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DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

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Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#141

Post by jstanley »

whalesalad wrote: post #46
chuckgreenman wrote: post #25

I think I've figured out what is happening when people tell me that DuckDuckGo's results "aren't good enough". What's really happening is that they've been trained to search a certain way to using Google and because DDG doesn't have all the historical data of your searches on their platform they can't fill in the gaps as well. After a couple days using DDG I found the right vocabulary to get good local results and wh…

A lot of DDG fans on HN blame the user or social conditioning and use that as a crutch. It’s BS. You need to provide clear examples of the differences in order to really make this argument to someone who might switch. What specifically are the differences? The last time this topic came up someone told me I was a total noob because I didn’t know how to use search and that was basically the extent of it.

An example of a difference: I live in Bristol. If I search for things like "car mechanic bristol", DDG comes up with lots of results from Bristol, Tennessee. It's not that DDG is worse than Google, it's just that DDG isn't tailoring the results to what it knows about me. The solution is to be more specific: "car mechanic bristol uk", for example, does the job.

Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#142

Post by teekert »

burlesona wrote: post #116

A few years ago I switched my desktops to use DDG while leaving my phone using Google. At first I had to !g all the time. Now that’s rare. Now I’m starting to have the other problem. If I search for a company, product, person, etc., on DDG it’s the first hit. But on google I just get a wall of ads and videos, and it’s hard to tell where the actual homepage is for the thing I’m looking for. So as of now I would say, g…

My story is the same! Also, when I want colouring pictures for my kids, DDG just lets met tap them and print them. That is nolonger possible using Google since some months. I also very much appreciate the code snippets when (already started typing "Googling"!) Searching for code related things.

Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#143

Post by svnpenn »

burkaman wrote: post #26
svnpenn wrote: post #17

I would like to take any chance I can to avoid Google products, but I dont agree with this. DuckDuckGo is using the infamous "More Results", essentially infinite scroll. Until that changes Im not using DuckDuckGo.

You can turn that off in the settings: https://duckduckgo.com/settings

No you cant. You can turn off auto loading, but you cant set it so that results are paginated.

Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#144

Post by Grimm1 »

josefresco wrote: post #119
Grimm1 wrote: post #110

To my knowledge duck duck go uses Bing's search API to get their results. To me Bing and Google have not been sufficient for my searching needs and the needs of a large group around me for a long time now. On a separate but related issue because DDG is using Bing the overall experience is lackluster, as other user's have noted things like very slow to re-index new results, new information climbs up to the top very sl…

It's actually Bing+ other sources, there's a page on their site that explains it. And I had the same opinion as you, until I started using it every day. My habit was as follows: When I didn't get good results, I would switch back to Google and run the same query. Over time I found more "purple" links in Google indicating DDG was giving me almost the same (sometimes better) results.

That's an interesting process, I'll have to give it a try ;)

I mentioned it above but Google has also been giving me worse results in recent years so I genuinely believe there's a better way to do these things and do them in a way that is also more respectful of the users.

Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#145

Post by ufo »

Does anyone know if there is a way to emulate DDG's bangs using Firefox search engine keywords?

I tried forcing myself to use keywords but apparently they only work on the address bar (and not on the search bar) and also only if you type them at the start of the query. DDG bangs also work on any part of the query, including at the end.

Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#146

Post by jstanley »

speps wrote: post #11

It's only good enough when you're in the US, I live in the UK and DDG consistently returns non local results even though the country is set correctly, it's especially annoying given how many US cities are named after their UK counterpart.

All you need to do is type "uk" at the end of the query. I now do this automatically if I want UK-specific results, it's not a problem.

Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#147

Post by _2d30 »

anderspitman wrote: post #15

I switched over to DDG a few weeks ago. I slowly regressed to more and more !g usage, and finally switched back to GOOG a couple days ago. Then just an hour ago I searched for "google fiber stadia", because I was curious how well they work together. The main reddit result opened in an amp page (and of course reddit pressured me to install the mobile app). I went back to the results and started scrolling down. I hones…

Mobile Google search is atrocious for my preferences. I pretty much avoid it entirely at this point.
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