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A lot of DDG fans on HN blame the user or social conditioning and use that as a crutch. It’s BS. You need to provide clear examples of the differences in order

A lot of DDG fans on HN blame the user or social conditioning and use that as a crutch. It’s BS. You need to provide clear examples of the differences in order to really make this argument to someone who might switch. What specifically are the differences? The last time this topic came up someone told me I was a total noob because I didn’t know how to use search and that was basically the extent of it.

gameswithgo 7y ago
One could ask that you provide clear examples of searches that don't work right for you, then maybe we can provide advice.
fossuser 7y ago
Have you tried it recently? I generally agree that people made excuses for DDG when it was clearly worse and unusable, but today it’s good enough to use instead (I think it’s better). I’d try it again if you haven’t for a while. Maybe your needs are different than mine, but since we’re both on HN there’s probably pretty good overlap. Small thing, but I really like how DDG results are primarily links to websites and I can see a bunch of links on the first page without scrolling. I think with google the last search I did had 3? I suspect the article is right about google being better about low intent searches (and just generally bad search queries from regular people which probably make up the vast majority of users), but I don’t care about that. I think DDG is probably better for more technical users.
- Grimm1 7y ago
  I have tried it recently and my co-founder and I are literally building a new search experience because we are deeply unsatisfied with the current ones.
  - ampdepolymerase 7y ago
    Any links to your new project?
    - Grimm1 7y ago
      Yup there is (alpha.whize.co) the question mark at the top links to a blog post with our broader goals though we've refined them a bit since that post. I'll warn you though, the alpha has a really limited index (github results) but was meant to showcase how we think we'll initially prioritize results and gauge people's interest versus this is the final version because as you can imagine crawling the larger internet is a bigger task and if no one was interested we weren't going to do it. That said we did have a healthy amount of people try it out (over 2000) and are still seeing people use it now over a month out so we've been full steam ahead on our generic crawler, plus a few social media specific crawlers and we expect to have our beta available mid May.
      - xigency 7y ago
        No offense, but I literally cannot find anything on GitHub with this search engine.
        Grimm1 7y ago
        It's tuned towards discovery, so if you search a topic you'll get results for smaller, new repos that do something around that topic. We deliberately hard downranked common repos but it's also 2 months out of date now since that was to test the waters and we didnt set up recrawling at the time. That said we shared your concerns and have changed things up with how we are approaching it for the beta
        FalconSensei 7y ago
        > We deliberately hard downranked common repos Wasn't google criticized here on HN for downranking specific results? If I'm looking for something, probably I'm looking for the most common, I think
        Grimm1 7y ago
        So we didn't pick specific repos, but we crafted a function based on some metrics we we're using from Github that had a sharp drop off after a certain point and basically -any- super common or well known repo would be down ranked based on those metrics. I can appreciate your thought on that but we're not necessarily geared towards the most common per se (though this might be me misunderstanding what you mean) as we have experienced multiple times the most common result being wrong or outdated and the way things are now it takes a long time for those to slide out of the rankings. We've been asking around for a while now to flesh out what our actual thought is and the description for the problem we're solving right now is "information staleness", you search for something and it leads you to a reddit post but that's outdated by 5 years and then you wind up actually having to do a deep dive and it turns out there was actually a more accurate post from a year ago but it just hasn't crept up to the top yet because everything references the 5 year old post. With our alpha we actually think we went too much in the other direction we focused on it all being super super new but the reality is there is nuance between different topics for what timeframe information decays in, if that makes sense, and now we're for the beta trying to strike a better balance.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- azinman2 7y ago
