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DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

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Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#191
post #176

I'll believe this when the third result for "filled torus" isn't "Cum Filled Pussy Porn Videos" unless safe search is enabled. DDG's contextual awareness is abysmal.

I do find that I get... a lot of porn images in any DDG image search past, say, the 20th image result. For literally any search term, it seems.

Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#192
post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Agreed, and the ad is often immediately above the native search result 1-2. I'm guessing clicking the ad costs the company money per click, and the native search result doesn't? If I'm explicitly searching for a company, and I'd prefer that they don't have to incur an advertising penalty on my behalf, I'd need to scroll past the first result to the second.

The cost of an ad depends on its 'quality'. A big part of the quality score is based on a model of how useful that result will be to the user.

Therefore, ads for a company that appear when the company name is clicked are considered highly relevant and useful, and therefore have a very high quality score and therefore very low price.

Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#198
post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

No offense, but I literally cannot find anything on GitHub with this search engine.

It's tuned towards discovery, so if you search a topic you'll get results for smaller, new repos that do something around that topic. We deliberately hard downranked common repos but it's also 2 months out of date now since that was to test the waters and we didnt set up recrawling at the time. That said we shared your concerns and have changed things up with how we are approaching it for the beta

Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#199

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'm using DDG but I have to "!g" a lot. The English language results are quite good but the German results are often not what I'm looking for. I'm assuming this will improve with time so I'm not too worried but DDG search results can still be improved a lot (imo). That being said, I'm not switching back anytime soon. Pretty happy so far.

FWIW I use uBlock Origin and Privacy Badger.

Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#200
I have been using duckduckgo on all browsers, including mobiles, for 2-3 years now. There are occasions when I don't get good results. But when I try the same query on G, the results are equally useless. So, I have since stopped using anything else.

Although, I should say, bing was equally good when I used it before duckduckgo, until they added that horrendous news feed in the bottom.

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