DuckDuckGo is Good Enough For Regular Use (bitlog.com) 79
Jake Voytko, who previously worked at Google, writing in a blog post: [...] Let's move away from Google's competitive advantages. How does DuckDuckGo perform for most of my search traffic? DuckDuckGo does a good job. I haven't found a reason to switch back to Google. I combed through my browser's history of DuckDuckGo searches. I compared it to my Google search history. When I fell back to Google, I often didn't find what I wanted on Google either. Most of my searches relate to my job, which means that most of my searches are technical queries. DuckDuckGo serves good results for my searches. I'll admit that I'm a paranoid searcher: I reformat error strings, remove identifiers that are unique to my code, and remove quotes before searching. I'm not sure how well DuckDuckGo would handle copy/pasted error strings with lots of quotes and unique identifiers. This means that I don't know if DuckDuckGo handles all technical searches well. But it does a good job for me.
There are many domains where Google outperforms DuckDuckGo. Product search and local search are some examples. I recently made a window plug. It was much easier to find which big-box hardware stores had the materials I need with Google. I also recently bought a pair of ANC headphones. I got much better comparison information starting at Google. Google also shines with sparse results like rare programming error messages. If you're a programmer, you know what I'm talking about: imagine a Google search page with three results. One is a page in Chinese that has the English error string, one is a forum post that gives you the first hint that you need to solve the problem, and one is the error string in the original source code in Github. DuckDuckGo often returns nothing for these kinds of searches. Even though Google is better for some specific domains, I am confident that DuckDuckGo can find what I need. When it doesn't, Google often doesn't help either.
There are many domains where Google outperforms DuckDuckGo. Product search and local search are some examples. I recently made a window plug. It was much easier to find which big-box hardware stores had the materials I need with Google. I also recently bought a pair of ANC headphones. I got much better comparison information starting at Google. Google also shines with sparse results like rare programming error messages. If you're a programmer, you know what I'm talking about: imagine a Google search page with three results. One is a page in Chinese that has the English error string, one is a forum post that gives you the first hint that you need to solve the problem, and one is the error string in the original source code in Github. DuckDuckGo often returns nothing for these kinds of searches. Even though Google is better for some specific domains, I am confident that DuckDuckGo can find what I need. When it doesn't, Google often doesn't help either.
Hardly news (Score:5, Interesting)
We've talked about DDG a lot here on Slashdot, whenever Google's latest abuse comes up. It's fine. The "bang codes" are great, especially "!wa" to use Wolfram Alpha as an online calculator from your search box, e.g., try !wa e^x + e^-x
I've been Google-free other than YouTube for years now. YouTube is the only Google property without a reasonable alternative. (Outlook.com doesn't suck, for example.)
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I have an instance of Brave that is almost entirely dedicated to youtube with shields up. When I say "almost entirely dedicated" I mean that I also use it to access a few local web-based control panels, like octopi, vmware, etc.
Been using DDG for the close to a decade now. It has been my home page for more than 7 years. Early on, I would occasionally use google if I really couldn't find something on DDG, but I literally can't remember how long it has been since I did that - for the most part, if I can't
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(i) All the ads I've seen from Brave themselves are turn off-able.
(ii) And the home page is configurable to any page you like.
You possibly should also read how Brave sends the least amount of telemetry [slashdot.org] of the browsers.
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For search I'm happy with it, but for maps... even openstreetmap is better.
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I find Bing maps vs Google maps to be a tossup. When I lived in Seattle, Bing maps was clearly better, but then it would be.
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duckduckgo is using apple maps, I think their slogan is "at least it isn't TomTom."
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Yup, but Bing maps is still a usable non-Google option.
I find that's the one place I like the tracking (Score:3)
It's kinda funny. The summary mentions "most of my searches are related to my job". That's the one place I find the tracking helpful - I can search some random term that has special meaning in the fields of security or law. Google knows I probably don't want a bunch of results for the typical meaning of the word; I'm probably thinking in the context of security.
I've noticed that when realize I entered a search term that would have totally different meaning for someone else. It's kinda spooky, yes - and h
What is the point of bang codes? (Score:3)
Firefox had keyword searches for many many years. (Edit the bookmark for a search, add "wa" to the keyword field, enter "wa 2+2" into the URL bar and press enter.)
Or does it anonymize those other searches?
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The issue is I would like my privacy but sometimes have to turn to google to get a result without wasting lo
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FOXNews is highest rated cable news
As if that means something useful.
Re:Same political filter (Score:4, Insightful)
FOXNews is highest rated cable news
As if that means something useful.
Popularity contests matter if the result agrees with your preconception.
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It does, it means that there is some level of political influence in the search results.
