DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use • Hacker News Board

Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#361

Post by pishpash » Fri, Mar 06, 2020, 10:14 PM UTC

akiselev wrote: post #345

joshspankit wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed as that’s my assumption. Do you have first-hand experience and/or a source?

Every single company I've ever worked for that advertised online had a "cost of doing business" ad budget just for buying their own keyword on Google (and Apple iOS Store/Google Play Store if they had consumer apps). Bigger international companies often have someone from an ad consulting firm tracking the major search engines and buying keywords for all of the big ones like Google, Bing, Yandex, etc. It's one of thos…

See, this is the kind of thing I knew would happen, rent seeking from the rest of the economy because the bar has risen and you have to pay, not because you get some economic benefit from paying for ads compared to the baseline prior to Google.

Google has become a bloodsucker on the economy. You and I are the ones paying in higher goods and services costs passed on to us. Worse, the bidding has no natural upper bound.

Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#362

Post by tyteen4a03 » Fri, Mar 06, 2020, 10:19 PM UTC

The only reason I am not using DDG for everything is because location based search simply suck. I live in Europe but all the search results default to US. I wish I can tell DDG that they can use my rough location for search queries.

Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#363

Post by unixsheikh » Fri, Mar 06, 2020, 10:20 PM UTC

I think I switched to Duckduckgo about 3 years ago and I have not done any searching on Google since then (with a very few exceptions just to compare).

I have been very happy with the results Duckduckgo provides.

The only exception, which is something I find really annoying, is when you want to limit the search to something specific using quotes and it ignores the quotes and provides results that are completely useless.

Startpage.com respects the quotes.

Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#364

Post by mdaniel » Fri, Mar 06, 2020, 10:24 PM UTC

tracker1 wrote: post #338

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 switched for about a month... for most general searches ddg was as good or better... when searching for development terms as a programmer, I found that the ddg results were often worthless to me. The context that google has associated to you specifically adds value to the results. Since most of my searches were for technical libraries, components, etc, I found myself searching again with !g more than half the time.…

> Also, a shorter domain name would help.

I'm surprised your browser doesn't just search from the "awesome bar", making navigating to the domain a non-event

However, the answer to your question is ddg.gg (unknown if that's short enough, but it's only 3 keys to press)

Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#365

Post by Jaxkr » Fri, Mar 06, 2020, 10:29 PM UTC

No it isn’t. I try to switch every few months, usually sticking with it as my only search engine on mobile and desktop. The results suck, and it is completely lacking in information about real-time topics.

Just compare the results for a live sports game across DuckDuckGo and Google. Or the query “democratic primary”.

In both of these google presents relevant accessible information while DDG does not.

DuckDuckGo wastes your time but protects your privacy. At the moment Google‘s results are so much better that I am willing to give up privacy in exchange for convenience.

I will continue trying DuckDuckGo every few months. Hopefully someday I will not feel drawn back to Google.

Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#366

Post by einpoklum » Fri, Mar 06, 2020, 10:33 PM UTC

The author does not remove ads. That skews the comparison relative to my experience.

Anyway - in my experience, DDG is good enough for most of my searches, but not all.

Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#367

Post by paul7986 » Fri, Mar 06, 2020, 10:37 PM UTC

Would any other DDG users like to see

- DDG Mail service

- DDG News.. i still use Google News begrudgingly

- a DDG Video site.. Youtube replacement (not easy to do with Youtube having so much content)

Personally, I'd drop all Google services if such were available. Maybe others would too?

Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#368

Post by zaat » Fri, Mar 06, 2020, 10:39 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

If you are on Windows, (or if you are on Linux but for some reason still runs) in PowerShell:

> (Get-Date).AddDays(365)

Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#369

Post by hombre_fatal » Fri, Mar 06, 2020, 10:54 PM UTC

sgt wrote: post #336

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 just googled DDG and nowhere on the front page did I see DuckDuckGo. Interesting, although not too surprising.

Comes up after DDG-the-artist related links at #3 or #4 on anonymized google. Seems ideally ranked.

Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#370

Post by hombre_fatal » Fri, Mar 06, 2020, 10:58 PM UTC

jt2190 wrote: post #154

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.

> A lot of DDG fans on HN blame the user or social conditioning and use that as a crutch. The tools are different, though, so searching the same way on DDG and Google will lead to different outcomes. This is no different than adapting you speech when speaking to an infant or speaking to an adult. [1] For example, I use DDG as my primary search tool, and I have a habit of using "keywords", rather than natural language…

I have a hard time believing there's actually much google-specific adaption going on for anyone except the biggest HN nerd.

My girlfriend types whole sentences into it. People in this thread have search examples like "harry potter sport". I look at my google search history and it's just generic search strings that DDG has no excuse to struggle.

Having to "tweak your language" just sounds like a cop-out to me. And I think people really just mean you have to add more context to DDG queries because it's easily confused. Like how "elm list" gives great results in google and bad results in DDG.