341–350 of 383 posts
Am I the only person who just doesn't have problems with DDG search results? What am I doing wrong (or right), here? I put a thing in and find it. I just don't use Google any more. Genuinely curious why it's working for me and such garbage for everyone else.
> The search results suck Do they really though, for normal people that is?. Some of my searches today below, can't remember the exact terms I used. Mix of DDG and Google. 1) Walt Whitman, I wanted a basic overview of his work to satisfy some idle curiosity. DDG gave me his wikipedia page. Bingo 2) EAN-13 check digit. First result wikipedia telling me how to calculate it. I see it is simple and I have a long list in…
I suspect that anyone who claims that Duckduckgo "Just works" only do english search. I usually do "english" / "mother tongue" searchs all day. Everytime, I need to remember to toggle the regional button otherwise I get attrocious results. Whereas google simply understand that if I'm searching using the english language it should prioritize english results while if I'm searching in another language it should prioriti…
I also search in Spanish (Castilian), but sometimes I want results from Latin America, sometimes from Spain.
Being able to set the language/region is of incredible help in both cases. There is no way to automatically detect this.
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This. We do not have machines able to sort meaning out yet, so why bother?
For most information retrieval purposes, Google's NLP algorithms can effectively determine the meaning of your query thanks to BERT
Until we address meaning, my statement remains solid. And it can often be easier to treat the tool like what it is rather than figure out how to best pretend it is something it is clearly not.
> The search results suck Do they really though, for normal people that is?. Some of my searches today below, can't remember the exact terms I used. Mix of DDG and Google. 1) Walt Whitman, I wanted a basic overview of his work to satisfy some idle curiosity. DDG gave me his wikipedia page. Bingo 2) EAN-13 check digit. First result wikipedia telling me how to calculate it. I see it is simple and I have a long list in…
I suspect that anyone who claims that Duckduckgo "Just works" only do english search. I usually do "english" / "mother tongue" searchs all day. Everytime, I need to remember to toggle the regional button otherwise I get attrocious results. Whereas google simply understand that if I'm searching using the english language it should prioritize english results while if I'm searching in another language it should prioriti…
In DDG it's usually the first page.
I still do a lot of !g when I search technical stuff, as it lets +word -word and DDG doesnt find a lot of weird github issue pages, old forums, usenet posts sometimes.
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robots.txt https://www.robotstxt.org/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robots_exclusion_standard
Note that robots.txt is a hint to well-behaved crawlers, not blocking them in any regard. You can block crawlers if you can identify them, but reliably identifying them is hard.
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I am typing this from India. DDG never provides satisfactory results for anything country specific. As an example, point 6 above is a failure. I used to have DDG as my default, but my workflow got so convoluted that I would search first on DDG, see that the results as not good, open google and search again. It is so frustrating that I switched back to Google even when I didn't want to. Edit: typos.
Did you use localized search or the general search? For me 6 works great with !ddgde
> The search results suck Do they really though, for normal people that is?. Some of my searches today below, can't remember the exact terms I used. Mix of DDG and Google. 1) Walt Whitman, I wanted a basic overview of his work to satisfy some idle curiosity. DDG gave me his wikipedia page. Bingo 2) EAN-13 check digit. First result wikipedia telling me how to calculate it. I see it is simple and I have a long list in…
I suspect that anyone who claims that Duckduckgo "Just works" only do english search. I usually do "english" / "mother tongue" searchs all day. Everytime, I need to remember to toggle the regional button otherwise I get attrocious results. Whereas google simply understand that if I'm searching using the english language it should prioritize english results while if I'm searching in another language it should prioriti…
> The search results suck Do they really though, for normal people that is?. Some of my searches today below, can't remember the exact terms I used. Mix of DDG and Google. 1) Walt Whitman, I wanted a basic overview of his work to satisfy some idle curiosity. DDG gave me his wikipedia page. Bingo 2) EAN-13 check digit. First result wikipedia telling me how to calculate it. I see it is simple and I have a long list in…
They do. Something fundamentally changed at some point during the past couple of years. It used to be that DDG was the best for verbatim search (meaning I want to only have results were the exact words I search for are included). Now, even with quotes, I routinely get a whole first page of results where my terms are not included anywhere. Google generally respect the quotes.
(No, I do not consider typing "!g" before any search that contains quotes a solution to the problem.)
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I suspect that anyone who claims that Duckduckgo "Just works" only do english search. I usually do "english" / "mother tongue" searchs all day. Everytime, I need to remember to toggle the regional button otherwise I get attrocious results. Whereas google simply understand that if I'm searching using the english language it should prioritize english results while if I'm searching in another language it should prioriti…
For me (German) it’s different. With DDG, I can easily choose to search for German content (by using !ddgde), with google I have to hope that they search for what I want. Sometimes google does, sometimes it does not. And if it doesn’t I’m out of luck unless I go into the settings and look for a way to tell it what to do. Google automates, DDG leaves me to choose. I prefer the 2nd approach every time.
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I really wish Google would prioritize English results for English searches consistently. I'm living in Japan as a native English speaker, and have my OS, browser and logged in Google account all configured for English only. Despite that, Google search results always prioritize Japanese language content. Every now and then (though not consistently) it gives me a yellow popup asking if I'd like English results instead,…
Was going to post the exact same thing. This was my experience while living in Japan too. To me, the takeaway is that you simply cannot catch everyone with your defaults. Google and DDG have made different prioritization defaults and the result of that is what we see in anecdotes in this thread.
Sure, give me local results if I don't specify anything. But let me tell you if I want results in English now.