There's an unusual amount of pro-DDG articles on Hacker News, half of them are PR fluff, and I don't understand why they keep getting upvoted.
People like underdogs ?
Underducks, in this case.
Nothing Can Stop Google. DuckDuckGo Is Trying Anyway
141–150 of 252 posts
Re: Nothing Can Stop Google. DuckDuckGo Is Trying Anyway
#142I stopped using Google due to intrusive ads, if you have someone in your family that have a chronic disease and you've ever googled it, get ready to be blasted with ads reminding of that every-time you watch youtube/browse the web. There are just some things I don't want to be reminded of Google !
Re: Nothing Can Stop Google. DuckDuckGo Is Trying Anyway
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
Documentation suggests Google never stopped doing this. https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/2466433?hl=en suggests "phrase inside quotes" is still exact match. And if you put a single word in "quotes", that indicates to Google the word must be included in the results (I determined this by searching for something where some words were omitted, then clicking the small "Must include:" link under a result and not…
You can go test it for yourself: it definitely no longer works!
Works for me. Link to a query?
Re: Nothing Can Stop Google. DuckDuckGo Is Trying Anyway
#144As long as DDG is not traded publicly it will do just fine. Investors would inevitably be screaming for more growth and ultimately force them to comprise their current values.
They're still beholden by their VC's, who most likely forced them to purge a lot of their !bangs not too long ago.
Why? The !bang is a referral, if you get enough traffic you can charge the site you’re sending traffic to
Re: Nothing Can Stop Google. DuckDuckGo Is Trying Anyway
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can't escape Gmail because you'd lose your address, and you can't escape Maps because the alternatives suck. On the other hand if I don't like Supermarket-X, I can go to Supermarket-Y
Or your were lucky enough to start using Gmail with your own domain, when Google Apps was still free for up to 10 users, and can still use it for free.
I have my own domain name through Google apps and use a naive mail client to access gmail. As soon as the handful of people I talk to exclusively on hangouts migrate elsewhere, I'm ditching Google as a back-end. I'd never have predicted this in 2008. Back then Google still cared about UI speed.
Re: Nothing Can Stop Google. DuckDuckGo Is Trying Anyway
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it's very much search topic related: * DDG is atrocious for anything other than English * Programing/IT searches often yield garbage on DDG while on Google a good result is within the first 3. I have it as my default now too, but "!g" is a constant companion. === Regarding Google and Amazon being unstoppable... it seemed the same once for Microsoft. Once they get too big/powerful (which they arguably already…
> "!g" is a constant companion. May I recommend an alternative bang? "!s" (for startpage.com) is my companion. It doesn't always work perfectly, but in theory [0] Startpage offers the same (edit: non-bubbled[1]) results as big G, while retaining your privacy. !s usually works for me. I always use !s before begrudgingly doing a !g. I have no other affiliation to Startpage or DDG. And to be fair, I think we have to sim…
Thank you! I had never heard of startpage. I am a notorious !g-er.
Re: Nothing Can Stop Google. DuckDuckGo Is Trying Anyway
#147Back in the day, before I just defaulted to using Google, I remember checking multiple search engines to find the thing I was looking for. You'd check Yahoo/Google/Lycos, try a couple of different phrasings, and then if that didn't work try searching on a few other search engines. Somewhere along the way, Google had won me over, because I almost always found my answer. I had stopped even considering other search engi…
I still have the opposite feeling. For a lot of things that I search, google still presents me more relevant results. Although DDG is catching up. Until recently, it always presented me with old.haxe.org results for some reason instead of the current version, but now it works fine.
The reason why DDG is my default url-bar search is because of the 'bangs'!g for google, !yt for YouTube, !w for Wikipedia and !t for thesaurus (when looking for variable names ;)), !gm for google maps, etc. Very handy.
Re: Nothing Can Stop Google. DuckDuckGo Is Trying Anyway
#148Back in the day, before I just defaulted to using Google, I remember checking multiple search engines to find the thing I was looking for. You'd check Yahoo/Google/Lycos, try a couple of different phrasings, and then if that didn't work try searching on a few other search engines. Somewhere along the way, Google had won me over, because I almost always found my answer. I had stopped even considering other search engi…
I think it's very much search topic related: * DDG is atrocious for anything other than English * Programing/IT searches often yield garbage on DDG while on Google a good result is within the first 3. I have it as my default now too, but "!g" is a constant companion. === Regarding Google and Amazon being unstoppable... it seemed the same once for Microsoft. Once they get too big/powerful (which they arguably already…
The Google results are tailored to you, so if you do lots of technical searches, Google has a lot of technical results.
Re: Nothing Can Stop Google. DuckDuckGo Is Trying Anyway
#149As has been mentioned probably millions of times in the last decade, "to google" is synonymous with, "to search the internet for". As long as this remains true, and google search remains free, their monopoly position cannot be challenged. they have the trademark on the shortest sequence of syllables which means "to search the internet for" which means that in the vast majority of cases, when people describe searching…
Isn't "Kodak moment" a counterexample?
No, because Kodak is not a free service. Xerox or Kleenex are closer, obviously, but neither of them is free to use, so there's always room to come along with something cheaper, moreover, Xerox and Kleenex at least have unbranded, one word synonyms for the commodity they produce, photocopy and tissue respectively. Google has "search the internet for", which you will never convince the average person to say, so dethroning google in "search" is at least as difficult as getting the word for "to google" changed.
Furthermore, no one can compete with Google on price, since it's free, and it's very unlikely that anyone will be able to compete on quality, unless they start disallowing adblock somehow.
The best you can hope for as a competitor is to carve out a niche of conscientious objectors, and google doesn't really care about those people either, because they are intrinsically difficult to monetize.
Re: Nothing Can Stop Google. DuckDuckGo Is Trying Anyway
#150Back in the day, before I just defaulted to using Google, I remember checking multiple search engines to find the thing I was looking for. You'd check Yahoo/Google/Lycos, try a couple of different phrasings, and then if that didn't work try searching on a few other search engines. Somewhere along the way, Google had won me over, because I almost always found my answer. I had stopped even considering other search engi…
One feature that I like about DDG is their multiple site search (search string site:123.com,345.com).
Startpage or Google, last time I checked a long while back, don't have this feature. Since I use an index.html (as my local home page), I wanted to get something similar to Google's Custom Search (ability to only search a set of specific domains).
At the very top of my index.html, is DDG's search form with radio buttons beneath (for the multiple site searches) - it looks something like this (included a couple of sample radioButtons):
" rel="nofollow">https://duckduckgo.com/">
DuckDuckGo
FOSS
videos
This is an ad-hoc (poor mans') replacement for Google's CSE (https://cse.google.com/cse/). Useful for a good number of category types (news, social media, etc) and/or to reduce typing.
It can certainly be improved but it works for me (constantly editing the home page with a lightweight editor so I want to keep it simple).