5 ms·

Can we get some examples of searches from the "DDG is terrible" camp? I've been using DDG for 100% of my searches on laptop and phone for ~3 years without any c

by ed312 6y ago

Can we get some examples of searches from the "DDG is terrible" camp? I've been using DDG for 100% of my searches on laptop and phone for ~3 years without any complaint. I've never used the "pipe it through google" search option.

hombre_fatal 6y ago
Every time I try to use it, almost every search query I write while trying to get work done I end up retrying with "!g". Eventually I find myself using "!g" preemptively because I don't want to miss out on results like long tail StackOverflow hits. Though "elm list" is still my classic example.
- majewsky 6y ago
  When you type "elm list" into Google and it understands that you mean the language instead of the tree, it's because they have an extensive profile on you. Of course DuckDuckGo won't do that since that's their unique selling point. I can see this being a legitimate gripe of an end user that just compares search engines, but I was under the impression that this crowd understands the proposition of DDG and doesn't complain when it's working as designed.
  - hombre_fatal 6y ago
    I hear this presumption a lot from people trying to defend DDG, but you can trivially disprove this by googling it anonymously from a random IP address. Try it with "elm list". Frankly, when I compare my logged-in, static-IP Google results to anonymous queries, I can see that the degree of "personalization" that people claim is vastly overstated; not much seems to change. It just seems like wishful thinking when the obvious reality is that Google is just more advanced in its ability to semanticize input. DDG "rust cargo" gives me images and results for cargo ships.
    - boomka 6y ago
      I followed your advice, turned on VPN, went private browsing and searched for "elm list". On DDG the first result was elm-lang homepage but the second was a tutorial on lists in Elm. Down the page I also saw a wikipedia entry for a list of elm trees. Seems ok overall to me. Then I tried the same thing with Google and first I was stopped by captcha and had to spend a minute clicking hydrants and traffic lights. Then I got a whole page of results about various programming discussions on lists in Elm, but nothing in the entire page about the trees. That does not seem right, I think regular person would be much more likely to search for a tree, not for an obscure programming language. Verdict: I found DDG results better as in more relevant for general population while still surfacing the programming ones. Also no hydrants on DDG.
      - joshuamorton 6y ago
        Would someone searching for the trees search "elm list" or "list of elms"?
- ed312 6y ago
  How is there anywhere enough information in that query to know its about programming? I guess the difference is I don't expect DDG to know anything about the query (imagine talking to a random librarian vs your coworker). This example helps - I think its down to a matter of expectations and tradeoffs. Maybe fundamentally DDG is a "search engine" and GOOG is a "personal AI research assistant".
  - hombre_fatal 6y ago
    As I point out in my sibling comment, you can google anonymously to prove that it's not personalized. In fact, you can do this with every google vs ddg query to prove it's not personalization that makes google superior. No need to guess. Also, ddg's first link is programming related, it's just a worthless result (Elm's homepage). You ask how someone/something could know that "elm list" is programming related, but I don't see why you think it's unfeasible for someone/something to come up with confidence levels for the various possibilities. Let's say you were sufficiently omniscient to know about the Elm language, elm trees, the elm email client, Professor Elm from Pokemon, and the tiny town of Elm, Switzerland. What do you think is a better result for the query "elm list"? If you can form an opinion, why couldn't the world's most lucrative machine learning project form a similar one?
