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And this is why I've grown to love DDG. My last "wow" moment was when I needed an ascii table two days ago. Searched for it and bam! it's right here in the fron

by Spittie 13y ago

And this is why I've grown to love DDG. My last "wow" moment was when I needed an ascii table two days ago. Searched for it and bam! it's right here in the front page. To anyone skeptic about DuckDuckGo: I've been there. But I've decided to give it a week worth of a try some time ago (Google is just a !g away, anyway), and it's been my default search engine for months now. You might want to give it a try as well. Maybe you'll get hooked on the !bang syntax, maybe you'll get hooked to the 0-click information box, or maybe you'll just switch back to Google. Some queries aren't always on par yet with Google, but I feel that it's getting here. It's mostly lacking on queries about specific errors, and local stuff. For everything else, I feel that I barely switch to Google anymore. And, as a bonus, DDG works perfectly with Firefox Mobile. Google instead has some problems (probably caused by some webkit-specific code).

prattmic 13y ago
With regards to the ASCII table: `man ascii` I searched for it for ages before realizing that it has been right there at my fingertips for ages.
- Erwin 13y ago
  Also useful: "man iso-8859-1" (aka latin-1, the most common Western charset if not using UTF-8). For the Windows version, you'll have to visit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows-1252 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows-1252 -- non-UTF encoded files are more likely to be that instead of latin-1 (fortunately either is just a s.decode('cp1252') away from Unicode in e.g. Python) There's a surprising amount of data files still being moved around in either of those. If your shell is in UTF-8 mode, you'll learn to recognize either encoding (a single funny character) or the UTF-1252 "encoding" (2 or more chars, where Ã is often one) where both utf-8 and cp-1252 were used.
chrismorgan 13y ago
I also use DuckDuckGo for most searches, not because of the privacy aspect in the slightest, but because it produces more immediately useful results in most cases. The bangs are great for saving time. I even requested and after a while got given !ngram :-) As you say, Google is just a !g away, and I do find myself still occasionally using that, but most of the time, DuckDuckGo's own search engine matches my requirements better.
- Spittie 13y ago
  Yes, this is exactly why I started using it. The privacy aspect is only a nice bonus.
Brakenshire 13y ago
The nice thing about DDG is it is built around competition, because of its emphasis on redirection. In theory, DDG can become the hub around which we access a whole variety of niche search engines, each time choosing which one is best suited to the task at hand. I think that encourages a fundamentally healthy ecosystem. It would be even better if they could play up that element a bit more, if they could make the different search options in a particular area more discoverable. You want a better way to search for search engines.
- sebcat 13y ago
  Ah, like the good old days. There was a metasearch engine that was fairly popular in pre-Google times. Can't remember the name of it though.
  - bigiain 13y ago
    There was probably more than one, but http://www.dogpile.com/ http://www.dogpile.com/ was the one I remember (which I'm quite surprised to see still exists/works).
  - andyjohnson0 13y ago
    Metacrawler? If so, its still there: http://www.metacrawler.com/ http://www.metacrawler.com/
  - showerst 13y ago
    There were many as the commenters have said, but I always like hotbot.com
logn 13y ago
> Some queries aren't always on par yet with Google I don't think google search is that great anymore. It's way too fuzzy of a match. If you're trying to remember an actor's name or find some reference with a vague query, it works ok. But google takes way too many liberties with search results and is super focused on showing maps, reviews, and youtube videos, and then results to alternate searches. Bing and DDG are better IMHO.
- DanBC 13y ago
  Google is useful to more people, which means it's less useful to people who are happy with things like the O Reilly Google Hacks. There's some switch somewhere to force it into "Literal" or "verbatim" mode. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3239452 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3239452 http://insidesearch.blogspot.co.uk/2011/11/search-using-your-terms-verbatim.html http://insidesearch.blogspot.co.uk/2011/11/search-using-your... (These are the posts that give me the '1 in 600 searches used the + operator correctly' factoid.) I think my current problems with Google are 1) Lack of predictability. I have no idea what terms might be substituted, or what they'll get subbed for. I don't know what terms get stemmed or not. 2) Recentism. Google is great at finding things from this year. Finding stuff from before 2000 is harder, and before 1990 is really tricky. (I don't have any examples! Normally I keep them.)[1] 3) Desire to return many hits. I'm happy if I enter a search term and don't get many hits. I'd rather have a few hits, rather than many hits that are less relevant. I'd rather have a few really bad hits, and thus know that I need to tweak my search terms, than get many sort of okay hits. But for most people Google is great. Having said that, I switched to mostly DDG and I really like it, except I'd like to be able to force a more English (and not US) result cloud; and I'd like to be able to enter a term, have it translated into other languages, and search for those. This would be a way to break out of the English speaking bubble. [1] I find it weirdly hard to find minor news events from before 2000, even though they're online and covered by newspapers, even if I use Google's time limit settings. I'll start to keep these difficult searches.
  - logn 13y ago
    > I find it weirdly hard to find minor news events from before 2000, even though they're online and covered by newspapers, even if I use Google's time limit settings. I'll start to keep these difficult searches. Might be because the pages are updated after the publication date. I don't know that google is able to find that type of structured info in each news page. Actually a specialized search engine which is focused on date functionality would be invaluable. Maybe someone like archive.org would tackle that. It would be great to search even pre-WWW results, such as historical archives or radio transcripts.
joelrunyon 13y ago
> Some queries aren't always on par yet with Google I think a lot of queries aren't on par with google. I'm bullish on DDG but it's got a long way to go if they want to deal with the spam issue that plagues tons & tons of queries.
michaelmior 13y ago
I tried DDG for a week, but I found it much slower than Google which is what ultimately led me to switch back.
- 1_player 13y ago
  Try turning off the "Redirect" option in the "Privacy" settings tab. When it's on, clicking on a result will send you to a DDG interstitial page which hides your search query, and I found it to be slow at times (~1 second).
  - michaelmior 13y ago
    The slowness was in returning the results, not visiting them.
conroy 13y ago
Story time: Three years ago, DDG had an image-only ASCII table which meant you couldn't copy any of the values. I emailed Gabriel with a link to a pure HTML version that I had compiled[0], and within a few days, he had added to the site. Glad to hear you like the table, and a huge thanks to Gabriel for being so awesome. [0]: https://github.com/kyleconroy/ascii-table https://github.com/kyleconroy/ascii-table
- adsche 13y ago
  The selectable table is great. But confusingly, ddg still shows asciitable.com as 'source' and a "more from asciitable.com" link below it. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=ascii+table https://duckduckgo.com/?q=ascii+table
someperson 13y ago
This blew my mind: https://www.google.com.au/search?q=avail+etymology&client=ubuntu&channel=cs&oq=avail+etymology&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8 https://www.google.com.au/search?q=avail+etymology&client=ub...
- junto 13y ago
  That really is very cool. As an English speaker living in Germany this is really quite useful: https://www.google.com.au/search?q=avail+etymology#q=etymology+haven https://www.google.com.au/search?q=avail+etymology#q=etymolo...
weavie 13y ago
I was really impressed with it just this morning. I've recently moved to Emacs and just couldn't work out how to create a new file. Everything just said it should be C-x f. But this just didn't work. Get into work today where my default search engine in DDG. Thought I'd just have another search, type in "emacs create new file" and there right away in the quick info box is : Try: C-x C-f C-f It should kick you out of ido mode into "normal" find file mode Ah ha.. There's my answer. I have Ido mode enabled. A similar search in google has a general (and useless) How to use emacs page as it's first link. The actual answer was a stack overflow question that came up second which I'd just missed before..

