Hacker News Reader

Comment by eggie | Hacker News Reader

I actually think that the duck (ddg.gg) is better. I now find it difficult to use google, which feels clunky and capricious. I make thousands of queries a day for work, so I really can't excuse poor performance.

For a while I would switch back to google when my searches failed and I wanted to check if the duck was getting me equivalent or better answers. In the past year and a half I've completely stopped. It is simply a high-quality product that exceeds google in what it offers.

Maybe you'll respond that "it just doesn't 'feel' high quality". OK, I can't argue with that because it's your opinion... but as long as we collectively decide to believe this fantasy we will continue to be locked into the search juggernaut. You can help improve the diversity of options by using something different and get to use a better product.

The only thing that I can't do on the duck is search academic papers. Google scholar is still the best thing of its type.

View on HN

The problem is, DDG is not a search engine. It is a UI on top of other search engines.

(Yes, you may say it has DuckDuckBot, but ask around people who run websites if they've ever seen a hit from it.)

I feel like that's equivalent to saying "DDG is not bread, it's a sandwich built on top of other breads"

Maybe Google makes the best bread, but it might be true that someone might make a sandwich on inferior bread that makes for a better overall snack.

In case you don't see the problem inherent in even your analogy: If the bakery goes away, or refuses to sell further bread to the sandwich maker, the maker is fucked.

And there's less than ten bakeries world-wide.

And if the sandwich maker actually got popular enough that people would only buy from them, then the bakeries would indeed give them the finger.

It's not a search engine. But the search engines it is based on provide surprisingly good results. So, I would be careful with the statement that "other search engines are not even close to Google".

I think that's just a matter of habits. Initially, it feels a bit unusual and maybe even uncomfortable to use not the search engine you've got used to. But after some time you understand that now Google is the one that is uncomfortable for you.

Did you reply to the wrong person?

Just another data point but I use ddg exclusively because it's more flexible. Do I get the results I'm looking for? Great. Do I not? I just use to bang syntax to query somewhere else without having to change sites. It's more convenient than google for me to use, therefore better for my needs. I've been using ddg long enough now that I often refer to "searching the internet" as "ducking" rather than "googling" xD but I'm sure that's just because it makes me feel cool, rather than me naturally thinking about ddg before google, haha.

I second that! I changed a month ago, and have been pleasantly surprised with the quality of search results. It should be noted that it is possible to adjust the theme so it looks almost exactly like Google, which helped me shake that "unfamiliar" feeling when transitioning. By the way, for academic papers, Microsoft Academic Search seems promising, although it means moving from one juggernaut to another.

This is exactly my experience. As for the disadvantages of ddg, it's difficult to find some regional results from not-so-popular websites. This is not where ddg shines. Apart from that, I like ddg's results more than google's ones.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com