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DuckDuckGo Raises $10M

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Re: DuckDuckGo Raises $10M

#131

Post by arminiusreturns »

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…

Especially images. Google freaking removed the ability to go straight to an image without going to the page. Google has also repeatedly violated user rights, computing isn't all about pragmatism. Of course, I'm a gplv3/gnu kind of user so I'm the outlier.

Re: DuckDuckGo Raises $10M

#132

Post by icantdrive55 »

rectang wrote: post #113
mynameishere wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"Boom, the top result for any simple query was what you wanted."

I wish I could go back to that Google.

Today--I discount the top searches by habit.

Re: DuckDuckGo Raises $10M

#134

Post by halflings »

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…

Google has been personalizing search results, and going way beyond just "link counts", for a while now.

e.g: When I type "pandas" or "kafka", I get the Python library and the streaming framework. I don't get cute black and white animals and a depressed novelist (what the average person would expect).

Re: DuckDuckGo Raises $10M

#135

Post by jdck1326 »

anilshanbhag wrote: post #27

DuckDuckGo claims to be all for privacy. What it doesn't tell users is that it is just a wrapper around Bing search results. The $10M they plan to spend is just going to increase search traffic to Bing.

"all for privacy" implies that duckduckgo cares about privacy at an ethical level, which doesn't really seem to be the case. I think it's more likely that they simply saw private search as a hole in a profitable market and decided to try to fill it.

Before founding duckduckgo, CEO Gabriel Weinberg ran Names Database. Names database was a social media site that collected personal information much more aggressively than any modern site that I'm aware of. This information was sold happily by Weinberg for about ten million dollars to classmates.com (a particularly controversial subsidiary of United Online) just two years before founding duckduckgo.

Re: DuckDuckGo Raises $10M

#136

Post by inciampati »

Semaphor wrote: post #116
yellowapple wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 DD…

I've noticed this too. It's probably the cause of all of my returns to the anonymous Google search via !g.

Also ddg doesn't have anything like Google scholar. Thankfully just a !scholar away, and faster on a slow connection than going to scholar.google.com.

Re: DuckDuckGo Raises $10M

#137

Post by inciampati »

mempko wrote: post #120
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.

I had the same experience. I'm using Google once a day at most. I can't remember the last time it helped me find something that ddg didn't. It can be harder to scroll into the later results with Google, which makes a big difference in my experience with it.

Re: DuckDuckGo Raises $10M

#138

Post by csdreamer7 »

I find that DDG is good for about 80% of what I want. But the other 20%, especially dev queries, I muscle memory type in !g.

Is there a bang for the type of query answer we are looking for?

Such as for 'Ruby gems' I can use !dev so the engine knows to ignore sites like Ruby Gemstone and focus on dev only.

I know there is !so and !gh, but I am looking for something that dynamically combines them and other dev resources as they fall in and out of search favor.

Re: DuckDuckGo Raises $10M

#139

Post by inciampati »

TheSmoke wrote: post #19

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.

You know I had the same experience bring me to Firefox on mobile. I'm not sure that was what Google intended to happen. It isn't like they prevent you from using other search engines. Just DDG! Maybe they identify it as a real competitor.

Re: DuckDuckGo Raises $10M

#140

Post by mscasts »

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 have been using DDG for about 2 years. While I also have !g programmed into my fingers, I notice that most of the time Google don't give me the result I want / expect so I have actually stopped doing that lately.

In fact, many, many times DDG gives me better results than Google.

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