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To be fair to DuckDuckGo, I tried your searches and did get useful results. "movies near me" took me to Yahoo! Movies, which showed me theaters near me. I could

by nilkn 14y ago

To be fair to DuckDuckGo, I tried your searches and did get useful results. "movies near me" took me to Yahoo! Movies, which showed me theaters near me. I could also search for something like "movies [zip code]". I tried it for a few different zip codes and it always got me the results I wanted, but not always through the same site. For one zip code, it brought up the Fandango page for that area, which had exactly what I wanted. For another, it took me right to the showtime page of the only theater in the town. As for "NBA standings," I'm not a huge NBA guy, so maybe I don't know what you wanted, but it takes me right to nba.com/standings, which is the same as the top result on Google. The only difference that I can tell is that Google puts some of the standings in a table on the search results page, which doesn't seem like a huge deal to me. It sounds like you're judging a search engine based solely on the information it takes out of links and puts in its own format on the results page, not by the links it provides. While I agree that bells and whistles like extracting certain results into a table on the results page are cool, that hardly seems to me like the ultimate test of a search engine. Actually I'd say that's one of the least important factors in a search engine, to me anyway. Anyway, with all that said, I don't have anything against Google. I just don't agree with your assessment of DuckDuckGo. Edit: That's not to say DuckDuckGo is perfect. I queried my own name and found that DuckDuckGo didn't pick up on all the stuff that Google does about me. For instance, I can't seem to find my linkedin page through DuckDuckGo at all. Still, honestly, I think it seems pretty decent for a search engine. Not better than Google, but certainly useful. Edit2: DuckDuckGo actually has some cool features that Google does not. Search "password generator" on DDG and it actually generates a password for you above the search results. Search "hackage reactive-banana" and it gives you a summary of the Haskell package above the search results.

simonsarris 14y ago
The author touted DuckDuckGo returning different results as an advantage, so I've been looking for differences between DuckDuckGo and Google, not similarities, and semantic data pulled is the easiest way to show that Google results are more informative faster. After all, if we ignore all the sugar from Google results, and they merely return the same top result, why then would I use DuckDuckGo? I've been fooling with it for 15 minutes now. Are there any good examples of DuckDuckGo results being more relevant than Google results?
- Draco6slayer 14y ago
  Well, if they're totally equal, sans sugar, then the obvious reason to choose DuckDuckGo is for privacy's sake. No sense sending personal information to Google when DuckDuckGo will do it for free.
- nilkn 14y ago
  That's a fair point, and I agree with you that it doesn't really seem to give significantly different results from Google, but regardless of what the author of the post said, I think the main intended selling point of DuckDuckGo is that it doesn't track user information at all. It's not an advertising company, and Google is.
- metastrategy 14y ago
  DuckDuckGo makes a decent point on a page of theirs[1]. Maybe, what you're missing is conformation bias in your results. I honestly don't know, and assumed a hell of a lot. >After all, if we ignore all the sugar from Google results, and they merely return the same top result, why then would I use DuckDuckGo? The question becomes, why wouldn't you? Personally, Google has screwed me over in the past & if I can get the same top 15 from DuckDuckGo & not worry about the data mining drill down on me, I'll take my search elsewhere. [1]http://dontbubble.us/ http://dontbubble.us/
JoshTriplett 14y ago
> What I would miss from Google, though, is stuff like "5 feet to meters." Google does the calculation. DuckDuckGo, like a pure search engine, just gives me a link which will do the calculation. For that search, DuckDuckGo shows an inline calculation: "Conversion result: 1.524 meters". It also includes a link to Wolfram Alpha, but it shows the result inline.
- nilkn 14y ago
  Yeah, I'm not sure how I missed that. I guess I looked right over it. I amended my post.
Cushman 14y ago
> The only difference that I can tell is that Google puts some of the standings in a table on the search results page, which doesn't seem like a huge deal to me. It depends what you mean by a huge deal, I guess. Going from information on the next page to information on this page is a big difference; it's one less click, which is 100% less clicks. And it's not just the click, the page has to load, then you have to find the information you want, if it even exists. You could wind up talking fifteen, twenty seconds to do what Google has done instantly. Fifteen seconds isn't a lot, but multiplied by every search you do in your life it starts to add up. Multiplied across the Internet, you start talking about whole lifetimes being wasted-- and multiplying miniscule efficiencies into lifetimes is Google's bread and butter. > It sounds like you're judging a search engine based solely on the information it takes out of links and puts in its own format on the results page, not by the links it provides. While I agree that bells and whistles like extracting certain results into a table on the results page are cool, that hardly seems to me like the ultimate test of a search engine. I'd quibble with this too. It seems to me that extracting the semantic content you're looking for directly is the ultimate destination of search engines. Certainly it is a much more difficult problem than text search. Google isn't that far down that road yet, but they're further along than anyone else.
- nilkn 14y ago
  > It depends what you mean by a huge deal, I guess. Going from information on the next page to information on this page is a big difference; it's one less click, which is 100% less clicks. And it's not just the click, the page has to load, then you have to find the information you want, if it even exists. You could wind up talking fifteen, twenty seconds to do what Google has done instantly. That's a fair point, but truth be told I rarely find myself completely satisfied with Google's extracted results anyway. When I look up movies, I almost always end up going to another page in the end anyway for more information. For instance, if I google "movies near me," it only gives me a list of movies with their running times. It actually doesn't give me any showtimes at all. So I definitely cannot make any decisions based on that list alone. > I'd quibble with this too. It seems to me that extracting the semantic content you're looking for directly is the ultimate destination of search engines. Certainly it is a much more difficult problem than text search. Google isn't that far down that road yet, but they're further along than anyone else. I do ultimately agree with you; my main point, though, was that the guy I replied to said DuckDuckGo gave nothing useful, which really doesn't seem to be true at all as far as I can tell. That said, I just found this: http://duckduckhack.com http://duckduckhack.com It looks like they're trying to let developers add in their own plugins to the search engine for instant answers, which is a pretty sweet idea IMHO.

