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Nothing Can Stop Google. DuckDuckGo Is Trying Anyway

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Re: Nothing Can Stop Google. DuckDuckGo Is Trying Anyway

#41

Post by Svip »

brylie wrote: post #26
todd3834 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

history has mostly shown a zero-sum game when it comes to search. Didn’t all of those other search engines you listed die off? Even Bing has been mostly irrelevant in comparison to Google. Also a lot of DDG users came over because they were unhappy with some of Google’s practices. Therefore it’s natural for them to want to justify their decision as a good choice by hoping the rest of the world comes to the same concl…

You can get anonymized Google results on DDG by prefixing the search with "!g" https://duckduckgo.com/bang

I think the choice is "!s" which redirects you to startpage.com, which is anonymised Google.

Re: Nothing Can Stop Google. DuckDuckGo Is Trying Anyway

#42

Post by tombert »

todd3834 wrote: post #19
tombert wrote: post #8

I started using DDG as my default search engine about 6 months ago, and for 95% of the searches I do it's totally fine. I don't know why people think that DDG needs to "stop" Google; did people think that Lycos and Infoseek and Yahoo couldn't coexist back in the 90's? I think it's good that both companies have some competition from each other.

history has mostly shown a zero-sum game when it comes to search. Didn’t all of those other search engines you listed die off? Even Bing has been mostly irrelevant in comparison to Google. Also a lot of DDG users came over because they were unhappy with some of Google’s practices. Therefore it’s natural for them to want to justify their decision as a good choice by hoping the rest of the world comes to the same concl…

Oh, I'm not disputing that the world tends to converge on a brands, but I'm trying to say that that doesn't have to be the case; both Coke and Pepsi can coexist, as can Lysol and Clorox. When I eat at McDonalds, I never have the mentality of "by eating here, I'm stopping Burger King".

At this point I've found DDG to be comparable to Google, but occasionally I have to do the !g to find what I'm looking for.

Re: Nothing Can Stop Google. DuckDuckGo Is Trying Anyway

#43

Post by twodave »

bunderbunder wrote: post #35
SpikeDad wrote: post #3

Why must everything be a "company" killer? There's room in markets for choices. I think DDG is providing a good choice for folks. And having Apple data behind them isn't just potatoes.

Because, in the current economic environment, there really isn't much room in the markets for choices. It's increasingly been one quasi-monopoly that everyone knows about, and then a bunch of niche options for people who dislike the monopoly player for whatever reason.

Oh? Let's pick an easy market to judge this against, then. I know! Let's talk about smartphones. Surely the largest company on the planet is a quasi-monopoly in this space... oh, but they're not. In fact, Apple's not even a majority leader in just the USA, and the numbers favor them even less globally. There is clearly a choice in the cell phone market between privacy, quality and cost, and people are making those choices.

Not to say that this isn't true right now in the search market. I grew up in a world where Google didn't exist, and the reason Google is so much more popular at search is because they're just that much better at delivering relevant results than everyone else. I used to search with Excite, Yahoo, Lycos, etc. and modernly I've TRIED to use Bing or DDG or whatever other choices have surfaced, but when the product seems free, people are going to make the choice that maximizes quality, and right now Google is just winning at it.

Still, if someone comes along who can actually deliver on the search quality then the market will change.

Re: Nothing Can Stop Google. DuckDuckGo Is Trying Anyway

#44

Post by shittyadmin »

tombert wrote: post #42
todd3834 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

history has mostly shown a zero-sum game when it comes to search. Didn’t all of those other search engines you listed die off? Even Bing has been mostly irrelevant in comparison to Google. Also a lot of DDG users came over because they were unhappy with some of Google’s practices. Therefore it’s natural for them to want to justify their decision as a good choice by hoping the rest of the world comes to the same concl…

Oh, I'm not disputing that the world tends to converge on a brands, but I'm trying to say that that doesn't have to be the case; both Coke and Pepsi can coexist, as can Lysol and Clorox. When I eat at McDonalds, I never have the mentality of "by eating here, I'm stopping Burger King". At this point I've found DDG to be comparable to Google, but occasionally I have to do the !g to find what I'm looking for.

With fast food or soft drink brands, the differences are minor taste based things and quite frankly one or the other doesn't matter much. It's easy to compare at different times and decide on your own tastes and efficiency factors. The problem is with search engines, quality of results makes a big difference in how your time is spent and it's trivial to check what the competition has on offer - almost every time I would run a query on DDG I would find myself going "huh, I wonder if Google would have done better".

You don't go "wow, that burger sucked, I'll go get the competitors now", you're already satiated enough with your crappy burger. Because it's easy and cheap to run a query, you're almost forced to check.

Given how much better Google often does, running my queries on DDG in the first place is generally a waste of my time.

Re: Nothing Can Stop Google. DuckDuckGo Is Trying Anyway

#45

Post by musha68k »

kojeovo wrote: post #21
tombert wrote: post #8

I started using DDG as my default search engine about 6 months ago, and for 95% of the searches I do it's totally fine. I don't know why people think that DDG needs to "stop" Google; did people think that Lycos and Infoseek and Yahoo couldn't coexist back in the 90's? I think it's good that both companies have some competition from each other.

95% just isn't good enough.

Search result quality is not a clear-cut issue. In my experience DDG/Bing even yield subjectively better results sometimes.

Re: Nothing Can Stop Google. DuckDuckGo Is Trying Anyway

#46

Post by natex »

Zecar wrote: post #28

Google is at it's core an ad company, not a search company. So they have backed off crawling the entire internet and only crawl what has a business return for them. Combine that with carefully curating the results they publish, it can barely even be called a search engine at this point. I get more relevant results from DDG at this point.

> So they have backed off crawling the entire internet and only crawl what has a business return for them.

What's the difference between Google's web crawler and DuckDuckGo's web crawler?

> Combine that with carefully curating the results they publish,

Google carefully curates? I thought that Google's search results is based on the users behavior? Are they carefully manipulating everyone's results?

Re: Nothing Can Stop Google. DuckDuckGo Is Trying Anyway

#47

Post by ouid »

As has been mentioned probably millions of times in the last decade, "to google" is synonymous with, "to search the internet for". As long as this remains true, and google search remains free, their monopoly position cannot be challenged. they have the trademark on the shortest sequence of syllables which means "to search the internet for" which means that in the vast majority of cases, when people describe searching the internet for something, they will do so with the word "google".

Re: Nothing Can Stop Google. DuckDuckGo Is Trying Anyway

#48

Post by Kiro »

phaedryx wrote: post #31

I use DDG primarily now. I've noticed that I often get better results for my programming queries than from Google and there's always `!g` if I don't find what I'm looking for. On a side note: anyone else think Apple will eventually buy DDG?

Previous "Will Apple buy DDG?" discussions:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18816748

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18913336

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