So for those of you who find DDG's generically mediocre retrievals sufficient, I am interested to know what you use for my other cases. When you want to eat Chinese food, do you always use Yelp? What do you use for recent event news?
So for those of you who find DDG's generically mediocre retrievals sufficient, I am interested to know what you use for my other cases. When you want to eat Chinese food, do you always use Yelp? What do you use for recent event news?
You search DDG differently than you search Google. And let's face it, you're already well trained in searching Google, even though you don't really think much about it. If you doubt me, ask someone new to the web try to use Google. The way they search will make your eyes roll. Because you know better how to use it.
Same with DDG. You're just not there yet. Besides Google has a more opinionated search, so it will more aggressively attempt to exclude parts of your search query and infer other possible meanings from the words left. And then it will search on what it assumes you meant, no matter if it is right or wrong.
DDG will search for what I ask it to search for. As a technical user and pedant, that suits me better.
I also have to say that your queries sounds very unnatural to me. They go along as if they were almost English. With DDG I just search for the basic keywords. If I know I need/want domain-specific limitations, I can apply bang-operators for that !so to get stack overflow, !w for wikipedia, etc.
In complex matters like these, there's obviously room for taste and opinions. But with that said, I'm getting fed up with the meme that DDG is inferior to Google. For my needs, I consider Google search the inferior product by now.
Maybe switching back to Google would be the easiest step. But there is more involved in this decision than comfort. It is futile to rely on one service. The customer never benefits in a monopoly or oligopoly scheme. Google is the enemy of anonymity on the web and collects quite a lot of data from anybody. Google is doing a lot of evil these days, such as pushing DRM into HTML5.
So yeah I often go back to Google Search. But I hope this will decrease over time. Meanwhile I help and support one of the few serious contenders to Google.
And it's not that Google Search is perfect. It constantly tries to second guess you and nowadays I end up constantly adding more and more quotes to my search terms to somehow prevent that.
DDG is for definitions, wiki lookups, unit conversions, some random stuff, and SP is for the specific searches, like for programming help.
If I search for "Chinese", I explicitly don't want restaurant results (I would have specified that).
If I search for "earthquake", I explicitly don't want news results (I would have specified that).
The fact that Google makes assumptions about what I want rarely benefits me.
Maybe it's because I grew up with web search as just that -- a way of finding websites. I don't search for information; I search for websites which provide me the information I need. I can see how Google's algorithms work for some people, but for me, DDG is exactly what I want. If I typed everything I ever wanted to know directly into Google, then I'm getting the information Google wants me to see, including if someone pays for the placement. I don't like that kind of control, and I don't like the idea of a single entity controlling the flow of knowledge over the internet. So I don't use Google.
I don't want "personalized" search results. I don't want Google's algorithms second-guessing what I searched for. If I want current news, I'll read the BBC. If I want a stack overflow result, I'll do a search on SO.
So "pull" is more favored than "push". See the book:
"Pull - The Power of the Semantic Web to Transform Your Business" by David Siegel.
But I do like personalized information storage. Maybe you want to reference to the blog post:
Why do we need the Private Web? http://bit.ly/1c2DzN6
this is very true. You have just listed a billion dollar idea. If I search for an adidas shoe or just go to a company website then I start seeing ads related to those just visited sites - how boring. Retargeting just seems to be plain stupid instead consumer should be showed more variety
But from an idea to a popular web application has long way to go. We just kicked off our first Kickstarter project to spread the message out here: http://kck.st/JNqv8z
Some people gave me negative points, maybe they don't like the BingoBo.com website because it does not provide enough data. Please read today's update here: http://kck.st/1exzNy6
Enjoy!
McDonald's is the only "restaurant" in town that's open today.
My four-year-old is "helping" me build a table.
Please escort this "gentleman" to the exit door.
For example:
I don't want the kinds of results Google calls "personalized".
Using the quotes elsewhere alludes to that same sort of sentiment – referring to something that others do literally call "personalized" – but in not so many words.
There may also be a slight implication of a "scare" second-level of meaning – maybe when Google claims the results are "personalized", that's really just cover for "revenue-optimized despite what's best for me". But that sinister reading isn't required by the quotes, just vaguely hinted.
There is a specific syntax for news (sort:date, IIRC) albeit it has a smaller index.
I don't have the numbers, but I believe DDG indexes a sufficient portion of the internet to answer satisfactorily a great portion of my queries. Sites like StackOverflow must be as indexed as Google at about 100%. The differential must be on sites with a very low pagerank which are quite irrelevant for the great majority of queries. If your query returns more than half a dozen pages on google it's probable DDG would also yield usable results.
>>>EDIT: region:cn returns results from Chinese sites I prefer this to the alternative of the search engine guessing if I want information about Chinese people and culture, Chinese restaurants, or from China, but I guess Google adds value after you train it a bit and learns what do you usually mean in your queries, while on the other hand DDG requires that you learn how to use it effectively. This value added from Google comes at the price of privacy which is much more valuable for me.
2) DDG doesn't have recent news Don't you love it when searching google with keywords vital to your business' placement in the results, a few News headlines show up, pushing you from 4 down to 8 or 9?
Me neither, if I want news, I'll go to the BBC, NY Times, etc.