by nilkn 14y ago

simonsarris 14y ago

The author touted DuckDuckGo returning different results as an advantage, so I've been looking for differences between DuckDuckGo and Google, not similarities, and semantic data pulled is the easiest way to show that Google results are more informative faster. After all, if we ignore all the sugar from Google results, and they merely return the same top result, why then would I use DuckDuckGo? I've been fooling with it for 15 minutes now. Are there any good examples of DuckDuckGo results being more relevant than Google results?

Draco6slayer 14y ago
Well, if they're totally equal, sans sugar, then the obvious reason to choose DuckDuckGo is for privacy's sake. No sense sending personal information to Google when DuckDuckGo will do it for free.
nilkn 14y ago
That's a fair point, and I agree with you that it doesn't really seem to give significantly different results from Google, but regardless of what the author of the post said, I think the main intended selling point of DuckDuckGo is that it doesn't track user information at all. It's not an advertising company, and Google is.
metastrategy 14y ago
DuckDuckGo makes a decent point on a page of theirs[1]. Maybe, what you're missing is conformation bias in your results. I honestly don't know, and assumed a hell of a lot. >After all, if we ignore all the sugar from Google results, and they merely return the same top result, why then would I use DuckDuckGo? The question becomes, why wouldn't you? Personally, Google has screwed me over in the past & if I can get the same top 15 from DuckDuckGo & not worry about the data mining drill down on me, I'll take my search elsewhere. [1]http://dontbubble.us/ http://dontbubble.us/

JoshTriplett 14y ago

> What I would miss from Google, though, is stuff like "5 feet to meters." Google does the calculation. DuckDuckGo, like a pure search engine, just gives me a link which will do the calculation. For that search, DuckDuckGo shows an inline calculation: "Conversion result: 1.524 meters". It also includes a link to Wolfram Alpha, but it shows the result inline.

nilkn 14y ago
Yeah, I'm not sure how I missed that. I guess I looked right over it. I amended my post.

Cushman 14y ago

> The only difference that I can tell is that Google puts some of the standings in a table on the search results page, which doesn't seem like a huge deal to me. It depends what you mean by a huge deal, I guess. Going from information on the next page to information on this page is a big difference; it's one less click, which is 100% less clicks. And it's not just the click, the page has to load, then you have to find the information you want, if it even exists. You could wind up talking fifteen, twenty seconds to do what Google has done instantly. Fifteen seconds isn't a lot, but multiplied by every search you do in your life it starts to add up. Multiplied across the Internet, you start talking about whole lifetimes being wasted-- and multiplying miniscule efficiencies into lifetimes is Google's bread and butter. > It sounds like you're judging a search engine based solely on the information it takes out of links and puts in its own format on the results page, not by the links it provides. While I agree that bells and whistles like extracting certain results into a table on the results page are cool, that hardly seems to me like the ultimate test of a search engine. I'd quibble with this too. It seems to me that extracting the semantic content you're looking for directly is the ultimate destination of search engines. Certainly it is a much more difficult problem than text search. Google isn't that far down that road yet, but they're further along than anyone else.

nilkn 14y ago
> It depends what you mean by a huge deal, I guess. Going from information on the next page to information on this page is a big difference; it's one less click, which is 100% less clicks. And it's not just the click, the page has to load, then you have to find the information you want, if it even exists. You could wind up talking fifteen, twenty seconds to do what Google has done instantly. That's a fair point, but truth be told I rarely find myself completely satisfied with Google's extracted results anyway. When I look up movies, I almost always end up going to another page in the end anyway for more information. For instance, if I google "movies near me," it only gives me a list of movies with their running times. It actually doesn't give me any showtimes at all. So I definitely cannot make any decisions based on that list alone. > I'd quibble with this too. It seems to me that extracting the semantic content you're looking for directly is the ultimate destination of search engines. Certainly it is a much more difficult problem than text search. Google isn't that far down that road yet, but they're further along than anyone else. I do ultimately agree with you; my main point, though, was that the guy I replied to said DuckDuckGo gave nothing useful, which really doesn't seem to be true at all as far as I can tell. That said, I just found this: http://duckduckhack.com http://duckduckhack.com It looks like they're trying to let developers add in their own plugins to the search engine for instant answers, which is a pretty sweet idea IMHO.