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

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

#181

Post by joesb » Fri, Feb 21, 2014, 4:13 AM UTC

edj wrote: post #110

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. The !g and !b commands make it my first choice. I keep leaving DDG for the not-always-super-relevant results, and I keep coming back for the privacy, clean interface, and !bang syntax. I love that using it means my searches are private by default. But the real killer feature is !bang. I find that it's faster to do a Google image search using DDG with "!gi" tha…

Why do people talk about this !bang syntax so much? I can do the same thing with search provider shortcut in my browser.

For example, after setting up once, I can press "Ctrl+L" then type "gi" then "Tab" and start typing my search keyword. I don't even have to first go to Google or DDG.

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

#182

Post by Zarel » Fri, Feb 21, 2014, 4:15 AM UTC

hootener wrote: post #29

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…

Or there's always the best of both worlds: http://www.duckduckgoog.com/

I'm confused. What does it do?

"Searches Google and !bangs DuckDuckGo."

What does this mean? It's the equivalent of a DDG !g search? Isn't that exactly the same as just searching Google?

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

#183

Post by patmcguire » Fri, Feb 21, 2014, 4:20 AM UTC

DanBC wrote: post #146

cpncrunch wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you say that? (and please don't say you read it on w3fools) In my own experience, w3schools is the quickest way of getting the information I want, which I guess is why it is at the top of google. I know it isn't cool to like w3schools, but then I'm not a cool programmer.

Lots of people complain about W3Schools. Some of those people say the Mozilla pages are a bit clunky. Seems like a nice passive income project - man pages for HTML / CSS aimed at beginners but with advanced information too. I'm surprised it hasn't already been done. Perhaps it has and I just don't know the URL.

You can't fight the SEO feedback cycle. W3 schools was linked to by some people, so it shows up on Google, so it gets linked to by more people...

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

#184

Post by JoshTriplett » Fri, Feb 21, 2014, 4:21 AM UTC

josteink wrote: post #97

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 On the contrary, I find Google barely usable these days, with everything covered in layers and layers of horrible bloat, random UX mess of the week and constant pestering about G+. DDG is nice and clean, has features Google is (still) lacking and just gets me the results. I may resort to other search-engines (like Google) once a week or so, but at this point, there's no way I'm going back t…

Agreed. It took me a little time using DDG before I could reliably tell the difference between "poor results" and "results that don't feel like Google results".

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

#185

Post by sytelus » Fri, Feb 21, 2014, 4:28 AM UTC

DuckDuckGo does not have its own index. They are pretty much layer over Bing plus some customizations for query parsing and head queries for trusted sources which they do index. If Bing decided to block DDG tomorrow, they will be toast. The only impressive thing for me about DDG is that they are able to turn privacy thing in to marketing for geeks and get tiny trickle of traffic to stay alive in hope someone would buy them out.

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

#186

Post by Crito » Fri, Feb 21, 2014, 5:02 AM UTC

enneff wrote: post #173

Crito wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That plural/singular makes a difference there is something that I would consider to be a fault. "Llamas" gives me the page for "llama". Why should "flower" and "flowers" give me radically different results? If I wanted to buy flowers I'd search "florist" or "online florist". The wiki page for florists is surely of far less interest than the page for flowers. I suspect the google/ddg results for "flowers" are a result…

More likely: Google have noticed users that search for "flowers" typically go on to search for "flower delivery", and started showing them results relevant to their intent. The Google result page for "flowers" also includes the wikipedia page for "Flower", btw.

> "The Google result page for "flowers" also includes the wikipedia page for "Flower", btw."

Yeah, but it is farther down the list. I have to search for it.

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

#187

Post by cromwellian » Fri, Feb 21, 2014, 5:09 AM UTC

username223 wrote: post #179

cromwellian wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only way for search engines to get better is to model the mental state of the person making the query. If you were asking another human being to help you with a query, they'd take into account your mental state, conversation state, and what they know about you and the situation, to narrow down and disambiguate the query. When people can't do this kind of social modeling, we perceive them as autistic. If you could…

> The only way for search engines to get better is to model the mental state of the person making the query. No. Another way is to make their behavior more predictable. If I type "Chinese" into the search box, Google may tell me about the Chinese language, or it may send me some ads for local take-out places. Either it guesses which I want, or it makes it easy for me to specify what I'm asking; I know which I'd prefe…

That would be frustrating for the user if the previous few queries were about learning foreign languages, or about the Great Wall.

If I'm having a conversation with you about learning foreign languages, and then I ask you about Chinese, I expect you to know I'm not talking about food.

Having to overspecify a query that could be determined from context is particularly annoying on mobile, or via voice.

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

#188

Post by enraged_camel » Fri, Feb 21, 2014, 5:26 AM UTC

Crito wrote: post #161

enneff wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What result do you expect for something as vague as "flowers"? Try something like "flower delivery " or "hydrangea" to see a useful search result page.

I would expect a glorified redirect to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flower That is what I expect for any search that is vague or generic. The results for "RTG" are pretty much my idea of what a set of results should look like. (Note that while DDG's results page for 'flowers' is cleaner, the actual results are similarly shit.)

>>I would expect a glorified redirect to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flower That is what I expect for any search that is vague or generic.

If they wanted the wikipedia page, they would have performed the search directly on wikipedia.

The question you have to ask is: what is the most likely thing they are looking to do? Is it to learn more about flowers (wikipedia) or is it to buy flowers (regular results with ads + map of nearby flower sellers)?

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

#189

Post by Derbasti » Fri, Feb 21, 2014, 5:41 AM UTC

SomeCallMeTim wrote: post #109

josteink wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Duck duck is barely usable On the contrary, I find Google barely usable these days, with everything covered in layers and layers of horrible bloat, random UX mess of the week and constant pestering about G+. DDG is nice and clean, has features Google is (still) lacking and just gets me the results. I may resort to other search-engines (like Google) once a week or so, but at this point, there's no way I'm going back t…

I've been using DDG as my primary search from desktop for several years now, and I find its results to be equivalent to or better than Google's most of the time. When I can't find something, I'll try a !g, but only rarely does that help any more.

I totally agree. In the beginning, I was !g a lot. These days, I mostly !g for more natural language kind of questions.

For more technical searches, Google has become next to useless for me. "lupdate.exe not working Qt" transforms to "did you mean 'Update not working'?" (lupdate.exe is part of the Qt translation toolchain and Windows forces it to run as admin only because there is "update" in its file name. The Google 'correction' of that is perfectly useless).

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

#190

Post by saltysugar » Fri, Feb 21, 2014, 6:01 AM UTC

Crito wrote: post #186

enneff wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More likely: Google have noticed users that search for "flowers" typically go on to search for "flower delivery", and started showing them results relevant to their intent. The Google result page for "flowers" also includes the wikipedia page for "Flower", btw.

> "The Google result page for "flowers" also includes the wikipedia page for "Flower", btw." Yeah, but it is farther down the list. I have to search for it.

Father? It's the second item on the list for me (and I use incognito)