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DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

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Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#111

Post by Normal_gaussian »

bobbylarrybobby wrote: post #20

To people who use DuckDuckGo: how do you deal with its inability to answer simple queries with factual answers? Things like “distance from Los Angeles to New York”, “Joe Biden age”, “knives out cast”, “capital of South Africa”, etc. The time it takes to click a result on DuckDuckGo and navigate to the answer is so much longer than just getting the answer at the top of the results page, as google (and even bing) provi…

Either it appears as part of the first result or one of the top results have it. This is the case for all of your queries, and the result to select is obvious - normally wikipedia or imdb.

This is arguably harder (+1 click and page load).

However for capital of south africa this is arguably more correct. My google test shows no distinction between the capitals, whereas the wiki page does.

Of course the wiki page is accessible on google as well.

I'm wary of cases when these facts are incorrect. Google declares them while trying to hide the source. This was very important recently when a friend googled for caucus winners and recieved an incorrect fact at the top of Google, something that would have rang alarm bells when seen on its candidate affiliated source page

Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#112

Post by commoner »

Fnoord wrote: post #66
andrepd wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try using a google mirror instead, like Startpage. The google results without the spying.

Startpage is in bed with an advertising company.

Google is an advertising company, so Startpage isn't any worse.

Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#113

Post by bad_user »

chuckgreenman wrote: post #25

I 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…

I use DDG on a daily basis, being my default search engine for the past two years.

However I don't agree — many of my searches have awful results on DDG compared with Google and I often find no words to make it better.

Local searches are an obvious candidate, DDG is awful for my native language, giving me results in Spanish (I'm Romanian).

But lately I'm noticing programming-related results being worse on DDG as well. I'm not sure why because they used to be similar, but now some of the results DDG is giving me (for very specific search terms) are really, really bad, many times DDG ignoring my keywords and giving me something else entirely.

It's fine for now, I prefer the privacy, but they'd better improve and fast.

Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#114

Post by no_wizard »

chuckgreenman wrote: post #25

I 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…

I think you inadvertently hit the nail on the head here, in that DuckDuckGo requires you to know its incantations, and Google has gotten really good at not having you to know any incantations at all. I can even obliterate the spelling of words and it often knows what i'm looking for.

Now, with that said, if your target is power searchers (like myself) I think you have a better argument, because Google often lacks in some of these areas (like being able to filter by a specific grouping of sorts, like if I want a "dev focused" search, not just filtering by a specific site, DDG has some methodology here that I haven't been able to easily surface with Google)

But there are cases where I've noticed DDG falling behind, like indexing newer content, or being able to filter by time accurately.

Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#115

Post by LeftHandPath »

whalesalad wrote: post #46
chuckgreenman wrote: post #25

I 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…

A lot of DDG fans on HN blame the user or social conditioning and use that as a crutch. It’s BS. You need to provide clear examples of the differences in order to really make this argument to someone who might switch. What specifically are the differences? The last time this topic came up someone told me I was a total noob because I didn’t know how to use search and that was basically the extent of it.

I agree. I’ve been in the DDG camp for a little while, but I finally had to switch back to google as my primary search engine on my laptop - fixing searches was taking too much time. That’s after two or three months of using DDG and Bing exclusively

Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#116

Post by burlesona »

A few years ago I switched my desktops to use DDG while leaving my phone using Google. At first I had to !g all the time. Now that’s rare.

Now I’m starting to have the other problem. If I search for a company, product, person, etc., on DDG it’s the first hit. But on google I just get a wall of ads and videos, and it’s hard to tell where the actual homepage is for the thing I’m looking for.

So as of now I would say, google is still better if you’re looking for something obscure and especially if you don’t know what it’s called. But today I would say DDG is better if you are searching for something specific by name.

Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#117

Post by zozbot234 »

UncleMeat wrote: post #94
Semaphor wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don’t use natural language, use keywords and quotes. Essentially the way people searched 5-10 years ago. I rarely need !g

> Don’t use natural language So... its worse. People want to use natural language.

If I wanted to search using natural language, I'd use Ask Jeeves. DDG is just fine in my experience.

Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#118

Post by diffeomorphism »

Grimm1 wrote: post #110

To my knowledge duck duck go uses Bing's search API to get their results. To me Bing and Google have not been sufficient for my searching needs and the needs of a large group around me for a long time now. On a separate but related issue because DDG is using Bing the overall experience is lackluster, as other user's have noted things like very slow to re-index new results, new information climbs up to the top very sl…

> To my knowledge duck duck go uses Bing's search API to get their results.

And their own crawler and wikipedia and stackexchange and about 400 other sources: https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/so...

That said, yeah it is mainly a better Bing.

Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#119

Post by josefresco »

Grimm1 wrote: post #110

To my knowledge duck duck go uses Bing's search API to get their results. To me Bing and Google have not been sufficient for my searching needs and the needs of a large group around me for a long time now. On a separate but related issue because DDG is using Bing the overall experience is lackluster, as other user's have noted things like very slow to re-index new results, new information climbs up to the top very sl…

It's actually Bing+ other sources, there's a page on their site that explains it.

And I had the same opinion as you, until I started using it every day. My habit was as follows: When I didn't get good results, I would switch back to Google and run the same query. Over time I found more "purple" links in Google indicating DDG was giving me almost the same (sometimes better) results.

Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#120

Post by akavel »

dhimes wrote: post #91
whalesalad wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of DDG fans on HN blame the user or social conditioning and use that as a crutch. It’s BS. You need to provide clear examples of the differences in order to really make this argument to someone who might switch. What specifically are the differences? The last time this topic came up someone told me I was a total noob because I didn’t know how to use search and that was basically the extent of it.

It might be more effective if you try it yourself. Google something you normally google, then repeat the search with &pws=0 at the end of the query string.

Interesting, what is the pws arg?
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