191–200 of 261 posts
The 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 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…
> But I basically have !g programmed into my fingers for everything more complicated. On mobile, typing "!g" takes 7 actions (including the focus, space and enter). DDG should make a button for it, below the search results, so you can easily revert to Google if you didn't find what you were looking for. Honestly, without this button, I doubt if I will ever start using DDG much.
In 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.
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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…
> The results may be good enough for plenty of folks, but I highly doubt they will ever be better than the big budget search engines. On the other hand, that is not the criteria for them to be successful, because they are already better on a different metric: Privacy. I find that 90% of my queries are just "who is that person?" or "what is that thing?". Those queries can be answered by DDG just as well as Google. So…
You could do both privacy and good search results without using DDG: startpage.com
You can also have at least as good privacy (better in my opinion) and better search results (again, in my opinion) with other search engines: qwant.com
What is it those two examples doesn't have that DDG does have? The evangelist feel of DDG really turns me off and I'm sure it scares many off from ever looking at it. It is a bit like listening to Apple fans talking about Steve 'The Juice' Jobs.
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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…
The vast majority of my searches are resolved by: 1) Wikipedia 2) Maps 3) Stack Overflow. I don’t see why I should sacrifice my privacy for google to provide me with a single interface for these few sites, especially when DDG does it without mining all my info.
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…
Also they have advertisements, but unlike Google they are not targeted to you, hence making them less competitive for advertisers. Hopefully, this will not prevent them from growing in the future.
> DuckDuckGo appears healthy and quite content with making money off of keyword-based ads alone. This makes perfect sense. Show an ad related to what a person is interested in and looking at. When I did adsense stuff a long, long time ago, I seem to remember that Google would request a copy of the page, and then tailor the ads to the content of the page. There was absolutely no interest at all in "Who" was looking at…
I hope that is true, but I have my doubts. Google must have given some thoughts to that issue and decided to switch their targeting to the "who" for a reason, if the previous model was more profitable they simply would have stuck with it I suppose.
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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.
After this Proton/Tesonet/Luminati fiasco, I would stay away from ProtonMail.
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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;" I fall back to google every 11th query, not counting maps searche…
duckduckgo.com|14129
encrypted.goog|345
images.google.|1
ipv6.google.co|1
mail.google.co|2
play.google.co|10
translate.goog|2
www.google.co.|1106
www.google.com|2084