DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use • Hacker News Board

Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#401

Post by incompatible » Sat, Mar 07, 2020, 1:11 AM UTC

LMMojo wrote: post #268

savanaly wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Depends what "celebrate" entails. The calculation of dates is straightforward at least.

Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#402

Post by rhexs » Sat, Mar 07, 2020, 1:14 AM UTC

hedora wrote: post #129

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.

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've said this before, but I really don't get any useful results from Google at all anymore. I have to prefix Reddit for every search to at least try to get a vaguely human answer to a question.

Of course Reddit is still gamed and has plenty of other issues, but far less than Google at this point.

Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#403

Post by soraminazuki » Sat, Mar 07, 2020, 1:23 AM UTC

coldpie wrote: post #220

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 strongly suggest installing an ad blocker. Firefox for Android supports ad blockers like uBlock Origin.

Using an adblocker won't stop an ad company from mining your search queries.

Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#404

Post by ensignro2340 » Sat, Mar 07, 2020, 1:32 AM UTC

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…

>Even if I never used DDG search it would still be valuable to use DDG with bangs for wikipedia, google, youtube, etc.

I love this about ddg. I watch to a lot of YouTube videos, and being able to just type “!yt search terms” is just too useful.

Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#405

Post by frosted-flakes » Sat, Mar 07, 2020, 1:42 AM UTC

dmoy wrote: post #393

ImaCake wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Sure, but you have to configure it to do that. There are bangs for pretty much everything, and I can usually guess them easily enough. !wayback is a favourite of mine.

Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#406

Post by drivebycomment » Sat, Mar 07, 2020, 1:42 AM UTC

wolco wrote: post #240

richthegeek wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Today I was trying to find info about Corpus Christi - a Polish film that won some awards lately. DDG gives me information about a place in Texas, including stuff from the local newspaper and attractions. I'm searching from a Poland IP btw. Anyway, the actual film was at the very end of the first page of results for me. It certainly feels like it priotises things weirdly. Google Maps has a similar issue though: plent…

Wait a second. You can't use a privacy themed search engine and expect them to lookup your ip, figure out what city you are in. The entire point of using ddg is to avoid this.

DDG does use ip address to locate you.

Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#407

Post by mindfulgeek » Sat, Mar 07, 2020, 1:47 AM UTC

I switched over to DDG + brave about 6 months ago. Haven’t looked back.

Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#408

Post by insulanus » Sat, Mar 07, 2020, 1:51 AM UTC

roydivision wrote: post #343

epicalex wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This drives me insane. In the early days you only got exact matches, now in an effort to sell more ads, or be more “helpful” you get random crap. I would pay for a search that only returned results with the words you entered.

Google Verbatim. It is super well hidden.

Type your Query, select "Tools", then "All Results".

Switch that to "Verbatim"

Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#409

Post by ryantgtg » Sat, Mar 07, 2020, 2:04 AM UTC

frosted-flakes wrote: post #405

dmoy wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Sure, but you have to configure it to do that. There are bangs for pretty much everything, and I can usually guess them easily enough. !wayback is a favourite of mine.

I’ve been using DDG for years, but sometimes i wonder if it’s just Bing with bangs. I haven’t exhaustively crosschecked this, but the results seem to very closely match Bing’s. They say they use results from a few engines. I wonder what the percentage per engine is.

Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#410

Post by wdutch » Sat, Mar 07, 2020, 2:29 AM UTC

speps wrote: post #11

It's only good enough when you're in the US, I live in the UK and DDG consistently returns non local results even though the country is set correctly, it's especially annoying given how many US cities are named after their UK counterpart.

I'm from the UK and have used duckduckgo as my default search engine for about 3 years. It's probably due to my specific searching habits but I have never noticed the issue you have.