4 ms·
I try to switch to ddg roughly every 6 months. I usually switch back within the hour. One example I can remember: I was working on some linux V4L2 code and wa
by simias 13y ago
I try to switch to ddg roughly every 6 months. I usually switch back within the hour.
One example I can remember:
I was working on some linux V4L2 code and wanted to get more informations on the "buf_queue". By mistake I searched for "vbuf_queue". Google's results:
https://encrypted.google.com/search?q=vbuf_queue https://encrypted.google.com/search?q=vbuf_queue
It only shows 3 results where I am (and 0 a few months ago when the problem occured) which makes it pretty obvious I'm not searching for the right thing.
As for DDG:
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=vbuf_queue https://duckduckgo.com/?q=vbuf_queue
It displays a pageful of garbage that I will parse for a while until it occurs to me I made a typo.
And it does it for pretty much any bogus query as well, compare:
https://encrypted.google.com/search?q=aoeulcrnh34ui345u34iyi3euieuiaeouaeou34i4y https://encrypted.google.com/search?q=aoeulcrnh34ui345u34iyi...
with:
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=aoeulcrnh34ui345u34iyi3euieuiaeouaeou34i4y https://duckduckgo.com/?q=aoeulcrnh34ui345u34iyi3euieuiaeoua...
In this case ddg happily outputs what appears to be misinterpreted binary files.
Maybe DDG works well for non-technical contents but 90% of my queries at work are obscure programming/electronics stuff, component datasheets and the like. For that ddg is simply not usable by my standards.
- howeyc 13y ago"Mr. Babage if I were to feed wrong inputs to that calculation machine will it still produce correct outputs?"
- streetnigga 13y ago"Look at this! If I mash gibberish into a search engine it returns the same."
- untog 13y ago...but Google does do that.
- KiwiCoder 13y agoThe better part of this quote is the sentiment that follows; I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.
- vacri 13y agoAnd yet the commentor is claiming that the other tool is able to produce useful output from those inputs.
- comex 13y agoThat would be more analogous to Google correcting input for perceived spelling errors. Putting in garbage as a query isn't wrong, it has a well-defined answer for the vast majority of garbage.
- enneff 13y ago"correct" is not equivalent to "helpful"
- jck 13y agoI see only one result on DDG for vbuf_queue. Maybe they changed it in the last 4 hours?