by Spittie 13y ago

prattmic 13y ago

With regards to the ASCII table: `man ascii` I searched for it for ages before realizing that it has been right there at my fingertips for ages.

Erwin 13y ago
Also useful: "man iso-8859-1" (aka latin-1, the most common Western charset if not using UTF-8). For the Windows version, you'll have to visit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows-1252 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows-1252 -- non-UTF encoded files are more likely to be that instead of latin-1 (fortunately either is just a s.decode('cp1252') away from Unicode in e.g. Python) There's a surprising amount of data files still being moved around in either of those. If your shell is in UTF-8 mode, you'll learn to recognize either encoding (a single funny character) or the UTF-1252 "encoding" (2 or more chars, where Ã is often one) where both utf-8 and cp-1252 were used.

chrismorgan 13y ago

I also use DuckDuckGo for most searches, not because of the privacy aspect in the slightest, but because it produces more immediately useful results in most cases. The bangs are great for saving time. I even requested and after a while got given !ngram :-) As you say, Google is just a !g away, and I do find myself still occasionally using that, but most of the time, DuckDuckGo's own search engine matches my requirements better.

Spittie 13y ago
Yes, this is exactly why I started using it. The privacy aspect is only a nice bonus.

Brakenshire 13y ago

The nice thing about DDG is it is built around competition, because of its emphasis on redirection. In theory, DDG can become the hub around which we access a whole variety of niche search engines, each time choosing which one is best suited to the task at hand. I think that encourages a fundamentally healthy ecosystem. It would be even better if they could play up that element a bit more, if they could make the different search options in a particular area more discoverable. You want a better way to search for search engines.

sebcat 13y ago
Ah, like the good old days. There was a metasearch engine that was fairly popular in pre-Google times. Can't remember the name of it though.
- bigiain 13y ago
  There was probably more than one, but http://www.dogpile.com/ http://www.dogpile.com/ was the one I remember (which I'm quite surprised to see still exists/works).
- andyjohnson0 13y ago
  Metacrawler? If so, its still there: http://www.metacrawler.com/ http://www.metacrawler.com/
- showerst 13y ago
  There were many as the commenters have said, but I always like hotbot.com

logn 13y ago

> Some queries aren't always on par yet with Google I don't think google search is that great anymore. It's way too fuzzy of a match. If you're trying to remember an actor's name or find some reference with a vague query, it works ok. But google takes way too many liberties with search results and is super focused on showing maps, reviews, and youtube videos, and then results to alternate searches. Bing and DDG are better IMHO.

