What I don't get is why DDG has no "google it" button. I mean, typing !g is not convenient, esp on mobile.
DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use
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Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use
#262For people complaining about worse local results:
You can also use the `site:` argument on TLDs. E.g.
"kino dresden site:.de"
If you can guess the TLD obviously.
Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use
#263I'll believe this when the third result for "filled torus" isn't "Cum Filled Pussy Porn Videos" unless safe search is enabled. DDG's contextual awareness is abysmal.
Maybe you just under-estimate the prevalence of porn searches on the Internet? Once could easily argue that your esoteric geometry search is likely not nearly as common as the results they returned you on what they surmised was a porn search with a typo for instance.
Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use
#264Sooo, when do you guys think Google will pull the plug from ddg?
You mean Bing?
Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use
#265I 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…
I found that searching was more difficult nowadays. Result from Google is becoming worse, filling with content farm and ads. In some sense, that gave opportunity to become a better search engine without any technical improvement, but better marketing.
I don't know if DDG is better or good enough - maybe I'll start using it.
But I do know that google has gone far downhill. and I think that is partially its fault, and also the fault of the internet as a whole. It's just become such an infested ad machine.
Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use
#266DDG is my daily driver and I do not miss Google Search in the slightest. I rarely need to !g and its often futile because Google returns nearly the same results. However, my favorite feature of DDG is it's native dark theme.
I just decided to try DDG out because of this post and am so happy there's a native dark theme. Now if only Github would release one!
Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use
#267Earlier 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.
An example of a difference: I live in Bristol. If I search for things like "car mechanic bristol", DDG comes up with lots of results from Bristol, Tennessee. It's not that DDG is worse than Google, it's just that DDG isn't tailoring the results to what it knows about me. The solution is to be more specific: "car mechanic bristol uk", for example, does the job.
I have exactly the same issue with it in Wellington, NZ.
Even with "New Zealand" turned on at the top, it gives me quite a few results for things in Wellington, Florida.
If I don't specify "Wellington" or "NZ" in the search terms, results are even worse, even with "New Zealand" turned on: I get results from Australia, Dubai, even the UK for various search terms. (and some of the TLDs are things like "com.au" or ".co.uk" so it should be trivial to filter those out.)
Google's not perfect in this regard, but it's an order of magnitude better in my experience for localised queries, even with both in Incognito/Private mode.
Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use
#268Earlier quoted context omitted.
I recently had to search for something similar to this: march 12 2019 + 366 days and DuckDuckGo gave me exactly what I wanted while Google gave me not-very-useful results.
I literally do this with google all the time though (my girlfriend like us to celebrate N * 100 anniversaries). Every hundred days or so I go to google and type "500 days after [date]" or something to that effect and it works. It was the first thing I tried, it works reliably every time, and it's google providing the result in the results page, which is better than a link to a website that would do it for me. What qu…
Being the socially inept person I am, I would find this exhausting.
Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use
#269A 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…
I'm still using g! about 50% of the time.
One thing I wish they'd add is to run the calculator if my search term starts with "=".
Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use
#270To 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…
That seems like more of what WolframAlpha caters to. Personally, I don't like assuming an engine has interpreted what I'm looking for correctly - I'd prefer to maintain some of the load of personally understanding the source of information and it's context. So here is what I do:
>> distance from Los Angeles to New York
!m los angeles to new york
>> Joe Biden age
!w joe biden
>> knives out cast
!imdb knives out
>> capital of South Africa
!w South Africa
And that last one is a really good example of why I don't want to trust an engine to interpret what I'm looking for, because Wolfram Alpha just tells you Pretoria, and if I hadn't spent a large part of my life there I wouldn't know that's probably not what people are looking for. Economically? They probably want to know that Johannesburg is the largest city. Just like how people are sometimes surprised when they learn that New York City and Los Angeles are not state capitals, even though they're really important cities. Politically? Well the roles of the government is split between 3 cities and that's not a simple thing for an engine to comprehend. And I didn't even know Bloemfontein held that kind of status until I just read it on Wikipedia. Neither I, a former citizen of the country, nor WolframAlpha, was aware of that.