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Why I Switched to Duck Duck Go Permanently

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Re: Why I Switched to Duck Duck Go Permanently

#31

Post by SageRaven »

streety wrote: post #30
SageRaven wrote: post #28

As much as I love DDG, I personally find it a hard pill to swallow knowing that it's not truly an independent search engine and just an API relay of Google's stuff. I do take comfort that Google isn't getting data from 90% of my online searches, but it would be awesome to know that DDG was truly its own entity and won't be cut off for some reason in the future, like we've seen with Scroogle (which, I believe, was mos…

My understanding is that duckduckgo uses Bing rather than google (mentioned in the comments at http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2009/03/duck-duck-go-arc... ). Although that doesn't alter the validity of your concern.

My bad, then. All this time I thought Google was the back end.

Re: Why I Switched to Duck Duck Go Permanently

#32

Post by ohyes »

burgerbrain wrote: post #3

I really wish I could do this, but Duck Duck Go really just seems subpar when it comes to anything I actually still use a search engine for these days (technical searches). A better solution for my use case is to 1) avoid search engines where possible (far easier than you might initially think) and 2) just use googlesharing with ssl to provide myself with some anonymity while using google.

I just add !google when DDG it doesn't return what I want. thinking about it i also do !wikipedia and !java, !lisp.

!amazon is also pretty awesome.

I use it more like a command line to search specific things from my browser bar than a general search engine like google.

Re: Why I Switched to Duck Duck Go Permanently

#34

Post by epi0Bauqu »

SageRaven wrote: post #28

As much as I love DDG, I personally find it a hard pill to swallow knowing that it's not truly an independent search engine and just an API relay of Google's stuff. I do take comfort that Google isn't getting data from 90% of my online searches, but it would be awesome to know that DDG was truly its own entity and won't be cut off for some reason in the future, like we've seen with Scroogle (which, I believe, was mos…

No Google APIs are currently used.

Re: Why I Switched to Duck Duck Go Permanently

#36

Post by danwolff »

burgerbrain wrote: post #14
NathanKP wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you explain a little more about how you avoid using search engines? Do you just go directly to sites that you know and trust and use their search functionality?

More or less, yes. I have bookmarks to all of my prefered news sites and blogs, use wikipedia or imdb for most of my general knowledge searching, and most of my technical questions are answered by official documentation or source diving.

Is this mostly about saving time, saving mental effort, simultaneously finding tangential content, aligning with some ideology, or something else? Actually curious.

Re: Why I Switched to Duck Duck Go Permanently

#37

Post by Tycho »

I wonder, if DuckDuckGo really hit the bigtime, could it usher in a new age of 'verbose' or 'wordy' startups/.coms?

There's only so many flickrs, twittrs, readrs, peckrs, etc. that can be registered as domain names. But a nonsense phrase of several words? Endless opportunity

Re: Why I Switched to Duck Duck Go Permanently

#39

Post by jawee »

Tycho wrote: post #37

I wonder, if DuckDuckGo really hit the bigtime, could it usher in a new age of 'verbose' or 'wordy' startups/.coms? There's only so many flickrs, twittrs, readrs, peckrs, etc. that can be registered as domain names. But a nonsense phrase of several words? Endless opportunity

I was trying to show somebody DuckDuckGo today and I could not even find it with Google as the name had escaped me. In fact, all I could think of was Go Dog Go. It has its disadvantages too.

Re: Why I Switched to Duck Duck Go Permanently

#40

Post by jawee »

johanhil wrote: post #22
util wrote: post #18

"I prefer to uses dashes rather than %20 as it looks cleaner and is more easily understood by the non-technically versed visitor." Isn't "+" the standard alternative, also pretty readable?

Yes, + is definitely more common. Do non-technically versed visitors know and/or care about the different parts of a URL?

If you glance up at a URL and see a bunch of %20 it's going to just look like a mess, whereas seeing a short and relevant URL makes sense.
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