DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use • Hacker News Board

Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#231

Post by aembleton » Fri, Mar 06, 2020, 5:37 PM UTC

jstanley wrote: post #141

whalesalad wrote: post #46

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.

Have you tried switching `United Kingdom` to on?

https://imgur.com/6ydSWAF

Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#232

Post by tomxor » Fri, Mar 06, 2020, 5:39 PM UTC

> Most of my searches relate to my job, which means that most of my searches are technical queries.

Recently I've found google infuriating for technical searches because it has started automatically searching for "what it thinks you meant", which when using technical terms or program parameters etc are always wrong.

Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#233

Post by godshatter » Fri, Mar 06, 2020, 5:39 PM UTC

VikingCoder wrote: post #78

It's Lent, so I just searched for "Fish Tacos" and clicked on Map. It showed four places, none of which are anywhere near me. I click on Directions and it takes me to Bing. Do the same thing on Google, see a dozen places in my neighborhood, and I get Google Maps navigation. What do you get in your searches for Fish Tacos? Do you have a better experience with DDG?

Don't make the assumption that a privacy-centered search engine is going to look at your location data. Add your location to the query itself.

Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#234

Post by iamaelephant » Fri, Mar 06, 2020, 5:40 PM UTC

It's not

Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#235

Post by patricklovesoj » Fri, Mar 06, 2020, 5:42 PM UTC

Switched to the duck 3 months ago. Don't really feel any pain really.

Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#236

Post by halflings » Fri, Mar 06, 2020, 5:43 PM UTC

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…

Could you give an example or query that gives you "a wall of ads and videos"?

I just tried a number of companies and it always shows a full column with info about the company (name, logo, stock value, founders, social media profiles, etc.)

Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#237

Post by staticassertion » Fri, Mar 06, 2020, 5:44 PM UTC

I've been using DDG for years. It's perfectly fine. What I've found is I don't use general search engines much in general anyways - I use ddg macros like !rust to search rust docs, or other common places I search.

Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#238

Post by schoen » Fri, Mar 06, 2020, 5:45 PM UTC

bloodorange wrote: post #156

teekert wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The date command can also answer this question:

  $ date -d 'march 12 2019 + 366 days'
  Thu Mar 12 00:00:00 PDT 2020

Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#239

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Mar 06, 2020, 5:45 PM UTC

[deleted]

Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#240

Post by wolco » Fri, Mar 06, 2020, 5:48 PM UTC

richthegeek wrote: post #76

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…

Today I was trying to find info about Corpus Christi - a Polish film that won some awards lately. DDG gives me information about a place in Texas, including stuff from the local newspaper and attractions. I'm searching from a Poland IP btw. Anyway, the actual film was at the very end of the first page of results for me. It certainly feels like it priotises things weirdly. Google Maps has a similar issue though: plent…

Wait a second. You can't use a privacy themed search engine and expect them to lookup your ip, figure out what city you are in. The entire point of using ddg is to avoid this.