Not necessarily. The popularity of the network doesn't necessarily translate into the same popularity for searches. Search results are based on how frequently something is search for, not how popular it is. Perhaps Fox "News" viewers are simply less inquisitive about searching for things on/from that network.
Now, go back to your hateful life spewing hate randomly at things you don't like, without considering that perhaps there is something deeper to be understood,
Not sure how you jumped to *that*, but perhaps you should reserve time for contemplation.
Re: Same political filter (Score:3)
Sure you didn't enter "lies"?
And sure MSNBC was not right next to is too? (Like there is any fuckin difference!)
Re: Same political filter (Score:2)
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First page of results entirely leftwing. Just like Google.
No wonder trust in news sources is collapsing.
FOXNews is highest rated cable news, but they're 2nd page on DDG.
When you're so far on the right, that everything else is on the left...
Found it lacking (Score:3)
Last month I switched my default search engine to DuckDuckGo for a couple weeks to force myself to use it. I found it lacking. I tend to do a lot of technical searching, so perhaps it is weak in that area. It's probably good enough for "normal" searching, whatever that is, but as much as I would like to use it over Google, it was not adequate for my use.
Maybe I'll give it another try and go to the trouble to log what I'm searching for and in what way it was deficient.
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Same here. ..." which seems to be some product on Alibaba
Just try "c# equivalent to supplier" on DDG. First 3 results: "java - Equivalent of Super Keyword in C# - Stack Overflow", "Reference Supplier - Suppliers for Reporting", and "equivalent, equivalent Suppliers and Manufacturers at
On German it's also useless. (Score:2)
Almost as bad as Ecosia.
And I did enter proper keywords. Not retarded things like "What's this thing that is yellow and bent, dear Duck?", like the "average" idiot assumes should work.
Sad. What's limiting them?
I thought a search engine was very straightforward. Crawl ALL the pages, find the most important words and phrases on every page, find th
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Wow. I remember when this website was populated primarily by tech savvy people.
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Sad. What's limiting them?
I thought a search engine was very straightforward. Crawl ALL the pages, find the most important words and phrases on every page, find th
Many problems appear trivial when you're not the one who has to solve them.
Essentially, this is how version 1.0 search engines worked, and they were terrible. They showed you page after page of irrelevant results because they had no real context for how important a given result was. Crappy websites mercilessly abused the naivete of these early algorithms by embedding all sorts of popular and completely irrelevant search terms in their code.
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Re: My default (Score:1)
Why do people hate Google? Did you one time search for penis pills and are now getting ads for such products?
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Google is evil. Between harvesting all your personal information to cooperating with totalitarian regimes, they're best avoided. For one example: Google knows who all the Muslims are in the US. Google cooperates with China, despite China shipping all it's Muslims to concentration camps. You think they wouldn't cooperate with a US government request?
Google has made it clear they're part of the 1984-esque dystopia. So, avoiding them seems to be the least one can do.
Re: My default (Score:5, Informative)
what i search is my business, not everyone else business.
If google only had the tracking in the search, not a big problem, but they also have the google analytics all over the internet, captcha, browser, android, and of course, their own ads...
they can track you in a much higher level than everybody else (while MS is trying to do the same, but i do not use windows for many years, i do not care about then)
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Type "joe biden dementia" and see what happens. Notice the auto complete does not even list dementia, even when you begin to type dementia.
Go to DuckDuckGo, as soon as you type Joe, "joe biden dementia" is the third result for auto complete.
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There is something strange going on there, but not quite what you think. "Donald Trump dementia" doesn't autocomplete, nor does "Ronald Reagan dementia". I would postulate that Google blocks the term "dementia" for all proper names.
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I've been using Duckduckgo as my primary search since 2011.
Google just pissed me off by continually returning completely irrelevant search results that didn't match the keywords I searched for. Page after page of results with none of the keywords in them. Sure, there was always tricks like adding a + or surrounding with quotes, and it would work for a bit and then Google would break it. So I finally I got fed up and switched to Duckduckgo, just because the results were so much better. Sure, I've experie
I've been using it (Score:2)
I've been using it at home and on mobile and at work for about two years and think it's great at everything except when I'm looking for restaurants I'm not seeing the hours open. It's been good and I haven't had to resort to Google very much in those two years.
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Startpage uses Google results. Supposedly its feature is the same search, but minus the tracking. I'm not optimistic that is actually true.
Yes, much better, but one big problem: (Score:2)
They got bought by an ad company. With them sitting in the Startpage board.
So it is only matter of time before they reveal they are a little Google.
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i also use startpage, works well and we can see that we are not inside a google bubble as results can even change.
