I use DDG as my main search engine - for most things it works just fine, when I can't find what I'm looking for I go to google. I find it hilarious that the image search function works a lot like Google used to in the past - I'm constantly looking for reference when drawing and more often than not if you type something innocuous like "man with hand in front of face" you'll end up with a first page full of porn in DDG whereas it's all SFW in Google, even with all restrictions off. Luckily DDG offers a nudity filter which works pretty well - even if it still fails to catch the odd gore picture.
DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use
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Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use
#32I’ve been using DDG exclusively for years. People talk about how hard it is to switch, but I’ve never had any trouble getting exactly the results I’m searching for. I sometimes wonder what makes google search results so amazing, but not enough to risk it.
The quality of my Google results plummeted when I blocked and opted out of as much tracking as I could. I'm not really happy with Google or DDG results at this point.
It doesn't help that search engines have been progressively hiding more and more functionality. Just last night I was trying to search for results within a window of "published after 18 months ago" but couldn't figure out how to do it. It was probably just another search away from finding the answer, but why are search UIs removing/hiding their best Advanced Search features?
Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use
#33They should shorten the name - DuckDuckGo.com is too long to type out.
Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use
#34It’s gotten better! I still use google for very obscure things but the vast majority of my searches these days are duckduckgo
Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use
#35I strongly disagree, especially when you have all the Wikipedia / contact / google map embedded into Google search, with one click it can call phone number from a restaurant. Edit: To add more, it's all those details that makes Google better than other, search engine are not just for searching things it's all about the display and relevance.
Mmmh, if you search for a place in the maps tab instead of the general one you usually have a telephone url you can tap to start a phone call.
I still find that you're using a very specific use case of a search engine to completely dismiss not using a different search engine.
Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use
#36Agreed. I tried it a few times over the years and found the results to be pretty poor, but I tried again recently and found the results to be good enough to fully switch both my computer and phone to DDG. Although I'm fully switched over, there are 2 drawbacks: * Since DDG tracks you less, the results for local searches may be worse. If you're in Boston, TX you'll probably want to search for "boston, tx restaurants"…
Yeah I don't like that DDG interface limits you to timeframes of Last Day/Week/Month/Year. There are lots of good reasons to want to search a particular timeframe!
Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use
#37I’ve been using DDG exclusively for years. People talk about how hard it is to switch, but I’ve never had any trouble getting exactly the results I’m searching for. I sometimes wonder what makes google search results so amazing, but not enough to risk it.
Guess it depends on domain. I've changed the default in Firefox a few weeks ago and find that for "regular" searching DDG is enough that I don't go to Google.
But for specialized searches I frequently reach for the Google override, and sure enough Google has significantly better results. Like searching specific, weird errors messages and such.
Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use
#38I think I've figured out what is happening when people tell me that DuckDuckGo's results "aren't good enough". What's really happening is that they've been trained to search a certain way to using Google and because DDG doesn't have all the historical data of your searches on their platform they can't fill in the gaps as well. After a couple days using DDG I found the right vocabulary to get good local results and wh…
Can you share what is the right vocabulary for example?
I have DDG as main engine for the phone and unless it’s Wikipedia level question, I have to use g!
Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use
#39I switched over to DDG a few weeks ago. I slowly regressed to more and more !g usage, and finally switched back to GOOG a couple days ago. Then just an hour ago I searched for "google fiber stadia", because I was curious how well they work together. The main reddit result opened in an amp page (and of course reddit pressured me to install the mobile app). I went back to the results and started scrolling down. I hones…
You can use !s in ddg to get google results without google.
Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use
#40I don't know. I am using DDG from outside the U.S. but with English as the primary search language. The Google's localized results are just an order of magnitude better. I end up re-doing almost 10-20% of my searches in Google after being dissapointed with DDG results. Most of the time Google results are sadly superior.
And don't get me even started in searching in my native language (Finnish). DDG is close to useless there, since it can not parse the different, obscure word forms we use (although I type word X in form A, I want my searches to include results in of word X in semantically related forms B and C). Google did not initially parse Finnish very well, but it eventually became amzingly good something like a decade ago.