Just talking about search alternative; DuckDuckGo is my default search engine for over 2 years. It's incredibly good, the only caveat is you need to re-learn how to search. The same way you "changed yourself" initially for google.
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Except google didn't need learning, in fact that's part of what made it so much more powerful, they early on dropped support for AND and OR and other boolean keywords which other search engines required to get good results.
In fact one of google's early "hidden" successful features was using implicit AND not implicit OR, which had been the de-facto on other search engines, so searching for "gold plates" on other search engines would return results for "gold" and results for "plates", that seems crazy now but that's just how it was back then.
"learning" how to search is precisely what google didn't require, they used data and some key insights to do a lot of "magic" behind the scenes to match the way people actually used search engines into results, and without needing to advertise being a "human" search engine like Ask Jeeves.
You certainly did have to learn to use google, you just don't remember it, or remember it selectively. I frequently come across people who ask questions which seem simple to google for, but when they try ask google, they do so incompetently and get bad answers or no answers, because they fundamentally don't get keywords, how other uses of words can override your intended meaning, or how to clarify by adding further phrases, or removing extraneous detail.
I feel like nowadays you can just Google "how do I change my oil" or "why do spiders make webs" and I pretty much always get something good.
It seems to me as if you can just ask Google the way you would a normal person.
I know that wasn't always the case, but I'm curious what specifically you feel like you need to learn about using Google today.
My wife does this. It drives me crazy; I'm thinking "That's not how you search! You should just type 'changing oil'." But she gets the results she's looking for anyway so she doesn't listen.
> My wife does this. It drives me crazy; I'm thinking "That's not how you search! You should just type 'changing oil'." But she gets the results she's looking for anyway so she doesn't listen.
And why should she? Is she happy with the results? Google has done it's job. The keywords aren't there for you, they're there for Google so they can make searching work even if you lard up your search with unnecessary words.
Why 'should' you?
I was more poking fun at myself for thinking you "should" when the other way actually works fine.
You're actually more likely to get instruction-type results if you ask "natural" questions. You can test this by searching for "changing oil" and then "how do i change my oil" and comparing the results.
Teaching a child to use Google will show you that there is indeed quite a learning curve. It is not intuitive how you evaluate your results and refine your search to get good results.
That's possibly just inexperience on the child's part
What? The claim was that it doesn't require learning to use. If lack of experience is detrimental, then it needs to be learned.
I was explaining to an adult yesterday that using -x will remove x from his google results. He was stoked! Then he concluded further that he could use +x too!
I hated to have to disappoint him.
IIRC +x keeps google from returning results that exclude the x term.
e.g. "x y z" ~ "x y z" + "x y" + "y z" + "x z" + "x" + "y" + "z"
where "+x y +z" ~ "x y z" + "x z"
Still, I would imagine this isn't exactly the behavior your friend would have expected.
I was referring to the Google+ fiasco and how + is no longer an operator. Instead, now you have to "quote" "for" "inclusion".
https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topicsearchin/webse...
That last sentence is key. Rather than force the user to structure their input based on the computer's constraints (and probably waste time learning/misunderstanding the computer's constraints), they forced the computer to (generally) output meaningful results given arbitrary user input.
Can anyone thing of examples where the free software community has successfully created software that does this? I'm thinking of VLC trying-- and often succeeding-- in playing most of the damaged files I've thrown at it. But I'm drawing a blank otherwise...
There's a reason why the term Google-Fu exists ( http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/19967/what-does-g... )
I didn't feel that I had to adapt "how to search" at all; I just had to get used to how the results looked. It took me a while to realize how much I'd associated "good search results" with the visual style of Google search results. I ended up temporarily switching to a DDG theme that mimicked the Google search result style, and I realized that doing that alone made the search results seem better.
It defies my experience to claim that DDG can have equivalent search quality to Google. For one thing Google search results include my own emails and docs, which DDG doesn't produce. I find that Google's personalization is key to quality, not counter to it. As an example search for "good espresso open now". The DDG results are entirely useless.
Generally yes. I default to DDG, but I when I don't find what I want I often just add the '!g' to the search.
The only issue I have with Google search (aside from privacy concerns and the like) is the frequency to which the results don't actually contain any of the search terms I use. This functionality is fine for general use, but when I'm actually looking for something very specific the guesses Google makes often makes the search results less helpful than nothing at all.
>Generally yes. I default to DDG, but I when I don't find what I want I often just add the '!g' to the search.
What's the advantage of that over just going to google.com?
Well, most of the time I don't need to go to Google. But with '!g' the search defaults to encrypted mode (which you can do anyway at encrypted.google.com).
Honestly, I mostly use ddg because the bang syntax is extremely helpful. Like if I want to search hacker news posts, I just add !hn or !hackernews to the search. They also have bang searches for documentation of many languages, like !java
You can also make DuckDuckGo the default search engine in Firefox' location bar. That way anything that is not a URL is treated as a search query. I particularly like !wen for Wikipedia and !wikt for Wiktionary.
