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Inside DuckDuckGo, Google's Tiniest, Fiercest Competitor

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

#121

Post by moya »

mrfusion wrote: post #80

I've actually been turning to reddit for a lot of my searches. Yes, you read that right, reddit. I found that a lot of times when I was looking for general advice from other people (recent examples: how to treat dandruff, how to start a garden) I actually get really well thought out answers from real people who have done the same things. And I know they're not trying to sell me anything or just get page views. Doing…

Same here. I've been using reddit primarily as a search engine for the last two years. It's a good supplement to filter out the bs.

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

#122

Post by SonicSoul »

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!

> Plus ducks are my favorite animal

Good point, if anyone made a search engine run by koalas I'd have to use it no matter how bad it was

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

#123

Post by streetnigga »

cpncrunch wrote: post #113
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…

Google's interface seems to have improved recently, now that they have removed the duplicate left-hand column and put the options on top. As for search results: I tried DDG again last week, and was shocked by the poor quality of results compared to google, bing or yandex. Search for "html table tag" and you'll see no w3schools or MDN results. Instead a lot of other, crappier sites. Google, yandex and bing all show w3…

The results seem perfectly usable to me, sorry your favorite sites are not top ranking[0]. Care to explain why you think DDG is explicitly filtering them?

[0] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=+%22html+table+tag%22

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

#124

Post by streetnigga »

howeyc wrote: post #114
simias wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 prett…

"Mr. Babage if I were to feed wrong inputs to that calculation machine will it still produce correct outputs?"

"Look at this! If I mash gibberish into a search engine it returns the same."

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

#125

Post by _delirium »

bduerst wrote: post #107
hdevalence wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that one can be concerned about privacy enough to choose to use a service which does not log queries, without thinking that this choice makes them immune to surveillance by state actors.

Does DDG not log queries? You would think they would, in order to make the service better.

They log queries but in an aggregated way not tied to specific users or sessions (not even pseudonymous user IDs or IP hashes): https://duckduckgo.com/privacy#s3

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

#126

Post by untog »

cpncrunch wrote: post #113
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…

Google's interface seems to have improved recently, now that they have removed the duplicate left-hand column and put the options on top. As for search results: I tried DDG again last week, and was shocked by the poor quality of results compared to google, bing or yandex. Search for "html table tag" and you'll see no w3schools or MDN results. Instead a lot of other, crappier sites. Google, yandex and bing all show w3…

I wouldn't consider w3schools a good search result, ever:

http://www.w3fools.com/

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

#128

Post by cpncrunch »

streetnigga wrote: post #123
cpncrunch wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google's interface seems to have improved recently, now that they have removed the duplicate left-hand column and put the options on top. As for search results: I tried DDG again last week, and was shocked by the poor quality of results compared to google, bing or yandex. Search for "html table tag" and you'll see no w3schools or MDN results. Instead a lot of other, crappier sites. Google, yandex and bing all show w3…

The results seem perfectly usable to me, sorry your favorite sites are not top ranking[0]. Care to explain why you think DDG is explicitly filtering them? [0] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=+%22html+table+tag%22

It's not that they're not top ranking - they don't appear anywhere in the first few hundred results. DDG must be filtering them because those sites are at the top of yandex and DDG says it is getting the results from yandex.

As for "perfectly usable", mountaindragon (result 2) and codesinhtml.com (result 3) are atrocious. And makemyownwebpage.com (result 10 or so) looks like a homepage from the 90s.

I think the issue is that DDG is getting crappy results from yandex, then filtering out the good sites to make the results even worse. Weird :)

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

#129

Post by untog »

howeyc wrote: post #114
simias wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 prett…

"Mr. Babage if I were to feed wrong inputs to that calculation machine will it still produce correct outputs?"

...but Google does do that.
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