DuckDuckGo is blowing up

Post by glesica » Thu, Mar 29, 2012, 3:57 PM UTC

phlyingpenguin wrote: post #52

mrspeaker wrote: post #17

!g is the google killer. I switched to DDG, but kept drifting back to see if Google was doing better. I find myself using !g less and less, as I get used to the result format. At the moment, DDG reminds me of Firefox (or was it WaterSquirrel then?) back-in-the-day. Its something that "feels" better than what is the standard - and it's something that I go on and on about to other nerds, when I'm drunk ;)

I hate this (!g) though. If I want Google results, it's a heck of a lot faster, easier, and natural to just Google it instead of adding some kind of search operator BS to my query. I used DDG for a while (a long time ago, admittedly) and basically had to !g every query I ran in order to get acceptable results. In the end, I gave up because it was just adding typing and thinking time to search. I suppose one could arg…

Post by pushingbits » Thu, Mar 29, 2012, 4:00 PM UTC

moultano wrote: post #95

pushingbits wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find that I am slowly losing confidence in Google. What I often do is input searches in the form: "general term", "specific term", then click on a link and immediately do a find for the specific term I searched for. In the last few months, the specific term I searched for often does not exist on the linked site at all, which I find quite annoying. I tried bing a couple of times, but the results are even worse. Mayb…

Would love to see some example queries to debug if you have them handy. (You can check your search history https://www.google.com/history/ to jog your memory if you have it turned on.)

Post by BCM43 » Thu, Mar 29, 2012, 4:07 PM UTC

Wilduck wrote: post #76

TylerE wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's probably thinking of "IceWeasel" which was a rebranded firefox a linux distro (Fedora maybe?) was shipping due to some sort of copyright/licensing quirk.

Debian actually. It's now GNU IceCat though. The reason they changed the name is because Debian backports some security features to Firefox, and Mozilla denies the use of the Firefox branding to unofficial builds of the software.

Post by xpose2000 » Thu, Mar 29, 2012, 4:11 PM UTC

jlarocco wrote: post #98

xpose2000 wrote: post #92

It's great to hear that DDG is doing well. The problem is that I will never switch over to it due to its shortcomings compared to Google and even Bing. I tried to give it a go for a day or so, but quickly realized the results being returned were not good enough. 1) It's not as accurate as Google. Sometimes DDG might return a better result (such as https://duckduckgo.com/?q=alternative+to+picasa ), but 9/10 times Goog…

As a counterexample for number one, I've found DDG to be as good or better than Google on almost everything. The only place Google really beats it is in mailing list archives. DDG doesn't seem to crawl sites like gmane. Numbers two and three don't make any sense to me as reasons not to use DDG. Using those criteria nobody would have switched to Google because they were just some college guys, while AltaVista and Yaho…

Post by chaostheory » Thu, Mar 29, 2012, 4:15 PM UTC

jackery wrote: post #46

spodek wrote: post #11

People care about privacy and not being tracked. I predict Google's arms race with Facebook to profit more from user's data will augment this growth. And/or dampen that arms race. That's why I search with DuckDuckGo by default (previously Scroogle).

With everyone's concern with privacy, I'm surprised Ask Eraser isn't mentioned more frequently ( http://sp.ask.com/en/docs/about/askeraser.shtml ).