  I’ve always had the opposite experience with DDG. Technical queries gave just garbage results, where as I got meaningful hits on google each time. </anecdote>
  - ckosidows 7y ago
    Agreed. Each time I see something about DDG on HN I try to switch and it never lasts. I don't like the results on DDG and as much as I'd like to move away from Google they've got search on lock.
    - azinman2 7y ago
      I don’t fully buy the whole “need to move away from google” part. Yes privacy, yes ads, yes SEO gaming, yes monotechopocolpyse. But the reality is they don’t sell my data, they’ve been a good steward of my search queries over the years (and have tools to clear my history or log me out and not save them), and their product is still the best over two-ish decades. If you’re going to convince me to move away from them, you gotta 10x it, not give me a poor clone with ! tools to force me to compensate for a not great search engine. Give me a fundamentally different experience that actually innovates in this space. I’d love to see the competition, but somehow it hasn’t materialized in all these years.
      - visarga 7y ago
        > If you’re going to convince me to move away from them, you gotta 10x it, The fact that you don't start all your searches in Google is sufficient reason. You could always jump to Google if DDG has bad results, but for many searches you don't need to leave Google traces.
        azinman2 7y ago
        Why is that sufficient reason? I'm not particularly concerned about Google having my search history. As I've said before, they've been good stewards with it over 20 years.
    - 7y ago
- chapium 7y ago
  DDG used to have issues with responsiveness on their page. Years later I tried it again and it actually feels right. A lot of work has gone into performance optimization and it has sucked me in.
dhimes 7y ago
It might be more effective if you try it yourself. Google something you normally google, then repeat the search with &pws=0 at the end of the query string.
- akavel 7y ago
  Interesting, what is the pws arg?
  - shrikant 7y ago
    It turns off personalised (based on your browsing/search history) search results.
  - dhimes 7y ago
    I think it's something like 'personalized web search' so you turn it off. That used to be the way to do it anyway.
pingyong 7y ago
Considering the base idea isn't that DDG's search is better, but that their privacy is better, it's kinda the opposite. The people not using DDG would have to provide clear examples. (Or just say that they don't care enough about Google's privacy issues to switch.)
LeftHandPath 7y ago
I agree. I’ve been in the DDG camp for a little while, but I finally had to switch back to google as my primary search engine on my laptop - fixing searches was taking too much time. That’s after two or three months of using DDG and Bing exclusively
_jal 7y ago
> You need to provide clear examples Nope, I don't. I don't care what search engine you like. I do want to see Google knocked down several pegs, but fan rants aren't going to do that. I just keep using DDG as it gets better while Google gets worse and sometimes think a little about the variety of the human experience.
hedora 7y ago
Google gives me bad results. It ignores some of the words in my queries, and the context boxes are generally spammy and irrelevant. Even if the correct information is somewhere in the results page, I bounce before I can find it. From what I can tell from the article, this might be because I type too much stuff into the search bar, and because Google’s manually curated semantic web stuff is not relevant to me. However, I’m really not sure why I can’t use Google anymore. It was better when I switched away, so I definitely used to be able to use it (I didn’t log in back then either). Ddg is fine, and more respectful to its users. I don’t have a practical reason to figure out what the problem is.
- hedora 7y ago
  I think, on reflection, the issue is that typing “harry potter sport” and clicking on the wikipedia article at the very top of the page (above the first ad) is a much lower cognitive burden than the Google way, where I guess people are trained to type “harry potter” and then skim an entire page of ads, search results and noise to find the word “Quidditch” (which doesn’t appear, I just checked). If I google harry potter sport, it presents the Wikipedia article in a context box, then the same article in a differently formatted context box, an ad, and then a third link to the same article at the top of the organic results. Duck duck go displays the same link twice (once in a big context box). This seems better, though arguably not great.
  - dagenix 7y ago
