Earlier quoted context omitted.
No because DDG is a frontend to Bing results. The ads are different (DDG shows Yahoo ads, which also shows Bing ads) and Bing shows Bing ads only.
Source?
Not available. DDG is closed source.
Improving DuckDuckGo
91–100 of 144 posts
Re: Improving DuckDuckGo
#92Goal #1 should be high quality search results while respecting privacy. Everything else should be secondary. The biggest thing DDG could do to improve their product is make it quick and easy for users to provide feedback about bad search results. I'd be happy to report searches that Google gives better results for but they don't have a mechanism to do so. For example, search DDG for "odroid". The official domain is h…
Their bangs are genius in that they already provide a natural way for you to give feedback without actually having to think about it - rerun a query with !g, and they will redirect you to Google. Good for you, good for DDG, since they can tell which queries provide insufficient results. Of course, you can't suggest the correct result for a specific search term, because search engines don't do a one-on-one matching of…
Thing is, bangs are for people who don't use launchers (Alfred, LaunchBar, QuikSilver, Launchy, Gnome Do, Unity Dash, etc.) with web search functions. To redo a search for me: Cmd-Space, Up, Return. To add a bang to a failed DDG search: click in a search bar, make sure the whole search text isn't selected so it won't be replaced, remember which bang I want, type it in, return.
Those who don't use launchers outnumber us greatly, of course. But by virtue of being able to specify an alternative search engine using the same efficient keyboard commands as everything else, bangs aren't much more than a pain in the butt.
Even putting launchers aside, not every DDG user is going to use bangs to get results from another site. I'm sure many, as I, have the muscle memory to bring up google.com in the flash of an eye, whereas awkwardly clicking in a search bar to type in a bang surely can't be used by even the majority of DDG users.
(Of course, I don't have data to back me up, but say DDG became as ubiquitous as Google, this would be unquestioned. All the users' habits in organisations where Qwant is set as the default could make an interesting data set — except, of course, it wouldn't be possible to track who used what)
tl;dr: Bangs are too inefficient and usage must be too inconsistent to use as the basis of improving the results.
Re: Improving DuckDuckGo
#93Goal #1 should be high quality search results while respecting privacy. Everything else should be secondary. The biggest thing DDG could do to improve their product is make it quick and easy for users to provide feedback about bad search results. I'd be happy to report searches that Google gives better results for but they don't have a mechanism to do so. For example, search DDG for "odroid". The official domain is h…
Are DDG users comfortable knowing that their search results are always going to be inferior?
I know I wasn't. Every time I try DDG, I immediately switch back to Google. DDG returns utter garbage when I try to do searches whose terms mix two or more languages; considering I study literary translation and am learning a few languages at the same time, this is fairly common.
I've a feeling that a lot of DDG users must be changing their search habits to suit DDG's engine, but I and plenty of others just can't.
Qwant did better, but still not close enough.
Re: Improving DuckDuckGo
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
For your second concern, did you know that you can change the colors and fonts on DDG from its settings? Once you do, it provides a couple of methods to sync it to each of your devices.
The defaults should be the best contrast/readbility.
Agreed. Making the user go to effort for the best usability isn't the way to get people to stay, not when what they're already using is perfectly clear and readable.
Re: Improving DuckDuckGo
#95i tried to change google to duckduckgo. it was not sustainable. immediately noticeable poor search results. Searching an address brings me to a subpar open map site,
I don't know why you're being downvoted, because your experience is as valid as anybody else's. I'm with you, I can't switch to DDG because my productivity tanks with the poorer results than Google.
I tried Startpage as a sort of in-between solution, but that site's so dang slow.
Re: Improving DuckDuckGo
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
I vehemently disagree with advertising in general, and go to efforts to make sure myself and my wife/kids see ads as little as possible (Pi-Hole, adblock plugins, no TV other than as a NAS screen, etc). I very much believe it is a form of malicious brainwashing. But, I very much want to reward the people who create the things I use. So I'll never whitelist any site or service, but I'll absolutely donate or make sure…
I agree with your position. I'm trying to figure out how to limit my kid from seeing any ads at all. Where can I get more information for this beyond adblock and host file manipulation?
> limit my kid from seeing any ads
I'm not sure if complete abstinence is good. I see my parents struggle with ads sometimes. They grew up as farmers in a rural enviroment with only a black and white TV (with 2 state channels). They seem unable to distinguish ads from proper content (unless it's obviously an ad), or they see ads as a kind of honest product documentation.
Re: Improving DuckDuckGo
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
Source?
https://duck.co/help/results/sources > We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we also source from a variety of partners, including Oath (formerly Yahoo) and Bing. They do not have their own search index.
Really... You read the last part of that paragraph, but no the first?
>In fact, DuckDuckGo gets its results from over four hundred sources. These include hundreds of vertical sources delivering niche Instant Answers, DuckDuckBot (our crawler) and crowd-sourced sites (like Wikipedia, stored in our answer indexes).
Kinda silly to have a crawler that doesn't index anything.
Re: Improving DuckDuckGo
#98If anyone from DDG is watching this thread, please stop "auto-correcting" my queries!!!!! "you" "know" what I mean
Google does the same thing, and it even leaves out words if it believe that is won't give you (enough?) results.
But I agree, it's rare that auto-correcting helps me, more often than not it changes my search to something wrong.
Re: Improving DuckDuckGo
#99I love duckduckgo and I feel I can almost replace google completely with it. I only have the following comments on it. 1. They're hosted in the US. I wish the company would pick up and move to a country not within the 14 eyes and out of jurisdiction of the cyber super powers(US, China, and Russia). Maybe panama? At least move it virtually with a warrant canary in place. 2. The search results need better contrasting c…
about 3: I have set DDG as default search engine and I can just type "site:ycombinator.com rust programming langugage" in the address bar and get the results from ycombinator only.
Also lots of sites have !bangs available, like "!hackernews rust programming langugage" will go the the HN search directly.
Maybe that helps.
Re: Improving DuckDuckGo
#100DDG sells your attention, just like all of them. It’s nothing about privacy, or selling your profile. You search a term, you get ads. When they say ‘We don’t sell your data’, it is a distraction, they are selling your immediate attention.
DDG is part of the yahoo-Microsoft search alliance. To advertise on DDG, use Bing Ads.