Of the google bangs, I find myself using !gm (google maps) the most.
DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use
241–250 of 490 posts
Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use
#242Engine search global market share:
Google 92.54%
so, who cares?
Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use
#243It'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.
Yeah, but it did. It knew where I was, based off of IP I presume.
Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use
#244If we are comparing anecdotes, like in this article, DDG is still not good enough for me for certain kinds of queries. My default search engine is DDG, but even today I had to switch to startpage (!s) for some searches. IIRC, these were just some searches related to some themes and features of Ghost (the publishing platform), Hugo (static site generator), etc. In my daily use, I still rely on startpage, and the next level, which is Google (!g), to get to what I need.
Forget about instant answers and similar things. DDG’s index of the web is not as vast as Google’s...or maybe it is but it’s unable to figure out relevance as well as Google does.
I still recommend DDG to people and tell them about a few bang commands. But as of today, DDG is not something I can totally rely on within the scope of its search results.
The new Edge browser from Microsoft uses Bing as the default search engine. It works better than DDG for several cases (for me), but whenever it doesn’t, I miss the bang commands that make the act of performing the same search on another engine so quick and easy.
Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use
#245A 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…
> 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.
You should also check out Qwant if you haven't. It's like DDG in this regard, but even "more so".
Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use
#246this is most likely not true.
i keep trying ddg every now and then - last attempt was ~ 6 months ago - and every time i have to return to google search with renewed appreciation. i have no idea why it's so bad - i think my queries should be very easy because most of the time i google referential material (e.g. information on a widely used api) and not something obscure.
Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use
#247Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
So does Google, "Corpus Christi" is too ambiguous. "Corpus Christi polish film" is good enough. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Corpus+Christi+polish+film&t=ffab&... "Corpus Christi film" also works, results look relevant, but knowledge graph shows the old 2014 Venezuelan movie. This is where Google is way superior, it showed me average score on imdb and even local showtimes.
I imagine that if you were searching from a Polish IP, Google would infer that you meant the movie, not the city. For anyone in the United States, however, I'd expect the city to be the more common search.
Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use
#248A 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.)
"Century 21" for me gives me three ads.
1. Reali (Google Play app) 2. century21.com 3. Redfin (Google Play app)
These three ads take up the entire screen of my phone, with official results below this wall.
One observation is that while one of the ads was for exactly what I was searching for, they had to pay for that placement. I imagine other companies might not bid high enough for their own names in the search results.
Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use
#249Earlier 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.
I literally do this with google all the time though (my girlfriend like us to celebrate N * 100 anniversaries). Every hundred days or so I go to google and type "500 days after [date]" or something to that effect and it works. It was the first thing I tried, it works reliably every time, and it's google providing the result in the results page, which is better than a link to a website that would do it for me.
What query did you do on google that didn't give you so good results?
Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use
#250I love duckduckgo, but for some reason my home ip address (new-to-me but fixed) seems to be banned on at least one server, and I have to flush my dns cache often to be able to reach duckduckgo.com . I've tried reaching out to info@duckduckgo.com but only got a generic "thanks for the feedback response", and I don't have twitter. Is anyone from duckduckgo reading this?