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Let's start using DuckDuckGo more often

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Re: Let's start using DuckDuckGo more often

#91

Post by epicide »

StevePerkins wrote: post #49
chongli wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plenty of people (particularly here on HN) consider many or even all forms of advertising to be unethical. I don't think it's fair to ask someone to disable their ad blocker. For someone who never clicks on ads, the revenue generated by disabling is negligible anyway.

Even if they added a Patreon button (or whatever the "ethical" provider is this month), 99.99% of their revenue would still come from ads. Seems like some weird mental gymnastics to pretend their business model wouldn't be what it is. Like it or not, it's fantasy to pretend that donationware scales beyond individual devs. It's rarely even enough to support individual dev stuff.

I don't think the point is to change their business model. The point is to include an alternative way to support them other than ads. Augment, not replace.

E.g. I remove ads (both in their settings and with an ad blocker). However, I would love to support them. I'd probably pay them more than they'd make off of me in ads, as well.

Re: Let's start using DuckDuckGo more often

#92

Post by benbristow »

lucb1e wrote: post #20
benbristow wrote: post #13

The thing with Google is that, like it or not, their analytics and their knowledge of you as an individual helps produce better search results for you. Google will always be the better search engine. That being said DuckDuckGo is definitely getting much better nowadays. Still end up going back to Google after a few days though.

You don't have to use either exclusively. Just pick the one you think is best as your default search engine, and for anything that this 'best' one (by whatever standard) cannot handle, you can still fall back to the other. For example, DDG is really good at documentation lookups like Java or Python docs. Google is much better at complicated queries (I always struggle for an example, had one recently where DDG was jus…

> For example, DDG is really good at documentation lookups like Java or Python docs

I've kind of found the opposite.

Because Google knows I'm a developer when I search for libraries etc. they're usually at the top.

For example, if I search for 'express' (the NodeJS package) on Google their website is at the bottom of the first page (just below my local newspaper's website, Paisley Express).

On DuckDuckGo it's 1 from the bottom of the second page.

Of course just a single example but you can see where I'm coming from.

Re: Let's start using DuckDuckGo more often

#93

Post by lucb1e »

epicide wrote: post #73
lucb1e wrote: post #14

Going one step further, I removed my websites from the Google index: https://lucb1e.com/?p=post&id=130 If you want to find my stuff, you now have to use DDG or some other search engine. Hopefully we can signal to Google that we are not okay with monopolistic behaviour (that's why I blocked them, not just for being the biggest or monopolist, but for also behaving like it -- see the blog post for details).

Doesn't this ultimately make the situation worse since now less people will see that page in the first place? i.e. the only people that will (likely) see it are the ones that are already doing what you want.

Would someone who wants to do this use Google? Even if you google for how to block google from your website, you are likely looking to block Google from pages like phpmyadmin, not all of their website. I don't think this blog post would ever be a relevant search result in Google. Maybe if someone saw this comment, tells a friend, and $friend googles it... It just seems like a remote chance.

Re: Let's start using DuckDuckGo more often

#94

Post by neurobashing »

jplayer01 wrote: post #84

DDG's search results seem consistently terrible whenever I try to use it for an extended period of time. It's fine for really basic searches, but anything more specialized or niche is terrible (considering my interests, that's all of my searches). I mostly use Startpage nowadays instead, which seems to give me good enough results most of the time.

I've been using DDG exclusively for a few years now. I don't want to get into anything personal, but just what the heck are you searching for, my man?

I hear this complaint from time to time and it just baffles me. I mean one day I forgot how to spell "guillotine", typed in "french beheading thing", and it was on the first page somewhere.

Re: Let's start using DuckDuckGo more often

#95

Post by mosselman »

Timucin wrote: post #90
jplayer01 wrote: post #84

DDG's search results seem consistently terrible whenever I try to use it for an extended period of time. It's fine for really basic searches, but anything more specialized or niche is terrible (considering my interests, that's all of my searches). I mostly use Startpage nowadays instead, which seems to give me good enough results most of the time.

