3 ms·

I tried DDG for a week as my search engine. The search result quality was definitely on par with Google, the two biggest factors for switching back : 1) Google

by aantix 16y ago

I tried DDG for a week as my search engine. The search result quality was definitely on par with Google, the two biggest factors for switching back : 1) Google's "Did you mean?" appears to be a bit smarter and corrected more of my obscure searches than DDG. Wish I had recorded a couple of concrete examples to pass on, but they escape me at the moment. 2) Speed. Google returns results faster (at least on the days I was using DDG). Apparently my brain is use to sub-second search results because anything longer than that can feel like an eternity.

epi0Bauqu 16y ago
Thx. Recently I've made a lot of improvements to #1. Of course, specific examples are always super helpful to improve it further. #2 varies a lot depending on location and network. Unfortunately I still don't have a lot of geographically distributed servers.
- _delirium 16y ago
  For me at least, #2 seems most often to have something to do with fetching the results themselves, rather than the network between me and DDG delaying the initial pageload. The results page will load very quickly (the header/sidebar, sometimes the zero-click results or disambiguation results), but then there's a very noticeable delay before the regular results get AJAX-loaded. (It is true that the the better DDG is at getting me the zero-click kinds of results, the less of a problem this is.)
yewweitan 16y ago
Have to agree on the first point, Google doesn't have all that datastore for nothing. However, that didn't stop me from switching. DDG is my default search engine, and while it's a little slower than Google, that difference isn't significant. Do note however, that I'm using Chrome, and found the speed difference to be a little annoying sometimes on Firefox. That said, I love the bang syntax. If your search fails in DDG, just add !g and you're immediately in Google. I've been using it for about a month now, and slowly gets a hang of what type of searches are better done in Google vs DDG (eg: shopping -> Google, documentation -> DDG, discussions (groups/forums or otherwise) -> Google, reviews (products,etc) -> DDG)
cdr 16y ago
Google's "Did you mean?" has gotten increasingly annoying for me as they evolved it. It's now at the point where it will silently, automatically return results for a different word than what I searched for if it thinks I misspelled it (aka it isn't a common term). This is infuriating 99% of the time, and I'm at the point where I just automatically enclose most of my single-word searches in quotes to begin with.

by aantix 16y ago

epi0Bauqu 16y ago

Thx. Recently I've made a lot of improvements to #1. Of course, specific examples are always super helpful to improve it further. #2 varies a lot depending on location and network. Unfortunately I still don't have a lot of geographically distributed servers.

_delirium 16y ago
For me at least, #2 seems most often to have something to do with fetching the results themselves, rather than the network between me and DDG delaying the initial pageload. The results page will load very quickly (the header/sidebar, sometimes the zero-click results or disambiguation results), but then there's a very noticeable delay before the regular results get AJAX-loaded. (It is true that the the better DDG is at getting me the zero-click kinds of results, the less of a problem this is.)

yewweitan 16y ago

Have to agree on the first point, Google doesn't have all that datastore for nothing. However, that didn't stop me from switching. DDG is my default search engine, and while it's a little slower than Google, that difference isn't significant. Do note however, that I'm using Chrome, and found the speed difference to be a little annoying sometimes on Firefox. That said, I love the bang syntax. If your search fails in DDG, just add !g and you're immediately in Google. I've been using it for about a month now, and slowly gets a hang of what type of searches are better done in Google vs DDG (eg: shopping -> Google, documentation -> DDG, discussions (groups/forums or otherwise) -> Google, reviews (products,etc) -> DDG)

cdr 16y ago

Google's "Did you mean?" has gotten increasingly annoying for me as they evolved it. It's now at the point where it will silently, automatically return results for a different word than what I searched for if it thinks I misspelled it (aka it isn't a common term). This is infuriating 99% of the time, and I'm at the point where I just automatically enclose most of my single-word searches in quotes to begin with.