I Used DuckDuckGo for a Week and Had to Switch Back. Here’s why.

Re:I Used DuckDuckGo for a Week and Had to Switch Back. Here... by relix on Saturday June 29, 2013 @06:36AM (#5961988)

The article is titled "I used ... and switched back" not, "why you shouldn't use DDG". It's by definition subjective, and if this person found better results 99% of the time, then that's a good reason to switch back. Those students studying philosophy might like DDG better, and that's perfectly fine.

200-300ms is a difference that you can feel. This is not about losing that time, this is about waiting for your results a little bit longer which adds friction and annoyance. If you can't understand that then I hope you're not in charge of any user-facing interfaces. It's the reason sites use CDN's and cache pregenerated pages, it's the reason why DNS systems have edges distributed all over the world, it's the reason why Github improved reaction time from 1 sec down to 300ms in their latest update, etc...

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Re:I Used DuckDuckGo for a Week and Had to Switch Back. Here... by narozik on Saturday June 29, 2013 @09:03AM (#5962260)

It is usually more about perceived speed and feels than actual speed. And giving the user a quicker feel is a user experience improvement.

But feeling quick to display results is worthless if you have to make 5 queries to find your results, if you actually find it, and in my experience google rarely offers what I'm looking for in the first few searches.

It was not that way until they removed some and modified others search operators from their engine.

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