I believe having privacy puts the user at disadvantage since DDG doesn't keep your history or track who you are. i.e. Google knows definitely knows I am a developer and shows the tech related things first even when I search for super generic words. That's why people think DDG doesn't do a good job but I think it does if you can be more specific. Yet I agree it's not better than or equal to Google when it comes to ima…

I believe privacy, to me as a user, is a huge advantage. I have been using DuckDuckGo for years now and I when I run into something I can’t find on it, which happens sporadically, I use !s to jump to anonymous google results on start page and it turns out I can’t find it with google either. So either DuckDuckGo has gotten better or I have gotten better at telling it what I want, or both. Either way, I don’t feel that privacy puts me at a disadvantage.

Re: Let's start using DuckDuckGo more often

#96

Post by StevePerkins »

lucb1e wrote: post #61
looeee wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, that's great and all. But I actually want people to use my website.

So do I, but my livelihood does not depend on it, so I can safely do this and encourage people to use another search engine. Any other search engine. Even if you fall back to Google if you can't find something, at least use another search engine by default. I don't think that's too harsh to ask of a tech audience (which is the audience of my websites). Of course, if your websites generate income based on people that…

But... how does this encourage anyone to do anything? No one knows who you are or what your site is, and I'm sure Google couldn't care less. This sounds like the technical equivalent of someone refusing to drive on public roads because taxation is theft or something.

Re: Let's start using DuckDuckGo more often

#97

Post by makecheck »

It’s still my default but results are becoming noticeably worse. For instance, I used to be able to search for uncommon names and have them surface; now DDG seems to try really hard to assume I meant some dictionary word (frankly, a search engine clearly ignoring your actual search term becomes useless really quickly).

A critical feature though is that “g!” to Google will never return AMP pages; as long as that’s true I will always start from DDG.

Re: Let's start using DuckDuckGo more often

#98

Post by utopcell »

phatfish wrote: post #27

I have used it as a default for at least 2 years. I'd estimate drop back to Google for 20-25% of specific "subject matter" searches, mostly around technology. Probably a bit less than that for general searches. Most of the time I run the same search on Google the results are very similar for the top hits. But Google does seem to produce helpful results that are not exactly what I searched for more often. DDG also ske…

The problem with falling back only 20% to 25% of the time is that you don't know what you've missed. By going to Google you already realize it is a better engine. What is the tangible gain of this self-sabotaging ?

Re: Let's start using DuckDuckGo more often

#99

Post by WarOnPrivacy »

0xcde4c3db wrote: post #67

I use DDG regularly. It's fine for casual "was that company's domain a .net or .com" kinds of searches, but it struggles for more specific or obscure content. My biggest problem with it is that the "advanced" operators are extremely buggy. Quotes and minus sometimes seem to be treated more as suggestions than requirements. Other times they return no results when omitting them returns results that should match. Someti…

> "My biggest problem with it is that the "advanced" operators are extremely buggy. Quotes and minus sometimes seem to be treated more as suggestions than requirements. Other times they return no results when omitting them returns results that should match. Sometimes a term with a minus is instead treated like there's no minus, i.e. ranking results with that word higher. This seems to have gotten worse over time."

This is the exact explanation of why I moved away from Google.

My searching trends toward very specific terms. >2 years ago, Google started ignoring my boolean operands. It became increasingly difficult to craft a boolean search that Google would actually respect.

I finally bailed 6 months ago. By that time, using a minus sign often returned nothing but the results I was trying to avoid.

Re: Let's start using DuckDuckGo more often

#100

Post by StevePerkins »

robertAngst wrote: post #55
benbristow wrote: post #13

The thing with Google is that, like it or not, their analytics and their knowledge of you as an individual helps produce better search results for you. Google will always be the better search engine. That being said DuckDuckGo is definitely getting much better nowadays. Still end up going back to Google after a few days though.

I'm a nerd with pretty mild porn usage and no terrorist habits. I have 0 reason to not use google. I really don't care if they find out my obsession with electronics and that I have the hots for tall girls. Out of every company, I'd give Google the nod as most helpful company of my lifetime. Can someone tell me why I'm wrong?

Because Bing is surprisingly better for porn related searches.

Otherwise... no, I don't think you are. The people who turn out for threads like these are hardly representative. You shouldn't sweat not passing muster with them too much.

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