DDG is good but not for non-english context. I mean, comparing to google for Greek text search is laughable at best.
That said, I hope the grow strong so I can use their engine.
Inside DuckDuckGo, Google's Tiniest, Fiercest Competitor
61–70 of 245 posts
Re: Inside DuckDuckGo, Google's Tiniest, Fiercest Competitor
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
I applaud what DDG is doing. I've been using it as my default search engine for roughly 2 years. Yes, there are some areas for improvement, especially when it comes to complex technical queries. But for the majority of everyday things, DDG is excellent, and returns less advertisement bloat within its results than Google/Bing. Plus ducks are my favorite animal, so launching DDG as I begin the work day is a joy!
>> Plus ducks are my favorite animal The "I'm feeling ducky" feature never fails to illicit a smile from me.
elicit.
(Why correct him? Because I care.)
Re: Inside DuckDuckGo, Google's Tiniest, Fiercest Competitor
#63Duck duck is barely usable ... but they don't spy on you. The !g and !b commands make it my first choice. If the results aren't getting what you want, try the search on google or bing. IF you don't mind Sergy Brin or Bill Gates tracking you. I still think there's room for a search engine that supports boolean(ish?) operations like AND, OR , NOT and NEAR. Providing links directly to the source and not a redirect to th…
Google supports AND, OR, NOT and NEAR. There is an AROUND operator that is similar to NEAR.
I think the way DDG can gain more traction is motivating top sites to enhance their local search pagerank. It's incredible how Google search restricted to Stack Overflow works better than the Stack Overflow local search engine. I wrote a rant about this at Challenging Google’s Search Engine [1].
[1] http://blog.databigbang.com/letters-from-the-future-challeng...
Re: Inside DuckDuckGo, Google's Tiniest, Fiercest Competitor
#64Duck duck is barely usable ... but they don't spy on you. The !g and !b commands make it my first choice. If the results aren't getting what you want, try the search on google or bing. IF you don't mind Sergy Brin or Bill Gates tracking you. I still think there's room for a search engine that supports boolean(ish?) operations like AND, OR , NOT and NEAR. Providing links directly to the source and not a redirect to th…
I applaud what DDG is doing. I've been using it as my default search engine for roughly 2 years. Yes, there are some areas for improvement, especially when it comes to complex technical queries. But for the majority of everyday things, DDG is excellent, and returns less advertisement bloat within its results than Google/Bing. Plus ducks are my favorite animal, so launching DDG as I begin the work day is a joy!
This was my experience with DDG as well. For everyday searches, it does a fine search. But it fails pretty miserably with complex technical queries which is probably 95% of what I use web search for. For that reason, after trying DDG for about a year (for the second time) I switched to startpage.com.
Re: Inside DuckDuckGo, Google's Tiniest, Fiercest Competitor
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
Good question. Google is better at guessing your focus. I'm not sure how they do it. Sometimes duckduck is pretty lost and scattershot. I have the opportunity of rephrasing the query or just hitting !g . If I don't mind google tracking the query, then I'll do a !g and often what I want is in the top 3. Sometimes, I don't want google tracking me (e.g. to check out a health issue) , then I'll work out a better query on…
Perhaps Google is better at guessing your focus precisely because they are tracking you?
The queries I find myself switching to Google for are:
* When I want a local result (i.e. I'm googling for business cards, and I want a UK based company that will sell them to me). This is because DuckDuckGo doesn't use your location (by default).
* When I am searching for a word that means something different to me than for the general population. For instance when I search for Python I don't want to see snakes. Google does this by tracking the results you click and forming a profile of you.
I guess the DuckDuckGo way is to search these by !uk and !programming, but that is a whole extra word to type. It would be nice if it let you list your interests in its settings page, creating your own filter bubble.
Re: Inside DuckDuckGo, Google's Tiniest, Fiercest Competitor
#66Re: Inside DuckDuckGo, Google's Tiniest, Fiercest Competitor
#67Re: Inside DuckDuckGo, Google's Tiniest, Fiercest Competitor
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
Barely usable, yes I agree. So use Startpage.com. They also say they don't spy on you. It works just as good as Google, because it uses Google (see it as a proxy). DDG is especially terrible if you are used localized versions of Google. I was used to "Swedish Google", and using a localized (Swedish) DDG was totally unusable. And so I found Startpage. Works better than the real deal for me. There are a few differences…
How come Startpage always shows me local results?
They could use GeoIP targeting without tracking users with cookies.
Re: Inside DuckDuckGo, Google's Tiniest, Fiercest Competitor
#69What's repeatedly surprised me is how I'll get results from DuckDuckGo and think that, "You know, I bet Google would have given better/more relevant results." And then I'm proven wrong! When DuckDuckGo gives nonrelevant results, Google often isn't any better, and when DuckDuckGo gives relevant results, sometimes they're often as relevant or more relevant than Google. I switched cold turkey a few months back, and I'm very pleased with how usable it is. I also really like the !word features, it's better than Google in that respect. I should mention that it's easier to do math in Google because Google infers more (such as inferring parens in an expression like: "2 + 2) * 4", outputting "16". DuckDuckGo can't handle that at the moment.
Re: Inside DuckDuckGo, Google's Tiniest, Fiercest Competitor
#70Most of the time when I have tried DDG the results I got back looked like spam I would get if I clicked on the 3 or 4 result page from a Google search.