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DuckDuckGo Cooks Google's Goose

thestreet.com

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Re: DuckDuckGo Cooks Google's Goose

#31

Post by sounds »

suking wrote: post #11

I'm so sick of these DDG stories. The truth is no one uses them, 99.9999% of people outside SV have never heard of them and currently there is no reason to switch to them.

I don't see DDG taking Google's search crown. But it could happen the way Firefox opened the barn door - then other browsers came to take the crown (Chrome, for example).

[1] indicates DDG uses third-party APIs for deep web searches. To me that sounds like how Inktomi was a "search engine API" and neither Inktomi nor Yahoo saw Google coming [2].

Even if DDG doesn't succeed, Google is now at the top of the hill and therefore is _the_ target for all competitors.

[1] http://help.duckduckgo.com/customer/portal/articles/216399-s...

[2] http://diegobasch.com/a-relevant-tale-how-google-killed-inkt... and HN discussion http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3924609

Re: DuckDuckGo Cooks Google's Goose

#32

Post by jebblue »

thematt wrote: post #9
jebblue wrote: post #3

It looks like a cheap knock-off of Google and doesn't give me the hit count for "Ubuntu" (or I missed it). Google gives me over 200 million, Bing over 44 million.

How is that in any way a useful statistic? Who cares about 200+ million results vs. 44 million? Most people don't look at the fifth result, let alone the 200 millionth one. What matters is the first page and whether those top results are the best and most relevant for a given query.

It's useful to me, I've looked at it for over a decade, I want to get a good feeling that my search engine is doing everything it can to scour the Internet and is not filtering my search results out, they prioritize and that's cool.

Re: DuckDuckGo Cooks Google's Goose

#33

Post by there »

glesica wrote: post #17
suking wrote: post #11

I'm so sick of these DDG stories. The truth is no one uses them, 99.9999% of people outside SV have never heard of them and currently there is no reason to switch to them.

I switched. For 80-90% of my queries it gets me to the same place as Google just as quickly, or more quickly in some cases. For the other 10-20% there's the !bang syntax, which also lets me search images and maps right from the Chrome address bar without ever hitting the mouse. Use the tools that make you most productive. For me, that's DDG. For you, maybe not. But I think "...there is no reason to switch to them" ju…

Unfortunately for me, the most used !bang function was "!g" to re-run the search on Google. I used DDG daily for months as my default search engine and on about half of all my queries (most of them technical searches), it would give poor enough results that I'd scan the page, re-run the query with "!g " and find a useful result on Google in the first or second listing.

I finally admitted to myself that I was wasting too much time having to run so many searches twice and I switched back to Google.

Re: DuckDuckGo Cooks Google's Goose

#34

Post by jebblue »

runako wrote: post #10
jebblue wrote: post #3

It looks like a cheap knock-off of Google and doesn't give me the hit count for "Ubuntu" (or I missed it). Google gives me over 200 million, Bing over 44 million.

>> Google gives me over 200 million, Bing over 44 million. Is that relevant to your evaluation of a search engine? I don't care how many hits the engine shows, just what it shows in the first 3 links or so. The rest is noise.

You bet, you can't plan a trip to the farthest reaches of the Universe on only a few data points.

Re: DuckDuckGo Cooks Google's Goose

#35

Post by jebblue »

Aloisius wrote: post #22
jebblue wrote: post #3

It looks like a cheap knock-off of Google and doesn't give me the hit count for "Ubuntu" (or I missed it). Google gives me over 200 million, Bing over 44 million.

Google gives me over 200 million, 9 which are useful, Bing over 44 million, 10 which are useful. There, fixed that for you.

You fixed it for you, not for me. DuckDuckGo does not tell me the data pool they are recommending results to me from. That is huge to me.

Re: DuckDuckGo Cooks Google's Goose

#36

Post by lambda »

zck wrote: post #26
lambda wrote: post #23

I tried setting my main search engine to DuckDuckGo once. I switched back to Google after trying to search for maps and local results. One of the really important features that Google offers me is Google Maps. Not having that kills DuckDuckGo for me, even if their normal search results were to work just as well.

In DuckDuckGo, searching for map! place I'm going to redirects you to google maps with the same query.

Yes, but with Google, I don't have to think about that; I just type "place I'm going" (which is frequently copied & pasted, so I'm not even typing, and adding "map! " would be a separate step), and I'm done. And it's not just for maps; it's also local results, like when you search for "japanese food some place" and get a list of several places with a map and aggregated ratings. For instance, when I do "japanese food place I live" on Google, I get a bunch of relevant results with star ratings, and the best one is on top. When I do the same on DDG, I get links to several other restaurant aggregator sites like GrubHub, Yelp, Urbanspoon, and so on, plus one link to a restaurant that only lasted a few months before closing.

If I'm going to do "map! place name" in order to get map results, I might as well just use Google; DDG isn't adding anything. Google is a place where I can type "thing I'm looking for", and get, most of the time, the answer I'm looking for, while with DDG that's just not true.

Re: DuckDuckGo Cooks Google's Goose

#37

Post by jebblue »

wahnfrieden wrote: post #16
jebblue wrote: post #3

It looks like a cheap knock-off of Google and doesn't give me the hit count for "Ubuntu" (or I missed it). Google gives me over 200 million, Bing over 44 million.

Just so you know, at least Google's hit count is usually off by several orders of magnitude. It's comforting to see it, but it's almost entirely inaccurate.

I've seen out field (ok outlier) data points end up making all the difference in the end. That's why it matters to me.

Re: DuckDuckGo Cooks Google's Goose

#38

Post by stevewillows »

there wrote: post #33
glesica wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I switched. For 80-90% of my queries it gets me to the same place as Google just as quickly, or more quickly in some cases. For the other 10-20% there's the !bang syntax, which also lets me search images and maps right from the Chrome address bar without ever hitting the mouse. Use the tools that make you most productive. For me, that's DDG. For you, maybe not. But I think "...there is no reason to switch to them" ju…

Unfortunately for me, the most used !bang function was "!g" to re-run the search on Google. I used DDG daily for months as my default search engine and on about half of all my queries (most of them technical searches), it would give poor enough results that I'd scan the page, re-run the query with "!g " and find a useful result on Google in the first or second listing. I finally admitted to myself that I was wasting…

I am in the same camp. I would like an option for custom bangs

Re: DuckDuckGo Cooks Google's Goose

#40

Post by codeka »

suking wrote: post #11

I'm so sick of these DDG stories. The truth is no one uses them, 99.9999% of people outside SV have never heard of them and currently there is no reason to switch to them.

The thing I don't understand is, for all that DDG does, there's really nothing that Google and/or Bing couldn't just copy wholesale if it were really that great.

The ONLY thing DuckDuckGo can do that Google won't is "privacy" (maybe "less ads" is another thing). While that might be reason enough for some people to switch, it's barely going to make a dent in Google's dominance.

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