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It's great to hear that DDG is doing well. The problem is that I will never switch over to it due to its shortcomings compared to Google and even Bing. I trie

by xpose2000 15y ago

It's great to hear that DDG is doing well. The problem is that I will never switch over to it due to its shortcomings compared to Google and even Bing. I tried to give it a go for a day or so, but quickly realized the results being returned were not good enough. 1) It's not as accurate as Google. Sometimes DDG might return a better result (such as https://duckduckgo.com/?q=alternative+to+picasa https://duckduckgo.com/?q=alternative+to+picasa), but 9/10 times Google is much more accurate. 2) DDG is playing catchup to a search engine that has hundreds of employees and a 10+ year head start. The types of queries DDG is trying to solve now were likely solved years ago and have been finely tuned numerous times. 3) I think this good video http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/2012/03/video-search-quality-meeting-uncut.html http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/2012/03/video-search-qualit... about sums up the type of problems they are solving now and how advanced their platform is. Google is tweaking an edge-case scenario that is only .1% of their traffic. That is more traffic than all of DDG. 4) If DDG is all about respecting privacy and not tracking users, then use Google or Bing in incognito mode. Problem solved. I'm not trying to be negative, but all signs point to a losing battle.

jlarocco 15y ago
As a counterexample for number one, I've found DDG to be as good or better than Google on almost everything. The only place Google really beats it is in mailing list archives. DDG doesn't seem to crawl sites like gmane. Numbers two and three don't make any sense to me as reasons not to use DDG. Using those criteria nobody would have switched to Google because they were just some college guys, while AltaVista and Yahoo have a big head start and huge departments working on search... Number four is simply too inconvenient. I could go through the trouble of switching to incognito mode every time I needed to search, or I could just use DDG.
- xpose2000 15y ago
  The difference now is that Google is constantly trying to improve now more than ever, whereas before the search engines thought it was "good enough". AltaVista and Yahoo were stuck in the technology of the day. The guys at Google had a crazy idea to implement "pagerank" and turn everything upside down. I switched to Google because it was more accurate, and for no reason other than that. That's my #1 priority. Fast forward to today and DDG is not trying to solve an accuracy or crawling problem. I'm not really sure what problem they are trying to solve other than to be an alternative search. There is nothing wrong with that, but I just don't think it fits me.
  - MatthewPhillips 15y ago
    They are trying to solve the same problems, just coming at it from different angles. Google has given up on providing accurate search results to the anonymous user. They now believe that customization is the way forward (Global Warming results depending on your political leaning, etc.). One aspect where Google's size is really killing it: they should be manipulating results manually. For example, a JavaScript search should return MDN in the top 5 results and W3Schools not at all. That doesn't happen, I believe because Google can't manually do stuff like this because of the fact that they compete in many different markets. That's the advantage of only being a search engine; a search engine's job is to be biased.

jlarocco 15y ago

As a counterexample for number one, I've found DDG to be as good or better than Google on almost everything. The only place Google really beats it is in mailing list archives. DDG doesn't seem to crawl sites like gmane. Numbers two and three don't make any sense to me as reasons not to use DDG. Using those criteria nobody would have switched to Google because they were just some college guys, while AltaVista and Yahoo have a big head start and huge departments working on search... Number four is simply too inconvenient. I could go through the trouble of switching to incognito mode every time I needed to search, or I could just use DDG.

xpose2000 15y ago
The difference now is that Google is constantly trying to improve now more than ever, whereas before the search engines thought it was "good enough". AltaVista and Yahoo were stuck in the technology of the day. The guys at Google had a crazy idea to implement "pagerank" and turn everything upside down. I switched to Google because it was more accurate, and for no reason other than that. That's my #1 priority. Fast forward to today and DDG is not trying to solve an accuracy or crawling problem. I'm not really sure what problem they are trying to solve other than to be an alternative search. There is nothing wrong with that, but I just don't think it fits me.
- MatthewPhillips 15y ago
  They are trying to solve the same problems, just coming at it from different angles. Google has given up on providing accurate search results to the anonymous user. They now believe that customization is the way forward (Global Warming results depending on your political leaning, etc.). One aspect where Google's size is really killing it: they should be manipulating results manually. For example, a JavaScript search should return MDN in the top 5 results and W3Schools not at all. That doesn't happen, I believe because Google can't manually do stuff like this because of the fact that they compete in many different markets. That's the advantage of only being a search engine; a search engine's job is to be biased.