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DuckDuckGo vs Google

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Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#91

Post by n0us »

laser wrote: post #28

"Google would be an elephant while DuckDuckGo is a mosquito (this is not to emphasize; I’m actually making things better for DuckDuckGo)." Why would this guy go out of his way to say this metaphor is actually literally informative and generous towards DuckDuckGo while apparently having exerted no mental effort and being incorrect by orders of magnitude on his own data? If you're most generous to the writer, you get 1…

if you like this, /r/theydidthemath is a great subreddit to check out in your spare time

Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#92

Post by r3bl »

sethrin wrote: post #62
jstanley wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same story here. And since I regularly browse via a Digital Ocean VM, the lack of CAPTCHAs on DuckDuckGo is refreshing as well.

> And since I regularly browse via a Digital Ocean VM If you don't mind my asking, why? And by which method do you usually accomplish this? Edit: Thanks for explaining the CAPTCHA issue.

> And what do the CAPTCHAs have to do with it?

Have you ever tried using Google's search over a VPN / Tor / public proxy? They're even worse than Cloudflare was with their CAPTCHAs).

> Why?

Probably to avoid fuckery by the local ISP and/or government.

> And how?

I'm assuming he meant OpenVPN or something, but I might be wrong.

Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#93

Post by djsumdog »

BerislavLopac wrote: post #49
laser wrote: post #28

"Google would be an elephant while DuckDuckGo is a mosquito (this is not to emphasize; I’m actually making things better for DuckDuckGo)." Why would this guy go out of his way to say this metaphor is actually literally informative and generous towards DuckDuckGo while apparently having exerted no mental effort and being incorrect by orders of magnitude on his own data? If you're most generous to the writer, you get 1…

So a... duck? ;-)

She's a witch, burn her!

Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#94

Post by josinalvo »

Catalyst4NaN wrote: post #66
tiffanyh wrote: post #63

Isn’t DDG just using Yahoo on the backend to perform the search (which in turn is using Bing)? What prevents Yahoo from (a) offering a competitive search to DDG or (b) Yahoo from shutting of DDG from using its search engine?

DDG is using over 400 sources apparently, of which one is Yahoo https://duck.co/help/results/sources

> https://duck.co/help/results/sources "We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we source from Bing, Yahoo, and Yandex."

I thought they where re-implementing search.. Are they "just" aggregating?

Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#95

Post by djsumdog »

afsina wrote: post #77
Catalyst4NaN wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DDG is using over 400 sources apparently, of which one is Yahoo https://duck.co/help/results/sources

Most of those sources are search engines of some web pages, answer pages, cheat sheets and help documents. They even list tiny unit conversation services there. Give me a break.

They license both Yahoo and Yandex (Yandex being a massive index based in Russia).

Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#96

Post by djsumdog »

amelius wrote: post #11

I tried to find some info on the architecture of DDG, and found this article from 2013: [1]. It seems they used Solr at the time. Is there anything more recent? [1] http://highscalability.com/blog/2013/1/28/duckduckgo-archite...

If you reverse some of their servers, you'll also find they're hosted mostly on AWS. So that privacy thing....

Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#97

Post by davedx »

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…

Refreshing viewpoint.

Is there a way to easily sync search repositories, like Stackoverflow, Wikipedia etc., to your local computer with an automatically built search index?

Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#98

Post by r3bl »

losvedir wrote: post #58

Isn't DDG basically Bing + bangs? Doesn't seem fair to credit it at beating Google without highlighting the billions of dollars that MSFT has invested.

I mean, a probably more relevant summary of what DDG offers would be: Bing/Yahoo/Yandex mashup stripped out of personalized results + bangs + [until recently] community maintained instant answers.

Edit: Worth pointing out: as far as I am aware, they're using all the other search engines with an agreement with those companies, which makes it completely okay in my book to credit them as the one.

I credit my operating system to Canonical, even though the heavy lifting and behaving nicely on hardware is done by people contributing to Linux. Linux out of the box doesn't mean a thing to me. Bing out of the box doesn't mean a thing to me. DDG and Ubuntu do mean a lot to me.

Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#99

Post by wastedhours »

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…

Stabilised != final though, so you'll still need a layer in order to find all of the new knowledge and compare it against what everyone has locally (not going to download 50GB every time someone posts a new useful SO answer), and update the local store. Why not keep that index centrally for everyone instead of replicating it for 2bn people?

Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#100

Post by flyinghamster »

bitL wrote: post #38
NaliSauce wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of interest: what is the reason/are the reasons that made you switch?

In my case it was this annoying Google's insistence on telling me what I was actually looking for instead of searching exactly what I wanted, including ignoring "" etc. It became too much hassle, I felt like fighting with windmills, then tried DDG, it did what I told it, results weren't terrible, so now I use it by default and only a few times a week I need to try Google. Maybe for regular folks Google's way is a lif…

> In my case it was this annoying Google's insistence on telling me what I was actually looking for instead of searching exactly what I wanted, including ignoring "" etc.

GOD YES! This gets incredibly annoying when searching for version-specific information, considering the differences there can be between version foo and version bar of $DISTRO. Nothing like searching for something specific to CentOS 7 and getting zillions of CentOS 6 and 5 hits.

Google will also helpfully ignore the "Verbatim" option, and God help you if you're trying to search for multiple specific phrases.

Google is looking more and more like Alta Vista in its waning days.

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