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DuckDuckGo vs Google

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Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#251

Post by StavrosK »

tallanvor wrote: post #81
StavrosK wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I made the jump to Fastmail.com and couldn't be happier. The UI is very snappy (much faster than Gmail's), the actual notifications and delivery is faster, and it's a better experience overall, for me. Plus, Google doesn't get to see my mail any more. Ditto for Firefox vs Chrome.

I'm a fan of moving away from Google where possible as well, but Fastmail would cost me $500/year with 10 accounts. My G Suite account is one of the original, so I can have up to 200 accounts for free. Granted, it's only 15GB of storage, but even after about 10 years, I only have about 1GB in my inbox, so I'm ok with the lower amount of space.

Wow, what do you do with 10 accounts? Isn't checking all of them a hassle?

I have multiple domains and aliases, and Fastmail is much better at those than Google Apps ever was (I also have the free plan but you can never change your initial domain), so I'm much happier.

Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#252

Post by visarga »

romo5 wrote: post #89

People are conditioned to think Search has to work online. This was true when Google was created. No one had the processing or memory available on their desktop to search an entire index of the "useful" web. Not anymore. How large is a "useful" index of the web today? And can it fit on your laptop? The answer is yes. Can the entire thing be queried fast? The answer is yes. As an example take the entire stackexchange…

Your idea doesn't go far enough. What good are a couple of stale indexes of Wikipedia and Stackoverflow going to be?

Instead, I am wondering why there isnt a federated open source search engine. It would be a cloud of nodes, each node spidering and indexing a small hash bucket of urls. With a million such nodes we could have a live updated, distributed search engine to replace Google. We could run millions of queries without paying someone - we'd pay back by serving as a node, just like in BitTorrent. With all the interest in privacy, I wanted to see more discussion of replacing Google with an open, non-censured and private protocol for search.

Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#253

Post by StavrosK »

kowdermeister wrote: post #61
StavrosK wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you care if one company has two employees and one has a million to produce the exact same end result?

> exact same end result Not really, but "exact same end result" is far from the current situation. And I'm not saying they shouldn't do it, rather that they really need to catch up. Google (not counting other Alphabet companies) does a lots of things. I think the original analogy is mostly right.

> "exact same end result" is far from the current situation

My point can be rephrased as "given that the result is the same, do employee counts matter"? If not, then they don't matter in general.

Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#254

Post by hellofunk »

BartSaM wrote: post #195
Uehreka wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN has a reputation among some[who?][weasel words] as a place where many commenters are some combination of pedantic, overly literal and out of touch with mainstream culture. Taking this metaphor to pieces would seem to check the first 2 boxes pretty neatly.

You actually make it sound bad. I would more likely to say they are precise and usually won't allow for inaccurate information to fly through the front page without pointing out the issues.

There is definitely a culture of contrarianism on HN; there is a tendency for some users here to play devil's advocate or just argue against the logic of any article for the sake of feeling superior or clever. I'll probably get downvoted for this comment, but doesn't change the reality. And most of us are probably guilty of blending in with that culture here occasionally, while others seem to thrive on it.

Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#255

Post by forgottenpass »

StavrosK wrote: post #60
Lifesnoozer wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I started feeling like I had all my eggs in the same basket. Google has my email, it knows where I want to go and when (Google Maps), it translates stuff for me, and it knows what I search for. While it doesn't really affect me that Google has all this information, I've become more and more uncomfortable with the fact that they do. So I figured if I had a choice of two search engines, where I get satisfying results i…

I made the jump to Fastmail.com and couldn't be happier. The UI is very snappy (much faster than Gmail's), the actual notifications and delivery is faster, and it's a better experience overall, for me. Plus, Google doesn't get to see my mail any more. Ditto for Firefox vs Chrome.

Interesting that you bring up the UI, switching to Fastmail's UI made me start checking/managing my personal email like a responsible adult again.

I could never get over the way using GMail felt like fighting with a sluggish toy version of email compared to desktop outlook (and I'm not really a fan of outlook, either). I just assumed that GMail's interface was the best a webapp could offer: it was the best I'd seen so far and had a no-longer-deserved "who could beat gmail at webmail?" bug in my mind.

I'm kinda surprised fastmail hasn't made larger inroads among the kind of techies that will occasionally bemoan giving their lives over to google.

Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#257

Post by mousa »

moduspol wrote: post #154
bamboozled wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently spoke with Gabriel and his view was that they're going to continue to outsource / proxy / aggregate unless they need to implement their own search. Right now it's not worth the investment apparently.

That seems reasonable if the goal is privacy, right? I mean, even if they were literally proxying to anonymized Google results, wouldn't that cover the privacy benefit?

It would make it hard to pretend that the DDG results were much better than those irrelevant Google results that more fanatical Googlephobes insist they get.

Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#258

Post by mousa »

jankotek wrote: post #12

Bing, Seznam, Yandex, Baidu.. there are many other search engines with surprisingly good results. Give it try. I started using alternatives, for privacy, but also because they are often better. Google Maps can not even find near pharmacy in EU country.

Noone in the world thinks Baidu gives good results.

Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#259

Post by pc86 »

tempay wrote: post #146
badosu wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with parent, it's not just a metaphor but a wildly inaccurate guess that makes the reader think duckduckgo is more irrelevant than it really is. > That was one of the most HN comments I've ever read. What does this mean?

I think they mean the tendency to take a statement and apply maths or logic to show that it is incorrect (or less frequently, correct). I regularly do this (to the frustration of those around me) and I think there is a strong correlation between enjoying hacker news and having this personality trait.

No, the point is not simply using math to show something is wrong. It's using math to show something that doesn't need to be 100% correct to convey the desired meaning is wrong. It's pedantry to the point of wondering if the person responding has ever actually had a conversation with a human being that didn't involve a keyboard. If someone hears an elephant/mosquito metaphor in this context and starts doing math instead of simply taking it for what it is - a hyperbolic way of saying "this thing is really, really big/impressive/well-funded/whatever, and this other thing is... the opposite," that's a level of social awkwardness and borderline autism that is simply unnecessary in any discussion.

Okay, DDG is a hyena and not a mosquito. Great. Tell me how that changes the meaning of the article, or the strength of the facts used, or its conclusions, or the credibility of the author.

Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#260

Post by pc86 »

cbg0 wrote: post #147
badosu wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with parent, it's not just a metaphor but a wildly inaccurate guess that makes the reader think duckduckgo is more irrelevant than it really is. > That was one of the most HN comments I've ever read. What does this mean?

> What does this mean? It means comments around here have a tendency to be overly pedantic and critical.

"I found a small detail in an irrelevant anecdote that is wrong (or more likely, that I misunderstood completely), therefore your entire argument is suspect and you're bad and you should feel bad."
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