I use DDG as my default search engine about 2 years. It's still have some issues should be fix. But it't works fine for programmer and some professional users.
Inside DuckDuckGo, Google's Tiniest, Fiercest Competitor
151–160 of 245 posts
Re: Inside DuckDuckGo, Google's Tiniest, Fiercest Competitor
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why correct him?
OP's motivations might be different, but a non native english speaker might find that this kind of short, unoffensive and straight to the point corrections could be very useful indeed.
I'm a native. I like corrections. We learn best through failure. Something I would think the HN community would appreciate.
Re: Inside DuckDuckGo, Google's Tiniest, Fiercest Competitor
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
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!
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…
I see only one result on DDG for vbuf_queue. Maybe they changed it in the last 4 hours?
Re: Inside DuckDuckGo, Google's Tiniest, Fiercest Competitor
#154I have lots of respect for the founder. One of his blog posts motivated me to buy my own rack + datacenter class equipment. So much fun!!
Link?
I need motivation.
Re: Inside DuckDuckGo, Google's Tiniest, Fiercest Competitor
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
OP's motivations might be different, but a non native english speaker might find that this kind of short, unoffensive and straight to the point corrections could be very useful indeed.
I'm a native. I like corrections. We learn best through failure. Something I would think the HN community would appreciate.
(It does, I got 23 upvotes.)
Re: Inside DuckDuckGo, Google's Tiniest, Fiercest Competitor
#156Earlier 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?"
That would be more analogous to Google correcting input for perceived spelling errors. Putting in garbage as a query isn't wrong, it has a well-defined answer for the vast majority of garbage.
Re: Inside DuckDuckGo, Google's Tiniest, Fiercest Competitor
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
>They need to build their own crawlers like gigablast. Unfortunately the opportunity for that is pretty meek. Many webmasters block crawlers that aren't the top search engines. :-(
Can't duckduckbot just present itself to the webserver as GoogleBot?
In our company we do a forward-confirmed DNS to verify whenever a bot is who it claims to be.
Oddly enough we have blocked legit googlebot/bing/baidu servers, because they fail to properly configure their servers...
Re: Inside DuckDuckGo, Google's Tiniest, Fiercest Competitor
#158I switched over to DuckDuckGo as my default search provider, for about half a year. It was alright for a while... but eventually I would search for things on both DDG and Google and realized how much I was missing... Sadly I've moved back to Google since then. Another issue that kept coming up for me, was their lack of keyboard controls on search result pages. Although, this isn't really as relevant to most users I w…
this is my experience as well. I've got two keywords set up for firefox, g for ddg, and go for google.
I type in "go blahblahblah" a whole lot more nowadays.
Re: Inside DuckDuckGo, Google's Tiniest, Fiercest Competitor
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
Im not sure where all of these cluttered Google search UI comments are coming from, this is what I see. Maybe a reality distortion field due to pent up HN Google hate? Just a few icons in the top right off screen with my profile pic and configuration wheel icon you can't see. Things look fine. http://i.imgur.com/J9AqaQK.png
Using a term like 'hn' isn't really a representative example, since it's unlikely that any advertising would be purchased for such a term or have any custom "knowledge panels". So, first, turn off AdBlock (if you hadn't already done so), then try a more representative query like "flowers": http://i.imgur.com/jsx1feJ.png It's a big difference, and these different experiences with Google could just be a matter of which…
What result do you expect for something as vague as "flowers"? Try something like "flower delivery " or "hydrangea" to see a useful search result page.
Re: Inside DuckDuckGo, Google's Tiniest, Fiercest Competitor
#160Earlier 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?"
"correct" is not equivalent to "helpful"