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DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

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Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#321

Post by cbHXBY1D »

xyst wrote: post #161
Grimm1 wrote: post #110

To my knowledge duck duck go uses Bing's search API to get their results. To me Bing and Google have not been sufficient for my searching needs and the needs of a large group around me for a long time now. On a separate but related issue because DDG is using Bing the overall experience is lackluster, as other user's have noted things like very slow to re-index new results, new information climbs up to the top very sl…

If that’s the case, then I’m sticking with Ecosia since it uses Bing as well. Not sure if Ecosia has it’s own crawler, but at least they appropriate some profits to plant trees. They also have an alias to redirect the search to google if the initial search doesn’t yield anything useful.

Compare searches between Ecosia and DDG. Same results.

Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#322

Post by babypistol »

I have used DuckDuckGo a couple of years back, but, after some more consideration switched back to Google. Apart from privacy I never really liked the direction DuckDuckGo was going in (more below). Just recently I decided to search for an alternative search engine once again.

Things I want to consider are:

1. Reasonable privacy - I don't want the search engine to take super invasive steps to track me (but still keep in mind that I need to send my queries to someone, so there's really no expectation of full privacy)

2. No personalization - I want to be sure that only obvious parameters affect the ranking of search results (e.g. manual language or location selection, manual time selection, ...). Want to avoid personalization and a search bubble at all cost.

3. No results processing - I want links to original sources, not processed or aggregated information with little or no references to sources.

4. Independence - I'd like to support a search engine that can operate as independently as possible. A search engine with it's own crawler seem far more resilient to external influence than a meta or proxying search engine.

Google falls short on 1, 2 and 3. But holds up very well on 4.

With Bing or Yandex I don't have much experience, but expect something similar.

DuckDuckGo heavily advertises 1. I guess 2 follows from it but didn't find it mentioned as an explicit goal. On 3 and 4 it falls short. If I remember correctly DuckDuckGo was one of the first to offer processed results (Instant answers). I'm not sure about the situation now, but I believe it started of as a meta search engine and proxied most searches to Yahoo, Bing or Yandex. https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/so... still lists Bing prominently.

Startpage.com seems to get me 1 and 3. But 2 is questionable since the results are still tailored by Google (not to me personally, but it's still not clear what factors into ranking). And 4 obviously doesn't apply.

To find a better alternative I started looking for search engines with independent web crawlers. So far I found mojeek.com, beta.cliqz.com and qwant.com. mojeek.com looks good on 1,2,3,4 but results aren't quite good enough. With Cliqz I'm not sure about personalization, but otherwise looks good.

I finally settled on Qwant.com for now. It promises privacy and no personalization explicitly. Has an independent crawler. Sometimes it tries to provide a processed answer card, but so far I managed to ignore that. Results are surprisingly good.

Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#324

Post by kodt »

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…

Yeah I am finding more often when I add !g I don't get significantly better results anymore. I often still do it just to check, but don't often find it was worth it.

Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#325

Post by Pxtl »

kodt wrote: post #324
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…

Yeah I am finding more often when I add !g I don't get significantly better results anymore. I often still do it just to check, but don't often find it was worth it.

I've been finding the same. When I first switched to ddg, I thought it just wasn't ready yet... But now i feel more like search is broken in general. The content farms have won.

Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#326

Post by thaumasiotes »

notahacker wrote: post #317
thaumasiotes wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. If I wanted a car mechanic in San Francisco, I would usually search for "car mechanic 94105" rather than "car mechanic san francisco". Regardless of search engine. Do postal codes not work to r…

The Bristol postcode is the letters 'BS' followed by a one or two digit number, so it's not particularly good for finding a service provider in a large area. UK postcodes are somewhat more useful when you want to narrow a search to a small area, especially for small towns and London districts where the number is a useful identifier and the area itself might have multiple or non-unique names

> it's not particularly good for finding a service provider in a large area.

Unless I'm misunderstanding something, this doesn't make much sense.

For example, running a search for "car mechanic 94105" doesn't restrict your results to car mechanics that are located inside the 94105 zip code. It restricts your results to car mechanics that are near the 94105 zip code, where "near" is a fuzzy term. I just ran this search myself, from outside San Francisco, and there's just a single result in the 94105 area. But there are plenty shown in 94107, 94103, 94102, 94111... (primarily 94107).

The zip code is a cheap, easy, and unambiguous way to tell the search engine what you want. It's on the search engine to decide how to respond.

Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#327

Post by alkonaut »

It’s not. Not even close. There should be some sort of “search benchmark” that could show this more objectively.

A table of searches with search queries and the correct first resukt. In maby cases it’s clear what the correct result is (Search for a major company and I want their website index page for example). In other cases the expected result is “what google does”, e.g when searching for “123 GBP in USD”.

It’s not that DDG doesn’t let me find what I want eventually, it’s that it doesn’t have the right result as #1 which is extremely frustrating when you are used to the I’m feeling lucky-click on the first result without reading.

To switch I’d want google quality results with zero added effort on my part e.g in learning better DDG-querying or accepting a slightly longer time to browse results. That’s pretty tough to pull off without the resources and data that Google has.

Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#328

Post by ImaCake »

_coveredInBees wrote: post #302
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…

I've switched to ddg for a while, and the one area where I find it really lacking in comparison to Google is that it is very poor in surfacing relevant hits from threads on forums or stackoverflow. Which is frustrating, as I'm almost more interested in results from there when looking up technical stuff than some spammy blog. It's gotten to the point where I almost always automatically bang out to Google for those typ…

I experience the same problem as a fairly novice programmer who doesn't always know the right term to stick into DDG/google.

>It's gotten to the point where I almost always automatically bang out to Google for those types of searches.

But this is why I stick with DDG, because it is very very easy to check elsewhere with a two letter bang. Even if I never used DDG search it would still be valuable to use DDG with bangs for wikipedia, google, youtube, etc.

Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#330

Post by gonehome »

whalesalad wrote: post #46
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…

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.

Funnily enough I just got an example of this from a friend who is trying DDG this week.

Her example query that did better on Google than DDG:

> why did robinhood go down feb 29 2020

What I would search for the same question that does better on DDG:

> robinhood down

She's 24 and I'm 29 so it's possible that difference is real, people who are younger may be tailoring searches in a way that benefits Google (in which case they may not benefit as much from DDG or really would have to change behavior).

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