Very strange timing on what is unfortunately a horribly inaccurate title based on my personal experience.
I tried swapping to DuckDuckGo yesterday on my iPhone as the primary search tool and reverted unfortunately back to Google after only two hours.
It’s hard to define all of the reasons the ‘mobile’ experience is so unbearable, but I’ll try:
1) No video or image results at the top of the page when that is most relevant.
2) No IMDB/overviews for movies, music, books, etc.
3) I am used to one of the first results in my search consistently being Wikipedia. This was the case about 1/3rd of the time vs. Google.
4) Results often appeared extremely out of order in terms of relevancy vs. Google, with the actual relevant like often being on the second(!) page.
5) Personal taste, but super relevant - In terms of UI/UX, the interface feels dated, actually harkening back to the days of AltaVista - I’m unfortunately honest when I say I feel like I’m using something designed 10-15 years ago.
6) Autocomplete seemed to have significant issues, and, for some reason, sometimes even taking several seconds to appear.
I couldn’t express my disappointment enough. I really wanted to give up the ghost, and just move on from Google - but I am so used to so many of the apparently fantastic nuances of Google, I believe it will unfortunately take 4-5 years before I can even get past enough of these significant issues to make it worth using.
On Desktop - the experience seems to be significantly better. I can’t even point out enough reasons why it’s so poor on mobile, it could unfortunately fill several blog posts and I don’t have time to point out the myriad of issues and inconsistencies here at this time.
If there’s jobs available at DDG - I’d love to help, in all seriousness.
It's not going to be convenient to get off any Google product. If privacy and escaping algorithm bubbles is important enough to you, DDG can probably be "good enough".
Unfortunately I need a search engine to be functional. The trade off privacy is certainly not worth it, and the algorithms aren’t half as good, at least in terms of search results. It’s a damn shame.
I tried swapping to DuckDuckGo yesterday on my iPhone as the primary search tool and reverted unfortunately back to Google after only two hours.
It’s hard to define all of the reasons the ‘mobile’ experience is so unbearable, but I’ll try:
1) No video or image results at the top of the page when that is most relevant.
2) No IMDB/overviews for movies, music, books, etc.
3) I am used to one of the first results in my search consistently being Wikipedia. This was the case about 1/3rd of the time vs. Google.
4) Results often appeared extremely out of order in terms of relevancy vs. Google, with the actual relevant like often being on the second(!) page.
5) Personal taste, but super relevant - In terms of UI/UX, the interface feels dated, actually harkening back to the days of AltaVista - I’m unfortunately honest when I say I feel like I’m using something designed 10-15 years ago.
6) Autocomplete seemed to have significant issues, and, for some reason, sometimes even taking several seconds to appear.
I couldn’t express my disappointment enough. I really wanted to give up the ghost, and just move on from Google - but I am so used to so many of the apparently fantastic nuances of Google, I believe it will unfortunately take 4-5 years before I can even get past enough of these significant issues to make it worth using.
On Desktop - the experience seems to be significantly better. I can’t even point out enough reasons why it’s so poor on mobile, it could unfortunately fill several blog posts and I don’t have time to point out the myriad of issues and inconsistencies here at this time.
If there’s jobs available at DDG - I’d love to help, in all seriousness.