Re: Almost all gpg2 operations hang after upgrade to stretch/testing

[<tomas@tuxteam.de>]

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On Thu, Apr 13, 2017 at 02:43:48PM +0100, Lisi Reisz wrote:
> On Thursday 06 April 2017 19:41:15 Richard Owlett wrote:
> > I've been avoiding Google for personal reasons and using DuckDuckGo
> > instead. DuckDuckGo does not return that page - I'd assumed the two
> > search engines were equally productive.
> 
> No, they are not.  That is why some of us sadly use Google - it has a LOT of 
> faults and problems, but it is a superb search engine.
> 
> Morally, of course, DuckDuckGo wins.

Part of Google's perceived superiority is that it "learns to know you": a
couple of search terms thrown in, for Google is "search terms + context",
while for DDG, the context is missing.

I've a nice anecdote for you: a friend of mine is doing her master's
thesis in molecular biology and had a bunch of articles she researched
from her PC at work (via Google). At home, she wanted to look up something
and didn't have the refs handy, so she repeated the search... only to
get totally different results, more suitable to an interested layperson.

Her box at the lab had a different personality than the one at home
(we had a talk about this a couple of days before, and she's an incredibly
smart person, so that's why she noticed).

Since then she's a DuckDuckGo user :-)

What's the problem? Using DuckDuckGo "right" entails being aware of
that and putting slightly more work into establishing context with
additional search terms. DDG won't equal Google any time (much less
raw power), but "training" your querying skills helps reduce most
of the difference in quality. Google makes you lazy because "it
already knows what you're looking for".

I switched from Google to DDG a couple of years ago, falling back
to Google when "there must be a hit for that, dammit". From one
to two fall-backs weekly, I'm now solidly below once a month.

So if you want to do yourself a favour (in terms of skills and
autonomy), my advice would be to always try first DDG, then Google,
and try to think about how the differences come about.

Enjoy
- -- t
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