111–120 of 167 posts
At the risk of being repetitious, I think what I'd like is a completely private search engine that uses only a self-curated list of websites. A year or two of googling and using the good results from that would probably fix me for some time. As usual, switch to google if the results aren't good.
Getting rid of the cruft would be a nice thing.
I'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…
They have a proxy (just like google) so they don't directly load the images you search for, they make their servers load the images and then send you a proxified version. If you search for obscure terms, they won't have a cached version available so they will have to request it from the actual server, and that makes all images take a while to load. On the other hand Google always keeps the images cached so they can serve them instantly.
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Am I the only one who really doesn't like having to prefix that symbol and never types bangs? I type faster than most other tech people but putting my whole left hand on the left side of the keyboard to press Shift with my pinky and 1 with my ring finger is more trouble than adding a keyword for the search in Firefox ( http://kb.mozillazine.org/Using_keyword_searches ). Especially because I type the G, Y, and W (goog…
That’s an odd complaint when I first read it Maybe it relates to hand pain and stuff You could use right shift, also, though that’d be tricky for my brain
It’s still my default but results are becoming noticeably worse. For instance, I used to be able to search for uncommon names and have them surface; now DDG seems to try really hard to assume I meant some dictionary word (frankly, a search engine clearly ignoring your actual search term becomes useless really quickly). A critical feature though is that “g!” to Google will never return AMP pages; as long as that’s tru…
> A critical feature though is that “g!” to Google will never return AMP pages;
Why is that?
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I match the user agent string on containing "Google". It seems that Google Chrome only includes "Chrome", so I don't block users this way. Here is an overview of all Google crawlers' user agent strings: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1061943 As you can see, they all include Google (capitalized). I don't use robots.txt because they say that doesn't stop them from including the site in search results: htt…
The documented way is the noindex tag (in html or http headers): https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/93710?hl=en
and if you are taking this action in protest, you probably don't.
if you don't serve the data at all, whether or not to respect your "noindex" is imposed on google, rather than being a suggestion (like "do not track" in the chrome browser; we all know how that turned out)
The main thing that made me go back to google is the smart results they offer. I search enough for things like "champions league", "PSG vs Inter", "Warriors", "US Open" expecting the smart result at the top (the little widget that embeds the info I want). Switching to DDG I missed that too much and decided to go back to google.
Also the ! command is amazing, no more wasted seconds on the homepages of youtube, amazon, ebay (!yt, !a, !e). Now if only we can add arrow key selection to those sites :)
DDG's search results seem consistently terrible whenever I try to use it for an extended period of time. It's fine for really basic searches, but anything more specialized or niche is terrible (considering my interests, that's all of my searches). I mostly use Startpage nowadays instead, which seems to give me good enough results most of the time.
I've been using DDG exclusively for a few years now. I don't want to get into anything personal, but just what the heck are you searching for, my man? I hear this complaint from time to time and it just baffles me. I mean one day I forgot how to spell "guillotine", typed in "french beheading thing", and it was on the first page somewhere.