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DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

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Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#431

Post by metastart »

I care about true privacy and transparency...so I use the Epic Privacy Browser and their ad-free and transparent EpicSearch.in.

The claim in the blog post and by DuckDuckGo "They do not collect or share personal information" can not be true depending on how you define personal information since search ads are localized on DuckDuckGo. Incidentally, DuckDuckGo refuses to disclose what data they send to Bing/Yahoo to retrieve search ads (forget about open source, they're not even transparent). This claim is further in question as their search ads link directly to Yahoo/Bing so they direct your IP and personal information directly to them -- while one can see those links while hovering on the links, it's not plainly disclosed (especially for non-technical users). Fundamentally their business is built on sending your personal information to Bing.

The results in EpicSearch aren't as good as Bing/Yahoo/DuckDuckGo nor as Google...but they are quite close to any intuitive idea of being private and are as good or better at times at least 80% of the time...so from there I'll click on to Bing or Google if I need more results.

Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#432

Post by ebg13 »

TwoBit wrote: post #426
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.

OK,though is "filled torus" even a proper name? Looks like Google recognizes that you probably really mean solid torus.

Fine. Search for "full prison" instead.

Worse yet, search for "middle school".

Hell, searching for "cat" results in "Cat Porn Videos"!

Searching for "zebra" results in "Zebra Porn Videos"!

Searching for "dolphin" results in "Dolphin Porn Videos"!

"ballet" gives porn!

Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#433

Post by elliottback »

bla3 wrote: post #163
diffeomorphism wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> To my knowledge duck duck go uses Bing's search API to get their results. And their own crawler and wikipedia and stackexchange and about 400 other sources: https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/so... That said, yeah it is mainly a better Bing.

That page basically confirms this. It says > To do that, we've developed an open source Instant Answer platform called DuckDuckHack, which links to https://duckduckhack.com/ which says "DuckDuckHack is now in Maintenance Mode". And the "four hundred sources" link links to 400 special case replies. They are probably useful, but fire rarely. It's basically Bing, and that page is a bunch of spin.

A search in Bing for "cult of the dead cow" seems to give me some localized (Japan) results, while DDG has a bunch of American Beto O'Rourke politics news pieces added.

Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#434

Post by NicolasGorden »

whalesalad wrote: post #46
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…

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.

For me the differences are:

Google is better at dealing with topics that are trending and providing data right on the SERP without having to click through. If I want to look up the latest Corona Virus stats, I'd do so on google. As the article states, things like Google's stock panel are just superior to other options.

But DDG is better at historical searches. It's like they try to 'understand' you less and want to provide you with all possible things you could be looking for. Like Google used to do and like I prefer. I've looked up old articles I had read and wanted to reference when writing an article. On Google and they just don't come up. No matter what I do: use the date tool, use quotes, etc, it's like Google thinks it's too old/irrelevant for me, so no matter what I search, it won't give it to me. But on DDG, they are there and will come up with the right set of keywords.

Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#435

Post by ferzul »

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…

yeah, i used to find ddg good enough for normal searces, and a bit off for specialised e.g. api help, for which a !g was necessary

nowadays, i get different results for those specialised searces, but they aren't better. i much more rarely bother with google now.

Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#436

Post by ferzul »

thewebcount wrote: post #315
schoen wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

you could be running gnu/linux or windows with msys, neither of which are unix

Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#437

Post by byuu »

joe_the_user wrote: post #341
sgt wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Note: The Duckduckgo site is the first result for "Duck Duck Go", you mean the string "DDG" in particular I'm presuming. Now, it's not Google's obligation to make Duck Duck go a primary result for the DDG abbreviation - DDG the artist is apparently quite popular. It would be nice, yes, if Google didn't just guess the best meaning for DDG but instead gave a spectrum of the common meanings (though Duck Duck Go might st…

Yeah, both Google and DDG have the "we know better than you" problem with searching. I have to aggressively use the -keyword filter on searches with both.

Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#438

Post by ferzul »

igravious wrote: post #384
bloodorange wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

So, to be clear, Google is lamer than DDG because it supports the natural language expression `X days after M D Y` but does not support the mathematical `M D Y + X days` I guess Google has figured out with its trillions(?) of queries how humans search and not how nerds search.

every nerd is a human

Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#439

Post by chipperyman573 »

rhexs wrote: post #402
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'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.

Just to be clear, are you saying DDG gives you better results? I was just thinking about how google has this problem

Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#440

Post by a_c »

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…

Have been using DDG for a couple of years. Am satisfied with its english result. One area for improvement would be non-english search results. For me it's non-english results are largely irrelevant, compared to google
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