Search Engines.

Long time ago, on reddit I had seen this search engine Duck Duck Go and I had thought, “Nice, but I will stick to Google”. Only today, did I ask myself, why! Why am I sticking to Google? What exactly is it about Google that is great! So, comparison time.

The first search I did was for the text “Once upon a midnight dreary”.

Google gives me:

DDG replies with:

Wikipedia features high on google’s list whereas DDG gives preference to the actual words of the search query. To me, this implies that Google probably have more sophisticated contextual search algorithms. The wikipedia page is bound to have links to both the text of the full poem, whereas the links offered by DDG are more related to the text itself. Still, I had wanted the poem itself, not the history! But thats just me.

Second Query is developer concerned and considering my recent work involving iOS, it was for “UIKit”.

Google gives me:

DDG counters with:

Google gives me cocoadev, apple and sourceforge. The most popular, then the official one and then someone from where I can get examples. DDG gives me the holy grail of open source software, github and then cocoadev and other links. Apple’s Developer Site does not even feature in the top three. And frankly, since the whole code documentation is embedded into XCode, I could not care less.

Last, I ask for one of my favourite books, “Bal-E-Jibreel”.

Google finds:

DDG finds:

This was the clincher. Google gave me Wikipedia again and some link to the same text. Look at what DDG gave me! *insert huge smile*.
They gave me links to the wikipedia page for the book, the author and found out some other books by the same author, and unlike Google, did not give me one link which had it all, but categorised the links and presented them to me. And thats what I wanted.

DDG, however, still feels a little bit sluggish compared to Google and the fact that it automagically searches into youtube and other such sites. It does self computation whereas DDG bases itself on wolfram (which might not be a bad thing. Why do something that someone else already does very well!).

I have however decided, in the interests of competition, to use DuckDuckGo from now on. Lets see how this rides goes, and how long it lasts.