    A Google search for me produces the word "Quidditch" in a box along with a link to the Wikipedia page for Quidditch and the first paragraph of that article. The box appears at the very top of the results. I'm not sure how a search result for that query could be much more useful.
    - gjm11 7y ago
      I can confirm that I also see this, both in my regular Firefox instance where I do everything and in an incognito Chrome window. Specifically, I get, in order from top to bottom, with only trivial differences between those two cases: A box with "Quidditch" in big letters, a picture and a brief description. Some "People also ask:" with questions that do seem to be reasonably relevant. The Wikipedia page about Quidditch. Some video links, all relevant. Some images, all relevant. Another Wikipedia page about Quidditch. A page about the "Department of Magical Games and Sports" from some Harry-Potter-specific wiki. Same wiki's "games and sports" category. "Beyond Quidditch: games and pastimes in the wizarding world" from www.wizardingworld.com. NPR article about real-world quidditch games. Quora question about other sports in Harry Potter. Related searches: a bunch of Harry Potter things which seem pretty relevant. Related search: "Quidditch teams". A bunch of "Searches related to harry potter sport" which mostly also seem relevant. So ... the organization of the page is a little weird in places, but this seems like an excellent set of search results for that query. The DDG results are also perfectly fine, though they feel slightly worse than the Google ones to me.
ravenstine 7y ago
> A lot of DDG fans on HN blame the user or social conditioning and use that as a crutch. It’s BS. That's no more or less BS than people saying that "DDG results are shit". I don't see anything wrong with trying to guess why DDG doesn't work well for some people, even if the conclusion happens to offend someone's personal choices.
jstanley 7y ago
An example of a difference: I live in Bristol. If I search for things like "car mechanic bristol", DDG comes up with lots of results from Bristol, Tennessee. It's not that DDG is worse than Google, it's just that DDG isn't tailoring the results to what it knows about me. The solution is to be more specific: "car mechanic bristol uk", for example, does the job.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- aembleton 7y ago
  Have you tried switching `United Kingdom` to on? https://imgur.com/6ydSWAF https://imgur.com/6ydSWAF
- berkut 7y ago
  I have exactly the same issue with it in Wellington, NZ. Even with "New Zealand" turned on at the top, it gives me quite a few results for things in Wellington, Florida. If I don't specify "Wellington" or "NZ" in the search terms, results are even worse, even with "New Zealand" turned on: I get results from Australia, Dubai, even the UK for various search terms. (and some of the TLDs are things like "com.au" or ".co.uk" so it should be trivial to filter those out.) Google's not perfect in this regard, but it's an order of magnitude better in my experience for localised queries, even with both in Incognito/Private mode.
- thaumasiotes 7y ago
  > If I search for things like "car mechanic bristol", DDG comes up with lots of results from Bristol, Tennessee. It's not that DDG is worse than Google, it's just that DDG isn't tailoring the results to what it knows about me. If I wanted a car mechanic in San Francisco, I would usually search for "car mechanic 94105" rather than "car mechanic san francisco". Regardless of search engine. Do postal codes not work to refer to particular areas of the UK?
  - notahacker 7y ago
    The Bristol postcode is the letters 'BS' followed by a one or two digit number, so it's not particularly good for finding a service provider in a large area. UK postcodes are somewhat more useful when you want to narrow a search to a small area, especially for small towns and London districts where the number is a useful identifier and the area itself might have multiple or non-unique names
jt2190 7y ago
> A lot of DDG fans on HN blame the user or social conditioning and use that as a crutch. The tools are different, though, so searching the same way on DDG and Google will lead to different outcomes. This is no different than adapting you speech when speaking to an infant or speaking to an adult. [1] For example, I use DDG as my primary search tool, and I have a habit of using "keywords", rather than natural language, when I search DDG. (This may be an outdated habit from my long exposure to search tools.) With modern Google though, I find that if I follow my habit and use keywords, my search results are poor. I have better results using natural language. As others have noted, I have better results when searching Google when I don't know what the thing I'm looking for is called, or when I'm looking for esoteric content (like code samples.) [1] I'm not saying that switching is easy or even ideal, I'm just underscoring that different tools are... different. ;-) And "knowing" how to use search well is kinda hard these days, as everything keeps evolving, and we're all busy doing other things.
