Wow, thats a great curve. Just wanted to throw in my personal experience with DuckDuckGo, and it doesn't necessarily reflect on DuckDuckGo specifically, however:
After seeing them pop up here once or twice quite recently I thought I'd give it a go, I opened up preferences in Chrome and switched my default search over to DDG. It felt good, made a nice change but was certainly a bit "odd". I found what I wanted, most of the time albeit it with a slight drop in quality vs Google.
But my biggest gripe with them was confidence. I'd just started out at a new job as a programmer and as you can imagine, I was searching for a good few things, usually things I was struggling with and I just didn't feel sure that I was getting the best results I possibly could be. You might think thats totally crazy, but when your battling an issue as many of you know, you want more than anything to work out whats going on. I didn't have any margin for error, I wanted the best results right there that second.
Specifics aside, knowing that Google is far superior in their results makes it real difficult to use another search engine really, extra features (!so etc) or no extra features. I personally search because I need to "find" something and I usually don't know where that something is, opening up Stack Overflow isn't that much of a chore for me. Its the other bit I need help with.
Anyway, I commend their mission and hope they succeed in taking a fair slice of the market. I think he's a great entrepreneur and I wish him the best of luck. I can't imagine what it must be like to be head on with... Google.
I find that I am slowly losing confidence in Google. What I often do is input searches in the form: "general term", "specific term", then click on a link and immediately do a find for the specific term I searched for. In the last few months, the specific term I searched for often does not exist on the linked site at all, which I find quite annoying.
I tried bing a couple of times, but the results are even worse.
Maybe Google verbatim mode will fix the problem? I've set up a quick search recently, but have yet to start using it.
Would love to see some example queries to debug if you have them handy. (You can check your search history https://www.google.com/history/ to jog your memory if you have it turned on.)
I don't know - if I had to guess what the query 'python list popleft' meant, it would be 'how to pop the leftmost element from a list', even though the answer does not contain the word 'popleft'.
In this case it does, but very often doesn't. It seems to me that this happens mostly with rapidly changing websites, as if the cache showed a somewhat later state than when it was indexed.
These days, I've been searching for things about Flask with Heroku. So I tend to search for something like "python flask heroku sqlite", and often times, I get results that are not specific to Flask. (NB: I don't know if this example works but you get the idea)
I hear a lot of people say that google search results are worse than they used to be - personally I have a hard time telling. What's interesting, though, is that nobody is doing search better, which suggests that it a very tough problem to solve, and even with all the resources Google has, they aren't doing it as good as it could be.
So my question is - what is google doing wrong?
Has their search algorithm become worse?
Has the web become more complex?
Have people just become lazy and feel like they should never have to dig beyond the first 10 results to find what they're looking for?
My take. Disclaimer: I'm a fan for a while now (lesson to startups: If you reply to feedback quickly and friendly, as Gabriel did in Aug 2010 when I submitted a tiny useless bit of feedback to the site, you'll be hard to remove from my list of 'great things').
That said, I do understand the confidence issue every now and then. For me it seems to arise mostly when DDG only shows half a page or less of results. Those are usually good. But I'm used to all the bullshit Google puts above and below that and sometimes have the feeling of missing out.
A quick check every now and then by now convinced me that I'm just conditioned to expect quantity. Which needs to be corrected.
I've also been demo'ing DDG the last week. As an ahem experienced developer, I've found that most of the time, the results I get from DDG are pretty close to what I'd get with Google, minus Google's interface.
I've built up enough confidence to feel that DDG is going to give me what I need.
I do wish it were a little faster though. Speed is a feature, and I'm sure it's hard to compete with google.
Simple results are better than Google - including the summary of the term grepped from wiki.
Complex or rare queries aren't as good.
I use it at home - it's quicker to find out when the new South Park episode is out. But it's less use at work for finding the solution to that weird problem
I have DDG set as my default, but I admit that that's more or less despite the quality of the search results.
