DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use • Hacker News Board

Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#421

Post by kunglao » Sat, Mar 07, 2020, 5:28 AM UTC

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…

There's also Qwant. I've been using it a for a while on PC and found it to be not bad. On Android I kept running into no results a few times, I don't know what that was about.

Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#422

Post by bobbylarrybobby » Sat, Mar 07, 2020, 5:40 AM UTC

TallGuyShort wrote: post #270

bobbylarrybobby wrote: post #20

To people who use DuckDuckGo: how do you deal with its inability to answer simple queries with factual answers? Things like “distance from Los Angeles to New York”, “Joe Biden age”, “knives out cast”, “capital of South Africa”, etc. The time it takes to click a result on DuckDuckGo and navigate to the answer is so much longer than just getting the answer at the top of the results page, as google (and even bing) provi…

That seems like more of what WolframAlpha caters to. Personally, I don't like assuming an engine has interpreted what I'm looking for correctly - I'd prefer to maintain some of the load of personally understanding the source of information and it's context. So here is what I do: >> distance from Los Angeles to New York !m los angeles to new york >> Joe Biden age !w joe biden >> knives out cast !imdb knives out >> cap…

Google and Bing both list all three capitals of South Africa. They also write out how they've interpreted your query so you can tell if they're giving you the answer to the right question.

Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#423

Post by almstimplmntd » Sat, Mar 07, 2020, 5:49 AM UTC

A bit tangential but related: has anyone else noticed an increased frequency in the desired result of a Google search being the first one on the second page?

Particularly for things involving reviews or booking, I have noticed an uptick in the (subjectively) “right” result being kept off page 1... it seems almost like some post processing logic to favor specific sites/companies. The fact that the “right” result in these instances is almost always the first result makes me think the true Ranking function knows the result’s actual value.

Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#424

Post by stubish » Sat, Mar 07, 2020, 5:50 AM UTC

I'd go further than damning with faint praise and say that it is more than good enough for regular use.

Common wisdom is that it isn't as good as Google, but whenever my results are bad and I fall back to a !g search, those results are also bad.

Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#425

Post by fouc » Sat, Mar 07, 2020, 5:56 AM UTC

tus88 wrote: post #297

schoen wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The date command can also answer this question: $ date -d 'march 12 2019 + 366 days' Thu Mar 12 00:00:00 PDT 2020

I starting thinking about the Python equivalent of this and it was disgusting.

Ruby isn't much better

    ruby -e "require 'date'; puts (Date.parse('march 12 2019') + 366)"
    2020-03-12

Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#426

Post by TwoBit » Sat, Mar 07, 2020, 6:01 AM UTC

ebg13 wrote: post #176

I'll believe this when the third result for "filled torus" isn't "Cum Filled Pussy Porn Videos" unless safe search is enabled. DDG's contextual awareness is abysmal.

OK,though is "filled torus" even a proper name? Looks like Google recognizes that you probably really mean solid torus.

Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#427

Post by igravious » Sat, Mar 07, 2020, 6:03 AM UTC

Naracion wrote: post #415

igravious wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Sure, nothing stopping them, and I'm not arguing against that.

Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#428

Post by igravious » Sat, Mar 07, 2020, 6:11 AM UTC

alkonaut wrote: post #327

It’s not. Not even close. There should be some sort of “search benchmark” that could show this more objectively. A table of searches with search queries and the correct first resukt . In maby cases it’s clear what the correct result is (Search for a major company and I want their website index page for example). In other cases the expected result is “what google does”, e.g when searching for “123 GBP in USD”. It’s no…

Absolutely. Completely anecdotally I know but I switched to the Brave browser recently to try it out. It came with DDG installed by default so I started using it in the omnibar or whatever it's called. Like many here I do some coding so I've been looking up stuff to do with Ruby, Vue.js. APIs, and the lambda calculus. DDG results were not very helpful so I've gotten used to navigating to google.com just like the old days.

As in, I'm so used to ctrl+t and type something to search that I had to train myself to type begin typing google.com again. Yeah, I could switch the default search engine but being forced to compare results is a good habit. These articles about how DDG is hit the front page time and again on Hackernews, this has never been my experience. I appreciate the privacy aspects 100% so I'd actually prefer if it was genuinely competitive with the big G but sadly this has never been my experience.

Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#429

Post by Schlaefer » Sat, Mar 07, 2020, 6:22 AM UTC

azinman2 wrote: post #162

gonehome wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you tried it recently? I generally agree that people made excuses for DDG when it was clearly worse and unusable, but today it’s good enough to use instead (I think it’s better). I’d try it again if you haven’t for a while. Maybe your needs are different than mine, but since we’re both on HN there’s probably pretty good overlap. Small thing, but I really like how DDG results are primarily links to websites and I…

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.

This thread made me change to DDG (again). A few minutes later gimp was crashing on me, so I did the lazy thing: C&P some of the error into the search engine.

This is the result of my fist search switching to DDG: https://i.imgur.com/05LxLDv.png

DDG results are utterly useless, while google gives three highly relevant results solving my issue within a few seconds. Happens all the time. DDG: I want, I just can't.

PS: And I'm not a person searching for anything gimp all the time, my browser history shows three prior "how to x in" gimp searches over the last year. Adding to that this is google.com not logged-in in a Firefox container solely for google searches where storage is scrapped somewhat regularly.

Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#430

Post by chapium » Sat, Mar 07, 2020, 6:33 AM UTC

gonehome wrote: post #82

whalesalad wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Have you tried it recently? I generally agree that people made excuses for DDG when it was clearly worse and unusable, but today it’s good enough to use instead (I think it’s better). I’d try it again if you haven’t for a while. Maybe your needs are different than mine, but since we’re both on HN there’s probably pretty good overlap. Small thing, but I really like how DDG results are primarily links to websites and I…

DDG used to have issues with responsiveness on their page. Years later I tried it again and it actually feels right. A lot of work has gone into performance optimization and it has sucked me in.