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For a couple of month I have set duckduckgo as my standard search engine, but I often do not get satisfactory results. Is this because I am used to the Google r
by phil9987 8y ago
For a couple of month I have set duckduckgo as my standard search engine, but I often do not get satisfactory results. Is this because I am used to the Google results or does duckduckgo indeed not prioritize in a good way?
- ipidov 8y agoYou can't have personalized, targeted results without being tracked.
- nukeop 8y agoPersonalized and targeted results aren't good results.
- ipidov 8y agoDidn't say they are, but I have a feeling that this is exactly what the original commenter is missing
- erinnh 8y agoI have the same issue where DDG sometimes just doesn't give relevant search results. That's when I use Google. But I also use temporary containers and no google accounts, so I'm not getting personalized results and they're still better.
- rovr138 8y agoThe fact someone doesn’t have an account does not mean they aren’t being tracked or that google (or any platform) can’t create a profile for you. Not saying it’s effective with the containers you’re using though.
- fluffycat 8y agoI beg to differ, they are actually essential in my case.
- DoingIsLearning 8y agoPerhaps I am alone in this but but all I want is a really really good crawler that can find the exact subset of results containing all of the keywords I query. Regional/targeted/personalized results often add noise. I appreciate that this is what google needs in order to monetize on ads. And that real verbatim searches are likely more resource hungry. I just wish there was an option to pay some form premium subscription service where I can have really in depth verbatim search without being treated as 'suspicious' activity by the engine.
- prepend 8y agoI would like a service that just keeps an up to date corpus of the web. Or at least the top few terabytes. Then I can pay the few dollars a month to run a giant map reduce grep on it. For most of my searches, debugging a few specific strings, I really just need grep. It’s too much for one person to crawl the web. But a good distributed network could.
- Moru 8y agoI haven't used google to search for several years now. Except by mistake on someone elses computer. And then I get disappointed on the results.
- derinbay 8y agoduckduckgo is definitely not an alternative for google. you can't even compare.
- datenhorst 8y agoIt is in some use cases. For programming related queries, it oftentimes gives me better results than Google because it's not trying to be clever and guess what I could actually mean.
- vperez 8y agoI second this, notably for programming related queries. I have been using DDG for a year or so now, and never looked back.
- phil9987 8y agoI do not quite agree. I found that duckduckgo often returns too many results from the same website, which is for programming related search queries often stackoverflow. The same query on Google leads (for me) often times to more diverse results which include more different base urls.
- 662a00c659fb134 8y agoWhy do you think that? I switched to duckduckgo about a year ago and never even looked back. The results are perfectly fine and I am pretty satisfied with them. What do you feel is not comparable? One thing I noticed, which is great, that duckduckgo does not filter/censor your search results (except pictures). edit: The only "bad" thing about it is its name. typing duckduckgo.com into the url bar when I am on some other computer takes kinda long, but I am okay with that
- icebraining 8y agoThe domain ddg.gg redirects to duckduckgo.com
- james_pm 8y agohttps://duck.com https://duck.com
- distant_hat 8y agoI default to DuckDuckGo as my search engine though I use !g for anything it doesn't get right. I was on call with a colleague and we were problem solving and I needed to look up something and I typed it in the search box and a bunch of porn results came up. She just laughed but I knew it was a close shave. DuckDuckGo's image search can come up with porn for rather innocuous terms, e.g., https://duckduckgo.com/?q=search+reddit&t=ffab&iax=images&ia=images https://duckduckgo.com/?q=search+reddit&t=ffab&iax=images&ia... for "search reddit" gets porn on the second screen for me.
- adgasf 8y agoNice idea, I even tried it myself. What happens though is you start putting "!g" before every search, since DDG is unreliable and searching twice adds friction.
- distant_hat 8y agofor me its about 30% of the searches, not every search. Its fine for very regular stuff, the kind where a Wikipedia page exists but not that great for deep searches.
- adgasf 8y agoBefore you search, you don't know if it will be in the 30% or the 70%. It is quicker to always add "!g" than it is to search twice 30% of the time.
- dyukqu 8y agoMaybe it's your DDG "safe search" preferences. There are three options: Strict, Moderate, Off. I clicked the link you provided and not any adult content showed up (it's in "moderate" mode by default). Some adult content appeared in results after I changing it to "off".
- distant_hat 8y agoOK, yea, my filter is set to off. But still, the search I made was regarding completely innocuous programming related stuff, why should adult results come up that quickly? My Google preferences are also set to no filtering and I looked almost 10 pages deep there (just to check), and no adult results showed up.
- envolt 8y agoI've done the same, few months back. And yes, sometimes (well most of the time) results are not satisfactory if I'm looking for a specific thing (e.g Expecting a relevant result from StackOverFlow). I'm using Firefox Containers, I hop on to Google Search with a temporary extension
- hrktb 8y agoI switched to DDG about two years ago. A bunch of results (20%? 30%?) are not very good, and it's not an exception. Also I know it's suppose to come down the line, but not having a filter for results of the past year is a PITA. In my case though, Google is not very good either, I remember getting very random results (mostly focused on popular or local trends, when I'm looking for something specific) about half of the time. In fine, I see DDG as an alternative giving access to both Google and DDG. Switching to DDG when Google was bad was not simple, the reverse is (just add a !)