- marcosdumay 6y ago
  Hum... My first 3 results are tutorials about how to use lists in Elm. The 4th is a link to the Elm language home page, followed by the official documentation. Google, instead, shows me a list-extras package first, followed by one tutorial on lists, one on types, an unrelated blog, a SO answer for "are Elm lists faster than JS arrays", followed by a bunch of random stuff, including the Facebook profile for A Elm List.
furi 6y ago
I'm not in that camp, I think it's fine for more mundane queries and kinda bad for more obscure ones. That said I can try dig some out of my search history anyway: "fiction perspectives" brings up an article titled "Fiction: Jewish perspectives on Niue" in DDG. In Google it brings up an info box titled "Here are the four primary POV types in fiction". "US military clacker" (searching for the name of that thing the player often squeezes in first person shooter games to set off explosives) brings up "U.S. WWII D-Day Signaling Cricket Clicker Clacker" in Amazon.com in DDG. In Google it brings up the Wikipedia page for the Claymore mine and chooses to show the sentence "The M57 firing device (colloquially referred to as the "clacker") is included with each mine". "lua_pcall example" brings up a thread titled "PCall function?" on the Roblox Developer Forum in DDG. In Google it brings up the page "Calling Lua Functions" from the official Lua manual. Many of these are still usable. There are some articles about perspective in fiction writing further down but none that address the topic quite so directly. The clacker search on DDG has pictures of clackers (which Google does not) which you could click on and investigate to work out the name of it. The Lua DDG search has the right page as the third result. But those little imperfections do add friction and make me reach for the g! flag for those trickier queries.
larrik 6y ago
Same, I go months at a time forgetting I'm not using Google at all. The few times I've compared results I didn't notice an improvement.
piokoch 6y ago
Compare "java jdk 15 what's new" search. DDG shows the same first result like Google, however next ones are not good: 2. What's New In JDK 14 Latest Release? 80 New Features ... - I was not asking for JDK 14 3. What's new in Java 15? | Learn To Code Together - sort of ok 4. JDK14: Java 14 Features - What's New in Java 14 - wrong JDK version again 5. whats new in Java 9 | Java 9 features | corejavaguru - getting even worst 6., 7. some links to Java 12 and 13 8. What's new in Spring Boot 2.3 (Java 14, OCI images, etc ... - totally unrelated stuff. From that point results are utter crap, duplicated multiple times. Google at least provides links to JDK 15 official java.net page and to release notes, plus it gets the version right - no links for other Java versions. As much as I would like DDG to be successful, it is not yet there.
- stjohnswarts 6y ago
  put +"jdk 15" in quotes with a + in front, you just have to learn the tool. Google AI will almost always be better because it learns your areas of interest, DDG will always be behind on that. So there is obviously a trade off.
  - frosted-flakes 6y ago
    What does adding the + do? Isn't the + implicit for each search term?

