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DuckDuckGo Traffic

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Re: DuckDuckGo Traffic

#81

Post by kccqzy »

nbrempel wrote: post #3

Over the past 5 years I’ve tried DDG several times. Each time except the last I wanted to stick with it but the results simply didn’t stand up to what I’d see on Google. About 6 months ago (a year? I can’t remember) I switched and haven’t looked back. Now, when I look at google, the results actually look less relevant. As well, the ads on Google have become very obnoxious. I don’t feel like I’m being served the best…

Google's results have definitely become more quirky. Just now I was writing some SQLite database code and was wondering how the sum() aggregate handles integer overflow. So I searched for "sqlite integer overflow" in DDG and Google. To my surprise the first result in Google is someone's random blog post[0] from 2011 describing their experience which doesn't answer my question at all. I am very surprised Google decided to put this as the first result. Both DDG and Google gave me results on Stack Overflow, but only Google managed to give me the official documentation of aggregate functions on the sqlite website, with the snippet highlighting the relevant fact: "Sum() will throw an 'integer overflow' exception if all inputs are integers or NULL and an integer overflow occurs at any point during the computation."

Overall I still believe for sloppily constructed queries for which I want specific results Google seems to read my mind better and produce better results than DDG, but Google is very quirky.

[0]: http://jakegoulding.com/blog/2011/02/06/sqlite-64-bit-intege...

Re: DuckDuckGo Traffic

#82

Post by OJFord »

I've used DDG for some years now, and never had the problem switching and needing !g that others describe. (I use things like !w to search specific actual sites, but not to change global search engine.)

The only thing that bugs me is regional result relevance. It gives you a toggle on/off for present country by IP; as far as I can tell it has no effect.

I get /en-us/ and amazon.com as (all) the top results whether it's on or off.

Re: DuckDuckGo Traffic

#83

Post by catalogia »

andrenotgiant wrote: post #31

I love DDG, I just want to point out that everyone is hating on Google's new search results, in part because of a distracting favicon, and DuckDuckGo results have had similar favicons for months now.

Can't say I ever noticed the favicons at all, nor do I see any comments complaining about them. I don't think favicons are Google's problem, I see no evidence for this hypothesis.

A more likely problem is the information density of the results pages. Google rarely manages to put more than a single search result above the fold on my screen, while DDG generally gets in six. That, unlike favicons, is a huge disparity between the two.

Re: DuckDuckGo Traffic

#84

Post by izacus »

catalogia wrote: post #83
andrenotgiant wrote: post #31

I love DDG, I just want to point out that everyone is hating on Google's new search results, in part because of a distracting favicon, and DuckDuckGo results have had similar favicons for months now.

Can't say I ever noticed the favicons at all, nor do I see any comments complaining about them. I don't think favicons are Google's problem, I see no evidence for this hypothesis. A more likely problem is the information density of the results pages. Google rarely manages to put more than a single search result above the fold on my screen, while DDG generally gets in six. That, unlike favicons, is a huge disparity be…

There is a post with 600+ complaint comments on first page city more than a day now... How can you say "you don't see any comments complaining"?

Re: DuckDuckGo Traffic

#86

Post by themodelplumber »

OJFord wrote: post #82

I've used DDG for some years now, and never had the problem switching and needing !g that others describe. (I use things like !w to search specific actual sites, but not to change global search engine.) The only thing that bugs me is regional result relevance. It gives you a toggle on/off for present country by IP; as far as I can tell it has no effect. I get /en-us/ and amazon.com as (all) the top results whether it…

As a 99% DDG user: I've always had better results with Google on specific tech problem-solving searches. Not sure how to explain it but it feels as if Google Search understands better the significance of the word order I'm using in order to give extra context. With DDG performing the search it's like I can tell from the first result that it really didn't get at what I was trying to figure out. How is Google so much better that that? It's been this way for years.

Still this isn't enough to take me away from the bangs and additional speed and privacy.

(Even when I see some joker/SEO is e.g. abusing Unicode to get bolding in DDG search results, saw that the other day)

Re: DuckDuckGo Traffic

#87

Post by rekoil »

pottertheotter wrote: post #41
grimgrin wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a thing I wish FF had that Chrome has had for a long, long time (an older comment of mine): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20056174 re: ease of searching within sites and building that availability (of sites) up

I switched back to FF from Chrome a year ago and that's one of the things I miss the most. I really like FF and will continue to support them, but there were so many little conveniences Chrome got right that FF seems to completely ignore.

Yep, the simplicity of Chromes keyword-based search feature is so good, I have several setup which aren't even really searches at all, such as translate from detected language to English (tren Some sentence in other language).

You can of course do this in Firefox as well, but in Chrome -besides Chrome most of the time just adding them automatically- there's a simple preference pane where I can easily configure the three important parts; keyword, pretty title, and search URL with %s as the search token.

I wish Firefox would add this, it's a big holdover for me.

Re: DuckDuckGo Traffic

#88

Post by catalogia »

izacus wrote: post #84
catalogia wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can't say I ever noticed the favicons at all, nor do I see any comments complaining about them. I don't think favicons are Google's problem, I see no evidence for this hypothesis. A more likely problem is the information density of the results pages. Google rarely manages to put more than a single search result above the fold on my screen, while DDG generally gets in six. That, unlike favicons, is a huge disparity be…

There is a post with 600+ complaint comments on first page city more than a day now... How can you say "you don't see any comments complaining"?

I don't see any mention of favicons in this thread other than the one I responded to, and I don't know what thread from yesterday you're talking about.

But since both DDG and Google have favicons on the results page, I find it hard to believe this is really a matter that has people moving to DDG. This hypothesis basically amounts to "people are blind idiots who notice favicons on one page but not the other", and I don't think that's true.

Re: DuckDuckGo Traffic

#89

Post by perlgeek »

sansnomme wrote: post #17
nbrempel wrote: post #3

Over the past 5 years I’ve tried DDG several times. Each time except the last I wanted to stick with it but the results simply didn’t stand up to what I’d see on Google. About 6 months ago (a year? I can’t remember) I switched and haven’t looked back. Now, when I look at google, the results actually look less relevant. As well, the ads on Google have become very obnoxious. I don’t feel like I’m being served the best…

DuckDuckGo uses Bing underneath so the company whom you should really be complaining to is MSFT.

I do believe DDG does some custom ranking on top of the Bing results.

Re: DuckDuckGo Traffic

#90

Post by rbinv »

akvadrako wrote: post #71
catalogia wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What the fuck.. Mozilla is really hell bent in this war on their own users aren't they? Does this mean I'll have to install an extension to replace each search keyword I have? That would be dozens of extensions, many of them for obscure niche websites.

No need for an extension, you can still set bookmarks that search with keywords. It just won’t automatically create the URL pattern the site suggests.

Not quite the same as entering "red" and hitting tab in order to search reddit, for example.
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