Why I Switched to Duck Duck Go Permanently | Hacker News Reader

Why I Switched to Duck Duck Go Permanently

bookflavor.com

101 pointsNathanKP49 comments

Just for everyone's notification Bookflavor is currently not delivering any book results. I am aware of this. Unfortunately it is because this post received considerably more attention than I originally expected and the API usage limits of 2000 requests per hour have been reached.

Edit: The service is back now. I'm working on a better caching solution to lower the number of hits on the API.

Edit #2: Okay, I have a more permanent solution. Bookflavor now serializes and caches API responses locally, then hits the cache and unserializes them if possible rather than hitting the Amazon API. Hopefully it won't exceed the limits this hour. Another advantage is that hitting the local disk cache is much faster than communicating with Amazon's servers.

Thanks for helping me load test Bookflavor everyone!

I really wish I could do this, but Duck Duck Go really just seems subpar when it comes to anything I actually still use a search engine for these days (technical searches).

A better solution for my use case is to 1) avoid search engines where possible (far easier than you might initially think) and 2) just use googlesharing with ssl to provide myself with some anonymity while using google.

That's curious because I really have been working hard to get it much better for technical searches, and I often get the opposite report (that it's better for those with integrated SO , less content farms, other zero-click & goodies). I guess it varies by specific type though. In any case, I'd really appreciate specific examples so I can improve!

I often search for Cocoa Touch and Cocoa class names to get at Apple's reference docs. XCode has them available offline, but this actually takes much longer than googling, and the doc viewer doesn't seem to support tabs.

DDG does fine for some of these (e.g. UIView), while some don't even list in the top 20-30 (e.g. UITableViewController). Google isn't 100% reliable for this either (Apple recently changed their URLs which probably cost them PageRank juice) but it's near enough. DDG is unusable for this specific pattern. I don't know if fixing it would adversely affect other searches, though.

A "!" bang syntax would be fine by me, if that helps. (that's option-shift-K on QWERTY I think)

One thing that would really help and guarantee that I use DDG over Google for this kind of search would be to keep your links to documentation pages up to date, or at least give an easy selection.

Google is really bad at this. For instance, most links to pages in the Apache docs on Google are for 1.x, which all have a big header that says "This is deprecated, use 2.x". I use 2.x so the 1.x links are annoying, and it would be difficult if Apache didn't provide a link right there.

Another example is PostgreSQL. Google has _always_ been bad at providing up-to-date links to the PgSQL manual, even now it's usually 8.0-8.2 results that come up (the current version is 9.0.x). It's annoying because Postgres doesn't have an easy jump-to-current link like Apache, so I have to go up to the address bar, delete the older version number, and replace it with my current version number or the word "current", which always points to the latest.

I know it would be hard to do this for general results, but for official documentation it shouldn't be too difficult since the URLs usually contain the version number in a reliable format.

So, if I searched for "postgresql grant", as an example, I would like recent results to come up, or at least an easy way to choose which version of the documentation to use before I clicked out. If I have to write "postgresql grant 9.0" or something similar that would be OK too. Google does poorly at this even when you specify the version number you want as just shown.

Specifically I generally search error strings, and expect to get relevant links to archived mailing lists.

Gotcha. I would love to do more with 0-click there. Does anyone know of any good/great listings or search engines for error strings?

I occasionally use http://www.errorhelp.com/ - it's a database of error messages and (hopefully) their fixes.

I switched back to Google because it performs significantly better on technical mathematics searches, which is mostly what I look for. On computer programming searches DDG and Google seem to do about equally well. On some domains I wouldn't be surprised if DDG does better.

To add on to this, every search engine is generally pretty bad at math related searches. It may be something worth looking into.

Can you give some examples as to math searches, the more the better :)

There are two major problems I've found.

1. Poor interpretation: "distribution of compact support" brings up nothing very useful in DDG -- a bunch of linkfarms, it looks like -- but in Google the third result for me is a relevant .pdf from Oregon State.

2. Users attempting to ad-hoc convert math notation into ascii: Google understands "l 2 space", but DDG thinks I mean "l2space" which is some sort of gallery in I don't know where.

It's a hard, nontrivial problem.

I think this actually homes in on one of the bigger issues with setting up a competing search engine, you have to be equal to or better than the incumbent all the time, and that is really hard.

The use of familiar everyday terms for technical mathematical objects makes this difficult ("net", "space", "compact", etc.). Since most pages are either all about math or have nothing to do with math, I wonder if there's an easy way to tag the former pages, which would then be used as an advanced filter available when searching. ("Is this a math search?")

I find that DDG is great for finding most of the programming-related stuff I'm looking for, but if I need to find more recent information, it's starting to fall behind.

For example, a recent AVG update caused widespread boot failures on 64bit versions of Windows 7. Searching "avg windows 7 crash" in DDG (and some other variations) is not returning very high-quality results at the moment; the top couple of results are from much older issues, the next one is a couple of paragraphs from some site about AVG apologizing for the trouble, and so on. Google isn't a lot better, but at least its top result is a brief article from Computer Weekly on the issue.

The advantage for using DDG for technical results comes from its !bang commands. Need python code? !python. java documentation? !jdk. ruby? !rails, !ruby, !rubydoc, !rubygems. HTML? !w3c. When you already know where you're going to go looking (as it sounds like you do from "avoid search engines") then DDG becomes the portal interface to get quick access to them out of a browser.

