. I want all results, but I want to be aware of the timeline of whatever I'm going to click.

But to take the thought further: I can understand when a date isn't important. Say some documentation for a specific programming related thing. You'll probably learn to use !clojuredocs or something.

What about outside that? Those searches I can't quite describe without thinking, but my example above sort of works nicely because that game in particular has changed a bunch (and will continue to) over time and you do care about the date of a forum post or whatever.

For all I know, the answer is "that's when you use !g".

Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#349

Post by runeb »

visarga wrote: post #252
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…

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…

In the same vein, what good is an index of the web going to be? Googles value isn't their index, its how they translate your search terms into good results from that index. Anyone can index the web, not everyone can make sense of it from human questions.

Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#350

Post by barrkel »

kronos29296 wrote: post #325
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.

It is quite for common things but searching uncommon ones always throws it off. Searching for research publications in a specific domain or just haskell or some thing like just returns 1good result with 10 bad ones. So I use !g for those. Also the autocorrect really throws my search terms off while Google does is right most of the time.

Interesting: autocorrect on Google is almost always wrong for me. Every day, I need to add quotes to maybe 20 of my search queries.
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