DuckDuckGo Raises $10M • Hacker News Board

Re: DuckDuckGo Raises $10M

#11

Post by sam0x17 » Tue, Aug 28, 2018, 9:43 PM UTC

The one thing I find really painful is when I want a localized search like searching for "[chain resturant name] grubhub" and I get results half way across the country. Other than that it's great.

Re: DuckDuckGo Raises $10M

#12

Post by shdh » Tue, Aug 28, 2018, 9:50 PM UTC

newfocogi wrote: post #4

I have been using DDG for about a year now, although I had tried using it years ago. It works fine for simple queries( e.g. search name of company rather than typing out url). But I basically have !g programmed into my fingers for everything more complicated. Many times when I don't find the results I am looking for, I subconsciously assume that google would be able to find them. This is in comparison to when I canno…

I also use !yt !gi !w and many many more including one I submitted: !hdb

Re: DuckDuckGo Raises $10M

#13

Post by speek » Tue, Aug 28, 2018, 9:51 PM UTC

newfocogi wrote: post #4

I have been using DDG for about a year now, although I had tried using it years ago. It works fine for simple queries( e.g. search name of company rather than typing out url). But I basically have !g programmed into my fingers for everything more complicated. Many times when I don't find the results I am looking for, I subconsciously assume that google would be able to find them. This is in comparison to when I canno…

There's also http://duckduckgoog.com which let's you use the !bang codes but defaults to Google search otherwise

Re: DuckDuckGo Raises $10M

#14

Post by smsm42 » Tue, Aug 28, 2018, 9:52 PM UTC

newfocogi wrote: post #4

I have been using DDG for about a year now, although I had tried using it years ago. It works fine for simple queries( e.g. search name of company rather than typing out url). But I basically have !g programmed into my fingers for everything more complicated. Many times when I don't find the results I am looking for, I subconsciously assume that google would be able to find them. This is in comparison to when I canno…

Have been using DDG for several years. Initially, I did !google a lot, not I maybe do it once a month, and even then the result is not always better. For most of my daily queries DDG is completely on par.

Re: DuckDuckGo Raises $10M

#15

Post by agumonkey » Tue, Aug 28, 2018, 9:53 PM UTC

newfocogi wrote: post #4

I have been using DDG for about a year now, although I had tried using it years ago. It works fine for simple queries( e.g. search name of company rather than typing out url). But I basically have !g programmed into my fingers for everything more complicated. Many times when I don't find the results I am looking for, I subconsciously assume that google would be able to find them. This is in comparison to when I canno…

same here, ddg is a web proxy front page with a !g fallback

Re: DuckDuckGo Raises $10M

#16

Post by gpm » Tue, Aug 28, 2018, 9:55 PM UTC

newfocogi wrote: post #4

I have been using DDG for about a year now, although I had tried using it years ago. It works fine for simple queries( e.g. search name of company rather than typing out url). But I basically have !g programmed into my fingers for everything more complicated. Many times when I don't find the results I am looking for, I subconsciously assume that google would be able to find them. This is in comparison to when I canno…

I've been using DDG for a few years now. I have the same reflex with !g, but when I'm on a browser that's google by default I quickly find that I also need a way to go the other way and do the equivalent of !ddg...

In other words the queries that google has good results for isn't a superset of the queries that ddg has good results for. It's just a different set.

Re: DuckDuckGo Raises $10M

#17

Post by eikenberry » Tue, Aug 28, 2018, 9:57 PM UTC

news_to_me wrote: post #10

mLuby wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have the same muscle memory, but I don't think it's a bad thing. Basically I only use !g when normal DDG doesn't give me what I'm looking for, and half the time !g doesn't have it either. The only thing I can't abandon is !gmaps. And I'm just discovering a bunch of other ! commands that make DDG significantly more useful that Google (eg !esen).

I've found that "!w", which searches Wikipedia, is extremely useful.

And !a for amazon and !yt for youtube and !dpkg for packages and !imdb...

Definitely my favorite feature of ddg.

Re: DuckDuckGo Raises $10M

#18

Post by wolco » Tue, Aug 28, 2018, 10:01 PM UTC

cabaalis wrote: post #6

> DuckDuckGo appears healthy and quite content with making money off of keyword-based ads alone. This makes perfect sense. Show an ad related to what a person is interested in and looking at. When I did adsense stuff a long, long time ago, I seem to remember that Google would request a copy of the page, and then tailor the ads to the content of the page. There was absolutely no interest at all in "Who" was looking at…

Those were the days when people didn't mind ads because they reflected the content of the page. When google changed this it was the beginning of the end.

Re: DuckDuckGo Raises $10M

#19

Post by TheSmoke » Tue, Aug 28, 2018, 10:01 PM UTC

i gave ddg a few tries back then but two months ago i've switched to it for good. on all my browsers it is the default search engine. on android, chrome does not let you set it as default engine so i also switched to firefox on mobile. not being tracked is a good feeling. i also never had a problem with search results, especially for development.

Re: DuckDuckGo Raises $10M

#20

Post by m52go » Tue, Aug 28, 2018, 10:03 PM UTC

I tried using DuckDuckGo many times over the past few years, but the results never enticed me to stay.

But for the past 3-4 months, it's been my default. Haven't felt the need to use Google Search even once!

Big props to Gabriel Weinberg and team!