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DuckDuckGo vs Google

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Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#441

Post by captainmuon »

zizek23 wrote: post #65

The thing with Duckduckgo is the choice has to be ideological or you will do a search again on Google again just to ensure you are not missing out. This is Google marketing and brand perception at work because Google results of late, 3 years, have been unimpressive and you have to sift through pages of useless links and content to find any relevant information beyond the usual suspects one already knows, so their int…

Sometimes I think there should be a search engine that has a button "these results are not satisfactory". When you click it, you can describe in detail what you were looking for... and hordes of cheap minimum wage or outsourced workers work 24/7 on these reports. Culling spammy search results, boosting good links, etc.. Solve what Google was always claiming to do purely algorithmically, with additional brute force labour.

(Actually, I suspect that a major ingredient of Google and Facebooks "algorithms" are really human reviewers... they want to keep this fact secret since human reviewers are responsible for judgement, whereas algorithms still count as impartial. This is not true of course, but it is the perception.)

Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#442

Post by MrJagil »

turc1656 wrote: post #414
MrJagil wrote: post #365

Why do search engines have to exist on a website? Couldn't they be a built-in part of the browser?

Not really. A search engine crawls the web (billions and billions of sites) and indexes them for quick and easy access. If you use Outlook for email, it's kind of analogous to how the search option works there. When an email arrives on your company's system, the mail server processes the mail and indexes it for searchability. The key here is that either your computer or your mail server have to have a copy to make it…

Thanks for the answer! Couldn't Apple crawl the web and store the index for safari to search through? This way, an iPhone user would search Apple's index instead of Bing's, no website needed.

Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#443

Post by captainmuon »

djsumdog wrote: post #107

Does anyone remember how back in the day, we had Lycos, Hotbot, Yahoo, Dogpile .. a whole host of search engines. You'd go to two or three to get an idea of what was out there. People had different indexes and there were a lot of players. Today, it's just Google. I've been using DDG for a few years, but about 1/3 of the time I add an !g because I don't find the results I need on DDG. The cost of entry to the search m…

+1

> Today, it's just Google. I've been using DDG for a few years, but about 1/3 of the time I add an !g because I don't find the results I need on DDG.

If DDG folks are reading this, here is an idea: Have a browser extension (so opt-in). If a user then does a !g search, forward the search terms and the search results to DDG and add them to your index. (I wouldn't go as far as Microsoft, who IIRC actually copied the results and the ranking for individual terms and added them to Bing.)

Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#444

Post by captainmuon »

adolph wrote: post #297
ballenf wrote: post #289

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 . . .

I first encountered Google as an embeddable widget on Warez sites. For the longest time, I was convinced it was a "Scene" thing (like the astalavista search engine) and avoided it :-D.

Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#445

Post by roryokane »

superasn wrote: post #435
jnmandal wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He also used the word "Solopreneur"

Am I missing something regarding not using this word?

It's the first time I've heard that word. I can guess that it's supposed to mean "solo entrepreneur", but it's a silly-sounding word to me. Basically, it's slang, which is unusual in a long article such as this.

Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#446

Post by captainmuon »

notzorbo3 wrote: post #141
kdamken wrote: post #122

I really, really want to like DuckDuckGo. But every single time I’ve switched from Google, I’ve found them to be much worse at returning the best results for what I’m looking for. For example, let’s say I want to look up “ear infection”. Google will spit out a bunch of info right on their results page, often saving me the trouble of even going to another site. DDG however will just give me 10 webmd links. If they wan…

Try startpage.com. I moved away from google a year ago and never looked back. I've never once needed to fall back to google. That's probably because startpage.com is basically anonymized google. I know we're supposed to root for the entrepreneurs here on HN, but DDG honestly seems like more hype / marketing than a decent product. You never hear anything about startpage.com (maybe because it has a boring name?) but it…

Do you know how they monetize? I know it's a bit of a cliche asking that (you're the product etc.) but I'm really curious - using the Google API for search isn't cheap at scale.

If they are using a video of Snowden, they may have some philanthropic money - or it may be something nefarious. I'd love to give them the benefit of doubt though.

Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#447

Post by smarinov »

unicornporn wrote: post #18

I'm sure DDG works great if you're an American. As someone who has tried a region specific version of DDG though, I can say the results are downright terrible. Some say the DDG bangs are a solution. What do I win by doing that? It only made me resort to !g all the time, because the results were so bad. Now I use https://www.startpage.com/ with region set to Swedish. It's practically a proxy for Google search, so it g…

I never touch the DDG settings, but I often search in about a dozen different languages, and I get great results. The rare times I try to find something in another search engine, including Google, I get worse (or not better at best) results there, even for quite obscure topics, so I guess everything is user-specific.

Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#448

Post by AlexTes »

482794793792894 wrote: post #416
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…

I didn't even realize until now that Google has this and DuckDuckGo doesn't. So, that's a No for me, I guess. Others here are saying that they need this for researching programming-related things. I just add the version number of the programming language (or whatever technology) I'm working with to the search query, when I find that the search results are outdated.

Let me guess, you do not work with JavaScript .

Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#449

Post by usuallymatt »

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. Had always switched back but this time I'm almost 1 month into using DDG and have no desire to go back.

Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#450

Post by browning99 »

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…

You are correct but I love the DuckDuckGo feature that let me to restrict my results à-la youtube (anytime, last month, week or day) which google lacks in it'S front-end options :)
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