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DuckDuckGo vs Google

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Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#421

Post by StavrosK »

forgottenpass wrote: post #255
StavrosK wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I made the jump to Fastmail.com and couldn't be happier. The UI is very snappy (much faster than Gmail's), the actual notifications and delivery is faster, and it's a better experience overall, for me. Plus, Google doesn't get to see my mail any more. Ditto for Firefox vs Chrome.

Interesting that you bring up the UI, switching to Fastmail's UI made me start checking/managing my personal email like a responsible adult again. I could never get over the way using GMail felt like fighting with a sluggish toy version of email compared to desktop outlook (and I'm not really a fan of outlook, either). I just assumed that GMail's interface was the best a webapp could offer: it was the best I'd seen s…

I am really surprised at how fast its UI loads and operates. It feels like a native app in a web where everything else feels like a slug. Major props to Fastmail for this. Hell, even Thunderbird feels slower.

Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#422

Post by 482794793792894 »

ams6110 wrote: post #368

How do you make money if you don’t track users? All you need is a keyword. For instance, let’s say I’m looking for a new computer, I insert the keyword in the search box “new PC” and all you have to show me are ads related to that. I don’t necessarily have to see all the things I’ve been looking for in the past. Seems eminently sensible to me. And much more likely to produce ads that are relevant to what I'm looking…

Yeah, I often wonder how what Google is doing can really be so much better that it justifies leaking billions of users' information all over the place and the massive infrastructure costs that they must have.

Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#423

Post by deltaprotocol »

Zhyl wrote: post #308
benbenhu wrote: post #54

Earlier 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 !'

The 'I'm feeling lucky' one is great. ' !' or ' youtube !' takes you right to it. I'd love a feature that opens the first result on a search engine like wikipedia does by default. Biggest use case for me would be imdb but there would be others.

Well, lucky you!

DuckDuckGo has that by using a backslash, a space and a search term (\ bed intruder youtube) or an exclamation a space and the search term (although I believe the former is the official way now). I use it all the time, it's like a superpower.

Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#425

Post by 482794793792894 »

andyhnj wrote: post #306

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.)

Recently needed random whole numbers from varying ranges. First looked up "random number generator" and got onto some sophisticated webpage where you could define your own set of items to be choosing at random from and have it list out ten thousand random results and so on. Really, everything you could wish for, but it was clunky as hell for varying ranges.

Then I decided to just look up "random 1 5", so that maybe a webpage which could deal well with intervals would show up. And there it was, DuckDuckGo understood immediately what I wanted and just generated one as an Instant Answer. Changing the interval was a matter of changing those two numbers in the query and getting the next random number worked with F5. Could not have wished for a better tool for the job.

Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#426

Post by jf »

andyhnj wrote: post #306

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.)

Have you tried using something like "uuidgen | pbcopy" from your command line?

Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#427

Post by greggarious »

Persoanlly I love DDG. It handles a vast majority of my search traffic quite fine.

Quick tip: Rather than falling back to Google, try the "!sp" bang command for StartPage, which crawls Google to supplement it's results.

Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#428

Post by Animats »

The useful insight about DuckDuckGo, which the author misses, is that even with 0.1% market share, a search engine can be profitable. Search ads are valuable, because they appear when someone is actually looking for something and likely to buy. Almost all other ads are merely annoying interruptions.

DuckDuckGo isn't even a full search engine. They don't crawl the whole Web. The heavy lifting is done by Bing and Yandex. That allows DuckDuckGo to have coverage without much infrastructure. That's what makes the business possible without too much expenditure.

Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#429

Post by majewsky »

Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #47
majewsky wrote: post #2

Might be an interesting article, but that position:fixed footer with ongoing animations is just too atrocious.

Don't worry, you're not missing out. The article is a bunch of questionable assumptions made from highly dodgy metrics written by the kind of person who calls people a "Solopreneur". DuckDuckGo, on the other hand, is very very much worth your time, if you aren't familiar with it: https://duckduckgo.com

I am! It's my default search engine.

Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#430

Post by ehsankia »

jasonkostempski wrote: post #383
grimgrin wrote: post #348

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…

The only thing I miss is the "Past Year" option. I find it really important for filtering out programming stuff that's too old. "Past Month" is too short. I can't understand why it's not there. I've sent the suggestion several times.

Custom dates is also extremely useful when you want an reverse date filter, removing recent results.
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