- rudigergerm 8y agoSame here tried using DDG, sometimes I get nothing relevant and find myself going to back to Google, I even tired forcing myself to use bing but still the results are not just good enough.
- astonex 8y agoIt's almost like Google is actually good at Search and replicating that isn't easy
- hrktb 8y agoI know it's partly snark, but I think Google is not actually that good at it. Not because they are complacent, but because search is a hard problem and there is no objectively 'good' results to any arbitrary query. There is a tradeoff for any given user between getting the most popular results and what could be the most 'accurate' result. I find myself using several search engines depending on what I want (apart from Google/DDG, you always have the option to go directly to amazon or StackOverflow for instance), and am pretty happy about it. But saying Google is good at search is a bit like praising Wallmart for being good at retail. Sure, they are to some extent, but there are clear tradeoffs we need to be aware of.
- roenxi 8y agoIt'd be interesting for the peanut gallery if you went into a bit of detail about what 'satisfactory' and 'unsatisfactory' means to you. I'm sitting here feeling confused because there is no detectable difference between DDG and Google for me. Search patterns must be very particular to the person and obviously I'm not searching for the right stuff :P.
- Simon_says 8y agoI have the same experience. I set DDG as my default search engine on all of my devices, and with maybe 10% of my searches I revert to Google. DDG is adequate for common stuff, but for anything obscure, it doesn't really cut it. These days, I have a pretty good feeling for whether DDG will give me what I want before I search.
- phil9987 8y agoA very concrete example: I am trying to find a solution for a certain error / warning in AndroidStudio. I try finding it using DDG, not succeeding, while on Google I'd find the solution within the 3 first results. Happened to me already several times. So it is satisfactory to me if the search leads to a solution or at least the right path to finding a solution to my query.
- meko 8y agoTbh ddg results are next to useless except the most common of issues. g! Is the only thing that makes it usable.
- br0ken_pipe 8y agohttps://www.startpage.com/ https://www.startpage.com/ is really good. Google search but anonymized
- craigsmansion 8y agoIf DDG results are unsatisfactory, you can add a `!s' to your query and it will take you to the results of startpage.com
- Daniel_sk 8y agoI experimented with DDG, but startpage is giving me better results at this time - especially if you are searching for something more local. So I set startpage.com as default search engine on all of my devices. I may try it again later...
- SJetKaran 8y agoYeah, I switched to DDG, but it didn't give me satisfactory results, particularly for debugging searches. Moved to startpage, and am a happy user since two weeks now.
- badpun 8y agoI switched recently and I find general results satisfactory. Google does have some specialised stuff, such as details about stores/cinemas around me, or championship league results, but I just look them up with a !g bang.
- spurgu 8y agoDDG if fine for some things, but I mainly use Startpage.com as a privacy focused Google alternative.
- irrational 8y agoI've been using DDG for so many years as my sole means of searching the internet (though I thought when I first started using it, it was proxing Google and not Bing) that I'm not sure if I'm getting satisfactory results back or not. It's not like I'm doing a head to head comparison with Google.
- NikkiA 8y ago> I thought when I first started using it, it was proxing Google and not Bing It probably was, it proxied google when I first used it, then at some point about 8 years ago or so it switched to bing and for a while I switched over to ixquick, but switched back to ddg and just got used to it proxying bing when ixquick dumbed their page down to match startpage.
- MildlySerious 8y agoIf you want to move away from Google 100% and expect DDG to fill the gap, it will be a disappointing experience. What I have been doing successfully for three-ish years now is to use DDG as my default, which handles about 50% of my searches, while the other 50% are !bangs to sites I know I want to end up on. A lot of the time that allows me to circumvent Google for a few extra searches, and sometimes it's just !g to show Google results, mostly when it's searches I want localized, or the topic is just too specific. For the latter I am trying to use !s more often. Much like knowing what terms to look up, knowing when DDG results are good enough and when to use !g, !s or when to jump straight to the website you want to go to, is something that gets easier and starts to feel natural eventually. I'm not 100% de-google-fied, but I'm 95% there in regards to searches, with none of the discomforts people keep bringing up.
- Taylor_OD 8y agoI switched a year or so ago. The results are different. They feel less spot on but they provide more depth. Google will typically give me the answer I'm looking for on the first page but if it doesnt the second/third/fourth page will not have it either. They will be very similar to the first page. DDG doesnt always have the right answer on the first page. But it may be on the second. Or the third. It's worth checking them at least. Realizing this made my DDG experience better.
- MrMember 8y agoI've been using DDG as my primary search engine for around a year now. I've kind of gotten a feel for the kind of searches I do that DDG doesn't handle very well. It's good for probably 95% of my searches but I still occasionally fall back on Google.
- masonic 8y agoYou can precede your query on DDG with !g to get Google results.