by ed312 6y ago

hombre_fatal 6y ago

Every time I try to use it, almost every search query I write while trying to get work done I end up retrying with "!g". Eventually I find myself using "!g" preemptively because I don't want to miss out on results like long tail StackOverflow hits. Though "elm list" is still my classic example.

majewsky 6y ago
When you type "elm list" into Google and it understands that you mean the language instead of the tree, it's because they have an extensive profile on you. Of course DuckDuckGo won't do that since that's their unique selling point. I can see this being a legitimate gripe of an end user that just compares search engines, but I was under the impression that this crowd understands the proposition of DDG and doesn't complain when it's working as designed.
- hombre_fatal 6y ago
  I hear this presumption a lot from people trying to defend DDG, but you can trivially disprove this by googling it anonymously from a random IP address. Try it with "elm list". Frankly, when I compare my logged-in, static-IP Google results to anonymous queries, I can see that the degree of "personalization" that people claim is vastly overstated; not much seems to change. It just seems like wishful thinking when the obvious reality is that Google is just more advanced in its ability to semanticize input. DDG "rust cargo" gives me images and results for cargo ships.
  - boomka 6y ago
    I followed your advice, turned on VPN, went private browsing and searched for "elm list". On DDG the first result was elm-lang homepage but the second was a tutorial on lists in Elm. Down the page I also saw a wikipedia entry for a list of elm trees. Seems ok overall to me. Then I tried the same thing with Google and first I was stopped by captcha and had to spend a minute clicking hydrants and traffic lights. Then I got a whole page of results about various programming discussions on lists in Elm, but nothing in the entire page about the trees. That does not seem right, I think regular person would be much more likely to search for a tree, not for an obscure programming language. Verdict: I found DDG results better as in more relevant for general population while still surfacing the programming ones. Also no hydrants on DDG.
    - joshuamorton 6y ago
      Would someone searching for the trees search "elm list" or "list of elms"?
ed312 6y ago
How is there anywhere enough information in that query to know its about programming? I guess the difference is I don't expect DDG to know anything about the query (imagine talking to a random librarian vs your coworker). This example helps - I think its down to a matter of expectations and tradeoffs. Maybe fundamentally DDG is a "search engine" and GOOG is a "personal AI research assistant".
- hombre_fatal 6y ago
  As I point out in my sibling comment, you can google anonymously to prove that it's not personalized. In fact, you can do this with every google vs ddg query to prove it's not personalization that makes google superior. No need to guess. Also, ddg's first link is programming related, it's just a worthless result (Elm's homepage). You ask how someone/something could know that "elm list" is programming related, but I don't see why you think it's unfeasible for someone/something to come up with confidence levels for the various possibilities. Let's say you were sufficiently omniscient to know about the Elm language, elm trees, the elm email client, Professor Elm from Pokemon, and the tiny town of Elm, Switzerland. What do you think is a better result for the query "elm list"? If you can form an opinion, why couldn't the world's most lucrative machine learning project form a similar one?
marcosdumay 6y ago
Hum... My first 3 results are tutorials about how to use lists in Elm. The 4th is a link to the Elm language home page, followed by the official documentation. Google, instead, shows me a list-extras package first, followed by one tutorial on lists, one on types, an unrelated blog, a SO answer for "are Elm lists faster than JS arrays", followed by a bunch of random stuff, including the Facebook profile for A Elm List.

furi 6y ago

I'm not in that camp, I think it's fine for more mundane queries and kinda bad for more obscure ones. That said I can try dig some out of my search history anyway: "fiction perspectives" brings up an article titled "Fiction: Jewish perspectives on Niue" in DDG. In Google it brings up an info box titled "Here are the four primary POV types in fiction". "US military clacker" (searching for the name of that thing the player often squeezes in first person shooter games to set off explosives) brings up "U.S. WWII D-Day Signaling Cricket Clicker Clacker" in Amazon.com in DDG. In Google it brings up the Wikipedia page for the Claymore mine and chooses to show the sentence "The M57 firing device (colloquially referred to as the "clacker") is included with each mine". "lua_pcall example" brings up a thread titled "PCall function?" on the Roblox Developer Forum in DDG. In Google it brings up the page "Calling Lua Functions" from the official Lua manual. Many of these are still usable. There are some articles about perspective in fiction writing further down but none that address the topic quite so directly. The clacker search on DDG has pictures of clackers (which Google does not) which you could click on and investigate to work out the name of it. The Lua DDG search has the right page as the third result. But those little imperfections do add friction and make me reach for the g! flag for those trickier queries.

larrik 6y ago

Same, I go months at a time forgetting I'm not using Google at all. The few times I've compared results I didn't notice an improvement.

piokoch 6y ago

Compare "java jdk 15 what's new" search. DDG shows the same first result like Google, however next ones are not good: 2. What's New In JDK 14 Latest Release? 80 New Features ... - I was not asking for JDK 14 3. What's new in Java 15? | Learn To Code Together - sort of ok 4. JDK14: Java 14 Features - What's New in Java 14 - wrong JDK version again 5. whats new in Java 9 | Java 9 features | corejavaguru - getting even worst 6., 7. some links to Java 12 and 13 8. What's new in Spring Boot 2.3 (Java 14, OCI images, etc ... - totally unrelated stuff. From that point results are utter crap, duplicated multiple times. Google at least provides links to JDK 15 official java.net page and to release notes, plus it gets the version right - no links for other Java versions. As much as I would like DDG to be successful, it is not yet there.

stjohnswarts 6y ago
put +"jdk 15" in quotes with a + in front, you just have to learn the tool. Google AI will almost always be better because it learns your areas of interest, DDG will always be behind on that. So there is obviously a trade off.
- frosted-flakes 6y ago
  What does adding the + do? Isn't the + implicit for each search term?