I have found the opposite. For technical searches DDG really works well for me. The only reason I don't use it 100% is that I find Google's autocomplete very useful (especially for none tech stuff) in that it reduces the number of searches needed to find something.

I just add !google when DDG it doesn't return what I want. thinking about it i also do !wikipedia and !java, !lisp.

!amazon is also pretty awesome.

I use it more like a command line to search specific things from my browser bar than a general search engine like google.

I can save you eighteen characters -

!google -> !g

!wikipedia -> !w

!amazon -> !a

I can save you 3 characters and a ton of bandwith, by using the address bar -

!g -> g

!w -> w

!a -> a

Could you explain a little more about how you avoid using search engines? Do you just go directly to sites that you know and trust and use their search functionality?

More or less, yes. I have bookmarks to all of my prefered news sites and blogs, use wikipedia or imdb for most of my general knowledge searching, and most of my technical questions are answered by official documentation or source diving.

Is this mostly about saving time, saving mental effort, simultaneously finding tangential content, aligning with some ideology, or something else? Actually curious.

For the most part it's just coincidence and me trying to keep myself away from a computer screen. I try to keep what I do on the internet in a narrow purposeful tract, so that I don't spend more time on the internet than I really need to. It just so happens that the things I really need the internet for rarely involve search engines.

I do use googlesharing just on principle, but that's pretty much the extent of my ideological reasoning.

Permanently - is that still a word on the Internet?

For short periods of time.

yes, for very small values of perma

As much as I love DDG, I personally find it a hard pill to swallow knowing that it's not truly an independent search engine and just an API relay of Google's stuff. I do take comfort that Google isn't getting data from 90% of my online searches, but it would be awesome to know that DDG was truly its own entity and won't be cut off for some reason in the future, like we've seen with Scroogle (which, I believe, was mostly due to API changes, not ToS violations).

My understanding is that duckduckgo uses Bing rather than google (mentioned in the comments at http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2009/03/duck-duck-go-arc...). Although that doesn't alter the validity of your concern.

My bad, then. All this time I thought Google was the back end.

No Google APIs are currently used.

Even if DuckDuckGo did get blocked eventually, it could easily switch to using a separate service. If Bing ever blocked it off, the code could be slightly altered to use Google instead.

I love DDG. I will point out one thing, though: Searching for LaTeX stuff works better in The Google atm.

For example, compare these results for something I looked into recently:

http://duckduckgo.com/?q=latex+flipbook

http://www.google.com/search?sclient=psy&hl=en&site=...

(Oh, if only I wanted fetish gear...)

I would love to make the switch as I love their philosophy and have been a follower since they started, however the results I get when I search are below par to what I receive with Google (for example). I keep trying and I will continue to keep trying.

"I prefer to uses dashes rather than %20 as it looks cleaner and is more easily understood by the non-technically versed visitor."

Isn't "+" the standard alternative, also pretty readable?

Yes, + is definitely more common. Do non-technically versed visitors know and/or care about the different parts of a URL?

If you glance up at a URL and see a bunch of %20 it's going to just look like a mess, whereas seeing a short and relevant URL makes sense.

DDG and Blekko definitely have a place besides google, bing and yahoo. One must appreciate Gabriel for his commitment to include BookFlavor. But on the other hand, I thought the article was pretty lame. Author did not give any convincing reason why he switched. Except, Gabriel was kind to him. Maybe he should investigate what DDG really has to offer and how it can maybe help him in his daily searches before committing to something as important as his daily to go knowledge resource. I use DDG and google to search for specific technical info. Google for obviously everything else. Simple as that.

Perhaps this post reveals a different point:

Treat People Well > Do No Evil

I also switched. Its cleaner, maybe quicker, and not obnoxious.

I wonder, if DuckDuckGo really hit the bigtime, could it usher in a new age of 'verbose' or 'wordy' startups/.coms?

There's only so many flickrs, twittrs, readrs, peckrs, etc. that can be registered as domain names. But a nonsense phrase of several words? Endless opportunity

I was trying to show somebody DuckDuckGo today and I could not even find it with Google as the name had escaped me. In fact, all I could think of was Go Dog Go. It has its disadvantages too.

i'm not so sure, i mean i once spent half an hour trying to find Joomla after somebody told me about it. I was searching for similar words like doopla, dupla, doopler, joomler, jumla. At least if you could remember 'DuckDuckGo' you wouldn't have any trouble spelling it. Also when I think of TV adverts, it's often the catchphrase i remember over the company/brand itself

I remember it because it is shorter than google.com.

dukgo.com

I have duck duck go integrated into my Chrome. Being able to do things like type '? md5 blabla' and have it spit out a hash has been helpful. Other things like integrated SO and Wikipedia help a lot too.

I use DDG strictly for technical searches. I've found that it makes programming much faster vs Googling.

ironically that was the reason i started using google back then.

You can do this with just about any site you want* right from the address bar of any modern browser.

* Dict.org, sadly not.

Why I don't use DuckDuckGo: it's slow as hell for me. Google has servers here in India, so its latency is less than 60ms. DuckDuckGo doesn't, so it takes well above 350ms to respond.

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