DanBC 13y ago
Google is useful to more people, which means it's less useful to people who are happy with things like the O Reilly Google Hacks. There's some switch somewhere to force it into "Literal" or "verbatim" mode. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3239452 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3239452 http://insidesearch.blogspot.co.uk/2011/11/search-using-your-terms-verbatim.html http://insidesearch.blogspot.co.uk/2011/11/search-using-your... (These are the posts that give me the '1 in 600 searches used the + operator correctly' factoid.) I think my current problems with Google are 1) Lack of predictability. I have no idea what terms might be substituted, or what they'll get subbed for. I don't know what terms get stemmed or not. 2) Recentism. Google is great at finding things from this year. Finding stuff from before 2000 is harder, and before 1990 is really tricky. (I don't have any examples! Normally I keep them.)[1] 3) Desire to return many hits. I'm happy if I enter a search term and don't get many hits. I'd rather have a few hits, rather than many hits that are less relevant. I'd rather have a few really bad hits, and thus know that I need to tweak my search terms, than get many sort of okay hits. But for most people Google is great. Having said that, I switched to mostly DDG and I really like it, except I'd like to be able to force a more English (and not US) result cloud; and I'd like to be able to enter a term, have it translated into other languages, and search for those. This would be a way to break out of the English speaking bubble. [1] I find it weirdly hard to find minor news events from before 2000, even though they're online and covered by newspapers, even if I use Google's time limit settings. I'll start to keep these difficult searches.
- logn 13y ago
  > I find it weirdly hard to find minor news events from before 2000, even though they're online and covered by newspapers, even if I use Google's time limit settings. I'll start to keep these difficult searches. Might be because the pages are updated after the publication date. I don't know that google is able to find that type of structured info in each news page. Actually a specialized search engine which is focused on date functionality would be invaluable. Maybe someone like archive.org would tackle that. It would be great to search even pre-WWW results, such as historical archives or radio transcripts.

joelrunyon 13y ago

> Some queries aren't always on par yet with Google I think a lot of queries aren't on par with google. I'm bullish on DDG but it's got a long way to go if they want to deal with the spam issue that plagues tons & tons of queries.

michaelmior 13y ago

I tried DDG for a week, but I found it much slower than Google which is what ultimately led me to switch back.

1_player 13y ago
Try turning off the "Redirect" option in the "Privacy" settings tab. When it's on, clicking on a result will send you to a DDG interstitial page which hides your search query, and I found it to be slow at times (~1 second).
- michaelmior 13y ago
  The slowness was in returning the results, not visiting them.

conroy 13y ago

Story time: Three years ago, DDG had an image-only ASCII table which meant you couldn't copy any of the values. I emailed Gabriel with a link to a pure HTML version that I had compiled[0], and within a few days, he had added to the site. Glad to hear you like the table, and a huge thanks to Gabriel for being so awesome. [0]: https://github.com/kyleconroy/ascii-table https://github.com/kyleconroy/ascii-table

adsche 13y ago
The selectable table is great. But confusingly, ddg still shows asciitable.com as 'source' and a "more from asciitable.com" link below it. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=ascii+table https://duckduckgo.com/?q=ascii+table

someperson 13y ago

This blew my mind: https://www.google.com.au/search?q=avail+etymology&client=ubuntu&channel=cs&oq=avail+etymology&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8 https://www.google.com.au/search?q=avail+etymology&client=ub...

junto 13y ago
That really is very cool. As an English speaker living in Germany this is really quite useful: https://www.google.com.au/search?q=avail+etymology#q=etymology+haven https://www.google.com.au/search?q=avail+etymology#q=etymolo...

weavie 13y ago

I was really impressed with it just this morning. I've recently moved to Emacs and just couldn't work out how to create a new file. Everything just said it should be C-x f. But this just didn't work. Get into work today where my default search engine in DDG. Thought I'd just have another search, type in "emacs create new file" and there right away in the quick info box is : Try: C-x C-f C-f It should kick you out of ido mode into "normal" find file mode Ah ha.. There's my answer. I have Ido mode enabled. A similar search in google has a general (and useless) How to use emacs page as it's first link. The actual answer was a stack overflow question that came up second which I'd just missed before..