I'm wondering about why, unlike Google, DDG doesn't display the number of results for a particular search query. It's quite frustrating.
DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use
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Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use
#412DuckDuckGo actually does a better job of indexing all of my blog posts than Google does. I discovered this when attempting to use Google to search for one of my blog posts using a domain specific query("site:myblog.com") and was unable to find the post I was searching for. However, I was able to easily find my blog post using the same query on DuckDuckGo. This made quite an impression on me as it was the first chink in Google's armor that I've seen.
Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use
#413Earlier 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 feels like Google's "AI" has reached the point of acting like a (rather stupid) human, complete with all the downsides. Many others I know are increasingly frustrated with this behaviour too, and one produced a very apt analogy: it's like walking into a pet store and asking for a specific type of dog, but being told by the sales assistant "would you like to see these instead" and pointing you to all the cats they have.
Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use
#414Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Bristol postcode is the letters 'BS' followed by a one or two digit number, so it's not particularly good for finding a service provider in a large area. UK postcodes are somewhat more useful when you want to narrow a search to a small area, especially for small towns and London districts where the number is a useful identifier and the area itself might have multiple or non-unique names
> it's not particularly good for finding a service provider in a large area. Unless I'm misunderstanding something, this doesn't make much sense. For example, running a search for "car mechanic 94105" doesn't restrict your results to car mechanics that are located inside the 94105 zip code. It restricts your results to car mechanics that are near the 94105 zip code, where "near" is a fuzzy term. I just ran this searc…
> For example, running a search for "car mechanic 94105" doesn't restrict your results to car mechanics that are located inside the 94105 zip code
I am seeing literally that issue with both Google and DuckDuckGo so maybe that depends on the region. My search results, both logged-in and in a private window, are limited to car mechanic websites that mention the zip code. The Google Maps search is not limited, but it's not very good in general, so I usually avoid it. DuckDuckGo finds practically no results in the map view (Apple Maps).
> The zip code is a cheap, easy, and unambiguous way to tell the search engine what you want. It's on the search engine to decide how to respond.
So is "car mechanic bristol uk". The parent's entire point is that DuckDuckGo doesn't consider context for natural language searches and claiming that everyone else is searching wrong is completely missing the point.
Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use
#415Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Why not be more inclusive and enable both how humans search as well as how nerds search?
Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use
#416Earlier quoted context omitted.
My story is the same! Also, when I want colouring pictures for my kids, DDG just lets met tap them and print them. That is nolonger possible using Google since some months. I also very much appreciate the code snippets when (already started typing "Googling"!) Searching for code related things.
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.
Try answering this one without looking it up:
February 29 2020 + 365 days
Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use
#417Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use
#418I 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 found that searching was more difficult nowadays. Result from Google is becoming worse, filling with content farm and ads. In some sense, that gave opportunity to become a better search engine without any technical improvement, but better marketing.
Search "phrases" are starting to return more and more useless results. I typed in some phrase as a question and got back a list of news articles about coronavirus. Can't recall what it was but it had nothing to do with coronavirus.
More and more often it will drop words out of my search; import words. I can't help but suspect it's because it has more ads to show me without the most contextually important bits of my search.
Half the first pages are ads. The next few pages may be shopping results even though I'm not searching for something to buy.
Something.. Happened on mobile. The search results now have a bunch of BS "sections" before the actual search results section! WUT.
Seems to be getting harder and harder to craft the right searches to get good results. I miss the days when people would write articles with headlines of " sucks". Was so much easier to find counter opinions to stuff :/
Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use
#419Can somebody explain why anyone should use DDG instead of Google when they are both free and ad funded?
I just issued my last Google query (some Mac OS troubleshooting) and the results were not even close. I understand that they try to differentiate by claiming they don't store previous queries and are stateless and not personalized in a sense which is a bug IMHO not a feature. Yet they sell it as privacy.
If one doesn't like their search queries stored remotely the real private solution is for the search engine to run locally which sounds technically hard/infeasible or some differential privacy magic to obscure individual queries (I'm not sure how exactly) but DDG doesn't seem to have any benefit over Google in a meaningful way.
That said, extra competition is always good for consumers
Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use
#420It'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.
Unfortunately this is the same for Romania as well, no local results are returned even though the country was set correctly.
Same for Australia. I use DDG exclusively on all devices for a few years now, and overall it works great for me. I probably use !g once or twice a month, if that.
But..
Even though I have the Australia button turned on, it doesn’t seem to do anything. So every time I need something local, I add “site:.au” to the end of the query then it works great again.