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DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

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Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#181

Post by godshatter »

hedora wrote: post #129
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.

Google gives me bad results. It ignores some of the words in my queries, and the context boxes are generally spammy and irrelevant. Even if the correct information is somewhere in the results page, I bounce before I can find it. From what I can tell from the article, this might be because I type too much stuff into the search bar, and because Google’s manually curated semantic web stuff is not relevant to me. However…

I have this same problem. I use the same "subject sub-subject (...) specific query" tactic I've been using since forever and Google search has been becoming less effective for me over the years. I switched to DDG a couple of years ago I think, and it's better for handling that sort of thing.

Is there a search engine out there that respects quotes, and, or, case-insensitive when asked for, etc? In some ways I miss the days of altavista and similar search engines which had "advanced" tabs you could use to craft your query as closely as needed to find that one web page you know has what you need to find that you stumbled upon years ago.

The only time I use what the author refers to as "low intent searches" is when I've just heard a term or phrase I don't understand and don't know enough about it to ask specifically for something.

Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#183

Post by kube-system »

Normal_gaussian wrote: post #111
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 a…

You don't need the extra click and page load. Try these:

"joe biden !w"

"Los Angeles to New York !wa"

"knives out !w"

"south africa !w"

"ddg bangs !hn"

Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#184

Post by ckosidows »

azinman2 wrote: post #162
gonehome wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you tried it recently? I generally agree that people made excuses for DDG when it was clearly worse and unusable, but today it’s good enough to use instead (I think it’s better). I’d try it again if you haven’t for a while. Maybe your needs are different than mine, but since we’re both on HN there’s probably pretty good overlap. Small thing, but I really like how DDG results are primarily links to websites and I…

I’ve always had the opposite experience with DDG. Technical queries gave just garbage results, where as I got meaningful hits on google each time.

Agreed. Each time I see something about DDG on HN I try to switch and it never lasts. I don't like the results on DDG and as much as I'd like to move away from Google they've got search on lock.

Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#185

Post by SubiculumCode »

I will give DDG in a similar try, but I am more like the HN crowd than the average user....lots of searches for statistical and programming functions/ideas that most people have never heard or think about :e.g. "model selection among non-nested fractional polynomial mixed level models"

Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#186

Post by kube-system »

VikingCoder wrote: post #80
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…

When I search for Fish Tacos on DDG's maps and Google, it's night and day. DDG gave me 4 results, none anywhere near me. Do you have a suggestion for how I could have been more effective?

I find DDG more useful when I treat it like it's trying to help me use the internet, rather than like it's trying to replace the internet.

try "fish tacos !yelp"

Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#188

Post by dagenix »

hedora wrote: post #165
hedora wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google gives me bad results. It ignores some of the words in my queries, and the context boxes are generally spammy and irrelevant. Even if the correct information is somewhere in the results page, I bounce before I can find it. From what I can tell from the article, this might be because I type too much stuff into the search bar, and because Google’s manually curated semantic web stuff is not relevant to me. However…

I think, on reflection, the issue is that typing “harry potter sport” and clicking on the wikipedia article at the very top of the page (above the first ad) is a much lower cognitive burden than the Google way, where I guess people are trained to type “harry potter” and then skim an entire page of ads, search results and noise to find the word “Quidditch” (which doesn’t appear, I just checked). If I google harry pott…

A Google search for me produces the word "Quidditch" in a box along with a link to the Wikipedia page for Quidditch and the first paragraph of that article. The box appears at the very top of the results. I'm not sure how a search result for that query could be much more useful.

Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#189

Post by bonsai80 »

I agree. I have switched and used to feel like the switch was failing when I had to use Google for some things, but realized that's just fine. I also occasionally use Wolfram Alpha for things too. Both there if needed, but otherwise getting great results from a company that respects me.

Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#190

Post by vesinisa »

benhurmarcel wrote: post #172
vesinisa wrote: post #40

I 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 useles…

For the same reason I find DDG very useful when I don’t want localized results, which is hard to get with Google. I currently live in Spain and Google returns mostly Spanish results, even on unrelated queries like programming or a device review.

Be sure to set your search language to English. It will still return localized results, but in English.
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