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Let's start using DuckDuckGo more often

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Let's start using DuckDuckGo more often

#51

Post by luckylion »

appleflaxen wrote: post #30
lucb1e wrote: post #14

Going one step further, I removed my websites from the Google index: https://lucb1e.com/?p=post&id=130 If you want to find my stuff, you now have to use DDG or some other search engine. Hopefully we can signal to Google that we are not okay with monopolistic behaviour (that's why I blocked them, not just for being the biggest or monopolist, but for also behaving like it -- see the blog post for details).

that's an awesome idea! how do you determine which IPs are the google webcrawler, though?

No need, you can block them by user agent, they are consistent - or just disallow them in robots.txt.

If you need to make sure it's actually a google bot when a client shows up with the user agent, you can use reverse dns: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/80553

Re: Let's start using DuckDuckGo more often

#52

Post by bpfrh »

phatfish wrote: post #27

I have used it as a default for at least 2 years. I'd estimate drop back to Google for 20-25% of specific "subject matter" searches, mostly around technology. Probably a bit less than that for general searches. Most of the time I run the same search on Google the results are very similar for the top hits. But Google does seem to produce helpful results that are not exactly what I searched for more often. DDG also ske…

I switched to DDG about half a year ago. What I really like is that for me I can switch location bias on and off. Sometimes I want region specific results, but most of the time not, so I actually get better results on DDG.

Re: Let's start using DuckDuckGo more often

#54

Post by _qxjp »

lucb1e wrote: post #14

Going one step further, I removed my websites from the Google index: https://lucb1e.com/?p=post&id=130 If you want to find my stuff, you now have to use DDG or some other search engine. Hopefully we can signal to Google that we are not okay with monopolistic behaviour (that's why I blocked them, not just for being the biggest or monopolist, but for also behaving like it -- see the blog post for details).

From what I recall, Bing also displays AMP pages. Wouldn't you want to block crawls from Bing too?

Re: Let's start using DuckDuckGo more often

#55

Post by robertAngst »

benbristow wrote: post #13

The thing with Google is that, like it or not, their analytics and their knowledge of you as an individual helps produce better search results for you. Google will always be the better search engine. That being said DuckDuckGo is definitely getting much better nowadays. Still end up going back to Google after a few days though.

I'm a nerd with pretty mild porn usage and no terrorist habits.

I have 0 reason to not use google. I really don't care if they find out my obsession with electronics and that I have the hots for tall girls.

Out of every company, I'd give Google the nod as most helpful company of my lifetime.

Can someone tell me why I'm wrong?

Re: Let's start using DuckDuckGo more often

#56

Post by lkj »

- "python remove from list": Google has the Python docs on the first page. DDG does not.

- "site:news.ycombinator.com rms_returns duckduckgo": At first the DDG results looked better but multiple results had no mention of "rms_returns" at all.

- "archlinux dmesg audit": Both nice.

- "lange nacht der museen berlin": Wow, unexpectedly relevant results on DDG, did they improve their local results?

I think I should indeed try again. Previous times it was full of spam for local results.

Re: Let's start using DuckDuckGo more often

#57

Post by tonfa »

lucb1e wrote: post #47
appleflaxen wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that's an awesome idea! how do you determine which IPs are the google webcrawler, though?

I match the user agent string on containing "Google". It seems that Google Chrome only includes "Chrome", so I don't block users this way. Here is an overview of all Google crawlers' user agent strings: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1061943 As you can see, they all include Google (capitalized). I don't use robots.txt because they say that doesn't stop them from including the site in search results: htt…

The documented way is the noindex tag (in html or http headers): https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/93710?hl=en

Re: Let's start using DuckDuckGo more often

#58

Post by weinzierl »

phatfish wrote: post #27

I have used it as a default for at least 2 years. I'd estimate drop back to Google for 20-25% of specific "subject matter" searches, mostly around technology. Probably a bit less than that for general searches. Most of the time I run the same search on Google the results are very similar for the top hits. But Google does seem to produce helpful results that are not exactly what I searched for more often. DDG also ske…

> DDG also skews heavily to US results which is a pain.

DDG also skews heavily to US results which is one reason I find DDG useful.

I have been largely using DDG for years. What finally drove me away from Google completely is that you cannot get search results that are untainted by localization anymore. Whenever I search for programming related topics or the subjects typically discussed on HN I always get a some confusing local results no matter what language and region settings I use. https://google.com/ncr which did a good job for years doesn't seem to work anymore.

Really the only reason to refer to Google nowadays is if I deliberately search local places, organizations and businesses - this is where Google is unbeaten in my opinion. Even local news and events isn't usually worth the g! switch. These two might be good in the US but here in Germany all search engines are equally bad at it.

Re: Let's start using DuckDuckGo more often

#59

Post by hi41 »

There are some queries that governments would be very interested in knowing who did it. As an example could be the query how to make bomb. Does DuckDuckGo hand over this information to government agencies? Information such as ip address, user if etc?
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