Why I Switched to Duck Duck Go Permanently

http://www.bookflavor.com/blog/2010/12/duck-duck-go-has-added-bookflavor-bang-syntax/

by NathanKP • 16 years ago

101 49 16 years ago

burgerbrain4• 16 years ago

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.

NathanKP2• 16 years ago

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?

burgerbrain4• 16 years ago

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.

epi0Bauqu4• 16 years ago

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!

omaranto• 16 years ago

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.

burgerbrain4• 16 years ago

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

pmjordan• 16 years ago

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)

thaumaturgy• 16 years ago

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.

cookiecaper• 16 years ago

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.

pilom• 16 years ago

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.

duck2• 16 years ago

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.

ohyes• 16 years ago

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.

aberkowitz2• 16 years ago

I can save you eighteen characters -

!google -> !g

!wikipedia -> !w

!amazon -> !a

duck2• 16 years ago

Permanently - is that still a word on the Internet?

wwortiz• 16 years ago

For short periods of time.

angrycoder• 16 years ago

yes, for very small values of perma

JoeAltmaier• 16 years ago

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

ianbishop• 16 years ago

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.

inovica• 16 years ago

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.

util• 16 years ago

"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?

johanhil• 16 years ago

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

jawee2• 16 years ago

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.

NathanKP2• 16 years ago

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!

jesusabdullah• 16 years ago

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...)

SageRaven2• 16 years ago

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).

streety• 16 years ago

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.

SageRaven2• 16 years ago

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

epi0Bauqu4• 16 years ago

No Google APIs are currently used.

rjvir• 16 years ago

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.

kin• 16 years ago

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

gcb• 16 years ago

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

Tycho2• 16 years ago

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

jawee2• 16 years ago

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.

Tycho2• 16 years ago

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

aberkowitz2• 16 years ago

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

dukgo.com

sid0• 16 years ago

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.

bcrawl• 16 years ago

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.

kayhi• 16 years ago

Perhaps this post reveals a different point:

Treat People Well > Do No Evil

beefman2• 16 years ago

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 Switched to Duck Duck Go Permanently

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