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DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

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Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#281

Post by kazinator »

nice_byte wrote: post #253
ebg13 wrote: post #176

I'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.

i'm not getting porn but this is nonetheless a perfect example of how bad ddg is. first result is the "torus" article on wiki, which is _not_ what the query asks for. by contrast, google's top result is the "solid torus" wiki article - much better.

I reproduced OP's search result by turning the safe-search from "moderate" to "off", and searching for "filled torus" without quotes.

Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#282

Post by bloodorange »

savanaly wrote: post #249
bloodorange wrote: post #156

Earlier 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…

The example I gave above should suffice to demonstrate the differences. Just copy the second line and paste it into both search engines.

Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#283

Post by thethethethe »

I use DuckDuckGo as the primary browser on my phone so I don’t accidentally search things on my corporate Google account and I can say the DDG is demonstrably worse in many situations.

If you have no idea how to spell a complex word, you can type absolute gibberish into Google and it will know what you meant. DDG will figure it out sometimes but less frequently.

Google also has better answer cards than DDG. Try searching “Facebook revenue” on DDG and Google. Google gives you the answer and DDG shows you nothing.

The notion that DDG is better than Google, which is only ever evangelized in these HN threads, is delusional idealism. Sure, DDG has some nice features (namely not being Google), but suggesting that it is better than Google and that the billions of unwashed masses are wrong about Google is silly and kind of elitist.

Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#284

Post by elagost »

Most people, I believe, could be served just fine by most "Free" alternatives. Many people, I believe, wouldn't notice if you replaced 1) their desktop OS with GNU/Linux, 2) their browser with Firefox, 3) their search engine with DuckDuckGo, 4) MS office with LibreOffice or FreeOffice, and 5) their various smartphone apps and social media services with webapps and/or Free alternatives.

How is this surprising? As long as it "just works" most people are going to be fine and won't really notice a difference.

I !g occasionally in DDG (which I've been using full time for over 4 years) but have found that Google's results aren't better, just different.

Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#285

Post by azinman2 »

visarga wrote: post #272
azinman2 wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, y…

> If you’re going to convince me to move away from them, you gotta 10x it, The fact that you don't start all your searches in Google is sufficient reason. You could always jump to Google if DDG has bad results, but for many searches you don't need to leave Google traces.

Why is that sufficient reason? I'm not particularly concerned about Google having my search history. As I've said before, they've been good stewards with it over 20 years.

Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#286

Post by hinkley »

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've made a promise to myself to start paying attention to this when I do searches, but so far that promise has gone unfulfilled.

If I had to hazard a guess, I'd say that I think I see quite a few SEO hackers pop up on the first page, to the point that it's sometimes difficult to find anything meaty.

I'll try to keep an eye on it this week so the next time DDG comes up I can contribute something substantial (and substantiated).

Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#287

Post by kube-system »

FalconSensei wrote: post #280
kube-system wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"

then, why not just use yelp?

The same reason that any ddg bang is useful: fewer keystrokes, one less page load.

Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#288

Post by thaumasiotes »

jstanley wrote: post #141
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.

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.

> 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.

If I wanted a car mechanic in San Francisco, I would usually search for "car mechanic 94105" rather than "car mechanic san francisco". Regardless of search engine.

Do postal codes not work to refer to particular areas of the UK?

Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#289

Post by codethief »

bad_user wrote: post #113
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…

My experience with DDG has been exactly the same, not just with programming- and, in my case, math-related search terms but also when I look for personal websites of people in academia. On Google, it's usually the first search result but it often isn't even among the first 10 in DDG.

Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#290

Post by guerrilla »

Funny you should ask. This morning I was apparently talking in my sleep, angrily saying "Don't delete my fucking search terms!" I've been using DDG for about 5 years but I feel it's actually been getting worse in that it more often randomly deletes terms when whatever I'm searching for is too specific for it's heuristic. On the other hand, Google does the exact same thing.
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