> That way anything that is not a URL is treated as a search query.
And if your search query does look like a URL, you can just add the !ddg bang to it & you'll be sent to DuckDuckGo instead of having your browser try to navigate to the URL! (At least, that's the only semi-legitimate use for !ddg that I can find - when else could it be used?)
Btw, you can also just use !w for Wikipedia.
> Btw, you can also just use !w for Wikipedia.
Yeah, but there is one caveat; !w will send you to the Wikipedia language matching the region DuckDuckGo is currently set at. So if you just did a search with the regional limiter set to The Netherlands, !w will send you to the Dutch Wikipedia. This is not usually what you would want for non-regional information. Without the region set it does take you to the English Wikipedia.
!wen is always the English Wikipedia.
Firefox actually has that feature built-in. It comes preloaded with the English Wikipedia, so you can type "wikipedia <term>" to search Wikipedia for "<term>". Other searches can be added from the addon store, or by right-clicking on a search box and defining a keyword.
Do you have any examples of queries which google doesn't return any results with the search terms used? I can't even remember the last time this has happened to me so I'm curious.
I mean, it's usually very very specific things. Yesterday I was looking at a summary query of earning records for a client by the IRS. The form had tons of abbreviations for columns with no explanation as to what they mean. I basically searched for multiple variations of the column names, and I eventually found what I needed, but often I'd open a result on the first page, ctrl-f one of my search terms, and find no results.
Meh result from Google for me.
Sitting in Mumbai, India and the first result is :
https://www.tripadvisor.in/Restaurant_Review-g45399-d2219937...
The same way you "changed yourself" initially for google.
But I didn't. The whole reason Google was an overnight success was that it usually gave me what I wanted first time, instead of me needing to jump around between Yahoo, altaVista, and Lycos and use regex-type thinking all the time. I love DDG and use it regularly, but my almost 20 years of experience with Google is that 99% of the time It Just Works, and I rather appreciate that it learns from me, because often now I just give it natural language queries the way I would with a person and It Still Works. Frankly the biggest issue I have with Google is that it doesn't display sufficient self-awareness for me to have metalearning conversations with it so I can teach it specific things that I know and it doesn't, and which would be very time-consuming to teach a human.
Have you compared DuckDuckGo and Google lately?
I ask because I used DuckDuckGo almost exclusively for about three years (had it as my search engine on desktop and iOS Safari) until a few months ago. A few months ago I noticed that DuckDuckGo's results began becoming very spammy and that I was having to use Google for anything more than a trivial single keyword search. So I switched back over to Google for a few days and never went back - Instant Answers actually turned out to be not that useful, Google's result quality is miles ahead, and the !bang feature is almost redundant because browsers support search-by-site natively. I know DDG has privacy as a selling point - but it's just not important enough for me to not use an overall better search engine, as much as I root for the underdog.
I've been using DuckDuckGo for about the same time frame and have had a similar experience. At first it was painful, but at this point it's extremely rare that I can't find what I'm looking for in one search with DDG.
I switched at about the same time and now I'm hooked. Using the ! syntax to search any major site from my address bar is so damn useful I don't want to go back.
I've used DDG for awhile and been using it as my default for at least a year. However, my pattern, still, is almost always "ddg.gg foo", skim, "ddg.gg foo !g"
I'll high-five other techies who I see using it, but I just can't recommend it for the average person without first warning them you'll give up accuracy and time for privacy.
Maybe I haven't relearned how to search?
As much as I want to love DDG my experience is similar to yours. It's my default search engine too but I'm constantly having to !sp my way to good results.
Isn't DuckDuckGo Bing behind the scenes, though? That doesn't seem that much better to me.
It would be nice to have a truly independent, startup search engine but it's a really big task for a fresh company to tackle.
They get their results from 400+ sources [1] [2]. Bing does happen to be one of them, though.
The major advantage DDG has is that it doesn't matter what it is behind the scenes. They can change whenever it suits them and the site will continue to act as an anonymizing front-end, complete with some useful extras.
That's an advantage for them but it doesn't seem like an advantage to me as the user. If they change their sources behind the scenes, what I get as a user would probably change drastically.
Google was great originally because their results were not just different and better but also reliable. If the back end changes without my knowledge that gets rid of the reliability aspect.
So what you're saying is that instead of Bing they could be using Yandex, Baidu or Google?
In fact I think they do use Yandex as well as Bing, at least they did the last time I looked.
This. I find DDG is the vim of search engines. Small learning curve but immensely powerful.
There's always Gigablast (gigablast.com)! And it'd be sweet if YaCy (yacy.net) took off.
My biggest issue with DuckDuck go is that it has very limited time search.
When programming I restrict most of my searches to 1 year since in most cases it makes sense. DuckDuck go doesn't allow this.
How did you change?
I used altavista first, so I was used to navigating directly to what I wanted by using word combinations that would be present in my target document but explicitly NOT present elsewhere. It was great!
Until Google pulls the plug because they are too famous. They don't have own infrastructure and own algorithms.