- hombre_fatal 7y ago
  I have a hard time believing there's actually much google-specific adaption going on for anyone except the biggest HN nerd. My girlfriend types whole sentences into it. People in this thread have search examples like "harry potter sport". I look at my google search history and it's just generic search strings that DDG has no excuse to struggle. Having to "tweak your language" just sounds like a cop-out to me. And I think people really just mean you have to add more context to DDG queries because it's easily confused. Like how "elm list" gives great results in google and bad results in DDG.
  - jt2190 7y ago
    > Having to "tweak your language" just sounds like a cop-out to me. Totally agree. But even Google is nowhere near perfection here, so we’re left with the same two strategies we all use when searching: * try over and over * continually tweak queries It’s especially easy to forget that we often actually search multiple times, because we do it so quickly that it’s an ingrained habit.
troyvit 7y ago
Actually the article in this post provides exactly that. https://www.bitlog.com/2020/03/06/duckduckgo-is-good-enough-for-regular-use/ https://www.bitlog.com/2020/03/06/duckduckgo-is-good-enough-... Look for the bit about Harry Potter.
chuckgreenman 7y ago
Let's say there's a new can opener in the drawer [1], it's the same size and shape as a can opener but because it's not what you're used to you try to use it in the normal orientation and it doesn't work. Even though the tool can open cans, rounds off the sharp edges and requires less grip force you reply with: a lot of OXO folks blame the user or social conditioning. It's BS. Is that a reasonable response? I'd argue that it isn't. But to answer your question I use more precise language for what I'm looking for, specifying the city and state I want results from, specifying the type of thing that I want. A lot of my searches are !bangs, !godoc - for searching Go packages !gems - for searching ruby gems !sx - for getting only stack overflow results !w - for jumping to a Wikipedia article !gh - for searching github - [1] https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000079XW2?tag=duckduckgo-ffab-20&linkCode=osi&th=1&psc=1 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000079XW2?tag=duckduckgo-ffab-20&...
fossuser 7y ago
Funnily enough I just got an example of this from a friend who is trying DDG this week. Her example query that did better on Google than DDG: > why did robinhood go down feb 29 2020 What I would search for the same question that does better on DDG: > robinhood down She's 24 and I'm 29 so it's possible that difference is real, people who are younger may be tailoring searches in a way that benefits Google (in which case they may not benefit as much from DDG or really would have to change behavior).
forkexec 7y ago
GP isn't a peer-reviewed journal, it's an opinion insight.
NicolasGorden 7y ago
For me the differences are: Google is better at dealing with topics that are trending and providing data right on the SERP without having to click through. If I want to look up the latest Corona Virus stats, I'd do so on google. As the article states, things like Google's stock panel are just superior to other options. But DDG is better at historical searches. It's like they try to 'understand' you less and want to provide you with all possible things you could be looking for. Like Google used to do and like I prefer. I've looked up old articles I had read and wanted to reference when writing an article. On Google and they just don't come up. No matter what I do: use the date tool, use quotes, etc, it's like Google thinks it's too old/irrelevant for me, so no matter what I search, it won't give it to me. But on DDG, they are there and will come up with the right set of keywords.
atoav 7y ago
I uaed google the last 3 years on my desktop while I used DDG on my phone, so I have a pretty good feeling about the differences. I started using duckduckgo because I accidentally set the default search engine to it and thought: OK I might as well use that for a while. The question you ask is hard to answer because the differences depend on the thing you are searching for. My feeling: for searching code stuff google is a tad better, while for everyday stuff duckduckgo seems to display more relevant results. It is definitly worth trying, just to notice the subtle things google does sometimes.

