DuckDuckGo vs Google • Hacker News Board

Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#521

Post by TheGrassyKnoll » Thu, Sep 21, 2017, 5:20 AM UTC

DDG user. I use this to cook pasta: 7 min !timer (goes off to google & starts a timer)

Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#522

Post by orthecreedence » Thu, Sep 21, 2017, 5:21 AM UTC

codelord wrote: post #488

I don't understand what's the difference between Google and DuckDuckGo when all of my traffic is going through Comcast and AT&T anyway. There's no privacy.

Unless AT&T/Comcast are somehow MITMing your SSL connections (unlikely), then your search terms are all encrypted and all the ISPs know is that you are using DuckDuckGo.

Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#523

Post by bamboozled » Thu, Sep 21, 2017, 5:45 AM UTC

Sargos wrote: post #244

bamboozled wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently spoke with Gabriel and his view was that they're going to continue to outsource / proxy / aggregate unless they need to implement their own search. Right now it's not worth the investment apparently.

Yeah because Search is an actual hard problem and putting up a proxy like DDG is not. DDG will never have any real value beyond that.

IDK, if it ain't broke don't fix it.

Also the system in place for aggregation isn't just Nginx, it actually does things, like bangs.

Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#524

Post by mikehain » Thu, Sep 21, 2017, 7:39 AM UTC

I'm a fan of DuckDuckGo and I've found myself using it more and more these days. I actually had to change my launcher on Android because the default Google Go launcher that comes packed with the Moto X Pure has no option to remove the Google search from every home page. I switched over to Nova launcher just so I could put a DDG search bar in its place.

Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#525

Post by itsnotvalid » Thu, Sep 21, 2017, 7:39 AM UTC

notspanishflu wrote: post #87

benbenhu wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And don't forget to use the bangs that can allow you to check other engines results fast if you need. For people afraid of getting off google, you can always search something like '!g my-search', it works the same for youtube(!yt), google image(!gi), or even hackernews(!hn) And of course the best bang is the 'I am feeling lucky' one (!), i.e.: 'hackernews !'

It's better to use the '!s' bang. Is like using '!g' but with more privacy because uses startpage.com

Then what's the difference between using !g and startpage.com ?

Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#526

Post by iDemonix » Thu, Sep 21, 2017, 7:41 AM UTC

romo5 wrote: post #89

People are conditioned to think Search has to work online. This was true when Google was created. No one had the processing or memory available on their desktop to search an entire index of the "useful" web. Not anymore. How large is a "useful" index of the web today? And can it fit on your laptop? The answer is yes. Can the entire thing be queried fast? The answer is yes. As an example take the entire stackexchange…

If you struggle to get any of your indexing working, let me know and I can Google it, whilst you grep through your stale Stack Overflow archive.

Your reply seems pointless, yes I could download an entire copy of Wikipedia, compress it and index it - why would I want to? Are you going to do this on every machine you own? What about the updates Wikipedia receives every minute?

You should start a company though to focus on this, maybe you could call it Encarta or something?

Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#527

Post by pvdebbe » Thu, Sep 21, 2017, 8:01 AM UTC

the_duke wrote: post #295

Freak_NL wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

!ud → Urban Dictionary (what do you mean, she's 'office cute'?) !wen → Wikipedia English !w.. → Wikipedia (two letter language code, e.g., 'nl') !wikt Wiktionary So many useful bangs.

So many bangs for you duck!

The best bang for your duck

Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#528

Post by staticelf » Thu, Sep 21, 2017, 8:40 AM UTC

AdamSC1 wrote: post #226

staticelf wrote: post #84

DuckDuckGo has really, really improved on their results for me who do not live in USA. Before, it was pretty much unusable. But today I use DDG as my main search engine on all my devices. You should too.

Our engineers have been working really hard on international results - I'm sure they will be happy to hear it's making a difference for our users! Disclaimer: DDG staff.

Glad to hear that! Big difference and I am glad you're not completely US-focused which is unfortunately common. :)

Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#529

Post by michaelbrooks » Thu, Sep 21, 2017, 8:43 AM UTC

MistahKoala wrote: post #483

michaelbrooks wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would recommend Vivaldi as it supports Chrome extensions. Chrome apps can be installed, but not used (hopefully Vivaldi fixes that). I really like the idea of Brave, but not having extension support is a major hurdle which I hope they get over.

I'm currently using Vivaldi, but have to say that it's not really an ideal analogue of Chrome as it doesn't carry over some of the everyday features and affordances of Chrome. That's partly understandable, because it's actually (apparently) intended to be a browser for Opera users to migrate to. It's also a bit buggy. I'm surprised there isn't a straightforward and user-friendly Google-less Chromium browser available…

I 100% agree with your statement, but I feel that Vivaldi is currently the best browser that's close to Chrome in terms of feature parity. Hopefully though, with more support, they will become an efficient browser that's unique enough to be separate from Chrome but have the features we know and love.

Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#530

Post by jatins » Thu, Sep 21, 2017, 8:59 AM UTC

One reason why Google seems to do better is because it knows more about me. For example when I search for "reverse a LL" shows me reversing linked list on Google (which is what I intended) but something completely else on DDG. Maybe because Google just knows that I tend to search for programming stuff.