Does anyone know how to donate to DDG? It doesn't say on their site, but I want to contribute to their success.
Let's start using DuckDuckGo more often
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Re: Let's start using DuckDuckGo more often
#12Started last week. So far so good.
Re: Let's start using DuckDuckGo more often
#13The thing with Google is that, like it or not, their analytics and their knowledge of you as an individual helps produce better search results for you. Google will always be the better search engine.
That being said DuckDuckGo is definitely getting much better nowadays. Still end up going back to Google after a few days though.
Re: Let's start using DuckDuckGo more often
#14Going one step further, I removed my websites from the Google index: https://lucb1e.com/?p=post&id=130
If you want to find my stuff, you now have to use DDG or some other search engine. Hopefully we can signal to Google that we are not okay with monopolistic behaviour (that's why I blocked them, not just for being the biggest or monopolist, but for also behaving like it -- see the blog post for details).
Re: Let's start using DuckDuckGo more often
#15Does anyone know how to donate to DDG? It doesn't say on their site, but I want to contribute to their success.
Just disable your ad blocker for their site. They're not a philanthropy, they have a profitable ad-based business model.
Re: Let's start using DuckDuckGo more often
#16I've been using it for a few months and I find myself using !g for like 4 out of 5 requests. Also image search is VERY slow, images load like in a slideshow. I'll end up going back to Google. I like the idea of DDG and I have a strong dislike for Google but DDG is simply not there yet. Having said that it's better than it was five years ago, when it was simply insufferable. So, maybe in five years? ;)
In my experience, I've been using it for a few years now and I've maybe used !g 4 or 5 times total in the past couple of years. I find the performance of image searches just fine myself. So it's always fascinating to see that people report such different experiences with DDG. It's hard to know for sure what's happening though. Maybe my searches are just very simple and don't need anything complex? Maybe I'm luckier a…
I alsmost never need !s or !g, and I tend to find what I'm looking for. Most of my searches tend to be related to coding, so it just could be that DDG is particularly good at those queries, but I still wonder what exactly it is that people are finding on Google that isn't on DDG. And I used to be one of those people who thought DDG was lousy.
Re: Let's start using DuckDuckGo more often
#17Is the moral basis enough to use an inferior product? So just because Google is "bad" does it make ok to use an inferior product? How does that help me as an end user?
OP's only argument (Google is bad so use DDG) is not really convincing tbh
Re: Let's start using DuckDuckGo more often
#18I've been using it for a few months and I find myself using !g for like 4 out of 5 requests. Also image search is VERY slow, images load like in a slideshow. I'll end up going back to Google. I like the idea of DDG and I have a strong dislike for Google but DDG is simply not there yet. Having said that it's better than it was five years ago, when it was simply insufferable. So, maybe in five years? ;)
When as that? Because I had the same experience of constantly using !g a few years ago. Decided to try ddg again around 6 months ago and it's gotten a lot better imo. Rarely use !g anymore and kept it as my default engine since.
Sometimes ddg results are even straight up better. Most of the time I use !g is when looking up location sensitive stuff, e.g. non-english local government stuff etc.
Re: Let's start using DuckDuckGo more often
#19I launched BuckBuckMoose.org recently so I could start using DuckDuckGo more often. The idea with BuckBuckMoose is that you can search DuckDuckGo without fear of missing out on Google. How it works is you simply enter your search query, and then a two split screen windows pop up with Google search results on the left and DuckDuckGo results on the right. If you want to try it out as your default search engine you can use Tom Schuster's "Add Custom Search Engine" extension for Firefox to add it (BuckBuckMoose) as your default search engine. (I don't actually expect anyone else to use it). Anyway, having used this tool daily for the past few months I feel that I'm somewhat of an expert* on DuckDuckGo's search results. One interesting thing I've noticed is how similar their results are. It's almost as if Bing is trying to mimic Google's results on purpose? It's a little odd. The results are pretty good tho. However, I have noticed that Google is always a little bit faster.
Re: Let's start using DuckDuckGo more often
#20The thing with Google is that, like it or not, their analytics and their knowledge of you as an individual helps produce better search results for you. Google will always be the better search engine. That being said DuckDuckGo is definitely getting much better nowadays. Still end up going back to Google after a few days though.
You don't have to use either exclusively. Just pick the one you think is best as your default search engine, and for anything that this 'best' one (by whatever standard) cannot handle, you can still fall back to the other.
For example, DDG is really good at documentation lookups like Java or Python docs. Google is much better at complicated queries (I always struggle for an example, had one recently where DDG was just lost and Google gave the perfect top result, and remember thinking "I should write this down" but I don't think I did...), so I use DDG by default and if I can't find what I'm looking for, I fall back to Google. I don't have to fall back for ~90% of my queries, so that's a significant improvement over using Google all the time.
DDG is horrible at images, and Google Images beats Bing Images. But again, 90% of my image queries can be answered by Bing, so in only 10% of the cases I fall back to Google for images.