Inside DuckDuckGo, Google's Tiniest, Fiercest Competitor • Hacker News Board

Re: Inside DuckDuckGo, Google's Tiniest, Fiercest Competitor

#81

Post by ithkuil » Thu, Feb 20, 2014, 6:00 PM UTC

I'm impressed, it works quite well.

However, just to put DuckDuckGo's 4 Mqpd into a broader context:

Google 2013: 5.9 Gqpd Bing 2012: 3.1 Gqpd

Not to put DuckDuckGo down or anything, but it's important to understand what a >1000x difference in scale means, in terms of operating costs and scalability issues. For example, for a single person is very easy to get hold of $10k but it's extremely difficult to get $10M. (I'm not actually interested in money, it's just an example measurement unit, and particular range, that people are familiar with).

Sources: http://www.statisticbrain.com/google-searches/ http://leaderswest.com/2012/07/02/how-bings-search-increased...

Re: Inside DuckDuckGo, Google's Tiniest, Fiercest Competitor

#82

Post by rjzzleep » Thu, Feb 20, 2014, 6:06 PM UTC

laureny wrote: post #72

tosseraccount wrote: post #11

Duck 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…

> Duck duck is barely usable ... but they don't spy on you. 1. You don't know that. 2. No search engine ever spied on you when they started.

absolutely true, but basically it just means, we need to make it easy to build search engine infrastructure

Re: Inside DuckDuckGo, Google's Tiniest, Fiercest Competitor

#83

Post by rjzzleep » Thu, Feb 20, 2014, 6:07 PM UTC

unicornporn wrote: post #49

tosseraccount wrote: post #11

Duck 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…

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…

why don't inurl: site: etc. work properly in startpage.com anyway?

Re: Inside DuckDuckGo, Google's Tiniest, Fiercest Competitor

#84

Post by rjzzleep » Thu, Feb 20, 2014, 6:09 PM UTC

pielud wrote: post #55

The killer feature for me with ddg (as a programmer) is the ! searches for documentation: !php strstr !python os.makedirs !pypi requests !js String etc. This gives you a single search bar for all documentation, which is amazing. edit: formatting

ironically !c# brings you to a forbidden place :p

Re: Inside DuckDuckGo, Google's Tiniest, Fiercest Competitor

#85

Post by acheron » Thu, Feb 20, 2014, 6:12 PM UTC

ithkuil wrote: post #48

arca_vorago wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, we absolutely cannot stop bringing up the privacy implications of an entity knowing more about us than they deserve to, and no amount of waving it away under the (false) pretense that they "need" it to do "other" things is going to work. I'll ignore the entire filter bubble issue and get right down to the privacy implications. When often people use search engines or other related websites (reddit search) to look…

I think the key point here is that corporation using your data doesn't imply that their CEOs or high executives are personally looking at your activity. On the other hand the fact that a specific person within those companies is not tracking your web activity doesn't make the privacy problem go away. Nevertheless, I just find it silly when somebody just alludes that some actual person (e.g. Bill Gates, Sergey Brin) m…

I think you're taking it a little too literally, like trying to parse an idiom.

The concept here is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synecdoche

Re: Inside DuckDuckGo, Google's Tiniest, Fiercest Competitor

#86

Post by pielud » Thu, Feb 20, 2014, 6:13 PM UTC

wila wrote: post #79

pielud wrote: post #55

The killer feature for me with ddg (as a programmer) is the ! searches for documentation: !php strstr !python os.makedirs !pypi requests !js String etc. This gives you a single search bar for all documentation, which is amazing. edit: formatting

That's absolutely fabulous. I'm a DDG user already, but didn't knew about this trick. A brilliant time saver. Thanks for sharing.

Here are all of the supported ! searches:

https://duckduckgo.com/bang.html

or just search ddg for !bang

Re: Inside DuckDuckGo, Google's Tiniest, Fiercest Competitor

#87

Post by ck2 » Thu, Feb 20, 2014, 6:17 PM UTC

I applaud the DDG spirit but without their own crawling data their future is doomed.

If their data sources ever cut them off, it's over.

They need to build their own crawlers like gigablast.

Re: Inside DuckDuckGo, Google's Tiniest, Fiercest Competitor

#88

Post by ithkuil » Thu, Feb 20, 2014, 6:19 PM UTC

ck2 wrote: post #87

I applaud the DDG spirit but without their own crawling data their future is doomed. If their data sources ever cut them off, it's over. They need to build their own crawlers like gigablast.

https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckbot ?

Re: Inside DuckDuckGo, Google's Tiniest, Fiercest Competitor

#89

Post by lostlogin » Thu, Feb 20, 2014, 6:19 PM UTC

wslh wrote: post #63

tosseraccount wrote: post #11

Duck 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…

If double up votes were possible... This isn't uncommon though. Try search "yllow submarine" on Spotify. Is there any other thing this could refer to? Not only do they not have the Beatles, but the search is awful. Nearly as awful as Apple mail. I suspect the real problem isn't that others are bad - Google has spoilt us with how good it is.

Re: Inside DuckDuckGo, Google's Tiniest, Fiercest Competitor

#90

Post by simias » Thu, Feb 20, 2014, 6:19 PM UTC

jmsduran wrote: post #33

tosseraccount wrote: post #11

Duck 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!

I try to switch to ddg roughly every 6 months. I usually switch back within the hour.

One example I can remember:

I was working on some linux V4L2 code and wanted to get more informations on the "buf_queue". By mistake I searched for "vbuf_queue". Google's results:

https://encrypted.google.com/search?q=vbuf_queue

It only shows 3 results where I am (and 0 a few months ago when the problem occured) which makes it pretty obvious I'm not searching for the right thing.

As for DDG:

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=vbuf_queue

It displays a pageful of garbage that I will parse for a while until it occurs to me I made a typo.

And it does it for pretty much any bogus query as well, compare:

https://encrypted.google.com/search?q=aoeulcrnh34ui345u34iyi...

with:

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=aoeulcrnh34ui345u34iyi3euieuiaeoua...

In this case ddg happily outputs what appears to be misinterpreted binary files.

Maybe DDG works well for non-technical contents but 90% of my queries at work are obscure programming/electronics stuff, component datasheets and the like. For that ddg is simply not usable by my standards.