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Why I Switched to Duck Duck Go Permanently

bookflavor.com

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Re: Why I Switched to Duck Duck Go Permanently

#51
post #43

DDG and Blekko definitely have a place besides google, bing and yahoo. One must appreciate Gabriel for his commitment to include BookFlavor. But on the other hand, I thought the article was pretty lame. Author did not give any convincing reason why he switched. Except, Gabriel was kind to him. Maybe he should investigate what DDG really has to offer and how it can maybe help him in his daily searches before committin…

Perhaps this post reveals a different point:

Treat People Well > Do No Evil

Re: Why I Switched to Duck Duck Go Permanently

#52

I really wish I could do this, but Duck Duck Go really just seems subpar when it comes to anything I actually still use a search engine for these days (technical searches). A better solution for my use case is to 1) avoid search engines where possible (far easier than you might initially think) and 2) just use googlesharing with ssl to provide myself with some anonymity while using google.

That's curious because I really have been working hard to get it much better for technical searches, and I often get the opposite report (that it's better for those with integrated SO , less content farms, other zero-click & goodies). I guess it varies by specific type though. In any case, I'd really appreciate specific examples so I can improve!

One thing that would really help and guarantee that I use DDG over Google for this kind of search would be to keep your links to documentation pages up to date, or at least give an easy selection.

Google is really bad at this. For instance, most links to pages in the Apache docs on Google are for 1.x, which all have a big header that says "This is deprecated, use 2.x". I use 2.x so the 1.x links are annoying, and it would be difficult if Apache didn't provide a link right there.

Another example is PostgreSQL. Google has _always_ been bad at providing up-to-date links to the PgSQL manual, even now it's usually 8.0-8.2 results that come up (the current version is 9.0.x). It's annoying because Postgres doesn't have an easy jump-to-current link like Apache, so I have to go up to the address bar, delete the older version number, and replace it with my current version number or the word "current", which always points to the latest.

I know it would be hard to do this for general results, but for official documentation it shouldn't be too difficult since the URLs usually contain the version number in a reliable format.

So, if I searched for "postgresql grant", as an example, I would like recent results to come up, or at least an easy way to choose which version of the documentation to use before I clicked out. If I have to write "postgresql grant 9.0" or something similar that would be OK too. Google does poorly at this even when you specify the version number you want as just shown.

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