3) DDG does not have the coverage to answer a narrow technical question valid use case, yes
4) What DDG does have is plain old search results Yes! Remember in the early days when Google was just that? I do. Google has become something else in the meantime, and organic search results are not at the top of their priority list (read: advertising is, they spam my gmail account pretty much daily with advice on how I can reactivate the adwords campaigns that I suspended, how, if I call now, a Google rep. will advise me [try to upsell me in everyway possible] on how to get the most out of my campaigns, and so on).
Google rules the search engine landscape (basically a monopoly); that's not a great situation as we (site owners, admins, etc.) are all completely beholden to a single corporation and are forced to play by their rules whether we agree with them or not.
2) I don't go to a search-engine for news. There are better tools and sites for that.
3) Excuse me. I just suffered a parsing error.
4) And this is why I use it. Google search has become a bloated UX disaster and Google is a creepy company. Just plain search sounds great!
⚫ Stick with it. DDG's improved hugely in the past 12-18 months.
⚫ Report your problems to DDG. I've done this in a few cases, and have been stunned to get personal replies in a couple of days. Try getting that from Google (without landing three stories on the top of HN for a day or three).
Hitting Google is a "!g" away -- just prepend / postpend that to your search and hit enter, you'll get Google's results (as I've noted elsewhere here: I usually try "!sp" first, as it's close to, but not quite, Google. What I noticed in my first weeks was that usually the initial results were actually very, very similar, if not identical. Since DDG has the same search syntax ("site:example.com" restricts to a domain or host, "quoted words" are searched together, (either|or) will do booleans), if you're a Google search power user, it's all familiar territory.
DDG's information and support pages tell you a lot, and the !bang search syntax is very much worth knowing about. If you want to search !so (stack overflow), the bang syntax is great: https://duckduckgo.com/bang.html
There are things DDG doesn't do, which I've also noted. Date-restricted searches and localization are two of the big ones. I don't avoid Google entirely, but it's way down my list.
I did enter into this with the mindset of intentionally taking a choice that's not Google, and that I'd have to make some compromises, but that I'd get better privacy as a result. The compromises really have been few, and I'm saying that as a long, long term Google user (since 1998) whose been increasingly disturbed by the company's direction.
In the end it's definitely a huge adjustment.
Also, I just found a ton of other cool features: https://duckduckgo.com/goodies#Programming
such as qrcodes and regular expressions.
Also, it will give news stories if you put "news" in your search query.
That, and the convenient info boxes for most sites (it even supports arch packages and bulbapedia articles) solve 90% of my queries.
Incognito mode or a different browser brings Google back to sub-second speeds, but it's frustrating enough that I set DDG as my default so that straightforward searches resolve quickly. I switch over with !g whenever I need better search results, news, etc.
So how did people manage then? If they did it then, they can do it now, too, if there are other factors that are of higher priority to them, such as privacy. This feels like the "but Intel will always be more powerful than ARM" kind of argument (which hopefully, many have learned by now that it was a pointless and irrelevant argument when it came to the success of ARM).
That is completely on purpose.
When I search for a word I'd like the euro language translation of that word to also be searched, and returns returned.
Yes, i know that I'm going to get a bunch of lousy results. But I'm also going to widen my web horizons and see more of the Internet.
One of the things that I find frustrating with DDG is the UScentric results.
(1) Many people don't search local often.
(2) People can type their location in the search engine for local results.
(3) There are alternatives like Yelp as you mention.
"DDG doesn't have recent news"
(4) !gn
(5) DDG doesn't give me news links when I'm not looking for them.
"DDG does not have the coverage to answer a narrow technical question"
(6) Google wins on your example but the answer for your example can most certainly be found in one of the top links on DDG.
(7) !so > site:stackoverflow.com
...
(8) "Duck Duck Go is a good search engine" is not incompatible with "Google has better search results than DDG" or "Google has faster search results than DDG".
Sorry too much facepalm here.
I's just that you've become accustomed to the way Google works, not vice versa.
It's important, because if you live in random country, you don't especially want to get news from what-the-search-engine-believe-that-people-want-to-read-in-random-country. In other words, tell people what they should read or not using computation and / or economic, politic rules.
When I live in random country, I'm often interested to know what newspapers from another random country can tell about random country. It makes me feel safer when obtaining the same result than you do.
Edit : more => DDG do have a region parameter, see https://duckduckgo.com/settings
For local searches, I use my GPS. Google often errors by 100 kilometers when trying to localise me, so local search is a pity. Otherwise, I use pagesjaunes.fr which does not work in your country.
I don't search recent news! I read news on some newspapers websites. Whenever I want to search for news, it is for old articles I remember having read but cannot find anymore. ddg is good enough for that.
I discovered stackoverflow through ddg, so when searching for answers to technical questions, ddg is also good enough for me. For your question, I believe that clicking "more from stackoverflow" gives an answer in the first five results.
The case where I used to bitch about ddg's search results was when pasting error messages, but either ddg improved, or google degraded as recently, whenever ddg did not answer satisfactorily to such requests, google did not either...
Do you assume that Google is the way a search engine should work and all other search engines should follow that? That is, should all search engines produce the same output given the same input?
I get a bunch of stuff about restaurants in small-town Missouri, which is somewhat reassuring, since I live nowhere near there, then actual information about the Chinese language. Awful.