gameswithgo 7y ago

One could ask that you provide clear examples of searches that don't work right for you, then maybe we can provide advice.

fossuser 7y ago

Have you tried it recently? I generally agree that people made excuses for DDG when it was clearly worse and unusable, but today it’s good enough to use instead (I think it’s better). I’d try it again if you haven’t for a while. Maybe your needs are different than mine, but since we’re both on HN there’s probably pretty good overlap. Small thing, but I really like how DDG results are primarily links to websites and I can see a bunch of links on the first page without scrolling. I think with google the last search I did had 3? I suspect the article is right about google being better about low intent searches (and just generally bad search queries from regular people which probably make up the vast majority of users), but I don’t care about that. I think DDG is probably better for more technical users.

Grimm1 7y ago
I have tried it recently and my co-founder and I are literally building a new search experience because we are deeply unsatisfied with the current ones.
- ampdepolymerase 7y ago
  Any links to your new project?
  - Grimm1 7y ago
    Yup there is (alpha.whize.co) the question mark at the top links to a blog post with our broader goals though we've refined them a bit since that post. I'll warn you though, the alpha has a really limited index (github results) but was meant to showcase how we think we'll initially prioritize results and gauge people's interest versus this is the final version because as you can imagine crawling the larger internet is a bigger task and if no one was interested we weren't going to do it. That said we did have a healthy amount of people try it out (over 2000) and are still seeing people use it now over a month out so we've been full steam ahead on our generic crawler, plus a few social media specific crawlers and we expect to have our beta available mid May.
    - xigency 7y ago
      No offense, but I literally cannot find anything on GitHub with this search engine.
      - Grimm1 7y ago
        It's tuned towards discovery, so if you search a topic you'll get results for smaller, new repos that do something around that topic. We deliberately hard downranked common repos but it's also 2 months out of date now since that was to test the waters and we didnt set up recrawling at the time. That said we shared your concerns and have changed things up with how we are approaching it for the beta
        FalconSensei 7y ago
        > We deliberately hard downranked common repos Wasn't google criticized here on HN for downranking specific results? If I'm looking for something, probably I'm looking for the most common, I think
        Grimm1 7y ago
        So we didn't pick specific repos, but we crafted a function based on some metrics we we're using from Github that had a sharp drop off after a certain point and basically -any- super common or well known repo would be down ranked based on those metrics. I can appreciate your thought on that but we're not necessarily geared towards the most common per se (though this might be me misunderstanding what you mean) as we have experienced multiple times the most common result being wrong or outdated and the way things are now it takes a long time for those to slide out of the rankings. We've been asking around for a while now to flesh out what our actual thought is and the description for the problem we're solving right now is "information staleness", you search for something and it leads you to a reddit post but that's outdated by 5 years and then you wind up actually having to do a deep dive and it turns out there was actually a more accurate post from a year ago but it just hasn't crept up to the top yet because everything references the 5 year old post. With our alpha we actually think we went too much in the other direction we focused on it all being super super new but the reality is there is nuance between different topics for what timeframe information decays in, if that makes sense, and now we're for the beta trying to strike a better balance.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
azinman2 7y ago
I’ve always had the opposite experience with DDG. Technical queries gave just garbage results, where as I got meaningful hits on google each time. </anecdote>
- ckosidows 7y ago
  Agreed. Each time I see something about DDG on HN I try to switch and it never lasts. I don't like the results on DDG and as much as I'd like to move away from Google they've got search on lock.
  - azinman2 7y ago
    I don’t fully buy the whole “need to move away from google” part. Yes privacy, yes ads, yes SEO gaming, yes monotechopocolpyse. But the reality is they don’t sell my data, they’ve been a good steward of my search queries over the years (and have tools to clear my history or log me out and not save them), and their product is still the best over two-ish decades. If you’re going to convince me to move away from them, you gotta 10x it, not give me a poor clone with ! tools to force me to compensate for a not great search engine. Give me a fundamentally different experience that actually innovates in this space. I’d love to see the competition, but somehow it hasn’t materialized in all these years.
    - visarga 7y ago
      > If you’re going to convince me to move away from them, you gotta 10x it, The fact that you don't start all your searches in Google is sufficient reason. You could always jump to Google if DDG has bad results, but for many searches you don't need to leave Google traces.
      - azinman2 7y ago
        Why is that sufficient reason? I'm not particularly concerned about Google having my search history. As I've said before, they've been good stewards with it over 20 years.
  - 7y ago
chapium 7y ago
DDG used to have issues with responsiveness on their page. Years later I tried it again and it actually feels right. A lot of work has gone into performance optimization and it has sucked me in.

dhimes 7y ago

It might be more effective if you try it yourself. Google something you normally google, then repeat the search with &pws=0 at the end of the query string.

akavel 7y ago
Interesting, what is the pws arg?
- shrikant 7y ago
  It turns off personalised (based on your browsing/search history) search results.
- dhimes 7y ago
  I think it's something like 'personalized web search' so you turn it off. That used to be the way to do it anyway.

pingyong 7y ago

Considering the base idea isn't that DDG's search is better, but that their privacy is better, it's kinda the opposite. The people not using DDG would have to provide clear examples. (Or just say that they don't care enough about Google's privacy issues to switch.)

LeftHandPath 7y ago

I agree. I’ve been in the DDG camp for a little while, but I finally had to switch back to google as my primary search engine on my laptop - fixing searches was taking too much time. That’s after two or three months of using DDG and Bing exclusively

_jal 7y ago

> You need to provide clear examples Nope, I don't. I don't care what search engine you like. I do want to see Google knocked down several pegs, but fan rants aren't going to do that. I just keep using DDG as it gets better while Google gets worse and sometimes think a little about the variety of the human experience.

hedora 7y ago

Google gives me bad results. It ignores some of the words in my queries, and the context boxes are generally spammy and irrelevant. Even if the correct information is somewhere in the results page, I bounce before I can find it. From what I can tell from the article, this might be because I type too much stuff into the search bar, and because Google’s manually curated semantic web stuff is not relevant to me. However, I’m really not sure why I can’t use Google anymore. It was better when I switched away, so I definitely used to be able to use it (I didn’t log in back then either). Ddg is fine, and more respectful to its users. I don’t have a practical reason to figure out what the problem is.