I trusted then, but now they were acquired by a ad company in a not transparent way... so the will probably not be a viable option for much longer. I still didn't notices any change, but it is possible that everything will change, specially in the backend tracking part (as it is more invisible)
i'm now testing qwant.com with good results, but you can check several privacy search engines here:
http [restoreprivacy.com]
Good Enough is hardly glowing recomendations (Score:4, Informative)
How's the produce section at your grocery store? It is good enough.
You can get fruit and vegetables that are in season, but good luck on variety
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If you believe Google is actively evil, then "good enough" is good enough to avoid them.
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True,
However DDG is playing a losing game.
People usually choose a product because they Like it over the other, Not as much when they hate it less then the other.
LibreOffice is good enough to replace Office, However Microsoft is still #1 with their MS Office Suite. Why is that? Mostly because there isn't enough people who hates Office that much that they will switch to LibreOffice even though it is free, and supports MS Documents just fine.
Tesla had help rejuvenate the Electric Car Market, because the oth
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However DDG is playing a losing game.
https://duckduckgo.com/traffic [duckduckgo.com]
Still small compared to Google, but growing exponentially so they'll get there unless they screw it up.
Yes, DuckDuckGo is good enough (Score:5, Informative)
I've been using it for years. The quality is absolutely equivalent to Google.
Equivalent, but not identical. The results in the two engines are different. When looking for something difficult, particularly if the only available search terms are ambiguous, sometimes it helps to use both.
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It depends on your use case. I find that for random day-to-day searching it's entirely fine; however, if I am looking for something for work (e.g. Google would return highly relevant StackOverflow content), DDG is just not up to snuff.
Thankfully, I can just do a !google and get the results I would expect w/o passing what I don't want passed to Google.
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It depends on your use case. I find that for random day-to-day searching it's entirely fine; however, if I am looking for something for work (e.g. Google would return highly relevant StackOverflow content), DDG is just not up to snuff.
Thankfully, I can just do a !google and get the results I would expect w/o passing what I don't want passed to Google.
Well YMMV, but that's not my experience. I use DDG all the time for work-related tech topics and I find it good. Even without using the !bangs, I find the quantity versus quality ratio of search results better on DDG.
Completely disagree. (Score:2)
For me DDG is basically useless.
I'm searching for scientifc topics (in English) and German pages a lot.
Can't agree with that (Score:1)
Been using it as main search engine for more than one year.
It does what I need 9 out 10 times.
In those 10 cases, I go to bing (yeah, Microsoft is evil too, I know) and if that didn't help (normally it doesn't as they don't have my search history) I try google.
I think overpromisnig is counter productive. By any metric, besides evilness, ddg cannot (and is not) better, but indeed good enough.
It's what I use (Score:2)
Mobile vs Desktop (Score:2)
For the work I do, a lot of my common searches, DDG is returning mobile URLs for desktop search. The mobile versions of the sites I need are highly crippled versions. The actual results that I need are also further down on the list (always #1 on Google, but possibly not even first page on DDG). And these are not highly technical searches ether, just "[company] [product]", something that should be quite simple to figure out. Companies that abuse SEO tactics are showing higher on DDG than the actual company n
Wasn't Good Enough for Me (Score:3)
I was particularly unhappy with all of the crap Google has been adding to the search query - especially things like:
&aqs=chrome..69i57.myIDNumsj0j
so I tried Duck Duck Go for about a week.
It took me significantly longer to find what I was looking for, and I switched back. I've been (partially) using FireFox to address these concerns, since a query looks more like:
&client=firefox-b-1-d
which is probably not personally identifiable to me.
However, the Chrome browser has a number of other improvements over FireFox that make this not really a long term, feasible, solution for me.
I think Duck Duck Go would work well for people that are not very aware of a few second difference in search results, and aren't very good at efficiently using Google. It reminded me of my experience with Google about 10-15 years ago, and helped me appreciate the improvements in search that happened during that time. But the privacy issues still suck. Just open up the network tab whenever you're searching anything, and you'll see each keystroke being AJAX'd in...
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>However, the Chrome browser has a number of other improvements over FireFox that make this not really a long term, feasible, solution for me.
like what?
what are you missing?
they are of course different, chrome is faster, specially on startup, so good for "open, search, close" cicles, but firefox uses less memory, so better for long term open browser and browser with many tabs
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The speed, and developer tools were the two big ones I noticed. I started web development using FireFox (pre-2008/Chrome release), but couldn't go back to their development tools. I'm not positive that this was an actual shortcoming with their tools, or more of a preference, but I believe the Chrome developer tools are better.
