I tried using duckduckgo for a period of about two months.
It's great that it's not monetized through ads, but it's main function, search, is not best in class.
I do not use duckduckgo anymore.
DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use
461–470 of 490 posts
Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use
#462Earlier quoted context omitted.
An example of a difference: I live in Bristol. If I search for things like "car mechanic bristol", DDG comes up with lots of results from Bristol, Tennessee. It's not that DDG is worse than Google, it's just that DDG isn't tailoring the results to what it knows about me. The solution is to be more specific: "car mechanic bristol uk", for example, does the job.
> If I search for things like "car mechanic bristol", DDG comes up with lots of results from Bristol, Tennessee. It's not that DDG is worse than Google, it's just that DDG isn't tailoring the results to what it knows about me. If I wanted a car mechanic in San Francisco, I would usually search for "car mechanic 94105" rather than "car mechanic san francisco". Regardless of search engine. Do postal codes not work to r…
Lithuania, Slovakia and Indonesia also have 94105 as a valid post code.
Post codes are not particularly human friendly (though British ones like N1C 4AG are a bit better than just numbers; it's easy to see the N, N1, N1C prefixes in that).
Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use
#463Startpage is falling apart. DuckDuckGo is good enough by virtue of being the only option.
Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use
#464recently i found myself switching to yandex.ru when i can't find it on google - and it worked. I guess it's better not to be too fixed on any single search engine;
Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use
#465Earlier quoted context omitted.
> A lot of DDG fans on HN blame the user or social conditioning and use that as a crutch. The tools are different, though, so searching the same way on DDG and Google will lead to different outcomes. This is no different than adapting you speech when speaking to an infant or speaking to an adult. [1] For example, I use DDG as my primary search tool, and I have a habit of using "keywords", rather than natural language…
I have a hard time believing there's actually much google-specific adaption going on for anyone except the biggest HN nerd. My girlfriend types whole sentences into it. People in this thread have search examples like "harry potter sport". I look at my google search history and it's just generic search strings that DDG has no excuse to struggle. Having to "tweak your language" just sounds like a cop-out to me. And I t…
> Having to "tweak your language" just sounds like a cop-out to me.
Totally agree. But even Google is nowhere near perfection here, so we’re left with the same two strategies we all use when searching:
* try over and over * continually tweak queries
It’s especially easy to forget that we often actually search multiple times, because we do it so quickly that it’s an ingrained habit.
Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use
#466Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm still using g! about 50% of the time. One thing I wish they'd add is to run the calculator if my search term starts with "=".
Their search results page has a feedback button in the corner. Use it! They listen to it.
They haven’t stopped returning results that don’t include my keywords yet, unfortunately.
Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use
#467Earlier 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.
I just pop open wolframalpha for anything that needs more meaning to it. I'll keep DDG in mind for next time.
If you use DDG as your universal search but want to go to WolframAlpha for your query:
x + y !wa
Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use
#468The only thing I miss in DDG is number of results. I use it often to check for the right way to compose a phrase. If there is a significant difference in numbers between the two alternatives, it pretty much indicates what's the right one.
Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use
#469No, it's not
Edit: this is coming from someone who wishes it was
Re: DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use
#470Earlier quoted context omitted.
Raku is a lot prettier than Python: perl6 -e 'say Date.new("2019-03-12").later( :366days )' 2020-03-12 perl6 -e 'say Date.new("2019-03-12") + 366' 2020-03-12
Probably because I have a finance background, I would go straight to Excel.
Which makes dates out of things that are not even dates! (Like gene names)