I Used DuckDuckGo for a Week and Had to Switch Back. Here’s why.
notes.brianmayer.com
notes.brianmayer.com
My usage split is about "best tool for the job" rather than privacy though, since I don't really mind google knowing what error messages I'm pasting from a console.
In theory that sort of thing ought to be true for search, too. For example, blekko (new UI as of 3 weeks ago) focuses on clustering results. Here's what it does for pride: https://blekko.com/#?q=pride That gives you the answer you wanted, without personalization, and gives other people the answer they wanted, too.
I add some keywords (would that I could still use + for its original purpose), but the top results continue to be filled with worthless, often spammy crap. Pages and pages of crap.
Your comment is encouragement to give DDG another go, and to take time to familiarize myself with its !
...by tracking you.
you can't win every time.
it parses google results on the server it is hosted on, and generate a page you can use without being tracked.
test it here: http://googlof.com/
To me this is still an improvement over google always directing me to a localized version of their search and forcing me to tricks to get the global google web search.
And if ddg fails short, I can bang to another search engine or use the address bar to try my search elsewhere.
Even though I do not consider google harmful or hostile, centralizing all my access to info in one search provider sounds like a bad idea.
There's also a Firefox Search Add-on [2], for those interested. I combine it with Foobar [3] for a more seamless and chrome-like interface.
[1] http://3g2upl4pq6kufc4m.onion/
[2] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/duckduckgo-to...
The title is misleading makes us think he had no other choice but to go back to google but when reading the article the reasons invoked are personal preferences preferences and comfort sprinkled with laziness.
Google feels faster by a small fraction of a second to OP, he asks to be geolocalized and profiled so he can skip a couple keywords in his query and his unreasonable expectations be met by google.
Here's an advice try searching for "pride weekend san francisco" instead of "pride" when you're looking for info about the pride weekend in san francisco. Try searching stackoverflow when you want stackoverflow results (though in my experience ddg almost always features a relevant stackoverflow result and link in ddg instant answer)
And this supposedly is worth renouncing privacy and being profiled and tracked across the internet and mined to oblivion ?
I'm not saying duckduckgo is perfect and will fulfill your every need but what telling the world youhad to switch back to google because ddg didn't fulfill personal expectation of it being google is dumb, really.
This article isn't insightful or original, only pathetic. The attitude shows you how many in the US are unwilling to make even the tiniest sacrifice to preserve a human right like not having all you information surveyed, recorded and stored for Big Brother to use against you.
Sad.
In my own experience, google is now offering poorer results to the point of being useless. I've been using it to search for error message for about 15 years now. While on the other hand duckduckgo very often nails it with a relevant stackoverflow result in instant answer.
I guess ymmv according to how much you're inside the bubble.
I'd like to see something more factual to show how much ddg sucks at fulfilling queries for info to fix error message vs unfiltered google.
In the meantime, everyone studying philosophy or psychology in the San Francisco area is probably bashing their head against the wall, because they want to find starting points about the moral implications of pride or its psychological cues.
The Google bubble is a good thing in about, what, 1% of the cases. Don't fall in love with it.
> It must be no more than 200-300 ms, but it really makes a difference.
At the risk of being impolite, this has to be the most retarded claim I have ever heard from someone who is doing programming, ever since I heard a colleague of mine revolutionizing virtual memory by thinking how the MMU could instantiate another MMU to avoid stack overflows.
You can literally compensate for the time you need to make 100 queries by getting to your office 30 seconds earlier.
If someone is mostly interested in philosophy or psychology, that, and they see articles which they are mostly interested, the fact that "Pride Weekend" might be a bit lower down in the ten natural search results doesn't mean that some abstract "alternate point of view" has been excluded from their world view.
I suspect people use the term "Google Bubble" mostly as an abstract FUD, as opposed to anything that they can definitively point to. This kind of context-aware searching is something they can "point with alarm" about, but it's actually a good thing, not a bad thing.
200-300ms is a difference that you can feel. This is not about losing that time, this is about waiting for your results a little bit longer which adds friction and annoyance. If you can't understand that then I hope you're not in charge of any user-facing interfaces. It's the reason sites use CDN's and cache pregenerated pages, it's the reason why DNS systems have edges distributed all over the world, it's the reason why Github improved reaction time from 1 sec down to 300ms in their latest update, etc...
But feeling quick to display results is worthless if you have to make 5 queries to find your results, if you actually find it, and in my experience google rarely offers what I'm looking for in the first few searches.
It was not that way until they removed some and modified others search operators from their engine.
You may not like it, but if Google is creating that bubble you can be sure that they have the numbers to prove that users generally like it this say.