For a couple of month I have set duckduckgo as my standard search engine, but I often do not get satisfactory results. Is this because I am used to the Google results or does duckduckgo indeed not prioritize in a good way?
A bunch of results (20%? 30%?) are not very good, and it's not an exception. Also I know it's suppose to come down the line, but not having a filter for results of the past year is a PITA.
In my case though, Google is not very good either, I remember getting very random results (mostly focused on popular or local trends, when I'm looking for something specific) about half of the time.
In fine, I see DDG as an alternative giving access to both Google and DDG. Switching to DDG when Google was bad was not simple, the reverse is (just add a !)
I'm sitting here feeling confused because there is no detectable difference between DDG and Google for me. Search patterns must be very particular to the person and obviously I'm not searching for the right stuff :P.
What I have been doing successfully for three-ish years now is to use DDG as my default, which handles about 50% of my searches, while the other 50% are !bangs to sites I know I want to end up on.
A lot of the time that allows me to circumvent Google for a few extra searches, and sometimes it's just !g to show Google results, mostly when it's searches I want localized, or the topic is just too specific. For the latter I am trying to use !s more often.
Much like knowing what terms to look up, knowing when DDG results are good enough and when to use !g, !s or when to jump straight to the website you want to go to, is something that gets easier and starts to feel natural eventually.
I'm not 100% de-google-fied, but I'm 95% there in regards to searches, with none of the discomforts people keep bringing up.
The majority of NSFW results in DDG comes from karmadecay.com, it’s a reverse image search engine.
Google doesn’t like that domain, you won’t get images from there even if you’ll search for the domain name. Google will only show result from that domain if you limit search to that domain with “site:karmadecay.com”
Have no idea why Google’s doing that. Could be google breaking antitrust laws (they have a reverse image search as well), or could be purely technical reasons.
Personally, I prefer DDG’s approach. If you’re using DDG in work environment and don’t want NSFW result, just set the safe search preference. Google appears to censor the results even if you explicitly asked not to.
It's duplicate content. That's punished in the SERPs.
Normally, the domain is very strong keyword. Search for “facebook” and the first image will be from facebook.com, search for “duckduckgo” and you’ll see a screenshot image hosted on duckduckgo.com on the 7-th place (not the first I expected but still high enough).
I’m not sure how your duplicate content remark explains this behavior. karmadecay has original logo image, why it’s not found?
> Google will only show result from that domain if you limit search to that domain with “site:karmadecay.com”
The question is, why doesn’t normal image search show that site ever, despite tons of content?
I know technical reasons are still possible, but so is google breaking laws, they have quite a history of unlawful behavior and have paid billions in fines for that.
My mistake.
>I know technical reasons are still possible...
It could be as simple as a penalty for breaking one of their webmaster guidelines.
Agree. Could also be for not having a mobile-friendly version, or for not using AMP.
Still, even if google does nothing illegal here and acts in good faith, do you think it’s OK to de-prioritize relevant search results based on these technicalities?
As a consumer, when I search stuff in a desktop browser, I don’t give a damn about mobile versions nor webmaster guidelines. I want search results relevant to my search query. Arbitrary limitations imposed on web masters by search engine decrease quality of results.
I do. That's actually the job of a search engine. If it wasn't choosing ranking factors, then it would just be a directory search.
Search engines are far more useful and relevant because they give more context to their results.
>when I search stuff in a desktop browser, I don’t give a damn about mobile versions
Desktop SERPs are actually different than mobile SERPs. They're crawled and indexed independently. A bad mobile site won't affect desktop results.
Haven’t yet noticed an improvement, but I haven’t been saving the queries I’ve sent to double check those.
DDG doesnt always have the right answer on the first page. But it may be on the second. Or the third. It's worth checking them at least. Realizing this made my DDG experience better.
Not saying it’s effective with the containers you’re using though.
Regional/targeted/personalized results often add noise.
I appreciate that this is what google needs in order to monetize on ads. And that real verbatim searches are likely more resource hungry.
I just wish there was an option to pay some form premium subscription service where I can have really in depth verbatim search without being treated as 'suspicious' activity by the engine.
For most of my searches, debugging a few specific strings, I really just need grep. It’s too much for one person to crawl the web. But a good distributed network could.
There is a tradeoff for any given user between getting the most popular results and what could be the most 'accurate' result. I find myself using several search engines depending on what I want (apart from Google/DDG, you always have the option to go directly to amazon or StackOverflow for instance), and am pretty happy about it.
But saying Google is good at search is a bit like praising Wallmart for being good at retail. Sure, they are to some extent, but there are clear tradeoffs we need to be aware of.
It probably was, it proxied google when I first used it, then at some point about 8 years ago or so it switched to bing and for a while I switched over to ixquick, but switched back to ddg and just got used to it proxying bing when ixquick dumbed their page down to match startpage.
I'm using Firefox Containers, I hop on to Google Search with a temporary extension
I switched to duckduckgo about a year ago and never even looked back. The results are perfectly fine and I am pretty satisfied with them. What do you feel is not comparable? One thing I noticed, which is great, that duckduckgo does not filter/censor your search results (except pictures).
edit: The only "bad" thing about it is its name. typing duckduckgo.com into the url bar when I am on some other computer takes kinda long, but I am okay with that
Or you could use yelp for all of it. I just typed "lunch" in and it gave me a list of reasonable placrs nearby, meanwhile Google maps listed every restaurant around me, including places not open for lunch.
Tapping a restaurant on yelp gives me the reviews and there an option in the app to get directions. I'm on Android so I can't check, but from when I used iOS I remember yelp defaults to apple maps for directions.
Seems like a good alternative to me.
There's a viable alternative for every service Google offers. Fuck Google.