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DuckDuckGo Raises $10M

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Re: DuckDuckGo Raises $10M

#151

Post by gregknicholson »

indigodaddy wrote: post #111
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).

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?

They're just quick redirects to specific sites' searches, which work wherever DuckDuckGo would otherwise return search results. They make it really quick to search specific sites, or even to go directly to specific pages on some sites (without remembering the URL's exact syntax).

Try searching for “!w search engine”: DDG sends you straight to Wikipedia, which sends you directly to the relevant article. (Search “!bang” for more info about bangs.) When DuckDuckGo is your default search engine you can do this straight from your browser's address bar or OS's search field. It's very nice.

(I have no affiliation with DuckDuckGo; I just really like this feature.)

Re: DuckDuckGo Raises $10M

#152

Post by Kiro »

mdaniel wrote: post #39
danielmorozoff wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this actually true?

They cite Bing, Yahoo, and Yandex as "sourced from," and they do list DuckDuckBot as its own thing -- although I am pretty sure they don't have the same resources for running their own distributed crawls as the 3 sources they list: https://duck.co/help/results/sources

DuckDuckBot only handles results for Instant Answers afaik. No own spiders in the traditional sense (following links between domains).

Re: DuckDuckGo Raises $10M

#153

Post by arthurfm »

pedro_hab wrote: post #144
csdreamer7 wrote: post #138

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 resource…

I'm actually feeling google worse every day, I developed a way of searching by only typing important keywords. eg: "js unique array" Now that's not working well anymore, google is ignoring 2 of 3 keywords to give me a general answer. And even the search tricks, such as using "" don't work as before. I think google is using far too much AI in the search is ruining it for me. I may switch to something else soon.

> And even the search tricks, such as using "" don't work as before.

While it doesn't have quite the same effect [1] as the double quote marks, you could select the 'Verbatim' option [2] from the search tools menu.

[1] https://search.googleblog.com/2011/11/search-using-your-term...

[2] https://i.imgur.com/I7eL41i.png

Re: DuckDuckGo Raises $10M

#154

Post by atupis »

arketyp wrote: post #142
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 find that Google is actually losing ground as the all-seeing-eye-reference-objective-truth due to the increasingly tailored searches. I can no longer refer to a search query and expect a peer to see the same results as I do. This social bubble phenomenon, while no doubt convenient, is sometimes a burden, and with their stricter privacy policy DDG actually has some ground to gain here. Using DDG is more like tuning…

Yeah I have noticed same problem. Try search something like Trump Twitter page, if you are very liberal bubble Twitter page comes like 4th or 5th result.

Re: DuckDuckGo Raises $10M

#155

Post by joe_the_user »

ColinWielga wrote: post #130
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 use DDG, Google and Bing pretty evenly. Unsurprisingly each out performs the others on some searches. Google generally has the best results but for 95% of searches they all find what I need.

My experience with DDG was the same when I used for a few month a while back. They definitely didn't exceed Google. When I try them once and a while, they still don't.

But thing is, Google itself seems worse and worse to me. It seems to try harder and harder to decide what I want and only give me that - if X is associated with something topical, only topical links appear. And DDG and Bing follow this problem.

Re: DuckDuckGo Raises $10M

#156

Post by lloeki »

rlv-dan wrote: post #124
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.

> when I'm on a browser that's google by default Tip: Type ddg.co/somequery in the address field to quickly get back to DuckDuckGo

Tip: ddg.gg may be easier to type.

Re: DuckDuckGo Raises $10M

#157

Post by lloeki »

mLuby wrote: post #7
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 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).

> The only thing I can't abandon is !gmaps

I was in the same boat with !gi but DDG image search is increasingly relevant, and is not infested by Pinterest results. DDG increasingly feels like home the way Google Search did years ago.

Re: DuckDuckGo Raises $10M

#158

Post by MarHoff »

mscasts wrote: post #140
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.

My personal rule of thumb is that if I look for a reference manual or an official website vanilla DDG is the way to go. If I'm looking for really fresh contents like news or latest QA !g gives better results.

Guess it's logical because even if the search algorithm of DDG is pretty neat, they can't compete yet with Google army of crawlers that probably use every idle computing power of their massive cloud.

Re: DuckDuckGo Raises $10M

#159

Post by lloeki »

mrweasel wrote: post #148
news_to_me wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The only thing that annoys me about DDG is that I have to use !wen for Wikipedia searches. !w will return localized search on Wikipedia, and I almost never want the Danish wikipedia.

I guess this is based on the Accept-Language header of your browser (which you can control), not guessed from your IP (which is a terrible thing to do): since my OS is in English even though I'm in France, I get to have the English wikipedia with !w and use !wfr for local stuff. In fact I did not know about the behaviour you describe because of that.

Re: DuckDuckGo Raises $10M

#160

Post by lloeki »

carterage wrote: post #21
news_to_me wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

One thing that consistently blows my mind is how readily an external search engine creates a better index, with more relevant recall, by scraping the published static pages of Wikipedia, such that it outperforms Wikipedia's own search, Wikipedia should be able to search itself better than any external entity, but cannot. Wikipedia, in effect, is blind to its own data, and can deliver less insight into it's own conten…

This seems typical of many built-in searches. It's halfway how things are indexed but also how things are presented: one of the worst offenders is ruby's documentation, where it's extremely cumbersome to get the latest version of a given item[0]. And that's a trivial search query.

[0]: https://ruby-doc.com/search.html?q=Array

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