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Social platforms are much "easier" to rebuild and actually gain market share with (because they're to a large extent self-contained, you "just" need the users).

by tazjin 9y ago

Social platforms are much "easier" to rebuild and actually gain market share with (because they're to a large extent self-contained, you "just" need the users). No company is really competing with Google on search. There's DuckDuckGo and all that, which is a nice idea, but their results are just nowhere near as good as Google's in most cases.

yellowapple 9y ago
"There's DuckDuckGo and all that, which is a nice idea, but their results are just nowhere near as good as Google's in most cases." I don't agree with that assessment. Occasionally I'll need to stick a !g at the front of my search, but usually DDG does a good enough job with the results (and when it fails, Google usually fails, too).
- seba_dos1 9y ago
  Recently I have switched all my browsers to DDG and found myself almost never having to fallback to Google. It became pretty good, sometimes even better due to Google trying too hard to interpret what I meant.
  - emodendroket 9y ago
    Sometimes the synonym searching doesn't make a lot of sense -- you can search for "mens socks" and it'll give you "womens socks," with "womens" highlighted. You can fix this with quoting terms, but how many people know to do that?
- jiveturkey 9y ago
  your evaluation is different than the GP’s. your DDG results are usually “good enough” so you don’t check google until they aren’t. since i’ve gone back to using google as primary i’ve found the results are better. anyway you are both speaking anecdotally but arguing as if you speak for the general case. at the risk of making the same mistake, i bet that in the general case google is better.
  - yellowapple 9y ago
    I didn't intend to imply that I'm speaking for the general case, especially for something as inherently individual as the relevance of search results :) From my perspective, and in my experience, DDG is indeed usually good enough; it presents the information I seek, and when it doesn't, Google usually doesn't, either. That's entirely dependent on my search habits, and will likely be a very different experience for someone else with one's own very different search habits. Either way, seems like betting on a general case is a shaky proposition given the difficulty of defining a "general" case for a search engine.
- ficklepickle 9y ago
  I've found I needed to adjust how I search slightly, after switching to DDG. Mostly for local results, because they don't know where I am! Which is a feature as far as I'm concerned.
  - yellowapple 9y ago
    I've noticed that, too; searching for "bars" is quite different from searching for "bars in Reno".

by tazjin 9y ago

yellowapple 9y ago

"There's DuckDuckGo and all that, which is a nice idea, but their results are just nowhere near as good as Google's in most cases." I don't agree with that assessment. Occasionally I'll need to stick a !g at the front of my search, but usually DDG does a good enough job with the results (and when it fails, Google usually fails, too).

seba_dos1 9y ago
Recently I have switched all my browsers to DDG and found myself almost never having to fallback to Google. It became pretty good, sometimes even better due to Google trying too hard to interpret what I meant.
- emodendroket 9y ago
  Sometimes the synonym searching doesn't make a lot of sense -- you can search for "mens socks" and it'll give you "womens socks," with "womens" highlighted. You can fix this with quoting terms, but how many people know to do that?
jiveturkey 9y ago
your evaluation is different than the GP’s. your DDG results are usually “good enough” so you don’t check google until they aren’t. since i’ve gone back to using google as primary i’ve found the results are better. anyway you are both speaking anecdotally but arguing as if you speak for the general case. at the risk of making the same mistake, i bet that in the general case google is better.
- yellowapple 9y ago
  I didn't intend to imply that I'm speaking for the general case, especially for something as inherently individual as the relevance of search results :) From my perspective, and in my experience, DDG is indeed usually good enough; it presents the information I seek, and when it doesn't, Google usually doesn't, either. That's entirely dependent on my search habits, and will likely be a very different experience for someone else with one's own very different search habits. Either way, seems like betting on a general case is a shaky proposition given the difficulty of defining a "general" case for a search engine.
ficklepickle 9y ago
I've found I needed to adjust how I search slightly, after switching to DDG. Mostly for local results, because they don't know where I am! Which is a feature as far as I'm concerned.
- yellowapple 9y ago
  I've noticed that, too; searching for "bars" is quite different from searching for "bars in Reno".