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DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

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Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#151

Post by ravenstine »

UncleMeat wrote: post #94
Semaphor wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don’t use natural language, use keywords and quotes. Essentially the way people searched 5-10 years ago. I rarely need !g

> Don’t use natural language So... its worse. People want to use natural language.

It depends on how you look at it. I want to be specific in my searches, which is why I often use quotes, things like `site:somedomain.com`, etc.

That said, that means that DDG is not for everyone. If people want to use Google because they prefer NLP, that's fine, but Google users who trash DDG because it's not smart like Google are totally dismissive of DDG's utility or why people choose it. DDG users on HN, on the other hand, at least seem to understand why people choose to use Google, and I don't think any appreciable number of them expect a large portion of the market to shift towards DDG. In fact, I don't think they believe that DDG is necessarily better. A lot of users, such as myself, use DDG because the UI is a little simpler and because they don't want Google to dominate their life, the compromise being a more stupid but still useful search engine.

Not everyone wants NLP. I dislike NLP and think that it's turning out to be a joke in a lot of ways. When I use natural language with Google, it often doesn't understand my intent, and it even ignores obvious keywords. This is true for pretty much every service or device I've used that has NLP. I don't want it. If others find it useful, that's great, and they should use Google in that case. I don't want it, and that doesn't mean that my chosen tools are "worse".

Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#153

Post by moksly »

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…

DDG doesn’t work well for my language, but it works perfectly well for my English searches.

Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#154

Post by jt2190 »

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.

> A lot of DDG fans on HN blame the user or social conditioning and use that as a crutch.

The tools are different, though, so searching the same way on DDG and Google will lead to different outcomes. This is no different than adapting you speech when speaking to an infant or speaking to an adult. [1]

For example, I use DDG as my primary search tool, and I have a habit of using "keywords", rather than natural language, when I search DDG. (This may be an outdated habit from my long exposure to search tools.) With modern Google though, I find that if I follow my habit and use keywords, my search results are poor. I have better results using natural language. As others have noted, I have better results when searching Google when I don't know what the thing I'm looking for is called, or when I'm looking for esoteric content (like code samples.)

[1] I'm not saying that switching is easy or even ideal, I'm just underscoring that different tools are... different. ;-) And "knowing" how to use search well is kinda hard these days, as everything keeps evolving, and we're all busy doing other things.

Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#155

Post by ce4 »

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…

It looks more and more like Google wants to convert native search hits to paid clicks...

Notice how often when you search for "company" you find the company's ad first and then below the native search result...

Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#156

Post by bloodorange »

teekert wrote: post #142
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.

I recently had to search for something similar to this:

march 12 2019 + 366 days

and DuckDuckGo gave me exactly what I wanted while Google gave me not-very-useful results.

Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#157

Post by Grimm1 »

ampdepolymerase wrote: post #132
ianbutler wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have tried it recently and my co-founder and I are literally building a new search experience because we are deeply unsatisfied with the current ones.

Any links to your new project?

Yup there is (alpha.whize.co) the question mark at the top links to a blog post with our broader goals though we've refined them a bit since that post.

I'll warn you though, the alpha has a really limited index (github results) but was meant to showcase how we think we'll initially prioritize results and gauge people's interest versus this is the final version because as you can imagine crawling the larger internet is a bigger task and if no one was interested we weren't going to do it.

That said we did have a healthy amount of people try it out (over 2000) and are still seeing people use it now over a month out so we've been full steam ahead on our generic crawler, plus a few social media specific crawlers and we expect to have our beta available mid May.

Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#158

Post by lobotryas »

ce4 wrote: post #155
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…

It looks more and more like Google wants to convert native search hits to paid clicks... Notice how often when you search for "company" you find the company's ad first and then below the native search result...

That’s not google’s direct doing. Google sells ads relevant to searches so you as a company want to buy ads on your name to prevent a competitor for doing the same. Imagine a competitor bought did that for tour company. Your business would take a hit.

Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#159

Post by JohnFen »

no_wizard wrote: post #114
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…

I think you inadvertently hit the nail on the head here, in that DuckDuckGo requires you to know its incantations, and Google has gotten really good at not having you to know any incantations at all. I can even obliterate the spelling of words and it often knows what i'm looking for. Now, with that said, if your target is power searchers (like myself) I think you have a better argument, because Google often lacks in…

> Google has gotten really good at not having you to know any incantations at all.

I disagree -- the decline of the quality of Google's search appears to have begun when it started trying to second-guess what I'm searching for, and has continued to decline ever since.

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