DuckDuckGo vs Google

Post by roryisok » Thu, Sep 21, 2017, 1:45 AM UTC

crummy wrote: post #201

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…

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.

Post by roryisok » Thu, Sep 21, 2017, 1:54 AM UTC

ianai wrote: post #305

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…

I really like the localized index idea someone posted earlier. If I could get 60% of my searches answered locally for the cost of 100 gigs of space I would use it. Even more so if I could host it on a local server somehow.

Post by chuckledog » Thu, Sep 21, 2017, 2:39 AM UTC

qweqweqweqw wrote: post #476

Freak_NL wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

!ud → Urban Dictionary (what do you mean, she's 'office cute'?) !wen → Wikipedia English !w.. → Wikipedia (two letter language code, e.g., 'nl') !wikt Wiktionary So many useful bangs.

I, too, switched to DDG, but sadly my most used bang is !g because in 1/3 cases DDG doesn't find what I am looking for.

Post by 482794793792894 » Thu, Sep 21, 2017, 3:51 AM UTC

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…

Post by forapurpose » Thu, Sep 21, 2017, 4:28 AM UTC

shpx wrote: post #315

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 !'

I added bangs to google by defining custom search engines with a one or two letter prefix in chrome://settings/searchEngines Now if I type "h my-search" into the omnibar, it goes to google.com/search?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+my-search which gives me only Google search results from HN. This is using google's algorithm (not the search bar built into whichever website like DDG) which is still the best, especially i…