Earlier quoted context omitted.
mdn: !mdn wikipedia: !wiki django: !django python: !py All sorts of them for your average developer.
Wikipedia is also just !w
!wikt is also very useful for wiktionary
Pro-privacy search engine DuckDuckGo hits 30M daily searches, up 50% in a year
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Re: Pro-privacy search engine DuckDuckGo hits 30M daily searches, up 50% in a year
#72I switched earlier this year. It takes some time to get used to it. I used to !g often. It doesn't feel as intuitive at knowing what you are looking like Google. Addresses and map integration is not that good either and does not come even close to Google. It is a good enough. I have their app on my phone as my search tool, which I miss Google maps more often.
I use DuckDuckGo as my default. The only time I ever have to revert to Google search is when I'm searching for things indexed within the past year. This is a pretty crucial feature when searching for technical items (ensures a good number of search results while also being relatively current). For some reason, DDG only lets you search up to the last month. If they added the ability to search within the past year, I probably wouldn't need to use Google search at all.
Re: Pro-privacy search engine DuckDuckGo hits 30M daily searches, up 50% in a year
#73After everything that has happened in the last few weeks I've completely moved away from Google. 1. I retired my ~15 year old Gmail account and registered with Fastmail 2. I moved away from Chrome to Firefox on both my laptop and phone 3. I stopped using Chrome's password manager on iOS in favor of 1Password and Firefox Lockbox 4. I've mostly stopped using the Google search engine and now using DDG and Bing if I have…
I never considered the general perception of worse results on DDG was due to pyschology but it's an interesting possibility.
Re: Pro-privacy search engine DuckDuckGo hits 30M daily searches, up 50% in a year
#74Can anyone comment on the security of StartPage/IxQuick? As far as I know, they proxy Google results and avoid storing them in the browser via either a URL rewrite or a POST call. I find Google to return superior search data than DDG, particularly if it's not giving you recommended or personally ranked results (that alone makes it feel worthwhile to switch to SP/IxQuick). But it kind of feels like a free lunch.
Beyond what you pointed out, it's hard to really know what's going on with something closed source. Disclosure: I run jivesearch.com (basically, an open source version of DDG). FYI, we've got an open issue on GitHub to add POST requests in addition to a proxy.
Re: Pro-privacy search engine DuckDuckGo hits 30M daily searches, up 50% in a year
#75After everything that has happened in the last few weeks I've completely moved away from Google. 1. I retired my ~15 year old Gmail account and registered with Fastmail 2. I moved away from Chrome to Firefox on both my laptop and phone 3. I stopped using Chrome's password manager on iOS in favor of 1Password and Firefox Lockbox 4. I've mostly stopped using the Google search engine and now using DDG and Bing if I have…
DDG gives pretty decent results. I search a lot, across various topics and interests, and DDG has never failed me.
Re: Pro-privacy search engine DuckDuckGo hits 30M daily searches, up 50% in a year
#76After everything that has happened in the last few weeks I've completely moved away from Google. 1. I retired my ~15 year old Gmail account and registered with Fastmail 2. I moved away from Chrome to Firefox on both my laptop and phone 3. I stopped using Chrome's password manager on iOS in favor of 1Password and Firefox Lockbox 4. I've mostly stopped using the Google search engine and now using DDG and Bing if I have…
As a dev I was pretty anxious about the quality of results from DDG but a couple of months into my experiment I’ve only found myself going back to Google for dev-related searches a handful of times (maybe 2 handfuls).
So I’m now sold on DDG. Yeh sure there are cool little helpers in Google that DDG doesn’t have (yet) but can’t think of any right now that I miss so they can’t be too important.
Re: Pro-privacy search engine DuckDuckGo hits 30M daily searches, up 50% in a year
#77I had no idea how good ddg had gotten these days. Being from NZ, I thought I'd give it a good challenge. I entered !maori love, thinking it was impossible it would have a bang pattern for that, and it automatically brought me here https://maoridictionary.co.nz/search?idiom=&phrase=&proverb=... .
The !bangs aren't too hard to implement. It's basically just a very large config file. You can see that in our code: https://github.com/jivesearch/jivesearch. I run the project, btw. And, yes, we have that same !bang as well as all of DDG's !bangs.
Re: Pro-privacy search engine DuckDuckGo hits 30M daily searches, up 50% in a year
#78This metric is meaningless, for all we know DDG could have become less helpful and people have to rephrase their queries more often than before. EDIT: I'm not saying that is the case, but I hope that this example illustrates why this metrics is not a good substitute for standard metrics like DAU, MAU, revenue.
If the results were less helpful than people would stop using it
I can vouch for that. We recently made a big improvement to our search results at Jive Search and have seen better traffic. People will set it as their default more if it's better.
Re: Pro-privacy search engine DuckDuckGo hits 30M daily searches, up 50% in a year
#79A search engine that has nothing more to offer than "privacy" isn't really worth my time. Whenever I use DDG I get inferior search results. If privacy is your concern with Google use Startpage. That Bing/Yahoo mashup that DDG want to sell simply doesn't cut it for me (or any of my friends/colleagues).
You are not concerned with privacy, obviously. What’s your name, address, favorite food, latest medical issue?
Re: Pro-privacy search engine DuckDuckGo hits 30M daily searches, up 50% in a year
#80After everything that has happened in the last few weeks I've completely moved away from Google. 1. I retired my ~15 year old Gmail account and registered with Fastmail 2. I moved away from Chrome to Firefox on both my laptop and phone 3. I stopped using Chrome's password manager on iOS in favor of 1Password and Firefox Lockbox 4. I've mostly stopped using the Google search engine and now using DDG and Bing if I have…
I’ve been very happy with ProtonMail since I finally ditched gmail last month too. Been using FireFox since quantum and DDG around the same time. It was disruptive for the first week but I can’t remember the last time I made a google search except maps. The google maps app didn’t make the cut for my new iPhone, though. Now I just need to dump my photos into Azure so I’m not dependent on drive.
Now, DDG just needs to rebrand with a “verbable” name so it’s easier to talk about...