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Inside DuckDuckGo, Google's Tiniest, Fiercest Competitor

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Re: Inside DuckDuckGo, Google's Tiniest, Fiercest Competitor

#51

Post by LordIllidan »

tosseraccount wrote: post #25
adrusi wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In what way do you find it barely usable? I've used it for about a year and I find the results to be great. I don't think there's been a time when I couldn't find the result I wanted with ddg but could with google.

Good question. Google is better at guessing your focus. I'm not sure how they do it. Sometimes duckduck is pretty lost and scattershot. I have the opportunity of rephrasing the query or just hitting !g . If I don't mind google tracking the query, then I'll do a !g and often what I want is in the top 3. Sometimes, I don't want google tracking me (e.g. to check out a health issue) , then I'll work out a better query on…

Perhaps Google is better at guessing your focus precisely because they are tracking you?

Re: Inside DuckDuckGo, Google's Tiniest, Fiercest Competitor

#52

Post by pbhjpbhj »

adrusi wrote: post #20
tosseraccount wrote: post #11

Duck duck is barely usable ... but they don't spy on you. The !g and !b commands make it my first choice. If the results aren't getting what you want, try the search on google or bing. IF you don't mind Sergy Brin or Bill Gates tracking you. I still think there's room for a search engine that supports boolean(ish?) operations like AND, OR , NOT and NEAR. Providing links directly to the source and not a redirect to th…

In what way do you find it barely usable? I've used it for about a year and I find the results to be great. I don't think there's been a time when I couldn't find the result I wanted with ddg but could with google.

I've had a serious go at DDG 3 times now - last month I tried it but I ended up just using !g for every search and so went back to Google. The thing I use most often, and major frustration with Google, is limiting the search by time period : I wish the additional tools would be sticky.

I did blind search engine testing and Google came out on top.

That said Google is frustrating me more and more, especially now you need to "put it in quotes" if you don't want them to just show you things they think might be tangentially related in some way to your search and, you know, show you results with the actual terms in.

It's quite interesting to me that Google's main advantage when I first used it was I didn't need to AND all my terms together, it was the differentiating feature that won me over (I can't recall who from, it was around the time of Teoma and AllTheWeb IIRC). Now even when you use the cumbersome notation to say a term is required it still shows you pages without the term on ... but it nonetheless is the best offering I can find (for me). Argh!

Re: Inside DuckDuckGo, Google's Tiniest, Fiercest Competitor

#54

Post by esemiss »

mscarborough wrote: post #18
tosseraccount wrote: post #11

Duck duck is barely usable ... but they don't spy on you. The !g and !b commands make it my first choice. If the results aren't getting what you want, try the search on google or bing. IF you don't mind Sergy Brin or Bill Gates tracking you. I still think there's room for a search engine that supports boolean(ish?) operations like AND, OR , NOT and NEAR. Providing links directly to the source and not a redirect to th…

Can we stop with this "bill gates is watching your searches" nonsense? I know you're fascinating, but Brin and Gates may be concerned about many things not related your internet activity. Corporations in data monitoring projects, OK.

From http://gawker.com/5637234/gcreep-google-engineer-stalked-tee...

In at least four cases, Barksdale spied on minors' Google accounts without their consent, according to a source close to the incidents. In an incident this spring involving a 15-year-old boy who he'd befriended, Barksdale tapped into call logs from Google Voice, Google's Internet phone service, after the boy refused to tell him the name of his new girlfriend, according to our source. After accessing the kid's account to retrieve her name and phone number, Barksdale then taunted the boy and threatened to call her.

In other cases involving teens of both sexes, Barksdale exhibited a similar pattern of aggressively violating others' privacy, according to our source. He accessed contact lists and chat transcripts, and in one case quoted from an IM that he'd looked up behind the person's back. (He later apologized to one for retrieving the information without her knowledge.) In another incident, Barksdale unblocked himself from a Gtalk buddy list even though the teen in question had taken steps to cut communications with the Google engineer.

Re: Inside DuckDuckGo, Google's Tiniest, Fiercest Competitor

#56

Post by DanielStraight »

zacinbusiness wrote: post #7

I've been a happy DDG user for about 3 years now. I initially started not because of privacy, but because I think the home page and search results are much cleaner and more minimalist. And I've told myself that if Google ever produces a search result that I couldn't find just as easily with DuckDuckGo then I will switch back. So far that hasn't happened. Now I use DuckDuckGo as my home page and it's my only search en…

This has been my experience as well. I have used DDG as my primary search engine for years. The results have been great, and the lack of !bangs on Google makes it extremely frustrating when I'm forced to use it. (Note for DDG users, you can type the bang on its own to go right to the main site. So just "!w" on its own to go to Wikipedia, or "!a" on its own to go to Amazon, which I find quicker than using the address bar.)

Re: Inside DuckDuckGo, Google's Tiniest, Fiercest Competitor

#57

Post by MisterWebz »

unicornporn wrote: post #49
tosseraccount wrote: post #11

Duck duck is barely usable ... but they don't spy on you. The !g and !b commands make it my first choice. If the results aren't getting what you want, try the search on google or bing. IF you don't mind Sergy Brin or Bill Gates tracking you. I still think there's room for a search engine that supports boolean(ish?) operations like AND, OR , NOT and NEAR. Providing links directly to the source and not a redirect to th…

Barely usable, yes I agree. So use Startpage.com. They also say they don't spy on you. It works just as good as Google, because it uses Google (see it as a proxy). DDG is especially terrible if you are used localized versions of Google. I was used to "Swedish Google", and using a localized (Swedish) DDG was totally unusable. And so I found Startpage. Works better than the real deal for me. There are a few differences…

How come Startpage always shows me local results?

Re: Inside DuckDuckGo, Google's Tiniest, Fiercest Competitor

#58

Post by rakoo »

tosseraccount wrote: post #11

Duck duck is barely usable ... but they don't spy on you. The !g and !b commands make it my first choice. If the results aren't getting what you want, try the search on google or bing. IF you don't mind Sergy Brin or Bill Gates tracking you. I still think there's room for a search engine that supports boolean(ish?) operations like AND, OR , NOT and NEAR. Providing links directly to the source and not a redirect to th…

> but they don't spy on you

How can you be so sure of that ? A few months ago, pretty much anyone would say "but the NSA don't spy on you". From a paranoid (ie security) point of view, DDG is not better than Google et al.

Now, I do believe they are more respective of everyone's privacy, but there's absolutely nothing more than words to back this.

Re: Inside DuckDuckGo, Google's Tiniest, Fiercest Competitor

#60

Post by ultrasandwich »

pielud wrote: post #55

The killer feature for me with ddg (as a programmer) is the ! searches for documentation: !php strstr !python os.makedirs !pypi requests !js String etc. This gives you a single search bar for all documentation, which is amazing. edit: formatting

Wow I didn't know about this. +100 for DDG.
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