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DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

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Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#471

Post by redwall_hp »

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 find it's okay for desktop use, but frustrating on phones, because of the far inferior search suggestions. When I'm banging out nonsense on the shitty touchscreen keyboard, Google usually figures out what the hell I'm trying to search for. Duck Duck Go fails miserably at that, unfortunately.

Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#472

Post by redwall_hp »

godshatter wrote: post #181
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 have this same problem. I use the same "subject sub-subject (...) specific query" tactic I've been using since forever and Google search has been becoming less effective for me over the years. I switched to DDG a couple of years ago I think, and it's better for handling that sort of thing. Is there a search engine out there that respects quotes, and, or, case-insensitive when asked for, etc? In some ways I miss the…

What's going on is those of us who have been using the Web since Google was brand new (or earlier...remember AltaVista?) expect a search engine to find text on web pages.

What the average user in the post-smartphone world expects a search engine to do is deliver an answer to a question. These are basically incompatible, and it seems like a progressively smaller circle of the Web is being surfaced by Google these days, as they focus heavily on popularity and novelty.

Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#473

Post by UncleMeat »

ravenstine wrote: post #151
UncleMeat wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Don’t use natural language So... its worse. People want to use natural language.

It depends on how you look at it. I want to be specific in my searches, which is why I often use quotes, things like `site:somedomain.com`, etc. That said, that means that DDG is not for everyone. If people want to use Google because they prefer NLP, that's fine, but Google users who trash DDG because it's not smart like Google are totally dismissive of DDG's utility or why people choose it. DDG users on HN, on the o…

I think it is fine to say that DDG targets a different userbase and that the tech community is far more comfortable thinking about computer interfaces and keyword search. But that's not the conversation that people always have about DDG. The conversation is always "why does anybody use Google anymore" and "DDG is a replacement".

Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#474

Post by mcdevilkiller »

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…

Exactly the same experience here! It's incredible how Google looks like a storefront rather than a search engine now, if you have off of it for a while.

Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#475

Post by roryokane »

I switched to DuckDuckGo not for privacy, though that is nice, but to get away from a horrid misfeature Google introduced a year or so ago that moves links out from under my cursor right as I try to click on them. Specifically, it's Google's "People also search for" links.

Those links used to appear as just another box in the search results. But then Google made them appear when you click a search result and then navigate Back to the search results page. When I go back, usually I am planning to click on the search result below the one I had just clicked on. But right as I move my mouse to where the next search result was and click, a box expands under the link I had just visited with suggested searches. Whenever that box appears, I always end up clicking one of the suggested search links instead of the search result I was aiming for.

Google's testers probably don't notice the problem because they are slow to acquire targets with the mouse. They probably click on the Back button with their mouse instead of using a keyboard shortcut like I do. But I'm sticking with DuckDuckGo, because it doesn't ever shift the search results around on the page while I'm looking at it.

Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#476

Post by lizmat »

labster wrote: post #397
tus88 wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Which recently became even shorter:

    raku -e 'say "2019-03-12".Date + 366'
    2020-03-12

Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#477

Post by copperx »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #378
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…

FWIW you would have had a similar experience using Bing. I built a script based on some principals that were in place at Google when I was there to measure search quality[1] and have watched Bing steadily improve over time. I attribute it to a combination of more click stream data as more traffic has been funneled their way (through DDG and others), and algorithm rot at Google which is putting more and more paid cont…

What about DDG? Has their quality increased by your metrics?

Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#478

Post by copperx »

jstanley wrote: post #141
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.

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.

Couldn't DDG use the users location in a non evil way instead of not using it at all, like 1998 Google?

Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#480

Post by nikanj »

CapmCrackaWaka wrote: post #276
nikanj wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For something obscure, Google ignores three out of four keywords and just produces drivel.

I have found the opposite. For obscure programming questions (_ESPECIALLY_ error codes), google always finds me the right stack exchange thread on the front page. DDG usually gives me crap (but I could see where that crap comes from). I have noticed that Google's ads have gotten harder and harder to distinguish from the valid results. I use DDG until I have an obscure question, then I have to go back to Google.

Yeah, but sometimes Google ditches the error code because there are so many more results for a different error code.
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