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DuckDuckGo vs Google

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Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#451

Post by atc »

I switched to DDG years ago and it didn't work out. I tried again recently when Google's treatment of the "women in tech" memo made me realised they're too powerful and I should support competition.

I've since moved to over to DDG on all my devices and I do not miss Google search one bit. It's frightening how little I need it. I now only use it for dictating reminders and rarely when DDG doesn't find the answers to my programming questions. The use of !ho or !stackage (and the many other bangs) are very addictive.

DDG has come a long way - well done!

Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#452

Post by atc »

Lifesnoozer wrote: post #42
mattmanser wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

DDG is definitely behind Google still, although it's come really far in a few years. I agree with most of what you're writing, but personally I'm okay with it not replacing 100% of my searches yet, got to start somewhere and I feel this is an acceptable point to switch at.

Same. It's good to support competition that isn't the big three either. Well done to DDG on its excellent progress.

Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#453

Post by Arubis »

Having swapped over to DDG a couple years back, I recall my frustration and Google-fallback habit lasting for ~6mo. At this point I'll end up using the big G maybe every week or two--mostly I forget that they're there.

Honestly, my second most-used "search" style interface these days is Wolfram Alpha. Google comes in _third._

Say what you will about their respective search result quality, I found that a lot of the delta between DDG and G! could be made up by just spending time with DDG. I believe I've subconsciously adjusted both my keyword structure (I'm conscious of using "explicitly" "quoted" "keywords" to ensure they're included in my results) and my expectations.

Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#454

Post by malyk »

browning99 wrote: post #450
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 :)

You can click "Search Tools" and then change the date to whatever you want it to be.

Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#455

Post by code_duck »

TuringTest wrote: post #236
code_duck wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea of a metaphor is to give you a more clear and ideally accurate understanding of something.

But doing that doesn't necessarily involves calculating a precise measurement of the ratios present in the metaphor. Human language conveys lots of meaning by evocative imaginery, too, so not all expressions should be taken literally. Sometimes, taking the literal meaning might even distort the original message, like in this case changing the mosquito with a goose - if that had been the original expression, everyone…

The calculations were necessary to determine and illustrate how inaccurate and distorting the original version is. The size of the animals is being used to show sizes of companies, since everyone is generally familiar with the sizes of mosquitoes, geese and elephants. But the difference between a mosquito and a goose is drastic… handily, someone else already did the calculations to show how drastic. So, it is a bad original metaphor and it is misleading.

I was going to suggest that a good author would then to choose an animal about the size of the goose that has the same characteristics as a mosquito, but why? A mosquito is considered annoying, harmful and parasitic – if it was the size of the goose, things to be very different. It would be considered a terrifying predator of the jungle. So I don't see what qualities of a mosquito would make it an appropriate choice, and this is what makes the metaphor worth correcting. It is somewhat of a slur against DDG, more so since the numbers are so dramatically inaccurate.

A good animal choose would be a… duck?

Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#456

Post by turc1656 »

MrJagil wrote: post #442
turc1656 wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If I understand your question, the answer is that what you describe is basically the same thing currently on Android phones with the Google search widget thing (I think it's called Google Now).

It can perform a search without going to Google's main search page. It may or may not open the results in a browser window, though (I don't know because I don't use it). But regardless, it goes through Google's main search system, much like the proposal you made for Apple.

Whether or not it is accessed through the site directly is kind of irrelevant. It's still accessing the same remote system in the same way. Whatever interface you choose to use is just a user preference, really. You're still submitting a query to the site/service over an internet connection and you are getting the response back with the results.

Does that answer your question? I'm not sure if you were asking if this hypothetical from Apple could avoid using Google or if you were asking something else. Because if you are trying to avoid giving your data to Google, then you should also be concerned with Apple.

Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#457

Post by lovich »

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…

Maybe I switched before they had the dates show up or I never noticed it. The only times I cared about the dates I tried to use the daterange operator in google searches but it uses some weird format, Julian dates I believe, that just made it too hard to be useful.

I still use !g on ddg but its about 1-2 times a month. As another poster said, I tried it a few years ago and had to quit but I tried it again a year ago and haven't switched back since

Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#458

Post by britishbanana »

Kluny wrote: post #337

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.

Seriously... grammatical errors everywhere and some of the sentences aren't even complete. I got halfway through before I gave up. It kind of reads like an essay from a middle schooler trying to imitate the way they think smart people talk.

Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#459

Post by AdamSC1 »

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.)

Hey Andy,

Do you know what firewall system your work uses? We were blocked in a few of them but found that reaching out to those companies got it fixed.

Would be happy to help investigate!

Disclaimer: DDG staff.

Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#460

Post by [deleted] »

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…

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