hedora 7y ago
I think, on reflection, the issue is that typing “harry potter sport” and clicking on the wikipedia article at the very top of the page (above the first ad) is a much lower cognitive burden than the Google way, where I guess people are trained to type “harry potter” and then skim an entire page of ads, search results and noise to find the word “Quidditch” (which doesn’t appear, I just checked). If I google harry potter sport, it presents the Wikipedia article in a context box, then the same article in a differently formatted context box, an ad, and then a third link to the same article at the top of the organic results. Duck duck go displays the same link twice (once in a big context box). This seems better, though arguably not great.
- dagenix 7y ago
  A Google search for me produces the word "Quidditch" in a box along with a link to the Wikipedia page for Quidditch and the first paragraph of that article. The box appears at the very top of the results. I'm not sure how a search result for that query could be much more useful.
  - gjm11 7y ago
    I can confirm that I also see this, both in my regular Firefox instance where I do everything and in an incognito Chrome window. Specifically, I get, in order from top to bottom, with only trivial differences between those two cases: A box with "Quidditch" in big letters, a picture and a brief description. Some "People also ask:" with questions that do seem to be reasonably relevant. The Wikipedia page about Quidditch. Some video links, all relevant. Some images, all relevant. Another Wikipedia page about Quidditch. A page about the "Department of Magical Games and Sports" from some Harry-Potter-specific wiki. Same wiki's "games and sports" category. "Beyond Quidditch: games and pastimes in the wizarding world" from www.wizardingworld.com. NPR article about real-world quidditch games. Quora question about other sports in Harry Potter. Related searches: a bunch of Harry Potter things which seem pretty relevant. Related search: "Quidditch teams". A bunch of "Searches related to harry potter sport" which mostly also seem relevant. So ... the organization of the page is a little weird in places, but this seems like an excellent set of search results for that query. The DDG results are also perfectly fine, though they feel slightly worse than the Google ones to me.

ravenstine 7y ago

> A lot of DDG fans on HN blame the user or social conditioning and use that as a crutch. It’s BS. That's no more or less BS than people saying that "DDG results are shit". I don't see anything wrong with trying to guess why DDG doesn't work well for some people, even if the conclusion happens to offend someone's personal choices.

jstanley 7y ago

An example of a difference: I live in Bristol. If I search for things like "car mechanic bristol", DDG comes up with lots of results from Bristol, Tennessee. It's not that DDG is worse than Google, it's just that DDG isn't tailoring the results to what it knows about me. The solution is to be more specific: "car mechanic bristol uk", for example, does the job.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
aembleton 7y ago
Have you tried switching `United Kingdom` to on? https://imgur.com/6ydSWAF https://imgur.com/6ydSWAF
berkut 7y ago
I have exactly the same issue with it in Wellington, NZ. Even with "New Zealand" turned on at the top, it gives me quite a few results for things in Wellington, Florida. If I don't specify "Wellington" or "NZ" in the search terms, results are even worse, even with "New Zealand" turned on: I get results from Australia, Dubai, even the UK for various search terms. (and some of the TLDs are things like "com.au" or ".co.uk" so it should be trivial to filter those out.) Google's not perfect in this regard, but it's an order of magnitude better in my experience for localised queries, even with both in Incognito/Private mode.
thaumasiotes 7y ago
> If I search for things like "car mechanic bristol", DDG comes up with lots of results from Bristol, Tennessee. It's not that DDG is worse than Google, it's just that DDG isn't tailoring the results to what it knows about me. If I wanted a car mechanic in San Francisco, I would usually search for "car mechanic 94105" rather than "car mechanic san francisco". Regardless of search engine. Do postal codes not work to refer to particular areas of the UK?
- notahacker 7y ago
  The Bristol postcode is the letters 'BS' followed by a one or two digit number, so it's not particularly good for finding a service provider in a large area. UK postcodes are somewhat more useful when you want to narrow a search to a small area, especially for small towns and London districts where the number is a useful identifier and the area itself might have multiple or non-unique names

