Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Inside DuckDuckGo, Google's Tiniest, Fiercest Competitor

fastcolabs.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 245 posts

Re: Inside DuckDuckGo, Google's Tiniest, Fiercest Competitor

#211

Post by edraferi »

pielud wrote: post #55

The killer feature for me with ddg (as a programmer) is the ! searches for documentation: !php strstr !python os.makedirs !pypi requests !js String etc. This gives you a single search bar for all documentation, which is amazing. edit: formatting

absolutely. this is why DDG is the default search on my browser. It's site-specific search for all the sites I actually care about rules into one easy command line interface. It's also replaced the desktop calculator thanks to wolfram alpha integration.

seriously, I don't know how I would function without !python, !pypi, !w, !gmap, and !hn

Re: Inside DuckDuckGo, Google's Tiniest, Fiercest Competitor

#212

Post by lmm »

Derbasti wrote: post #189
SomeCallMeTim wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been using DDG as my primary search from desktop for several years now, and I find its results to be equivalent to or better than Google's most of the time. When I can't find something, I'll try a !g, but only rarely does that help any more.

I totally agree. In the beginning, I was !g a lot. These days, I mostly !g for more natural language kind of questions. For more technical searches, Google has become next to useless for me. "lupdate.exe not working Qt" transforms to "did you mean 'Update not working'?" (lupdate.exe is part of the Qt translation toolchain and Windows forces it to run as admin only because there is "update" in its file name. The Googl…

I use an extension to always set google to Verbatim search results. It works very nicely.

Re: Inside DuckDuckGo, Google's Tiniest, Fiercest Competitor

#213

Post by lmm »

Crito wrote: post #206
enraged_camel wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>I would expect a glorified redirect to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flower That is what I expect for any search that is vague or generic. If they wanted the wikipedia page, they would have performed the search directly on wikipedia. The question you have to ask is: what is the most likely thing they are looking to do? Is it to learn more about flowers (wikipedia) or is it to buy flowers (regular results with ads +…

I've already said that I believe the most likely thing they are looking for is the wikipedia page. How many times do people actually buy flowers? Once or twice a year? If they are doing it any more often than that, then they shouldn't need to google "flowers" each time....

> If they are doing it any more often than that, then they shouldn't need to google "flowers" each time....

Why not? Computers are better at memorizing things than people; it shouldn't be a human's job to remember a site URL (and browser bookmarks are less useful than intelligent search engines).

Re: Inside DuckDuckGo, Google's Tiniest, Fiercest Competitor

#214

Post by ikurei »

cpncrunch wrote: post #113
josteink wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Duck duck is barely usable On the contrary, I find Google barely usable these days, with everything covered in layers and layers of horrible bloat, random UX mess of the week and constant pestering about G+. DDG is nice and clean, has features Google is (still) lacking and just gets me the results. I may resort to other search-engines (like Google) once a week or so, but at this point, there's no way I'm going back t…

Google's interface seems to have improved recently, now that they have removed the duplicate left-hand column and put the options on top. As for search results: I tried DDG again last week, and was shocked by the poor quality of results compared to google, bing or yandex. Search for "html table tag" and you'll see no w3schools or MDN results. Instead a lot of other, crappier sites. Google, yandex and bing all show w3…

I'm surprised no one mentioned you can do !mdn "html table tag" and go straight to the mdn page.

Re: Inside DuckDuckGo, Google's Tiniest, Fiercest Competitor

#215

Post by lmm »

pielud wrote: post #55

The killer feature for me with ddg (as a programmer) is the ! searches for documentation: !php strstr !python os.makedirs !pypi requests !js String etc. This gives you a single search bar for all documentation, which is amazing. edit: formatting

I already have that in my browser. And have since before DDG was launched.

Re: Inside DuckDuckGo, Google's Tiniest, Fiercest Competitor

#216

Post by JunkDNA »

bsbechtel wrote: post #39

I reached out to Gabriel a few times while living in the Southeast PA region for entrepreneurial related questions. He always got back to me within a day or so...incredibly helpful and nice. I switched to DDG a while back, and while it took a little bit to get used to the changes, I use it for 80% of my searches now. The only way they will improve is by us using them more and more often. You can complain about how th…

I'll second this. Gabriel is an extremely nice guy. I approached him over 5 years ago for info about the Philly startup scene and he wrote me a huge, detailed email that I'm sure he didn't really have the time to write.

I switched my default search engine to Duck Duck Go a few years ago mainly because of that interaction. I still need to fall back on the g! shortcut a lot, but search quality has improved quite a bit over the years. I like supporting a hometown startup that exists outside the Bay Area bubble.

Re: Inside DuckDuckGo, Google's Tiniest, Fiercest Competitor

#217

Post by dredmorbius »

I made two attempts to convert to DDG, the first nearly two years ago, then, successfully, this past June. And in large part, it's working better than Google. Searches are fast, they're unfiltered, the !bang syntax is great, privacy is respected, and overall site weight and load is much preferable to Google. While I don't always find what I'm looking for, switching to !g often doesn't turn up what I was hoping for either -- sometimes it's just search refinement that you need.

All in all, I'm happy with it. This after sixteen years of Google use.

Re: Inside DuckDuckGo, Google's Tiniest, Fiercest Competitor

#219

Post by dredmorbius »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #52
adrusi wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In what way do you find it barely usable? I've used it for about a year and I find the results to be great. I don't think there's been a time when I couldn't find the result I wanted with ddg but could with google.

I've had a serious go at DDG 3 times now - last month I tried it but I ended up just using !g for every search and so went back to Google. The thing I use most often, and major frustration with Google, is limiting the search by time period : I wish the additional tools would be sticky. I did blind search engine testing and Google came out on top. That said Google is frustrating me more and more, especially now you ne…

The lack of a time-bounded search is one of the few things I'll return to Google for.

Also: news, and book or Google Scholar.

I'm willing to accept the lack of these most of the time. Yes, privacy matters to me.

Re: Inside DuckDuckGo, Google's Tiniest, Fiercest Competitor

#220

Post by dredmorbius »

unicornporn wrote: post #49
tosseraccount wrote: post #11

Duck duck is barely usable ... but they don't spy on you. The !g and !b commands make it my first choice. If the results aren't getting what you want, try the search on google or bing. IF you don't mind Sergy Brin or Bill Gates tracking you. I still think there's room for a search engine that supports boolean(ish?) operations like AND, OR , NOT and NEAR. Providing links directly to the source and not a redirect to th…

Barely usable, yes I agree. So use Startpage.com. They also say they don't spy on you. It works just as good as Google, because it uses Google (see it as a proxy). DDG is especially terrible if you are used localized versions of Google. I was used to "Swedish Google", and using a localized (Swedish) DDG was totally unusable. And so I found Startpage. Works better than the real deal for me. There are a few differences…

!sp == StartPage.

That's usually my first fallback before going !g

Post reply on HN