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I switched from Chrome+Goog to Firefox+DDG...but had to dump DDG a week later. The results just aren’t anywhere near on par with google. The results have no dat
by xref 7y ago
I switched from Chrome+Goog to Firefox+DDG...but had to dump DDG a week later. The results just aren’t anywhere near on par with google. The results have no dates so I’m constantly served results to outdated tech info (5 year old posts about Cassandra, no thanks DDG), and they only present 1 link to an article vs the more info-dense google format with 1 primary link to say, StackOverflow, and 4 more possible hits smaller just below it presented as “more from this site.”
Basically I get more done faster with google search, however much I hate the goog panopticon. I’ve also switched to Apple News and Maps so I’m very much trying to dump goog, but search is where they still really excel.
I do wish I’d come back to Firefox sooner though, absolutely love it post quantum.
- half-kh-hacker 7y agoI've taken to using DDG and when I find that the results are unsatisfactory, I stick a '!g' at the start or the end of my query, and it redirects to the google results page.
- xref 7y agoLike I mentioned though, with no dates every page is unsatisfactory. I’m not gonna waste time clicking each link to look at the date before I devote time to reading it
- unforeseen9991 7y agoI JUST ran into this. It's not good for tech searches for this very reason. I was trying to look up an issue with an application, and every link I clicked on was from 7 years ago. I switched to google and instantly grabbed some ones from 2019
- m-p-3 7y agoThis is the kind of feedback DDG should take seriously.
- your-nanny 7y agothen use DDG's time filter.
- dingsbumps 7y agoThat's tough when the only filters are "1 month", "1 week", and "1 day". Is there some way to get 1 year? I ask as a daily ddg user
- IAmGraydon 7y agoThat seems like a good approach until you consider that you don’t know whether the results are unsatisfactory if you aren’t looking at both sets of results on each search. You can’t see what you don’t look at and you can’t know what you don’t know. Google may have a better result for you, but how would you know unless you search both engines?
- darkerside 7y agoThat's not what satisfactory means.
- mathgeek 7y ago“Unsatisfactory” is an opinion-based comparison. If you find something that satisfies your desire, it’s satisfactory. I’d say your argument is more based on whether the results are more accurate, or “better” in some more concrete way.
- mancerayder 7y agoI was doing g! at work for tech searches so often I switched back. I gave it several months of effort. One example, I was googling an AWS service related question and the front page was blogs and garbage. g! had the official docs at the relevant part as the first result. This happens way too often, and I like to think not because of personalized results.
- Engineering-MD 7y agoYou could use s! As an alternative to startpage (which serves google results but without google directly tracking you)
- inimino 7y ago> constantly served results to outdated tech info Just to be contrarian... maybe there's some useful signal there about why you might prefer technologies without so much churn.
- KingFelix 7y agoOne problem I wish Google would solve is this. When I'm looking to solve a problem I've found that tons of first page results are dated but years. Adobe cc for example, they are churning updates, lots of people are having the same issues once I actually go to Adobe but the results are sometimes a decade old!
- your-nanny 7y agobut both Google and DDG let you filter by date. Does that not work for you?
- mschuster91 7y agoBiggest problem in your problem is Adobe. It's an utter nightmare to keep up with the constant UI changes - I really wish they'd invest more time in fixing crashes than moving shit around. If anyone here is at Adobe, please for the love of god hammer it into the heads of your PMs to do three or four sprints dedicated only to resolving bugs and crashes.
- inimino 7y agoJust to be clear (since downvotes and replies suggest I wasn't) my point is that if you're using a technology where anything written two years ago is out of date and now useless information, maybe instead of using a search engine that shows newer information you should rather prefer to use technologies where ten-year-old information is still relevant. I'm pretty sure anything I read about TeX today is going to continue to be useful information ten years from now. Not so much anything I read about Kubernetes or the non-relational database du jour. (Which is why I prefer not needing to read about those things ever.)
- spurgu 7y agoStartpage.com is a good alternative for those who don't find DDG results satisfactory.
- emptyparadise 7y agoAnd you can get to startpage by doing !s instead of !g.
- valec 7y agoI've has the same experience; firefox has been comparable to chrome in functionality but ddg is just awful compared to google. Maybe it'll get better as time goes on...
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- your-nanny 7y agoI've been using ddg as default for over year now. But I do pull Google results when querying documentation.
- ldng 7y agoFunnily enough, I've been using DDG for a few years and results have definitively improved to the point I'm using less and less !g And when I do use !g results (especially tech related) are not that good ! Maybe because Google have not enough info to set me in the correct "bubble" ? DDG does the job for me.