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We can do better than DuckDuckGo

drewdevault.com

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Re: We can do better than DuckDuckGo

#381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was a time, a long time ago, where google had this: www.google.com/ncr 'ncr' here stands for no country recognition. It allowed many expats to do technical searches without the noise of regionalization results. Of course someone clever at google figured out that was probably too useful and now it just redirects you back to google.com because screw all those niche use-cases.

That's not what it was. "ncr" was "No Country Redirect". When you were in a different country (e.g., India), and you typed in google.com out of habit, it would recognize your IP-geo and redirect you to the country-specific domain (e.g., google.co.in). If you really just wanted google.com for whatever reason, then you'd type google.com/ncr. It then wouldn't redirect you based on your IP-geo, and you'd stay on google.c…

Thanks for correcting the acronym TIL.

However you can see from the comments in both android police [0] and reddit [1] that, irrespective of your assertiveness, the behaviour did indeed change at least in 2017 if not more times before.

It at the very least used to preserve the suffix and absolutely respect no regional results. It's the same as the old bolean operators, google claims the behaviour is unchanged but will silently ignore them.

[0] https://www.androidpolice.com/2017/10/27/changing-googles-do...

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/google/comments/4xda1p/googlecomncr...

Re: We can do better than DuckDuckGo

#382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Google automates, DDG leaves me to choose. I prefer the 2nd approach every time.

This is exactly why I like DDG way more than Google and why I love to use Alfred instead of Spotlight on my Mac. With DDG you have !bangs and with Alfred you also can tell him what you’re looking for. 99.9% of the time I know I’m looking for a file or a folder or a definition of a word or want to open an app or want to search the web etc. With Spotlight you’re stuck to the order Apple designed the results to show up

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