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Comment by jmsduran | Hacker News Reader

I applaud what DDG is doing. I've been using it as my default search engine for roughly 2 years. Yes, there are some areas for improvement, especially when it comes to complex technical queries. But for the majority of everyday things, DDG is excellent, and returns less advertisement bloat within its results than Google/Bing.

Plus ducks are my favorite animal, so launching DDG as I begin the work day is a joy!

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I try to switch to ddg roughly every 6 months. I usually switch back within the hour.

One example I can remember:

I was working on some linux V4L2 code and wanted to get more informations on the "buf_queue". By mistake I searched for "vbuf_queue". Google's results:

https://encrypted.google.com/search?q=vbuf_queue

It only shows 3 results where I am (and 0 a few months ago when the problem occured) which makes it pretty obvious I'm not searching for the right thing.

As for DDG:

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=vbuf_queue

It displays a pageful of garbage that I will parse for a while until it occurs to me I made a typo.

And it does it for pretty much any bogus query as well, compare:

https://encrypted.google.com/search?q=aoeulcrnh34ui345u34iyi...

with:

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=aoeulcrnh34ui345u34iyi3euieuiaeoua...

In this case ddg happily outputs what appears to be misinterpreted binary files.

Maybe DDG works well for non-technical contents but 90% of my queries at work are obscure programming/electronics stuff, component datasheets and the like. For that ddg is simply not usable by my standards.

"Mr. Babage if I were to feed wrong inputs to that calculation machine will it still produce correct outputs?"

"Look at this! If I mash gibberish into a search engine it returns the same."

...but Google does do that.

The better part of this quote is the sentiment that follows;

I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.

And yet the commentor is claiming that the other tool is able to produce useful output from those inputs.

That would be more analogous to Google correcting input for perceived spelling errors. Putting in garbage as a query isn't wrong, it has a well-defined answer for the vast majority of garbage.

"correct" is not equivalent to "helpful"

I see only one result on DDG for vbuf_queue. Maybe they changed it in the last 4 hours?

>> Plus ducks are my favorite animal

The "I'm feeling ducky" feature never fails to illicit a smile from me.

elicit.

(Why correct him? Because I care.)

Oh my, that is quite a difference in meaning. Thank you!

Kinky is feathers. Illicit is using the whole duck ;-)

Why correct him?

OP's motivations might be different, but a non native english speaker might find that this kind of short, unoffensive and straight to the point corrections could be very useful indeed.

I'm a native. I like corrections. We learn best through failure. Something I would think the HN community would appreciate.

(It does, I got 23 upvotes.)

I know how it feels. I wrote an anti-abuse system that labeled stuff as elicit until a coworker came by.

> Plus ducks are my favorite animal

Good point, if anyone made a search engine run by koalas I'd have to use it no matter how bad it was

This was my experience with DDG as well. For everyday searches, it does a fine search. But it fails pretty miserably with complex technical queries which is probably 95% of what I use web search for. For that reason, after trying DDG for about a year (for the second time) I switched to startpage.com.

Thx for the info on startpage.com. Never heard of it till this thread on HN. Just made it my homepage and added it to my tool bar.

I switched to DDG a couple years ago after becoming concerned about privacy. Unfortunately, DDG has never quite cut it for me in terms of search results. I do a TON of technology related searches, particularly wrt very obscure programming related technologies, especially related to embedded target dev. DDG always comes up short, and I typically end up doing "!g" searches. So startpage.com appears to the best blend of privacy + good search results. For me anyway...

I use ixquick.com myself, which is, if I understand correctly, developed and run by the same company that runs startpage. Both are hardcore about privacy. https://ixquick.com/eng/what-makes-ixquick-special.html

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