duckduckgo.com

[scooterscot]

A better alternative

Yandex

Better, how?

[chef]

what made you decide to go a week without Google?

[scooterscot]

what made you decide to go a week without Google?

In a word, quality.

The decision is based on a couple of jobs I've been quoting for over the last week or so. When researching I want few returns and quality results. Google struggles to do this for me these days. I just performed a very niche search term yet I get 126,000,000 results.

You see I've been searching and searching, Google is all I've ever used. Have been experimenting with DEVONagent Pro in an attempt to improve the quality of material I've been looking for but I do not really want another app. Although it looks the business.

Then other search engines came to me attention, I've found the quality of results produced from duckduckgo, for my work related research, much more relevant. Don't want to sounds like a cliché, but it does what it says.

The tracking of my searches gave me the final push, I don't need privacy but neither do I want the quality of my searching to suffer while Google chase $$ using my searching habits. On the plus DDG do not track or bubble your searching habits. If I could buy shares in this company I would.

In the end commerce is bad for research, Google should know better.


Google’s Broken Promise: The End of "Don’t Be Evil"

[d000hg]

Doesn't DDG largely get its information from other 'proper' search engines like Yahoo/Google, topped up with wikipedia?

[scooterscot]

Doesn't DDG largely get its information from other 'proper' search engines like Yahoo/Google, topped up with wikipedia?

If so, whatever, etc, the quality of results when researching, for me, is improved.

DuckDuckGo | Sources

DuckDuckGo gets its results from over 50 sources, including DuckDuckBot (our own crawler), crowd-sourced sites (in our own index), Yahoo! BOSS, embed.ly, WolframAlpha, EntireWeb, Bing & Blekko. For any given search, there is usually a vertical search engine out there that does a better job at answering it than a general search engine. Our long-term goal is to get you information from that best source, ideally in instant answer form.

[d000hg]

I still find Google great for searching - hard to see how they would make it worse - but fair enough. However, surely Google will quickly copy any new innovation (or just buy out the provider).

[scooterscot]

I still find Google great for searching -

So do I. But when it comes to researching topics related to work does not mean I'm looking to spend money. I want searches that have no past history of me.

However, surely Google will quickly copy any new innovation (or just buy out the provider).

Perhaps. They'd probably forget to adopt the tracking policy during the acquisition.

[scooterscot]

So the results.

In the last 7 days I've used Google. No escaping it. I used Google for Maps and translation and Google News but not searching. Even install DDG on the iPhone.

All searches were made with DDG.

My thoughts: Regardless of search engine I'm surprised really how easy it is to switch my preferred search engine. I suspect Google needs those other services to keep a captive audience. The quality of results I'm retrieving with DDG I find I get a meaningful result with less searching, which is good as I don't need 1,000,000 plus results I need 'the result'.

I like the clean interface of DDG, like Google use to be.