It's very, very noticeably faster in executing JavaScript, and generally faster in loading pages. I have enough memory on the machines that I use, so for me this an improvement (but, l
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I didn't even realize that Bing HAD reward points.... Thanks.
best feature of DDG (Score:3)
It's not Google. [pjmedia.com]
"Fairness is a dog whistle. It does not mean what you think that it means and you have to apply doublethink in order to understand what they’re actually saying. What they’re really saying about fairness is that they have to manipulate their search results so it gives them the political agenda that they want. And so they have to rebias their algorithms." -- Zachary Vorhies, former Google software engineer
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Source rates about the same as Infowars.
https://mediabiasfactcheck.com... [mediabiasfactcheck.com]
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Attacking the source instead of addressing the facts? I haven't seen that since the Soviets.
From TFA:
police storming his home to perform a "wellness check"
That was a CCCP tactic as well. Don't like someone's political opinion? They must be mentally unstable. Better kick in the door and haul them off to the psychiatric ward.
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The only "Fact" we have that we can verify is the source of the story, which is, as the GP points out, an unreliable conspiracy-theory driven rag.
Well, Google doesn't exactly keep their thumb on the scales a secret: [blog.google]
"AI algorithms and datasets can reflect, reinforce, or reduce unfair biases. We recognize that distinguishing fair from unfair biases is not always simple, and differs across cultures and societies. We will seek to avoid unjust impacts on people, particularly those related to sensitive characteristics such as race, ethnicity, gender, nationality, income, sexual orientation, ability, and political or religious belief."
So when Google decide
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Was there something in that article that was untrue or misleading, or did you just want to associate Infowars with the source?
A person should always have a grain of salt with any source, if it's PJmedia, or CNN that says it's illegal to look at Snowden docs. Mediabiasfactcheck is some guy named Dave Van Zandt, and I'm not sure why his opinion qualifies for an appeal to authority.
Anyway it is good to have a search like DuckDuckGo that isn't simply parroting Google's results, like so many other branded search
Much worse for obscure topics (Score:2)
I have a hard time finding technical information on Duckduckgo. It seems to prioritizes the most common meanings of words, making it hard to search using specific technical jargon.
Try StartPage (Score:2)
Even though Google is better for some specific domains, I am confident that DuckDuckGo can find what I need.
Try using Startpage [wikipedia.org] (homepage [startpage.com]). They bill themselves as "The world's most private search engine" and they use Google for their backend. They support saving your preferences via cookies or an encrypted string that can be specified in the URL. As a bonus, they're based in The Netherlands and not subject to U.S. Government disclosure "requests" like DuckDuckGo, which is based in the U.S.
The world's most private ad company subsidiary. (Score:2)
This was true. Sadly, they have been bought by a subsidiary of adtech company System1.
Which either makes Startpage not really trustworthy from the beginning, given its owners would ever even think about such a deal being acceptable,
or it wouldn't be surprise if that is actually CIA/NSA/... shop. (What other ad company would buy itself in on a privacy-focused search engine, and then not alter it for the purposes of what an ad company does? Only one that wants to keep privacy-focused users, but spy on them.)
I disagree. It isn't good enough. (Score:2)
Maybe for that dumbest common denominator "average person" that doesn't actually.exist.
Startpage is much better, and actually usable.
Too bad it got bought by a sleazy ad company. (To be fair, I still have to see any effects from that. But it would be delusional not to expect data shenenigans.)
Still better than Google.
I'd switch to DuckDuckGo, if it had a better crawler/spider.
Google no longer good for error strings (Score:2)
Google recently stopped accepting long strings, which limits the size of the stack trace you can copy and paste into it. While it's always necessary to edit a stack trace to remove you-specific parts of it, providing a lot of the stack trace would often lead to better results as you would end up at something very specific to your issue. Now that this is no longer the case, Google is a far less valuable tool for searching for error messages.
This takes me back to the early days. (Score:2)
You used to get better results by opening several browser windows and comparing different search engines' first page of results than scrolling through pages of a single engine's results.
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Two things (Score:2)
These are the two most annoying issues I have with DDG, other than search results quite often being not really up to par with Google:
1. If DDG doesn't find much, it fills several result pages with totally unrelated stuff in which none of the search terms exist, and it does that even if the search terms were set in quotes.
2. Using the browser's back button does not recall the previous search, but opens the empty DDG front page instead.
Extremely annoying.
DuckDuckGo has worked fine for me (Score:3)
I've been using it for a few years now. Every once in a while, when a particular search result seems lacking, I'll use the "!g" to throw the same search over to Google... but it almost never is any better, and I've found I hardly use that anymore.
it also keeps data in the US (Score:1)
DDG is nice, but its search results suck! (Score:2)
I try DDG first, but then sometimes I need to use Google's. :(
DuckDuckGo ignores quotation marks (Score:2)