DuckDuckGo's killer feature to me is that I can always depend on it to be in English. Google annoyingly always changes the language based on the location of the IP address you're connecting from. It's very annoying when traveling.
DuckDuckGo Raises $10M
71–80 of 261 posts
Re: DuckDuckGo Raises $10M
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Contrary to the seemingly popular belief, that their success was due to their algorithm, I used them because of their uncluttered and simple design. That's why I used Altavista before that. Google kept things very simple while other sites loaded on the bloat and garbage. I don't remember ever feeling like what I found with Google couldn't be found with Altavista or lycos. But a lot of the other companies tried to pre…
I was quite young at the time but made the same transition for the same reasons.
I think the vast majority of users don't consciously evaluate search engines for accuracy. And most non-technical users just assume that if they cant find it through X, its probably not there.
Re: DuckDuckGo Raises $10M
#73I 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 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).
If anybody is curious for the distribution of used searches between ddg/!g, I came up with this rough estimate for firefox:
sqlite3 ~/.mozilla/firefox/*default*/places.sqlite "select substr(p.url,9,14) as search_backend,count(1) from moz_places p where p.url like 'https://duckduckgo%' or p.url like 'https://%.google.%/search%' group by search_backend;"
Re: DuckDuckGo Raises $10M
#74I'm I the only one who's surprised to see how small this round was?
The modern SV economy seems to be built around $100M seed rounds and valuations in the low billions, pre-launch.
Re: DuckDuckGo Raises $10M
#75I use DuckDuckGo as default... from time to time I need to use Google but I try to keep it at minimum. It's not about privacy, it's because I like Google less every fucking time that they do update on any of their products. Look at Google News, it was simple and nice before, now looks like it is a part of Yahoo.
Re: DuckDuckGo Raises $10M
#76I 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…
Google search results are getting increasingly more terrible. If this trend keeps up, Google will be a barely viable search engine in a couple years. Google's interests are too conflicted now, rigging their search results to benefit their own alphabet companies. The result is search results biased to Google's own walled garden... And it's Very noticeable
Re: DuckDuckGo Raises $10M
#77I 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 basically have !g programmed into my fingers for everything more complicated
Or !s for Googling with less Google?
Re: DuckDuckGo Raises $10M
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Contrary to the seemingly popular belief, that their success was due to their algorithm, I used them because of their uncluttered and simple design. That's why I used Altavista before that. Google kept things very simple while other sites loaded on the bloat and garbage. I don't remember ever feeling like what I found with Google couldn't be found with Altavista or lycos. But a lot of the other companies tried to pre…
I remember google having vastly more useful results than its competitors at that time. The uncluttered design was a bonus.
Re: DuckDuckGo Raises $10M
#79The 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
What I mean, though, is I wouldn't mind if duckduckgo did localized searches based on IP geolocation. There are no privacy implications for this as long as the results are not logged anywhere.
Re: DuckDuckGo Raises $10M
#80DuckDuckGo is fantastic on mobile (iPhone). It feels way faster than Google for me — part of that is not getting the "Can I use your location?" pop-ups which then trigger a re-search.
Plus there's no AMP junk in the results! And links are real links — when you copy them you get the URL, not some huge tracking string.
Occasionally I've felt like I'm not getting good results so have gone to Google to repeat the search. There hasn't yet been a case where that's helped, so I've stopped doing it.