jt2190 7y ago

> A lot of DDG fans on HN blame the user or social conditioning and use that as a crutch. The tools are different, though, so searching the same way on DDG and Google will lead to different outcomes. This is no different than adapting you speech when speaking to an infant or speaking to an adult. [1] For example, I use DDG as my primary search tool, and I have a habit of using "keywords", rather than natural language, when I search DDG. (This may be an outdated habit from my long exposure to search tools.) With modern Google though, I find that if I follow my habit and use keywords, my search results are poor. I have better results using natural language. As others have noted, I have better results when searching Google when I don't know what the thing I'm looking for is called, or when I'm looking for esoteric content (like code samples.) [1] I'm not saying that switching is easy or even ideal, I'm just underscoring that different tools are... different. ;-) And "knowing" how to use search well is kinda hard these days, as everything keeps evolving, and we're all busy doing other things.

hombre_fatal 7y ago
I have a hard time believing there's actually much google-specific adaption going on for anyone except the biggest HN nerd. My girlfriend types whole sentences into it. People in this thread have search examples like "harry potter sport". I look at my google search history and it's just generic search strings that DDG has no excuse to struggle. Having to "tweak your language" just sounds like a cop-out to me. And I think people really just mean you have to add more context to DDG queries because it's easily confused. Like how "elm list" gives great results in google and bad results in DDG.
- jt2190 7y ago
  > Having to "tweak your language" just sounds like a cop-out to me. Totally agree. But even Google is nowhere near perfection here, so we’re left with the same two strategies we all use when searching: * try over and over * continually tweak queries It’s especially easy to forget that we often actually search multiple times, because we do it so quickly that it’s an ingrained habit.

troyvit 7y ago

Actually the article in this post provides exactly that. https://www.bitlog.com/2020/03/06/duckduckgo-is-good-enough-for-regular-use/ https://www.bitlog.com/2020/03/06/duckduckgo-is-good-enough-... Look for the bit about Harry Potter.

chuckgreenman 7y ago

Let's say there's a new can opener in the drawer [1], it's the same size and shape as a can opener but because it's not what you're used to you try to use it in the normal orientation and it doesn't work. Even though the tool can open cans, rounds off the sharp edges and requires less grip force you reply with: a lot of OXO folks blame the user or social conditioning. It's BS. Is that a reasonable response? I'd argue that it isn't. But to answer your question I use more precise language for what I'm looking for, specifying the city and state I want results from, specifying the type of thing that I want. A lot of my searches are !bangs, !godoc - for searching Go packages !gems - for searching ruby gems !sx - for getting only stack overflow results !w - for jumping to a Wikipedia article !gh - for searching github - [1] https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000079XW2?tag=duckduckgo-ffab-20&linkCode=osi&th=1&psc=1 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000079XW2?tag=duckduckgo-ffab-20&...

fossuser 7y ago

Funnily enough I just got an example of this from a friend who is trying DDG this week. Her example query that did better on Google than DDG: > why did robinhood go down feb 29 2020 What I would search for the same question that does better on DDG: > robinhood down She's 24 and I'm 29 so it's possible that difference is real, people who are younger may be tailoring searches in a way that benefits Google (in which case they may not benefit as much from DDG or really would have to change behavior).

forkexec 7y ago

GP isn't a peer-reviewed journal, it's an opinion insight.

NicolasGorden 7y ago

For me the differences are: Google is better at dealing with topics that are trending and providing data right on the SERP without having to click through. If I want to look up the latest Corona Virus stats, I'd do so on google. As the article states, things like Google's stock panel are just superior to other options. But DDG is better at historical searches. It's like they try to 'understand' you less and want to provide you with all possible things you could be looking for. Like Google used to do and like I prefer. I've looked up old articles I had read and wanted to reference when writing an article. On Google and they just don't come up. No matter what I do: use the date tool, use quotes, etc, it's like Google thinks it's too old/irrelevant for me, so no matter what I search, it won't give it to me. But on DDG, they are there and will come up with the right set of keywords.

atoav 7y ago

I uaed google the last 3 years on my desktop while I used DDG on my phone, so I have a pretty good feeling about the differences. I started using duckduckgo because I accidentally set the default search engine to it and thought: OK I might as well use that for a while. The question you ask is hard to answer because the differences depend on the thing you are searching for. My feeling: for searching code stuff google is a tad better, while for everyday stuff duckduckgo seems to display more relevant results. It is definitly worth trying, just to notice the subtle things google does sometimes.