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I've been experimenting with DuckDuckGo and I must say, I'm finding what I'm looking for pretty quickly (minus junk results) in the first few results. Their Wol

by eksith 13y ago

I've been experimenting with DuckDuckGo and I must say, I'm finding what I'm looking for pretty quickly (minus junk results) in the first few results. Their WolframAlpha results are actually pretty good too. I hope they can move into image searching that isn't dependent on Google or Bing though. I'm still curious as to what criteria they used to differentiate Yahoo traffic under "Yahoo! Sites" though. Did they also include Flickr and other acquisitions as well? (Tumblr seems to be on its own still)

nazgulnarsil 13y ago
DDGs bang notation is amazing. Now when I use other people's browsers It feels clunky.
oinksoft 13y ago
I used DDG for a while and really wanted it to work for me, but for any non-obvious search, it simply falls on its face. It's easy to take for granted how good Google is at determining equivalent keywords based on context, or at grokking context in general. I only adopted DDG over privacy concerns, and StartPage is filling this need wonderfully. Hopefully it stays up.
- eksith 13y ago
  Ah yes, if I'm searching for something non-obvious, it does get a bit tedious. It's not like Google where I still find it after the 3 or 4th page; the results just get further and further from what I expect. DDG's biggest problem so far is "grokking context" as you put it.
  - oinksoft 13y ago
    The contrast was/is starker: DDG would return pages of irrelevant crap, and Google/StartPage would have exactly what I wanted in the first 1-3 results, with usually 8 of the top ten being relevant. Google is simply leagues ahead of the competition right now in both index quality and query recognition.
    - pessimizer 13y ago
      I hear this a lot, but no one ever gives me a search example that bears it out. I !g sometimes after I'm just not seeing what I want on DDG, and as often as not, the Google results are even worse.
      - oinksoft 13y ago
        Sure. Just now, I wanted to make sure I was right about elements that fire the DOM "change" event for a guy in ##javascript by looking at Mozilla documentation. Unfortunately, I had DDG active in my search bar in Firefox. "mdn change" in DDG turns up nothing remotely useful, whereas the first result in StartPage (Google) is what I want, and the subsequent results are all of some interest. Google seems to understand the proximity of the name of a common DOM reference and the name of a DOM event (probably via some graph) and Bing/DDG is clueless.
cgman 13y ago
I tried DuckDuckGo and was instantly turned off their website due to the terrible results they display. Not to mention that site looks like it was made by a programmer, not a designer i.e. unreadable.
- eksith 13y ago
  It's a bit of an acquired taste in the UI department, but I got used to it in about a couple of days. As for results, it may be that I'm searching for common/obvious things, but most of what I'm looking for are in at least the first 1-4 result or so.
Kiro 13y ago
It's not just their image searching that is dependent on Google and Bing. The site is basically just a skin on top of Bing's index. They do have their own spider but I highly doubt you see many results crawled by it.
- eksith 13y ago
  It's a bit unfair to call it a skin on top of Bing etc... DDG isn't another HotBot. There's quite a bit more happening in the background : https://dukgo.com https://dukgo.com

by eksith 13y ago

nazgulnarsil 13y ago

DDGs bang notation is amazing. Now when I use other people's browsers It feels clunky.

oinksoft 13y ago

I used DDG for a while and really wanted it to work for me, but for any non-obvious search, it simply falls on its face. It's easy to take for granted how good Google is at determining equivalent keywords based on context, or at grokking context in general. I only adopted DDG over privacy concerns, and StartPage is filling this need wonderfully. Hopefully it stays up.

eksith 13y ago
Ah yes, if I'm searching for something non-obvious, it does get a bit tedious. It's not like Google where I still find it after the 3 or 4th page; the results just get further and further from what I expect. DDG's biggest problem so far is "grokking context" as you put it.
- oinksoft 13y ago
  The contrast was/is starker: DDG would return pages of irrelevant crap, and Google/StartPage would have exactly what I wanted in the first 1-3 results, with usually 8 of the top ten being relevant. Google is simply leagues ahead of the competition right now in both index quality and query recognition.
  - pessimizer 13y ago
    I hear this a lot, but no one ever gives me a search example that bears it out. I !g sometimes after I'm just not seeing what I want on DDG, and as often as not, the Google results are even worse.
    - oinksoft 13y ago
      Sure. Just now, I wanted to make sure I was right about elements that fire the DOM "change" event for a guy in ##javascript by looking at Mozilla documentation. Unfortunately, I had DDG active in my search bar in Firefox. "mdn change" in DDG turns up nothing remotely useful, whereas the first result in StartPage (Google) is what I want, and the subsequent results are all of some interest. Google seems to understand the proximity of the name of a common DOM reference and the name of a DOM event (probably via some graph) and Bing/DDG is clueless.

cgman 13y ago

I tried DuckDuckGo and was instantly turned off their website due to the terrible results they display. Not to mention that site looks like it was made by a programmer, not a designer i.e. unreadable.

eksith 13y ago
It's a bit of an acquired taste in the UI department, but I got used to it in about a couple of days. As for results, it may be that I'm searching for common/obvious things, but most of what I'm looking for are in at least the first 1-4 result or so.

Kiro 13y ago

It's not just their image searching that is dependent on Google and Bing. The site is basically just a skin on top of Bing's index. They do have their own spider but I highly doubt you see many results crawled by it.

eksith 13y ago
It's a bit unfair to call it a skin on top of Bing etc... DDG isn't another HotBot. There's quite a bit more happening in the background : https://dukgo.com https://dukgo.com