Frankly I think it's an inherently monopolistic industry.
In the current state of affairs (i.e. web browser interfaces and mobile phone integration), it's quite inconvenient for people to switch up their search engine regularly, or even use multiple ones regularly.
With say, supermarkets, it's pretty easy to shop at Acme one day, Trader Joes another, and Superfresh the third. Search engines aren't like this, or at least, we haven't figured out a way to use them in a way that is conducive to fast-paced, low-barrier-to-entry (or at least not astronomically expensive barrier to entry) competition. Maybe we should.
bang commands on DDG come pretty close. I use DDG as my primary search, but in reality I use about 20 different commands for specific searches on any given day, including quite a bit of google search and wolfram alpha. Not saying these commands will ever see wide use, but I find it a convenient platform for lots of different search engines.
That's a really good point. Every few months I try to adapt to using DDG as my primary search, but I always find myself throwing a !g into my searches, which kind of defeats the purpose. I'm curious, for what kind of searches do you find DDG's own search results to be good enough (or better) than Google's? What kind of searches make you bang to Google?
I generally use !g if I want local results (say, looking for a restaurant) or I use !m if I want a map (which is really the same thing as local for me). I also use Google if I know my particular search is going to be obscure and/or noisy. For instance, weird error messages get a !g. The other major exception is that Google Scholar is incomparable for finding academic papers on a particular topic. However, for everything else (general knowledge, non-weird errors, most programming-related topics) I find the DDG results entirely sufficient. In fact, I intentionally use DDG by itself if I expect to end up at Wikipedia since DDG adds possible Wikipedia matches at the top of the search results.
That being said, I end up using the DDG results for >50% of my searches. If you do more local searches, or if the things you search for tend to be noisy or obscure then, of course, YMMV.
About the same as me! I generally do DDG first unless I know I want a map, or I'm searching for error messages. Other commands I use fairly frequently are
!yt (youtube)
!gmail
!news
!gg (google groups)
!hn
!boingboing
!torrent
!itunes
!rubydoc
!rubygems
!codex
!so (stack)
!am (amazon)
!jstor (and a few other specific academic journal searches, but you can also use !googlescholar)
!flickr
and probably a few others! I encourage everyone to check out the list and get it into their workflow. With Alfred + DDG I can get to most things much quicker than I could through google
I don't see why its not just as easy to switch to other search engines. If Google is beating these other search engines purely because they are a better product then there is nothing monopolistic here.
The reality is that the barrier is very low. Blekko, DDG, bing, yahoo, and we can go back even farther and list more search engines. Nothing is stopping them other than their own engineering resources. Your entire argument is saying Google is better and out innovating the competitors so we should punish them.
Comments
Frankly I think it's an inherently monopolistic industry.
In the current state of affairs (i.e. web browser interfaces and mobile phone integration), it's quite inconvenient for people to switch up their search engine regularly, or even use multiple ones regularly.
With say, supermarkets, it's pretty easy to shop at Acme one day, Trader Joes another, and Superfresh the third. Search engines aren't like this, or at least, we haven't figured out a way to use them in a way that is conducive to fast-paced, low-barrier-to-entry (or at least not astronomically expensive barrier to entry) competition. Maybe we should.
bang commands on DDG come pretty close. I use DDG as my primary search, but in reality I use about 20 different commands for specific searches on any given day, including quite a bit of google search and wolfram alpha. Not saying these commands will ever see wide use, but I find it a convenient platform for lots of different search engines.
That's a really good point. Every few months I try to adapt to using DDG as my primary search, but I always find myself throwing a !g into my searches, which kind of defeats the purpose. I'm curious, for what kind of searches do you find DDG's own search results to be good enough (or better) than Google's? What kind of searches make you bang to Google?
I generally use !g if I want local results (say, looking for a restaurant) or I use !m if I want a map (which is really the same thing as local for me). I also use Google if I know my particular search is going to be obscure and/or noisy. For instance, weird error messages get a !g. The other major exception is that Google Scholar is incomparable for finding academic papers on a particular topic. However, for everything else (general knowledge, non-weird errors, most programming-related topics) I find the DDG results entirely sufficient. In fact, I intentionally use DDG by itself if I expect to end up at Wikipedia since DDG adds possible Wikipedia matches at the top of the search results.
That being said, I end up using the DDG results for >50% of my searches. If you do more local searches, or if the things you search for tend to be noisy or obscure then, of course, YMMV.
About the same as me! I generally do DDG first unless I know I want a map, or I'm searching for error messages. Other commands I use fairly frequently are
!yt (youtube) !gmail !news !gg (google groups) !hn !boingboing !torrent !itunes !rubydoc !rubygems !codex !so (stack) !am (amazon) !jstor (and a few other specific academic journal searches, but you can also use !googlescholar) !flickr
and probably a few others! I encourage everyone to check out the list and get it into their workflow. With Alfred + DDG I can get to most things much quicker than I could through google
https://duckduckgo.com/bang.html
I don't see why its not just as easy to switch to other search engines. If Google is beating these other search engines purely because they are a better product then there is nothing monopolistic here.
The reality is that the barrier is very low. Blekko, DDG, bing, yahoo, and we can go back even farther and list more search engines. Nothing is stopping them other than their own engineering resources. Your entire argument is saying Google is better and out innovating the competitors so we should punish them.