Comparing Apples and a Bunch of Grapes a Common Misunderstanding about DuckDuckGo
July 11, 2014
Over at OS News, Thom Holwerda disagrees with a recent, positive review on search engine DuckDuckGo in, “Review: DuckDuckGo Compared to Google, Bing, Yandex.” A user going by “sb56637” at LibreTechTips.com had found that:
“In many respects the tiny DuckDuckGo holds its own against the giant that is Google, and even more so if the user is willing to slightly manipulate the search query to work around DuckDuckGo’s temperamental intelligence layer. So it is heartening to see that DuckDuckGo is a viable alternative to Google by its own merits.”
As our readers may know, usage of DuckDuckGo has grown heartily as people have become more interested in not being tracked. That’s why sb56637 was so happy to call the site a “top-notch search engine.” Holwerda, however, did not have similar success when he tried to substitute the Duck for Google. He writes:
“I tried the ‘new’ DDG as well since it came out, setting it as my default search engine. Sadly, my experience wasn’t as positive – it simply didn’t find the things I was looking for about 80% of the time. Within a few days, I got into the habit of simply adding !g to every search query to go straight to Google anyway since that gave me the results I was looking for.”
Perhaps that is because DuckDuckGo is a metasearch engine, while the rest are not. (Metasearch engines mix results from several search engines.) Recall that reviewer sb56637 noted that having to adjust to DuckDuckGo’s “temperamental intelligence layer” is kind of a pain. It seems those willing to do some research and make the adjustments, though, can have both (comparatively better) privacy and good results.
Cynthia Murrell, July 11, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
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