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DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

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Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#201

Post by nikanj »

burlesona wrote: post #116

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, g…

For something obscure, Google ignores three out of four keywords and just produces drivel.

Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#202

Post by computerex »

I have tried to do this a couple times and have always had to resort to switching back to Google. As a software engineer I use Google heavily and do dozens of searches a day. In my personal qualitative experience Google seems to return better results for technical queries.

For day to day use I think DDG is more than sufficient however. I think DDG is certainly usable even for my work related searches but it simply takes longer to arrive to the answer in my experience.

Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#203

Post by jryb »

I exclusively used DDG for the past couple of years but gave up on it recently. I never kept track of how often I used the "!g" google fallback but in the past year or so it started to be the overwhelming majority of searches, even for simple things like the name of an organization.

Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#204

Post by friseurtermin »

speps wrote: post #11

It's only good enough when you're in the US, I live in the UK and DDG consistently returns non local results even though the country is set correctly, it's especially annoying given how many US cities are named after their UK counterpart.

That's the reason I much prefer DDG over Google. When I want the news about politics in my country or restaurants in my town, I switch to local results in my language and region with the simple click of a button.

Sometimes I want results from StackOverflow, in English. On Google getting this right was a PITA.

Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#205

Post by HenryBemis »

teekert wrote: post #142
burlesona wrote: post #116

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, g…

My story is the same! Also, when I want colouring pictures for my kids, DDG just lets met tap them and print them. That is nolonger possible using Google since some months. I also very much appreciate the code snippets when (already started typing "Googling"!) Searching for code related things.

Regarding coloring pictures, I use coloring.ws (not affiliated in any way with the site, just a happy uncle)

Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#206

Post by azinman2 »

ckosidows wrote: post #184
azinman2 wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don’t fully buy the whole “need to move away from google” part. Yes privacy, yes ads, yes SEO gaming, yes monotechopocolpyse. But the reality is they don’t sell my data, they’ve been a good steward of my search queries over the years (and have tools to clear my history or log me out and not save them), and their product is still the best over two-ish decades.

If you’re going to convince me to move away from them, you gotta 10x it, not give me a poor clone with ! tools to force me to compensate for a not great search engine. Give me a fundamentally different experience that actually innovates in this space. I’d love to see the competition, but somehow it hasn’t materialized in all these years.

Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#207

Post by gjm11 »

dagenix wrote: post #188
hedora wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I can confirm that I also see this, both in my regular Firefox instance where I do everything and in an incognito Chrome window. Specifically, I get, in order from top to bottom, with only trivial differences between those two cases:

A box with "Quidditch" in big letters, a picture and a brief description.

Some "People also ask:" with questions that do seem to be reasonably relevant.

The Wikipedia page about Quidditch.

Some video links, all relevant.

Some images, all relevant.

Another Wikipedia page about Quidditch.

A page about the "Department of Magical Games and Sports" from some Harry-Potter-specific wiki.

Same wiki's "games and sports" category.

"Beyond Quidditch: games and pastimes in the wizarding world" from www.wizardingworld.com.

NPR article about real-world quidditch games.

Quora question about other sports in Harry Potter.

Related searches: a bunch of Harry Potter things which seem pretty relevant.

Related search: "Quidditch teams".

A bunch of "Searches related to harry potter sport" which mostly also seem relevant.

So ... the organization of the page is a little weird in places, but this seems like an excellent set of search results for that query. The DDG results are also perfectly fine, though they feel slightly worse than the Google ones to me.

Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#208

Post by mmhsieh »

burlesona wrote: post #116

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, g…

question: google has enough on the ball such that if it got out of the search business they could keep themselves going?

Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#209

Post by pricees »

I recently switched to DDG after giving it a shot 2 years ago and finding it wanting.

Good, bad, or indifferent, I land on the same 5-10 platforms (or did Google only promote those platforms??) for 95% of my searches. This makes DuckDuckGo's !bang commands more efficient than a Google search.

Google wins for completely agnostic default searches and rich map functionality. For everything else, I am very satisfied with DDG.

Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#210

Post by troyvit »

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.

Actually the article in this post provides exactly that. https://www.bitlog.com/2020/03/06/duckduckgo-is-good-enough-... Look for the bit about Harry Potter.
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