DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use • Hacker News Board

Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#311

Post by ThePowerOfFuet » Fri, Mar 06, 2020, 7:27 PM UTC

koheripbal wrote: post #269

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…

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 "=".

Their search results page has a feedback button in the corner. Use it! They listen to it.

Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#312

Post by kuon » Fri, Mar 06, 2020, 7:28 PM UTC

I have been using DDG for years and did not know the !g I copy paste search often when DDG results are lacking, I feel so stupid.

Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#313

Post by clarry » Fri, Mar 06, 2020, 7:35 PM UTC

kazinator wrote: post #279

auiya wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Maybe they should simply re-label their settings, for starters. The safe search has three levels: "off", "moderate" and "strict". I would call this the "Adult content" setting, and the choices would be "prefer", "neutral", and "suppress". These would just map exactly to the semantics of the current three choices. Transitioning to the "prefer" option could require some dialog or check box tick-off to state that the se…

> I would call this the "Adult content" setting, and the choices would be "prefer", "neutral", and "suppress". These would just map exactly to the semantics of the current three choices.

I honestly think a better idea would be tagging all results. A lot of the irritation with search engines seems to come from the fact that words can be so overloaded and ambiguous. It's unreasonable to expect that any search engine could return what you want in the first 20 results if there's no way to narrow down results by tags and categories. Porn shouldn't be the only category that gets special treatment.

For example, sometimes I want to search about how to make foo, and I get pages and pages of results about... crafting foo in games. At that point I'd like to turn off all results that have to do with games or fiction. Or enable categories about.. actually making stuff?

And speaking of games, it's fucking irritating that the results aren't tagged so when you try to look up information about a game in a series, you get tons of results about more recent sequels and it can be really hard to filter those out.

Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#314

Post by epicalex » Fri, Mar 06, 2020, 7:36 PM UTC

nikanj wrote: post #201

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.

This has become increasingly frustrating for me, and I now have to overuse quoting to get the things I want.

Why would I include a word if I wanted results that didn't include it. I could understand that on later pages to include more results, but regularly even the very first results don't include one of the key words in my search.

Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#315

Post by thewebcount » Fri, Mar 06, 2020, 7:37 PM UTC

schoen wrote: post #238

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.

The date command can also answer this question: $ date -d 'march 12 2019 + 366 days' Thu Mar 12 00:00:00 PDT 2020

assuming you're on Unix

Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#316

Post by mdrachuk » Fri, Mar 06, 2020, 7:38 PM UTC

I have ddg setup as default on my laptop, phone and iPad for over the year. I’m using google fallback almost half of the time. In particular, non-English queries and software development queries are way better in google.

Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#317

Post by notahacker » Fri, Mar 06, 2020, 7:39 PM UTC

thaumasiotes wrote: post #288

jstanley wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 r…

The Bristol postcode is the letters 'BS' followed by a one or two digit number, so it's not particularly good for finding a service provider in a large area.

UK postcodes are somewhat more useful when you want to narrow a search to a small area, especially for small towns and London districts where the number is a useful identifier and the area itself might have multiple or non-unique names

Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#318

Post by habosa » Fri, Mar 06, 2020, 7:42 PM UTC

I am really trying to use DDG more but I dunno, it's not very good in my experience.

Specifically these use cases fail:

  * When searching for local business / places.

  * When searching for something I want to buy.

  * The news index doesn't seem very real-time.

However it has some things I love:

  * !twitter to search Twitter!

  * Sometimes non-personalized results help me find something outside my bubble

Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#319

Post by alex_young » Fri, Mar 06, 2020, 7:43 PM UTC

I switched for a month and went back to Google.

DDG is about 95% there for me, but that missing 5% is the crucial on point results for technical questions I rely on.

In these cases DDG point me at useful stuff, but not as useful as Google, and that edge costs time spent traversing and sorting information.

I’m happy there is a good competition here and I’ll try again, but for now I’m happy with Google results even with the ads.

Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#320

Post by SirLotsaLocks » Fri, Mar 06, 2020, 7:44 PM UTC

It really is, I've been using ddg for a few months now near exclusively. The bangs, though I still haven't gotten particularly fluent in them, really help sell it for people who aren't sure (like I was). Now like others in this thread have said, for more obscure things like when im bug fixing I use google but for most things ddg is sufficient.