6 ms·
I use DuckDuck go as my default search on my machines, but I think the fact that Google is not anonymous does give them a big advantage. An obvious example of
by collyw 10y ago
I use DuckDuck go as my default search on my machines, but I think the fact that Google is not anonymous does give them a big advantage.
An obvious example of this is when I search for "Django" (I am primarily a Django developer). DuckDuckGo will return results about the film as the top hits, whereas Google already knows that I mean Django Web Framework and will return those as the top hits.
I appreciate the fact that my searches are anonymous with DDG, but I doubt that it will be able to be "as good" as Google for that reason.
- ascagnel_ 10y agoThey don't always do a good job of that, though. Yesterday I was searching for documentation for a JS validation library (Joi), and a specific search string ("Joi deny substring") returned some... pornier search results as the top five. It was somewhat redeemed with the sixth result being the one I was looking for. And this was with safe search on.
- hedora 10y agoI misread your comment. Google does indeed return porny stuff for this, and ddg does not. In both engines, your comment is the top of the search results. :-)
- lostlogin 10y agoI cringe remembering when I Googled "developer dick image" instead of "disk image" with colleagues watching.
- tlarkworthy 10y agoOut of curiosity I Googled that and, for me, Google now auto-corrects it to disk image.
- lostlogin 10y agoIt would have been excellent if that had happened. It was about 2-3 years ago.
- steanne 10y agoi searched for freezing eggs (for cooking) and then saw ads for fertility clinics for the next few weeks.
- ky738 10y agoAnd DuckDuckGo is not really comparable when you don't live in the US. Google is far more superior, even without your info.
- rms_returns 10y agoWe have the chicken and egg problem there. Google have that results because it has terabytes of information on everything and that's because millions use it. If more and more people start using DDG, their results will also improve.
- thesmallestcat 10y ago> If more and more people start using DDG, their results will also improve. Let's say everybody stops using Google right now and starts using DDG with its anonymous, proxied queries to Bing. How does this in any way improve search results? You could maybe argue that heavy direct use of bing.com would give Microsoft some useful training data. But none of that changes the fact that Bing's crawlers aren't that good, and neither is its search engine.
- st3v3r 10y agoSee, I'm not willing to do that. I'm not willing to put up with inferior results on the promise that maybe, someday in the future, they might get better.
- sujay_m 10y ago
- rms_returns 10y agoI just tried that with DDJ out of curiosity (I develop mostly in Flask, but also Django occasionally). It did display a few imdb movie results (though the top one still referred to the framework). However, when I searched for "django python", the intent became quite clear and I got the relevant results. So basically, what you say about personalized search applies only to normal users who don't have much "googlefu" skills, for power users like us who know exactly what to search for, its not much relevant.
- peatmoss 10y agoI find myself often doing a two- or three-step search with DDG. First I search for a thing on DDG. Then if I get something back like Django the movie instead of Django the framework, I'll search the thing again on DDG with some sort of specializing term, e.g. "python." Lastly, I almost always end up searching with "!g thing + specializing term(s)." I love the idea of DDG, and I'm delighted on the rare occasion that I get better results than google. But most of the time I get results that are inferior to El Goog. Still, I keep trying.
- StavrosK 10y agoReally? I've been using DDG exclusively for a few months, and whenever I get unsatisfactory results, I retry with !g. Invariably, I get equally unsatisfactory results with Google. Maybe in some rare cases where I'm searching for something esoteric, Google will return an extra page or two, but that's not very frequent.
- peatmoss 10y agoMaybe I'm searching in a way that biases in favor of Google? I'm willing to stick with DDG-first on principle alone, so perhaps DDG getting better + me figuring out subtlety of search will improve things.
- subinsebastien 10y agoMay be use DDG as the primary search enigne, and switch to Google when you don't get what you want in the first go on DDG. Atleast more traffic to DDG, and hence better results in future.
- collyw 10y agoPretty much what I do, as I say its set as my default search engine on most of my machines. Add "g!" if I am not happy with the results.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- whatshisface 10y ago>* the fact that Google is not anonymous does give them a big advantage.* What if DDG allowed us to manually tell them information about our demographic in a way that wasn't stored on their servers and could be changed at will? If you want convenience, maybe there could be an optional client-side preference detector script that only offered possible configurations.
- joeclark77 10y agoGood idea. I definitely don't want them "filtering" my results without my permission, but with permission is fine.
- IgorPartola 10y agoWhat a drag. So now I have to set up a profile of my ever changing interests on all of my devices just so I can get an approximation of what Google offers out of the box? Don't get me wrong, I like the idea of not using Google, but this seems like a very user hostile way to do it.
- gtf21 10y agoI actually think this gives one slightly better control. I've experienced a weird phenomenon on Facebook where a contact of mine kept posting borderline conspiracy theories and I kept correcting him, but now all I get are his posts and it's really quite infuriating. I would prefer conscious filtering to this automated (and obscure) filtering that Google et al. utilise. I understand it's not for everyone, but it would suit me far better.
- IgorPartola 10y agoSure it is more control. Just like pushing electrons with a magnetized needle is even more control. It doesn't mean it's convenient. Now if you had an ML algorithm running in your browser that analyzed your preferences and transparently changed your DDG searches from "Django" to "Django web framework", you might get something closer to what you get with Google. Wonder if Firefox could make that happen.
- hedora 10y ago"As good" is subjective. I hate search bubbling. I'd rather click through semi-relevant results a few times then figure out why google hasn't heard of the movie Django, for example. Also, I switched to ddg years ago, and can't remember one time when I thought that personalizing the results would improve matters. Every few months, I'll search for something, not find it, and try google. Falling back to google has helped maybe two times out of dozens of searches. In one case google found an old email thread where someone asked my question and got no answer. In the other, I was looking for a specific document with a solution to a Linux issue. I had found it with ddg before. It turns out the solution no longer worked, and was superceded by documents ddg had already returned. It is unclear that running that test with google as the primary search engine and ddg as the secondary would have different results.
- Twisell 10y agoAnd it not as if searching google from DuckDuckGo was hard. DuckDukGo bangs syntax is simply fantastic even if i mostly always use theses 4 : !w , !m, !g, !gi Privacy by default, google when you need, it's my default since 2 years.
- Sir_Cmpwn 10y agoIt just requires a habit shift. You have to learn to be slightly more specific. "Django framework".
- roryisok 10y agoLets hope that's not the name of the sequel.
- enzolovesbacon 10y agoLogged in just to upvote.
- DanBC 10y agoHave you tried the bang searches? https://duckduckgo.com/bang?c=Tech&q=django https://duckduckgo.com/bang?c=Tech&q=django
- VT_Drew 10y agoIt has it's pro's and con's. I do love how I can just to !a to search amazon, or !w to search wikipedia, or !g if I really want to use Google. Kind of wish Google had a feature like that.
- eternalban 10y agoIf that's what's holding you back: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=django+python
- PrivacyGirl 10y agoNo doubt Google has great search results. (Many people just give up privacy because they're so much better.) Solution: Use StartPage for private Google search results. I also like that StartPage has a proxy option so I can visit webpages anonymously.