When I'm searching for "discovery" purposes, such as when trying to diagnose an error message, I add a !g. When I want an image, !gi. If I want to look up some library, I use !clojure, !python, !php, etc. The only time I let it fall to DDG is when I'm looking for some specific thing that I don't know the URL for, like "American Airlines", or something that I know has a lot of results of about equivalent quality, like "Pulled Pork Recipe."
I find I'm effectively using DDG as a search routing service. I really enjoy that, and I miss it when I use a computer that's not set up with chrome and ddg as the search default, but I feel like they're missing out on some ad revenue here.
Ad confidence; my default search engine is Google's "Feeling Lucky". Many repetitive searches (wiki, imdb, documentation) are so accurate I can skip the step of clicking on results. But most of the time I use keyword searches anyway. With google, images, wolframalpha, tineye (because google image search is still blocked using user agent sniffing), torrentz, public transit, and a few more (including stuff like open a subreddit, so not really a search).
I generally stick to Google for programming related searches and use DDG for the rest. Hopefully DDG improves to the point where I can use it 100% of the time.
Interestingly I switched to DDG because I was having to quote too many programming terms in Google. All of them sometimes, just to stop Google from autocorrecting. I still have 'g' wired as my omnibar shortcut for Google though as I don't always find what I'm looking for on DDG.
If it were possible to take Bing’s search results, throw a handful of people at them and match the quality of Google’s results, Google would not be where it is today.
That is the main problem I see with Duck Duck Go. The quality of its search results depends on Bing. Duck Duck Go can do things to offer something better than Bing, but not that much better that matches Google’s quality.
Result quality is only one part of the equation. Features is another, which is where DDG seems to be making a land-grab for. Users seem to be responding to this approach.
> Specifics aside, knowing that Google is far superior in their results makes it real difficult to use another search engine really, extra features (!so etc) or no extra features.
Just so you know, you can use keyword searches to get this same functionality directly in your browser for any search engine of your choice.
It's because we've been training to understand that "if it isn't on Google, it doesn't exist". That doesn't seem to be true though (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invisible_Web), but in practical terms, it is...
"Specifics aside, knowing that Google is far superior in their results makes it real difficult to use another search engine"
Except that Google is far from delivering superior results. In fact, many of their results are full of spam links and garbage.
One of the main reasons I use DDG over Google is that DDG often delivers better results.
Another major reason is DDG's promises of no-tracking and privacy (which I hope can be verified some day). That alone sets them far above and beyond Google, which is spyware incarnate.
Google is now basically in the exact same position that AltaVista was in when Google came along and ate their lunch. Only Google is much more dominant and wealthier than AltaVista ever was (not to mention their legendary ability to attract and keep talent), so they'll no doubt hang on much longer. But DDG and other search engines are still primed to take a bite at those parts of the business where Google has drop the ball -- like privacy, literal search, and search quality.
After seeing them pop up here once or twice quite recently I thought I'd give it a go, I opened up preferences in Chrome and switched my default search over to DDG. It felt good, made a nice change but was certainly a bit "odd". I found what I wanted, most of the time albeit it with a slight drop in quality vs Google.
But my biggest gripe with them was confidence. I'd just started out at a new job as a programmer and as you can imagine, I was searching for a good few things, usually things I was struggling with and I just didn't feel sure that I was getting the best results I possibly could be. You might think thats totally crazy, but when your battling an issue as many of you know, you want more than anything to work out whats going on. I didn't have any margin for error, I wanted the best results right there that second.
Specifics aside, knowing that Google is far superior in their results makes it real difficult to use another search engine really, extra features (!so etc) or no extra features. I personally search because I need to "find" something and I usually don't know where that something is, opening up Stack Overflow isn't that much of a chore for me. Its the other bit I need help with.
Anyway, I commend their mission and hope they succeed in taking a fair slice of the market. I think he's a great entrepreneur and I wish him the best of luck. I can't imagine what it must be like to be head on with... Google.