The curious case of DuckDuckGo

#1

Post by sbashyal » Mon, Aug 22, 2011, 3:25 AM UTC

The curious case of DuckDuckGo
hacksandthoughts.posterous.com

Re: The curious case of DuckDuckGo

#2

Post by sofuture » Mon, Aug 22, 2011, 3:53 AM UTC

I switched and never looked back :) I did have to (re)map my search keyword 'g' to DDG in all my browsers though!

Re: The curious case of DuckDuckGo

#3

Post by ceejayoz » Mon, Aug 22, 2011, 3:54 AM UTC

> I did the same search in DuckDuckGo and I got results as expected. Simple.

For this unusual case. In most situations I've encountered, Google's auto correction is quite helpful.

> What if I was searching for place Java of Java Coffee fame. I would need to scan through the search results, spanning multi-pages (second page in this), until I came across the one that related to Java, the place.

Or, you revise your query to "Java coffee". Hell, with Google Instant it's not even another pageview. As a programmer, I'm glad Google does a little guesswork and gives me results that are relevant to the types of queries I'm likely to be making.

Re: The curious case of DuckDuckGo

#4

Post by Mithrandir » Mon, Aug 22, 2011, 3:55 AM UTC

One of the great parts of DuckDuckGo is that if you don't find what you're looking for, you can just type in '!g QUERY', '!b QUERY', or one of the other ~1400 !bangs.

https://www.duckduckgo.com/bang.html

Re: The curious case of DuckDuckGo

#5

Post by mtogo » Mon, Aug 22, 2011, 4:01 AM UTC

Among the benefits listed and hundreds of others are the !bang commands, which i really love.

Want to do a search on stackoverflow right from your url bar?

  !so Hello world

Or maybe wikipedia?

  !w Hello world

Or do a google search

  !g Hello world

Re: The curious case of DuckDuckGo

#6

Post by mtogo » Mon, Aug 22, 2011, 4:04 AM UTC

ceejayoz wrote: post #3

> I did the same search in DuckDuckGo and I got results as expected. Simple. For this unusual case. In most situations I've encountered, Google's auto correction is quite helpful. > What if I was searching for place Java of Java Coffee fame. I would need to scan through the search results, spanning multi-pages (second page in this), until I came across the one that related to Java, the place. Or, you revise your quer…

> Or, you revise your query to "Java coffee".

Right, but DDG makes it easier. Sure, technological advancement isn't required, you could still just do it the old way and edit your query, but this makes it easier and better. And that's a good thing.

Re: The curious case of DuckDuckGo

#7

Post by bendmorris » Mon, Aug 22, 2011, 4:12 AM UTC

I use DDG as my main search engine mostly because of the convenience of !bangs. Also, search results on other engines seem to be going down in quality lately. Too many spam sites are reaching the top of Google, and I'm finding real answers to questions I ask on page 2 or 3. The nice thing about DDG is that if you can't find what you're looking for you can just add !w, !so, etc. to try a more targeted search.

Re: The curious case of DuckDuckGo

#8

Post by slowpoke » Mon, Aug 22, 2011, 4:15 AM UTC

I've been saying since a while that, barring pure performance, DDG beats GoogleSearch any day. Switched months ago and never looked back. Unfortunately, many people think I'm just a paranoid neckbeard who dislikes Google when I dare to suggest DDG to them.

Re: The curious case of DuckDuckGo

#9

Post by thezilch » Mon, Aug 22, 2011, 4:29 AM UTC

mtogo wrote: post #5

Among the benefits listed and hundreds of others are the !bang commands, which i really love. Want to do a search on stackoverflow right from your url bar? !so Hello world Or maybe wikipedia? !w Hello world Or do a google search !g Hello world

How does this differ from using browser-builtin search-keywords, other than not having to rely/wait on a proxy?

http://i.imgur.com/Tz7by.png

Re: The curious case of DuckDuckGo

#10

Post by ugh » Mon, Aug 22, 2011, 4:31 AM UTC

Point one I can’t understand. Google is optimized for the common case. It’s not that often that I want to search for something not in Google’s (excellent) dictionary.