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DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

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Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#391

Post by lostgame »

hedora wrote: post #165
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 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…

Might have wanted to try this, before using this example. As other commenters have noted, this immediately offers up ‘Quittich’ at the first result.

Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#392

Post by PunchTornado »

brann0 wrote: post #35
Thaxll wrote: post #8

I strongly disagree, especially when you have all the Wikipedia / contact / google map embedded into Google search, with one click it can call phone number from a restaurant. Edit: To add more, it's all those details that makes Google better than other, search engine are not just for searching things it's all about the display and relevance.

Mmmh, if you search for a place in the maps tab instead of the general one you usually have a telephone url you can tap to start a phone call. I still find that you're using a very specific use case of a search engine to completely dismiss not using a different search engine.

it's not a specific case. if I type federer on google I get a list of all his recent matches and live scores so it is easy to follow. A lot of my searches on google are like that. I don't even have to click on any links.

Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#393

Post by dmoy »

ImaCake wrote: post #328
_coveredInBees wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've switched to ddg for a while, and the one area where I find it really lacking in comparison to Google is that it is very poor in surfacing relevant hits from threads on forums or stackoverflow. Which is frustrating, as I'm almost more interested in results from there when looking up technical stuff than some spammy blog. It's gotten to the point where I almost always automatically bang out to Google for those typ…

I experience the same problem as a fairly novice programmer who doesn't always know the right term to stick into DDG/google. >It's gotten to the point where I almost always automatically bang out to Google for those types of searches. But this is why I stick with DDG, because it is very very easy to check elsewhere with a two letter bang. Even if I never used DDG search it would still be valuable to use DDG with bang…

Can't every web browser do this with keyword prefixes?

Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#394

Post by xingyzt »

ignoramous wrote: post #333
hiccuphippo wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can use !s in ddg to get google results without google.

I'm redirected to startpage for both !s and !sp from duckduckgo. Is there a setting I need to flip?

Startpage is a privacy-oriented proxy of Google search results.

Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#395

Post by burlesona »

halflings wrote: post #236
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…

Could you give an example or query that gives you "a wall of ads and videos"? I just tried a number of companies and it always shows a full column with info about the company (name, logo, stock value, founders, social media profiles, etc.)

Try searching for "Joe Biden." If you don't want his campaign to pay for an advertising click, where is the organic search link to his site? It's there but, at least for me, I now have to hunt to try and find it.

Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#396

Post by IlIlI »

alkonaut wrote: post #327

It’s not. Not even close. There should be some sort of “search benchmark” that could show this more objectively. A table of searches with search queries and the correct first resukt . In maby cases it’s clear what the correct result is (Search for a major company and I want their website index page for example). In other cases the expected result is “what google does”, e.g when searching for “123 GBP in USD”. It’s no…

If such a test existed, i would expect ddg to be on par or better than google. For finding index pages, I prefer ddg because the actual company isnt placed below advertised results of competitors. Currency conversions are supported. It also shows SO answers, github project info, latex commands and more on the results page. I'd recommend revisiting it.

Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#397

Post by labster »

tus88 wrote: post #304
michael_j_ward wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This? $ python -c 'import datetime; print(datetime.date(2019, 3, 12) + datetime.timedelta(days=366))' 2020-03-12

Yes.

Raku is a lot prettier than Python:

    perl6 -e 'say Date.new("2019-03-12").later( :366days )'
    2020-03-12
    perl6 -e 'say Date.new("2019-03-12") + 366'
    2020-03-12

Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#398

Post by dredmorbius »

galangalalgol wrote: post #359
vorpalhex wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish I could permanently remove pinterest from my version of the internet - it's literally spam at this point that never contains the content I'm looking for and adds no value while polluting search results.

ddg has -site:pinterest.com but i dont know ho to automatically append that to every search, which is what i want.

I could at least plug that (and a few others) into my default CLI search as part of the query string.

See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22506360

Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#399

Post by blisterpeanuts »

_coveredInBees wrote: post #302
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've switched to ddg for a while, and the one area where I find it really lacking in comparison to Google is that it is very poor in surfacing relevant hits from threads on forums or stackoverflow. Which is frustrating, as I'm almost more interested in results from there when looking up technical stuff than some spammy blog. It's gotten to the point where I almost always automatically bang out to Google for those typ…

Recently, at least, DDG has been surfacing lots of StackOverflow results for me, including the relevant snippets in the right margin that sometime suffice without opening the url.
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