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by magicalhippo 2488 days ago
DDG is just so bad. Yesterday I found a website on my desktop. I wanted to view it on my Raspberry Pi so I could copy/paste the commands. So I typed in some keywords from the title and the name of the site. By default the Raspbian image uses DDG apparently.

The page I was after was not to be found.

Well at least on the first page, I didn't bother checking beyond. Did the !g thing and got the page I wanted straight up first hit.

Here are the searches for reference:

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=maker+pro+install+tensorflow

https://www.google.com/search?q=maker+pro+install+tensorflow

I've tried DDG so many times, but it just doesn't find relevant stuff. Sad, because I don't want to rely on Google.

2 comments

The top result is the same (for me) in both searches (<https://www.tensorflow.org/install/>). What is the page you were trying to find?
Interesting, I guess Google used the fact that both searches came from the same IP to prioritize the one I wanted[1].

In any case, I just connected to my work PC and did a search from a clean VM there, we don't do anything remotely Raspberry Pi or TensorFlow related there. The link you posted was the first hit at work, but the one I wanted[1] was the third hit.

Yet for DDG the results were the same, no hits. I even tried pressing "more" once, still nothing. I even tried "maker.pro install tensorflow" (without the quotes), and similar result. I tried "maker.pro tensorflow raspberry pi", still not finding it.

Maybe I just need to learn what DDG focuses on in a search string, and I've been trained to what Google weights.

But the reason Google got big was because it was the first search engine where, for 99% of the time, I didn't have to spend several minutes optimizing search terms just to find the right thing.

I don't want to go back to that.

[1]: https://maker.pro/raspberry-pi/tutorial/how-to-set-up-the-ma...

They both return the site tensorflow. What were you going for exactly a specific page?