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DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

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Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#371

Post by m12k »

anderspitman wrote: post #15

I switched over to DDG a few weeks ago. I slowly regressed to more and more !g usage, and finally switched back to GOOG a couple days ago. Then just an hour ago I searched for "google fiber stadia", because I was curious how well they work together. The main reddit result opened in an amp page (and of course reddit pressured me to install the mobile app). I went back to the results and started scrolling down. I hones…

I tried DDG half a year ago when I also switched back to Firefox, but didn't like the results at the time, so I switched to Startpage. Then for the past couple weeks, Startpage has been having technical issues, so I tried out DDG again. And it's nice. Like I don't even think about it. I'm actually impressed

Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#373

Post by hombre_fatal »

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…

On the other hand, when people say you need to learn how to search DDG, they basically mean you need to add more context to your search because DDG is easily confused and categorically worse.

Having to "retrain" yourself to use DDG is the most romantic way to say "it's a worse tool so you need to give it more context."

Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#374

Post by sedatk »

speps wrote: post #11

It's only good enough when you're in the US, I live in the UK and DDG consistently returns non local results even though the country is set correctly, it's especially annoying given how many US cities are named after their UK counterpart.

It's not even good enough in the US.

Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#375

Post by TLightful »

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…

Correct.

Google is over. A zombie behemoth that will continue through sheer inertia.

Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#377

Post by TomVDB »

I switched to DDG for my desktop, laptop and phone a few weeks ago.

I'm on the fence about switching back: I find myself using g! all the time to get (better) Google results.

I want anything related to soccer (national competitions standings, live results, match results, ...)? DDG doesn't have it.

Anything where I know up front that the result will be in some forum? DDG almost never has it.

Some kind of local news event, whether recent or not? Don't count on DDG.

Typo correction is worse. Relevance of the result is worse. Contextual understanding is close to non-existent.

Only for the most basic search operations, DDG is fine for me. Other than that, it's g!.

I wish it were different.

Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#378

Post by ChuckMcM »

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…

FWIW you would have had a similar experience using Bing. I built a script based on some principals that were in place at Google when I was there to measure search quality[1] and have watched Bing steadily improve over time. I attribute it to a combination of more click stream data as more traffic has been funneled their way (through DDG and others), and algorithm rot at Google which is putting more and more paid content into their results.

[1] And no, I'm not going to release it because as far as I know Google has never released any information externally about how they compute search quality and so its still protected by my NDA with them.

Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#379

Post by vinclou »

tracker1 wrote: post #338
hedora wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google gives me bad results. It ignores some of the words in my queries, and the context boxes are generally spammy and irrelevant. Even if the correct information is somewhere in the results page, I bounce before I can find it. From what I can tell from the article, this might be because I type too much stuff into the search bar, and because Google’s manually curated semantic web stuff is not relevant to me. However…

I switched for about a month... for most general searches ddg was as good or better... when searching for development terms as a programmer, I found that the ddg results were often worthless to me. The context that google has associated to you specifically adds value to the results. Since most of my searches were for technical libraries, components, etc, I found myself searching again with !g more than half the time.…

I use DDG for 2 years already, and I'm a developer, I've never experienced ur problem, and I do search for technical stuff all the time. I dont see how DDG can fail to show u a documentation or library result, especially if you know what u are looking for
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