i have used duckduckgo for years, they are really good :)
DuckDuckGo Raises $10M
61–70 of 261 posts
Re: DuckDuckGo Raises $10M
#62DuckDuckGo is a great search engine, I've been using it for a while. The only thing that stops me from fully moving to DuckDuckGo is eseential DOM load speed. Google search results page loading speed is two times faster. DuckDuckGo needs to hire a Frontend wizard that will address all the issues with load speed and hopefully make it quicker than competitors.
Re: DuckDuckGo Raises $10M
#63DDG's bang search is by far my favorite feature, I've been using DDG for about 4 years and being about to just !w or !m for common stuff is a huge win.
when the alternative is adding the search query to my browser for each and every service, ill take the bang searches.
Re: DuckDuckGo Raises $10M
#64In 2015 I tried using DDG for programming questions and the results were inferior to my co-worker who used Google Search. Even without the comparison I could tell DDG was inferior due to how few answers I'd find. I recently switched away from Google services to Firefox, Fastmail, and DDG for privacy reasons. I no longer have issues finding answers within the top 4-5 results and if I do, Google almost never has the an…
What made you opt for Fastmail over Protonmail? I'm still on gmail, but I'm interested in switching. Want something that supports calendars too. Only think I'm not sure I can get away from is Android... I really do prefer it to iOS.
Re: DuckDuckGo Raises $10M
#65I 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 started out doing that, but I've found myself using !g less and less recently. There are two main things I find myself needing it for: Location based queries, Google will always prioritize UK based results, and often London based results for me. The other is technical searches, I'm not sure how much this is due to Google having better search algorithms for this, or just that it has the data to know that I'm a progr…
I find DDG does a better job with low-to-mid difficulty tech queries because it displays the top stack overflow answer at the top of the results which is often what I want. But you're right, really obscure tech questions usually involve a !g.
Re: DuckDuckGo Raises $10M
#66The 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.
Try using it outside the US. Then you get results halfway across the world. :( Example: if I search DDG for "Worcester" (a significant city near my home in south-central England), 28 of the top 30 results are Worcester, Massachusetts. There is a toggle at the top of the page where I can choose "United Kingdom". That fixes it. But the default should be "worldwide" or "localised by IP address", not "US".
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Re: DuckDuckGo Raises $10M
#67The 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.
I promise I don't mean this in a snarky way, but: isn't the behavior you're describing almost the exact opposite of not being tracked? Or, put another way: does "[chain name] grubhub [zipcode]" still do what you are describing? Heh, as one might expect, "there's a bang for that" which will save you two characters: https://duckduckgo.com/bang?q=grubhub
I'm generally OK with a search engine using my IP Address to provide localized results. I don't think that's really a privacy concern as that is exposed to everyone. Maybe I'm wrong in thinking that though?
Re: DuckDuckGo Raises $10M
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
You are primarily going to get responses from people on threads like this who like and use DDG regularly. Selection bias. If you didn't find DDG useful, you wouldn't be using it, and probably don't have much commentary to add. I don't see them truly competing with big budget search engines, but it's probably easy enough to make decent money from keyword ads and if you can sell the brand, you can get enough users to c…
This post reads perfectly if you replace DDG with "Google" and believe it's 1999. Sure Google had a vastly superior algorithm but I don't think too many people really grasped that at the time.
I don't think they are comparable. DuckDuckGo federate the results of other search engines (e.g. Bing) and add its own sauce on top of it. There is a limit to what it can do.
Google invested in the fundamental from the start and they pushed the limit of what search engines can do.
Re: DuckDuckGo Raises $10M
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
You are primarily going to get responses from people on threads like this who like and use DDG regularly. Selection bias. If you didn't find DDG useful, you wouldn't be using it, and probably don't have much commentary to add. I don't see them truly competing with big budget search engines, but it's probably easy enough to make decent money from keyword ads and if you can sell the brand, you can get enough users to c…
This post reads perfectly if you replace DDG with "Google" and believe it's 1999. Sure Google had a vastly superior algorithm but I don't think too many people really grasped that at the time.
YUP!
When I was in my first role as an IT manager, I set the policy that all machines had their default page set to google.com away from Yahoo, because yahoo was an ugly mess.
Google was clean and simple. This was the only reason. I made the edict to set it to google and so some people said "you should go work for google since you like them so much" - man I wish I had tried to do so then.
And this was in 1998 or so...
Re: DuckDuckGo Raises $10M
#70The fact DDG can even get to the ballpark, let alone compete against an opponent whose budget is 3 orders of magnitude larger is astounding, and should be applauded.