181–190 of 252 posts
I wish they got domain like ddg.io|ai|... [that appear to be available too]. It would be so much easier to quickly type that in when DDG doesn't happen to be a default search engine somewhere. Instead of typoing it in a hurry to demo it to someone.
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I wish I could tell ddg that I only care about postgresql. It seems heavily skewed to oracle/ms server when searching anything sql related. Perhaps because it's powered by Bing?
I wish I could tell DDG that I don't give a shit about Python 2.7. Stop linking me to the Python 2 doc! I haven't used Python 2 in five years!
Back in the day, before I just defaulted to using Google, I remember checking multiple search engines to find the thing I was looking for. You'd check Yahoo/Google/Lycos, try a couple of different phrasings, and then if that didn't work try searching on a few other search engines. Somewhere along the way, Google had won me over, because I almost always found my answer. I had stopped even considering other search engi…
I still have the opposite feeling. For a lot of things that I search, google still presents me more relevant results. Although DDG is catching up. Until recently, it always presented me with old.haxe.org results for some reason instead of the current version, but now it works fine. The reason why DDG is my default url-bar search is because of the 'bangs'!g for google, !yt for YouTube, !w for Wikipedia and !t for thes…
- https://support.mozilla.org/kb/how-search-from-address-bar
- https://www-archive.mozilla.org/docs/end-user/keywords.html
- https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/95426
- https://www.howtogeek.com/howto/24227/complete-guide-to-keyw...
You don't even need to type a 'bang' (!): just use whatever keyword you want. And you can add any search engine you'd like.
Browser keywords are also handy for navigating to certain websites, not just searches. For example:
https://www.reddit.com/r/%s
I use and like DDG but I can't believe this article didn't mention Bing, which powers DDG's organic results. Like, yes DDG is a small company based "just east of nowhere" in PA because Microsoft has spent literally billions of dollars on Bing . To the extent we have a choice in search provider at all, it's entirely due to Microsoft's huge investment, and I feel like it's remiss not to consider those implications. If…
I think the guys in DDG know this, but if they don't.. they're a bad business decision from Microsoft away from nonexistence.
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I think it's very much search topic related: * DDG is atrocious for anything other than English * Programing/IT searches often yield garbage on DDG while on Google a good result is within the first 3. I have it as my default now too, but "!g" is a constant companion. === Regarding Google and Amazon being unstoppable... it seemed the same once for Microsoft. Once they get too big/powerful (which they arguably already…
> "!g" is a constant companion. May I recommend an alternative bang? "!s" (for startpage.com) is my companion. It doesn't always work perfectly, but in theory [0] Startpage offers the same (edit: non-bubbled[1]) results as big G, while retaining your privacy. !s usually works for me. I always use !s before begrudgingly doing a !g. I have no other affiliation to Startpage or DDG. And to be fair, I think we have to sim…
I'd be interested in more concrete reasons to use DDG over Startpage. First thing that comes to my mind is that with Startpage, Google still "reads" your search queries, which might leak info. What else?
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> It feels like when I search on Google, Google is telling me 'No no, you don't care about JsonAPI parsing performance, you care about parsing json, because we know best'. I've experienced more of this lately, and see myself using the quotation mark syntax to a greater extent (quotations will tell Google to explicitly include a phrase in their search). I don't know if at this point their are over-optimizing and now a…
I've found that even quotes don't always work with Google these days. Google's insistence on returning results to more popular, but distinctly different, queries than what I actually searched for is what finally prompted me to switch over to DDG full time. Overall I've found DDG results are actually better and less frustrating than Google's for this exact reason.
I have yet to find a Google query where Google ignores the quotes (it even goes as far as telling me it can't find anything).
DDG, on the other hand, decided a few months ago that their users are dumb and only mistakenly tried to force part of their query. It's really annoying me because it's what makes me use !g more than anything else.
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> "!g" is a constant companion. May I recommend an alternative bang? "!s" (for startpage.com) is my companion. It doesn't always work perfectly, but in theory [0] Startpage offers the same (edit: non-bubbled[1]) results as big G, while retaining your privacy. !s usually works for me. I always use !s before begrudgingly doing a !g. I have no other affiliation to Startpage or DDG. And to be fair, I think we have to sim…
When I decided to move away from Google Search I went with DDG for some time, since it seemed to be the more independent / open approach, compared to Startpage. I found myself switching back to Google way to often, for either performance and / or relevance of results. I then switched to Startpage and used it as primary search for well over a year - only switching back to google for image search. I still feel like DDG…
1) I came to like DDG's grouping of results by site. See a result and think that page's site might have more results? Click the favicon.
2) DDG is faster now than it was a few years ago. (At least it seems that way, for me and the things I typically search for).
3) Extensive bang shortcuts: https://duckduckgo.com/bang
4) Different, non-personalized search bubble. I like the idea of non-monocultures, which I guess extends to my search results.
Downsides:
-1) Some time ago DDG changed to requiring the same stupid quoting behavior Big G began mandating for required search terms, replacing +.
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I've found that even quotes don't always work with Google these days. Google's insistence on returning results to more popular, but distinctly different, queries than what I actually searched for is what finally prompted me to switch over to DDG full time. Overall I've found DDG results are actually better and less frustrating than Google's for this exact reason.
That's funny because unlike DDG, Google actually works with quotes. I have yet to find a Google query where Google ignores the quotes (it even goes as far as telling me it can't find anything). DDG, on the other hand, decided a few months ago that their users are dumb and only mistakenly tried to force part of their query. It's really annoying me because it's what makes me use !g more than anything else.
I think it would be helpful if I (or anyone else reading this) saved some examples for the next time this discussion comes up.
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Documentation suggests Google never stopped doing this. https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/2466433?hl=en suggests "phrase inside quotes" is still exact match. And if you put a single word in "quotes", that indicates to Google the word must be included in the results (I determined this by searching for something where some words were omitted, then clicking the small "Must include:" link under a result and not…
They say that but I have tried this many, many times in the past few years only for Google to just ignore it. It's possible my search query just has no exact matches, but Google thinks it is being helpful by expanding the query. This just ends up wasting the users time because they scan through all the related results looking for the exact match that doesn't exist.
I've switched to DDG and I've hardly looked back. Google's search has been seriously declined in quality. Most search operators [1] are no longer supported. Even those directly in the "tools" menu don't work. For example if you search "Nothing Can Stop Google. DuckDuckGo Is Trying Anyways site:medium.com", and set a custom date range to sometime last year. You'll see results which state this blog post was posted in 2…