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The curious case of DuckDuckGo

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Re: The curious case of DuckDuckGo

#21

Post by homosaur »

wongm wrote: post #18
homosaur wrote: post #12

I wish there was some way for the system to ban people if they submit their own blog posts. This is a non-study. The vast majority of people looking for "java" are looking for the programming language. If they weren't, all those links wouldn't be at the top of Google. For most people, this IS the correct response. For anyone else, seems like they could just say "huh, programming languages?" And then type "java indone…

What makes you think the vast majority of people looking for "java" are looking for the programming language? How many people in the world are programmers and are you biased by your own particular situation? The rest of the non-programming world is probably full of people wanting to know where to buy Java coffee, or wanting to know something about Indonesian islands.

I'm biased by knowing how Google works.

http://www.google.com/insights/search/#q=java&cmpt=q

The top searches involving "java" are download java, free java, string java, java script, sun, java sun, java code, etc etc. Even in Indonesia, the top searches are about the programming language.

I don't see islands or Indonesia or coffee anywhere.

Re: The curious case of DuckDuckGo

#22

Post by fbuilesv »

puredemo wrote: post #19

I've said this for a long time, but I think the biggest thing holding back DDG from truly widespread adoption is the name and branding. No one is ever going to 'dukgo' someone. Searching is a verb, the naming conventions used with DDG in its current form just don't fly. I'd love to talk shop with Gabriel about the identity decisions, and whether he is open to pivoting the brand identity now that the service is gettin…

Before Google we never Altavista'd or Yahoo'd anything, I don't see why this has to be a problem.

Also, please stop abusing the word "pivot" :(

Re: The curious case of DuckDuckGo

#23

Post by ecounysis »

homosaur wrote: post #12

I wish there was some way for the system to ban people if they submit their own blog posts. This is a non-study. The vast majority of people looking for "java" are looking for the programming language. If they weren't, all those links wouldn't be at the top of Google. For most people, this IS the correct response. For anyone else, seems like they could just say "huh, programming languages?" And then type "java indone…

The article does a good job of highlighting certain instances where using Google is a pain in the ass. I personally don't like the spell-correct feature. For me, it is only correct in its conclusion that I mistyped a word about 10% of the time. The other 90% is a nuisance because I have to go back and explicitly tell it that I meant to tell it what I told it.

Re: The curious case of DuckDuckGo

#24

Post by robrenaud »

gallerytungsten wrote: post #13

re: "Google over does search" (and "autocorrects" your search). This "feature" has been getting steadily more annoying, particularly with more obscure words, or words where there is a similar word that's in more widespread use. Thinking about it now, I was wishing there was a way to turn off this feature; but alas, a dive into http://www.google.com/preferences doesn't seem to have "turn off that dang autocorrect" as…

Append &nfpr=1 (short for "no full page replacement") to all your google queries:

For example:

http://www.google.com/search?q=college+or+uncollege&nfpr...

I am sure it's not that hard to write a greasemonkey script to do that for you automatically, but I tend to like the feature, especially when I fat finger queries with my cell phone.

Re: The curious case of DuckDuckGo

#25

Post by Sephr »

mtogo wrote: post #5

Among the benefits listed and hundreds of others are the !bang commands, which i really love. Want to do a search on stackoverflow right from your url bar? !so Hello world Or maybe wikipedia? !w Hello world Or do a google search !g Hello world

If you visit any of those sites enough in Chrome, all you have to do is type a couple letters from the domain and then space or tab to search that site, given that they expose an OpenSearch Description. DuckDuckGo can't do this, as it static keywords instead of heuristically selecting the site you most likely want to search with the characters you have entered so far.

Re: The curious case of DuckDuckGo

#26

Post by mtogo »

Sephr wrote: post #25
mtogo wrote: post #5

Among the benefits listed and hundreds of others are the !bang commands, which i really love. Want to do a search on stackoverflow right from your url bar? !so Hello world Or maybe wikipedia? !w Hello world Or do a google search !g Hello world

If you visit any of those sites enough in Chrome, all you have to do is type a couple letters from the domain and then space or tab to search that site, given that they expose an OpenSearch Description. DuckDuckGo can't do this, as it static keywords instead of heuristically selecting the site you most likely want to search with the characters you have entered so far.

This is one of my favorite features of Chrome, but as i said in my comment below, that only works in chrome, it only works on the computer you visit those sites from, and DDG has a handful of hundred sites whereas chrome has only a few that you visit.

A good feature, but for my usage patterns it doesn't hold a candle to DDG !bang commands.

Re: The curious case of DuckDuckGo

#27

Post by mitjak »

robrenaud wrote: post #24
gallerytungsten wrote: post #13

re: "Google over does search" (and "autocorrects" your search). This "feature" has been getting steadily more annoying, particularly with more obscure words, or words where there is a similar word that's in more widespread use. Thinking about it now, I was wishing there was a way to turn off this feature; but alas, a dive into http://www.google.com/preferences doesn't seem to have "turn off that dang autocorrect" as…

Append &nfpr=1 (short for "no full page replacement") to all your google queries: For example: http://www.google.com/search?q=college+or+uncollege&nfpr... I am sure it's not that hard to write a greasemonkey script to do that for you automatically, but I tend to like the feature, especially when I fat finger queries with my cell phone.

If you're using Chrome's omni bar to search, you can permanently append that query parameter in the search engine settings in the preferences to avoid having to specify it explicitly.

Re: The curious case of DuckDuckGo

#29

Post by nl »

ecounysis wrote: post #23
homosaur wrote: post #12

I wish there was some way for the system to ban people if they submit their own blog posts. This is a non-study. The vast majority of people looking for "java" are looking for the programming language. If they weren't, all those links wouldn't be at the top of Google. For most people, this IS the correct response. For anyone else, seems like they could just say "huh, programming languages?" And then type "java indone…

The article does a good job of highlighting certain instances where using Google is a pain in the ass. I personally don't like the spell-correct feature. For me, it is only correct in its conclusion that I mistyped a word about 10% of the time. The other 90% is a nuisance because I have to go back and explicitly tell it that I meant to tell it what I told it.

it is only correct in its conclusion that I mistyped a word about 10% of the time

I'd love to see your statistics on that - you must use a lot of very unusual words. Google has published a paper about the algorithm they use.

There are two cases:

If Google thinks you might be wrong it will display "Did you mean..." with the possible correction.

If Google is pretty sure you are wrong, it will search for what it thinks is correct and show what you typed originally as an option.

If you are hitting the second case 90% of the time then you are a very, very special snowflake indeed!

I have to go back and explicitly tell it that I meant to tell it what I told it

You have to click on the link to say you really meant what you typed.

Re: The curious case of DuckDuckGo

#30

Post by wiradikusuma »

lotharbot wrote: post #15
ceejayoz wrote: post #3

> I did the same search in DuckDuckGo and I got results as expected. Simple. For this unusual case. In most situations I've encountered, Google's auto correction is quite helpful. > What if I was searching for place Java of Java Coffee fame. I would need to scan through the search results, spanning multi-pages (second page in this), until I came across the one that related to Java, the place. Or, you revise your quer…

> "In most situations I've encountered, Google's auto correction is quite helpful." I'm a fairly good speller and a good typist, and I almost always mean to search for what I typed. Most days, Google's auto-correct feature is of negative value to me. YMMV of course.

but it can be beneficial for those non-native English speakers like me. sometimes, when composing email, i googled for some word to know its meaning and its correct spelling.
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