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DuckDuckGo Raises $10M

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Re: DuckDuckGo Raises $10M

#111

Post by indigodaddy »

yellowapple wrote: post #91
gpm wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The bang commands alone are DDG's killer feature for me, and it's why DDG is set as my homepage and default search engine (and probably still would be even if I did have to !g every non-site-specific query).

Had no idea about these DDG bang features, although admittedly I've barely used DDG. Usually use startpage if I'm not using Google. I imagine to there also might be a chrome extension that does a similar thing to the DDG bang features, or are these just DDG-only search indexes?

Re: DuckDuckGo Raises $10M

#112

Post by rectang »

philipps wrote: post #78
jjeaff wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Before people figured out how to game PageRank, Google was spooky. Unreal. Incredibly good results.

Re: DuckDuckGo Raises $10M

#113

Post by rectang »

mynameishere wrote: post #83
lugg wrote: post #59

Earlier 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.

Google was clearly better at the beginning. I remember those days, and how Yahoo! put a bunch of other search engines at the bottom of its own results (Altavista, Excite, Lycos, etc). So it was easy to compare. When Google showed up, it was pretty obvious the game was over. The main reason? "And" searches. Brilliant.

AltaVista had support for boolean operators; I and many other techies became very practiced in composing complex queries. It was my favorite search engine.

Then Google showed up, and Google had PageRank. Boom, the top result for any simple query was what you wanted.

Re: DuckDuckGo Raises $10M

#114

Post by pwaai »

digi_owl wrote: post #44
gpm wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I suspect that the eternal problem will be that of context. Back when Google started out, they bet the farm on the idea that more links pointing to a document meant that said document was informative. These days though, i wonder if what we are looking for is more hair. That what we are looking for depends on a context that can't be properly included in the search terms used. On top of this "naive" metrics like link c…

but the frequency of reputable backlinks are perfectly suitable variable to rank a website's importance and relevance, and Google obvious knows how to discern garbage backlinks vs legitimate ones.

For instance, a certain startup I worked for in the past used a military blog seemingly belonging to a web of Eastern European entities to link to our company website and the CEO advertised it on linkedin....it was pretty fucking embarassing tbh but it was oviously for gaining SEO juice. It worked for a while but now when I search for the same keyword I don't see it in the SERPs.

Re: DuckDuckGo Raises $10M

#115

Post by [deleted] »

dhbradshaw wrote: post #104
jiveturkey wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

switched to google on mobile recently, due to DDG only option of infinite scroll. it makes 'back' useless. now i am back to google on desktop as well. it is markedly better than DDG for the searches I'm doing anyway.

I hate infinite scroll.

[deleted]

Re: DuckDuckGo Raises $10M

#116

Post by Semaphor »

yellowapple wrote: post #91
gpm wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The bang commands alone are DDG's killer feature for me, and it's why DDG is set as my homepage and default search engine (and probably still would be even if I did have to !g every non-site-specific query).

So recently I got annoyed by DDG's "optimizations" (they are a lot more aggressive in ignoring words in your query than google and unlike google they don't even tell you about it; I know I can use "" to force a term, but !g is much quicker).

I thought I'd give startpage.com a try (proxied google results without tracking), but besides being slow I realized I couldn't live without bangs anymore (and was also missing DDG's rich snippets).

I wish DDG had some kind of bang that tells it that I actually want to search for the query I entered, not some random query they think I might have wanted :/

edit: I should mention that after complaining about it on their subreddit, someone on the team said they are looking into it.

Re: DuckDuckGo Raises $10M

#117

Post by boomboomsubban »

jiveturkey wrote: post #89
jmah wrote: post #80

DuckDuckGo 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.…

switched to google on mobile recently, due to DDG only option of infinite scroll. it makes 'back' useless. now i am back to google on desktop as well. it is markedly better than DDG for the searches I'm doing anyway.

>switched to google on mobile recently, due to DDG only option of infinite scroll

Settings are on the right, other settings, disable auto-load.

Re: DuckDuckGo Raises $10M

#118

Post by Semaphor »

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.

!mdn for developer.mozilla.org is one of my most used ones :)

Re: DuckDuckGo Raises $10M

#119

Post by Semaphor »

wjoe wrote: post #42
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 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…

> 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.

As I'm German, that's actually where DDG has the advantage over Google. Most of my searches are in English, but sometimes I want to search for something here, with DDG that's just a single press of a button and I get German results. With Google I'd have to do multiple clicks.

Re: DuckDuckGo Raises $10M

#120

Post by mempko »

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'm actually surprised how often I search in ddg and think , wow maybe google has better results? then I do !g and find that Google's results are worse! Then I hit the back button and browse ddg results.
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