I just want to say I use duckduckgo, but the reason is because I find Google's recent policies to be unsupportable and I no longer want to use them. So far duckduckgo has been inferior in just about every way to google, most notably search speed and search quality. Also I have seen some extremely dubious scammy ads in ddg, which make me uncomfortable for sure.
DuckDuckGo is blowing up
111–120 of 219 posts
Re: DuckDuckGo is blowing up
#112Thank you all! (I'm the founder.) In response to a lot of the comments here, please know that two major things we're working on are better programming queries ( https://duckduckgo.com/tech.html -- one of my new favorites https://duckduckgo.com/?q=alternative+to+picasa ) and speed. For speed, just this week we upgraded our whole caching system, which should significantly speed up a lot of queries. I'd be interested to…
I've certainly noticed a difference in speed. I've been using DDG solid for around a couple years now and the only thing I ever really lament is the speed, so I'm very glad you guys are working on it. And it is definitely getting better. And, as always, I can't live without the disambiguation feature, it saves me so much time.
Re: DuckDuckGo is blowing up
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
The difference now is that Google is constantly trying to improve now more than ever, whereas before the search engines thought it was "good enough". AltaVista and Yahoo were stuck in the technology of the day. The guys at Google had a crazy idea to implement "pagerank" and turn everything upside down. I switched to Google because it was more accurate, and for no reason other than that. That's my #1 priority. Fast fo…
They are trying to solve the same problems, just coming at it from different angles.
Google has given up on providing accurate search results to the anonymous user. They now believe that customization is the way forward (Global Warming results depending on your political leaning, etc.).
One aspect where Google's size is really killing it: they should be manipulating results manually. For example, a JavaScript search should return MDN in the top 5 results and W3Schools not at all. That doesn't happen, I believe because Google can't manually do stuff like this because of the fact that they compete in many different markets. That's the advantage of only being a search engine; a search engine's job is to be biased.
Re: DuckDuckGo is blowing up
#114Wow, thats a great curve. Just wanted to throw in my personal experience with DuckDuckGo, and it doesn't necessarily reflect on DuckDuckGo specifically, however: After seeing them pop up here once or twice quite recently I thought I'd give it a go, I opened up preferences in Chrome and switched my default search over to DDG. It felt good, made a nice change but was certainly a bit "odd". I found what I wanted, most o…
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…
I know what you mean.
These days, I've been searching for things about Flask with Heroku. So I tend to search for something like "python flask heroku sqlite", and often times, I get results that are not specific to Flask. (NB: I don't know if this example works but you get the idea)
Re: DuckDuckGo is blowing up
#115Thank you all! (I'm the founder.) In response to a lot of the comments here, please know that two major things we're working on are better programming queries ( https://duckduckgo.com/tech.html -- one of my new favorites https://duckduckgo.com/?q=alternative+to+picasa ) and speed. For speed, just this week we upgraded our whole caching system, which should significantly speed up a lot of queries. I'd be interested to…
Thanks for having people answer feedback with real emails. My feedback has been mostly about the existence of malware-wrapped download links for popular tools like FileZilla, PuTTY, vlc, etc. I've gotten good support responses that have removed particular links, but how do I bubble this up into a feature with the goal of never showing a user a non-official download?
Re: DuckDuckGo is blowing up
#116I've tried hacking the Safari Binary using the online instructions to make DDG my default search (GLIMS sucks), but I can't get it working at all. I can't find the lines that I'm meant to be replacing.
Has anyone else had any luck?
Re: DuckDuckGo is blowing up
#117about a year ago i checked my niche site and you still have the same results,
my niche word is no 1 on both Google and Duck ,
while google places my website first for the given niche word ,
then Duck places my facebook page first and my actual website as a second result - which seems odd, especially because the website has few fans
Re: DuckDuckGo is blowing up
#118about a year ago i checked my niche site and you still have the same results,
my niche word is no 1 on both Google and Duck ,
while google places my website first for the given niche word ,
then Duck places my facebook page first and my actual website as a second result - which seems odd, especially because the website has few facebook fans
Re: DuckDuckGo is blowing up
#119Thank you all! (I'm the founder.) In response to a lot of the comments here, please know that two major things we're working on are better programming queries ( https://duckduckgo.com/tech.html -- one of my new favorites https://duckduckgo.com/?q=alternative+to+picasa ) and speed. For speed, just this week we upgraded our whole caching system, which should significantly speed up a lot of queries. I'd be interested to…
Way cool. Going to try using this as my default search engine for a while. I really really like the "alternative to" feature. What could I do to help you get better at alternatives which are not as popular? (eg, "alternative to cheetahmail" or "alternative to grubhub" or "alternative to xkcd"?) Also, what kind of feedback would you need to help improve the tech-related searches? Like "ebcdic table" or "1010 in hex"?
I agree, DDG is very cool.
As I understood a while ago that Google tracks my search habits, I avoid using it. I went back to WebCrawler, Cuil, Altvista, Bing... None of these compare to DDG in terms of quality.
Great job. It is time to get an alternative to Google. Don't be evil is just a silly marketing gag.
Re: DuckDuckGo is blowing up
#120Glad to hear. Been using it more of late.