I still end up reverting back to google a lot, especially for more natural language question-type searches.
DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use
381–390 of 490 posts
Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use
#382I 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.
GP isn't a peer-reviewed journal, it's an opinion insight.
Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use
#383Earlier quoted context omitted.
It looks more and more like Google wants to convert native search hits to paid clicks... Notice how often when you search for "company" you find the company's ad first and then below the native search result...
Agreed, and the ad is often immediately above the native search result 1-2. I'm guessing clicking the ad costs the company money per click, and the native search result doesn't? If I'm explicitly searching for a company, and I'd prefer that they don't have to incur an advertising penalty on my behalf, I'd need to scroll past the first result to the second.
We regularly bid for our own keyword and it is super competitive as competitors are always trying to buy our company name. It is awkward when you type "My company", and the first page is all competitor ads
Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use
#384Earlier quoted context omitted.
I literally do this with google all the time though (my girlfriend like us to celebrate N * 100 anniversaries). Every hundred days or so I go to google and type "500 days after [date]" or something to that effect and it works. It was the first thing I tried, it works reliably every time, and it's google providing the result in the results page, which is better than a link to a website that would do it for me. What qu…
The example I gave above should suffice to demonstrate the differences. Just copy the second line and paste it into both search engines.
So, to be clear, Google is lamer than DDG because it supports the natural language expression `X days after M D Y` but does not support the mathematical `M D Y + X days`
I guess Google has figured out with its trillions(?) of queries how humans search and not how nerds search.
Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use
#385I 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 ev…
Soccer is a great example. Searching "Chelsea" in Google vs DDG demonstrates the differences between the two.
Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use
#386Earlier quoted context omitted.
I recently had to search for something similar to this: march 12 2019 + 366 days and DuckDuckGo gave me exactly what I wanted while Google gave me not-very-useful results.
The date command can also answer this question: $ date -d 'march 12 2019 + 366 days' Thu Mar 12 00:00:00 PDT 2020
Or excel, rc[-1]+366, assuming you typed in the date you want in the cell to the left...
Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use
#387[deleted]
Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use
#388I don't know. Ddg is my default but I still !g most of my searches after not getting what I need in the top 3 items. Beyond that I need to scroll and I'll probably try a different query
Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use
#389Earlier quoted context omitted.
For something obscure, Google ignores three out of four keywords and just produces drivel.
This has become increasingly frustrating for me, and I now have to overuse quoting to get the things I want. Why would I include a word if I wanted results that didn't include it. I could understand that on later pages to include more results, but regularly even the very first results don't include one of the key words in my search.
It's even worse if they helpfully replace the word with a "synonym" (which isn't!) instead of removing it.
Usually the replacement is significantly broader than the original. For example, "Debian" might get replaced with "Linux", giving lots of irrelevant results. Sometimes it will even replace e.g. "FreeBSD" with "Linux", when the whole point of having it in the query was to exclude the irrelevant Linux results.
Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use
#390Very strange timing on what is unfortunately a horribly inaccurate title based on my personal experience. I tried swapping to DuckDuckGo yesterday on my iPhone as the primary search tool and reverted unfortunately back to Google after only two hours. It’s hard to define all of the reasons the ‘mobile’ experience is so unbearable, but I’ll try: 1) No video or image results at the top of the page when that is most rele…
It's not going to be convenient to get off any Google product. If privacy and escaping algorithm bubbles is important enough to you, DDG can probably be "good enough".
Unfortunately I need a search engine to be functional. The trade off privacy is certainly not worth it, and the algorithms aren’t half as good, at least in terms of search results. It’s a damn shame.