Switched to Bing a while ago and have stayed put. Never needed Google cos the results are garbage nowadays.
DDG isn't there yet, but Bing reminds me of Google 5 years ago
DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use
351–360 of 490 posts
Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use
#352Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed as that’s my assumption. Do you have first-hand experience and/or a source?
Every single company I've ever worked for that advertised online had a "cost of doing business" ad budget just for buying their own keyword on Google (and Apple iOS Store/Google Play Store if they had consumer apps). Bigger international companies often have someone from an ad consulting firm tracking the major search engines and buying keywords for all of the big ones like Google, Bing, Yandex, etc. It's one of thos…
I'm not into that stuff much but this may be the reason why there's often bad ads if you search for popular foss software binaries like LibreOffice or Gimp.
Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use
#353A 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 actually switched to Bing years ago and had a similar experience, good enough results 95% of the time. In the last year though, I switched to DuckDuckGo, for the obvious privacy benefits, and the results are acceptable 99% of the time.
It seems there are real options in search these days.
Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use
#354Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’ve always had the opposite experience with DDG. Technical queries gave just garbage results, where as I got meaningful hits on google each time.
Agreed. Each time I see something about DDG on HN I try to switch and it never lasts. I don't like the results on DDG and as much as I'd like to move away from Google they've got search on lock.
The same thing was true for me until it wasn’t, I stayed on DDG after trying it again probably three months ago.
Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use
#355Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed as that’s my assumption. Do you have first-hand experience and/or a source?
Every single company I've ever worked for that advertised online had a "cost of doing business" ad budget just for buying their own keyword on Google (and Apple iOS Store/Google Play Store if they had consumer apps). Bigger international companies often have someone from an ad consulting firm tracking the major search engines and buying keywords for all of the big ones like Google, Bing, Yandex, etc. It's one of thos…
The browser vendors are in bed with the search providers. You can't bookmark a site or go directly to it, it always goes via search. No wonder companies want native apps rather then web pages, then the user get an icon on the app drawer/desktop, and they don't have to pay the middle man.
Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use
#356I've switched to Qwant a few months ago at home. Aside a few usability issues (like hijacking the space button), the search results are fine both for random searches and for programming-related ones (aka. SO, JavaDoc, cppreference search).
Their map search is not great, so had to switch back to google for that.
Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use
#357Earlier quoted context omitted.
Pretty sure that’s because google got hit with a lawsuit about hot linking. DDG will suffer the same fate once they get big (and rich) enough.
Yep, Getty Images sued them and Google had to remove the view images button, making the process of viewing the source image more difficult and convoluted. I've now resorted to using DDG anytime I need to do an image search, and have been using it more and more myself when searching for anything related to IT or programming.
You can also set your user agent to googlebot and get the old google images back. Also the search results don’t look as bad.
Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use
#358Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yep, Getty Images sued them and Google had to remove the view images button, making the process of viewing the source image more difficult and convoluted. I've now resorted to using DDG anytime I need to do an image search, and have been using it more and more myself when searching for anything related to IT or programming.
For those interested there’s an open-source Chrome extension that brings back the View Image button: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/view-image/jpcmhce... https://github.com/bijij/ViewImage
Awesome, thanks!
Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use
#359Earlier quoted context omitted.
Pinterest spam in DDG is a major annoyance, thou directly viewable images compensates somewhat.
I wish I could permanently remove pinterest from my version of the internet - it's literally spam at this point that never contains the content I'm looking for and adds no value while polluting search results.
ddg has -site:pinterest.com
but i dont know ho to automatically append that to every search, which is what i want.
Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use
#360Earlier quoted context omitted.
Now "google" is a common enough word for generic online searches that the sentence "I googled 'australian licorice' using DuckDuckGo's image search" doesn't sound weird to me. See definition 2, under the transitive verb form of the second etymology: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/google#English
That still sounds weird to me. I obviously understand what you mean, but I still don't like the idea of saying "I googled x on DuckDuckGo".
You can say "Have a look, I just duck this up.."