DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use • Hacker News Board

Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#451

Post by Kiro » Sat, Mar 07, 2020, 10:33 AM UTC

elliottback wrote: post #433

bla3 wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That page basically confirms this. It says > To do that, we've developed an open source Instant Answer platform called DuckDuckHack, which links to https://duckduckhack.com/ which says "DuckDuckHack is now in Maintenance Mode". And the "four hundred sources" link links to 400 special case replies. They are probably useful, but fire rarely. It's basically Bing, and that page is a bunch of spin.

A search in Bing for "cult of the dead cow" seems to give me some localized (Japan) results, while DDG has a bunch of American Beto O'Rourke politics news pieces added.

The Bing API provides a different set than Bing itself. Compare "cult of the dead cow" on Ecosia Japan (which is a straight-up Bing API proxy) with DDG Japan and you will see that the results are identical.

Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#452

Post by hestefisk » Sat, Mar 07, 2020, 10:37 AM UTC

If you’re in US yes.

Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#453

Post by yann63 » Sat, Mar 07, 2020, 10:40 AM UTC

insulanus wrote: post #408

roydivision wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This drives me insane. In the early days you only got exact matches, now in an effort to sell more ads, or be more “helpful” you get random crap. I would pay for a search that only returned results with the words you entered.

Google Verbatim. It is super well hidden. Type your Query, select "Tools", then "All Results". Switch that to "Verbatim"

Awesome! Thanks!

However it does not seem possible to set this as default for all searches :-(

Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#454

Post by 4ad » Sat, Mar 07, 2020, 10:46 AM UTC

smichel17 wrote: post #178

4ad wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That means I should try DDG. I NEVER EVER want local results, and Google always gives me local results. If I'd want local results I would put my country or my city in the search query.

DDG has a toggle to choose whether to prioritize local results or not. Try a search, and then it's prominent enough that I don't think I need to describe its location; you'll find it if you're looking.

That's great!

Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#455

Post by thsealienbstrds » Sat, Mar 07, 2020, 10:55 AM UTC

It has been for a while. I occasionally need to do !g when I'm searching for obscure errors, but it doesn't happen often.

Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#456

Post by GoofballJones » Sat, Mar 07, 2020, 12:06 PM UTC

Been using DDG now for over a year and I would say, for me, it's about 95% accurate in finding what I want found. It's rare now that I go to Google to search for anything.

DDG is the default search engine on Firefox and Safari for me. I no long use Chrome (it's not even loaded on this computer) and rarely Google.com itself.

Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#457

Post by _v7gu » Sat, Mar 07, 2020, 12:19 PM UTC

ensignro2340 wrote: post #404

ImaCake wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I experience the same problem as a fairly novice programmer who doesn't always know the right term to stick into DDG/google. >It's gotten to the point where I almost always automatically bang out to Google for those types of searches. But this is why I stick with DDG, because it is very very easy to check elsewhere with a two letter bang. Even if I never used DDG search it would still be valuable to use DDG with bang…

>Even if I never used DDG search it would still be valuable to use DDG with bangs for wikipedia, google, youtube, etc. I love this about ddg. I watch to a lot of YouTube videos, and being able to just type “!yt search terms” is just too useful.

It also coordinates very nicely with Firefox's search bookmark feature, I just start the keywords with ! and it's just like I'm doing a normal web search on DDG

Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#458

Post by ignoramous » Sat, Mar 07, 2020, 12:27 PM UTC

xingyzt wrote: post #394

ignoramous wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm redirected to startpage for both !s and !sp from duckduckgo. Is there a setting I need to flip?

Startpage is a privacy-oriented proxy of Google search results.

Weren't they bought by an ad-company recently? I used their anonymous browsing extensively, even if it was slow. I've all but stopped using them now.

Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#459

Post by pnako » Sat, Mar 07, 2020, 12:29 PM UTC

It's not. I'm not a big fan of Google the company, but Google the search engine finds what I'm looking for.

If I type "the two magicians from TV" in Google, I get what I'm looking for (Penn and Teller). It's way down the list in DDG.

I suspect DDG is a glorified regex, whereas Google is able to infer connections and figure out what I meant.

Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use

#460

Post by cjohansson » Sat, Mar 07, 2020, 12:41 PM UTC

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…

Yeah I agree, in some rare cases Google is better, in most cases DDG is best from my experience