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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

#81

Post by isostatic »

verelo wrote: post #10
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.

I recently switched my homepage to be ddg. Most of the time it’s pure annoyance, returning unrelated results and never giving nice top of page summaries. I really didn’t want it to be this way, but most of the time (I’m pretty sure 2/3 at least) i have to revert back to google.

People still have homepages? My homepage has been about:blank since about 2005

Re: Nothing Can Stop Google. DuckDuckGo Is Trying Anyway

#82

Post by simias »

mda wrote: post #77
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.

DDG = Bing for most of the queries in US. You are basically using bing and 95% of the time and happy with it. Good I guess.

I've heard that a few times on DDG-related articles this past week but I was under the impression that the duck had its own crawlers and used Bing on top of that to complete its results. Do they really solely proxy Bing results?

Re: Nothing Can Stop Google. DuckDuckGo Is Trying Anyway

#83

Post by Rooster61 »

anomie31 wrote: post #54
ouid wrote: post #47

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…

Isn't "Kodak moment" a counterexample?

"Hey, let's take a Kodak moment of this event"

Hmm, doesn't quite roll of the tongue, does it? Not the same thing.

Re: Nothing Can Stop Google. DuckDuckGo Is Trying Anyway

#84

Post by dec0dedab0de »

You know what can stop google? a search engine that assumes I want every word in my query, or even better a search engine that honors a string in quotes to mean these words in this order. When did google stop doing this?

edit: This wouldn't stop google, it would just make that part of my life as easy as it was 10 years ago.

Re: Nothing Can Stop Google. DuckDuckGo Is Trying Anyway

#85

Post by dwighttk »

fareesh wrote: post #13

I use DDG by default. If I am not satisifed I simply prepend !g to my query. The bangs feature is really useful to me personally since it supports so many sites. https://duckduckgo.com/bang My only complaint is that it's noticeably slower than Google

you can also add bangs at the end or in the middle if you want, or decide halfway through you want to adjust your search.

Re: Nothing Can Stop Google. DuckDuckGo Is Trying Anyway

#86

Post by bunderbunder »

twodave wrote: post #43
bunderbunder wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ch…

So, sure, let's talk about smartphones.

In 2010, there were quite a few smartphone platforms: iOS, Android, Blackberry, Symbian, WebOS, Windows (CE or Mobile or maybe both; can't remember when the switchover happened), Bada, probably some others I'm forgetting.

Between then and now, the story, aside from slight eddies such as the dismal failures that were Ubuntu Touch and FirefoxOS, has been one of platforms steadily exiting the market. So now we basically have just two options: Android and iOS.

And already I see people on HN occasionally predicting that iOS is doomed due to the fact that it has ~15% global marketshare, and Android has all the rest. I'm not sure if that's really true, but, regardless, the trend is still most certainly not toward a robust, competitive market with lots of consumer choice.

Re: Nothing Can Stop Google. DuckDuckGo Is Trying Anyway

#87

Post by yzb »

rcMgD2BwE72F wrote: post #59
Theizestooke wrote: post #52

There's an unusual amount of pro-DDG articles on Hacker News, half of them are PR fluff, and I don't understand why they keep getting upvoted.

And all the pro-Google articles are what ?

They are nothing because they don't exist. When was the last time you saw a pro-Google/Alphabet article?

Re: Nothing Can Stop Google. DuckDuckGo Is Trying Anyway

#88

Post by addicted »

mda wrote: post #77
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.

DDG = Bing for most of the queries in US. You are basically using bing and 95% of the time and happy with it. Good I guess.

Without the personal information being recorded and sold.

Kind of goes to show that the personal information we are giving away may not be that important when it comes to finding what we need, even as it makes us a bigger and juicier target for ads.

Re: Nothing Can Stop Google. DuckDuckGo Is Trying Anyway

#89

Post by mda »

simias wrote: post #82
mda wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DDG = Bing for most of the queries in US. You are basically using bing and 95% of the time and happy with it. Good I guess.

I've heard that a few times on DDG-related articles this past week but I was under the impression that the duck had its own crawlers and used Bing on top of that to complete its results. Do they really solely proxy Bing results?

Mostly Bing for any non trivial query. As far as I see, they never give actual numbers / breakdown and try hard to divert attention from this. If they do i would love to know.

Re: Nothing Can Stop Google. DuckDuckGo Is Trying Anyway

#90

Post by isostatic »

viivaux wrote: post #17
harveywi wrote: post #6

DuckDuckGo is a heel.

I'd just like to encourage people to think a little longer about what you might be saying, before reactively downvoting.

It's hardly a common idiom, does he mean ddg is close behind google, does he mean it's run down? Does he mean it's keeping people down?
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