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DuckDuckGo grew more than 70% this year

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Re: DuckDuckGo grew more than 70% this year

#171

Post by Retric »

jerf wrote: post #170
Retric wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agents are not just irrational, but also acting with limited information and limited computation. Amusingly, we have trouble getting a few hundred agents to act reasonably in RTS games, modeling 100's of millions of people for long periods of time is just shy of ludicrous.

But if you want to make pronouncements about how irrational agents actually act, a prerequisite to having any sort of scientific confidence. People on HN, not being economists and usually in a polemical mood when this topic comes up, generally strike me as thinking that "people are not entirely rational -> people are entirely irrational -> all possible theories of economics have now collapsed to the very simple thing…

You missed my point. It's not enough to model a persons bias, you also need to model what they know, when they learned it etc. This information flow has massive scaling problems.

100,000 agents is at least 1 million times easier than 100 million agents and you can't parallelize the problem very well due to speed of light propagation issues.

However, 100,000 agents is enough to do a lot of interesting research.

Re: DuckDuckGo grew more than 70% this year

#172

Post by biomcgary »

AdamSC1 wrote: post #121
forgetsusername wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the only way DDG is going to improve search results is by you using it regularly. For what company or product is that not the case? Unfortunately, most people (myself included) aren't interested in integrating inferior products into our lives with the hope that "one day" they might be as good. I decided to default to DDG last year to see how it was, and because my online privacy is worth something. I found the resu…

Hi forgetsusername, The results have come along way over the past year, and we've also added a feedback tool that lets you share with us when you feel an answer was lacking. If you are interested in trying us again sometime I know we'd love to hear the feedback as we aim to provide a great search experience without sacrificing your privacy. We also have our "!Bangs" ( https://duckduckgo.com/bang ) which allow you to…

I use DDG as my default search engine, but I created a bookmarklet that adds g! to my DDG query. I know you don't track users, but do you track queries that are reposted with a bang? It seems like it might give you an indication that the results are not what was expected.

Re: DuckDuckGo grew more than 70% this year

#173

Post by chimeracoder »

Rainymood wrote: post #71
netcan wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think an unavoidable conclusion is that while people may like privacy or some other benefit/function, they are rarely willing to take a hit on the main benefit/function (search results) to get it. It think this is an important thing to learn here as it applies in many cases. Maybe everyone complains about bad behaviour of their insurance company, but that does not mean they'll take a higher premium. Some people car…

>Maybe everyone complains about bad behaviour of their insurance company, but that does not mean they'll take a higher premium Exactly. >There's something here about "consumer" psychology and choices that is hard to capture in the concrete terms economists like to formalize using. That some/most economists like to use. There is a huge field in economics (and econophysics and stuff) that focused on actual irrational b…

> That some/most economists like to use. There is a huge field in economics (and econophysics and stuff) that focused on actual irrational behaviour (like trend-following, trying to time the market, predicting the 'mood' of the market)

Behavioral economics is really interesting, yes, but this isn't even an example of irrational behavior (in the technical meaning of "rational").

What a consumer says they want isn't necessarily the same as what they do want, as determined by their revealed preferences (ie, what they do with their actions). If those are self-consistent, the behavior is rational, even if it contradicts what they say they want.

Re: DuckDuckGo grew more than 70% this year

#174

Post by AznHisoka »

infbtag wrote: post #83
AznHisoka wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is Google an option? They offer no API whatsoever

StartPage uses Google so there must be a way.

They probably scrape Google. Willing to bet there is no deal. Google would never agree to such a thing. Even paying $XXXXX a month isn't worth it to them.

Re: DuckDuckGo grew more than 70% this year

#176

Post by pilooch »

qwertyuiop924 wrote: post #161
pilooch wrote: post #100

DDG is basically a meta-search engine. It is then better to host it yourself with https://github.com/asciimoo/searx Set it up remotely and you basicially have your own DDG.

... but without a company and a community of hackers constantly working to add more backends, more instant answers, more !bangs, and give you better results. So why would I use it?

You don't need a company for building a meta-search engine. And most importantly, if you value privacy, you want the whole meta-thing to be open source, always.

Re: DuckDuckGo grew more than 70% this year

#177

Post by luckydude »

bsbechtel wrote: post #55

Most of the comments here are complaining that, while people like the idea of DDG, the search results are poor. Two comments regarding that: 1) the only way DDG is going to improve search results is by you using it regularly. Using it regularly drives not only revenue, allowing them to hire additional developers, but it also drives feedback to help DDG improve search results. 2) I suspect that the difference in searc…

I switched to DDG maybe 4-5 months ago and it mostly works fine for me. If I suspect it is wrong I !g google it and see if that works better.

For me, the tradeoff is a win, I don't like being the product.

Re: DuckDuckGo grew more than 70% this year

#178

Post by yohui »

will_pseudonym wrote: post #14
muddi900 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use DDG because of custom search 'bangs'. I have gotten rid of a whole bookmark sub folder of custom keyword searches. When I want google, which is less and less often, I just add a '!g' to my search. I doubt DDG will ever catchup to the Big G, but It works.

Is that similar to Chrome's "search engines"? They work really well, and I tend to use google's "site:" filter to search sites that have awful search capabilities.

Yes, and also similar to Firefox bookmark keywords.

e.g. a Chrome search engine or Firefox bookmark with URL "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=%s" and keyword "wp" will return the Wikipedia page for Hacker News if you search "wp Hacker News".

Also works for stuff other than searches, e.g. "https://www.reddit.com/r/%s" with keyword "rr" to quickly navigate to the Hacker News subreddit with "rr hackernews".

Chrome automatically adds search engines, while Firefox requires a bit more manual work: https://support.mozilla.org/kb/how-search-from-address-bar

Re: DuckDuckGo grew more than 70% this year

#179

Post by infbtag »

AznHisoka wrote: post #174
infbtag wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

StartPage uses Google so there must be a way.

They probably scrape Google. Willing to bet there is no deal. Google would never agree to such a thing. Even paying $XXXXX a month isn't worth it to them.

That's what I always thought but according to this they have a contract: https://support.startpage.com/index.php?/Knowledgebase/Artic...

Re: DuckDuckGo grew more than 70% this year

#180

Post by andrea_sdl »

Wow, so many people talking about how DDG is lacking good search results.

Here's my personal experience. I've tried using DDG 2 years ago, and it sucked. In my language (italian) results were poor, and also for general searches.

6 Months ago I gave it a try again, and I've been pleased enough to use it both at work, at home and on my smartphone.

The results are not always perfect, but I find myself using !g bang mainly when I feel there's something missing (which doesn't happen that much) or when I need to find a very selective piece of information.

I also loved the integration with stack overflow. Works nicely, it doesn't always "answer" your question, but just yesterday it did and the moment was like "wow, it's getting interesting".

So, while I admit that DDG may not be ready for prime time yet, I guess there's a chance that many of us (developers, etc) might start liking it and using it constantly.

While it would be naive to say "I wouldn't go back to google", I'm now an happy user of DDG, and I wasn't expecting it to begin with (In fact I was very skeptical).

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