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DuckDuckGo announces partnership with Yahoo

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Re: DuckDuckGo announces partnership with Yahoo

#41
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good things dont scale. Sergey Brin & Larry Page could have been the old Japanese man in the subway station sushi joint making the the best bites of a lifetime for a few hundred humans a day. They decided to go a different route.

I don't think I follow. A good web search engine cannot be a niche product with a few users. The bigger the resources, the better the results. That's an impossible problem to overcome by merely being really good at something. DDG overcomes it, reasonably effectively, by getting results from a huge list of partners. If there weren't huge companies offering search APIs, DDG simply couldn't compete with Google (without…

I think the implication is for Google to just do search. Nothing else. Not to be niche product with a few users.

Re: DuckDuckGo announces partnership with Yahoo

#42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So they data mine this traffic at the nameserver level, just to reasonably say that DDG doesn't share info? Making it technically your computer sharing the info, by way of their forced implementation? Seems like the ad blockers are making the right move here.

This comment is puzzling, since authoritative nameservers only see actual end-user traffic on an occasional basis given the cornucopia of resolver caches in near-unanimous use (as well as the fat TTL on the yahoo.net side of the delegation). This denies Yahoo! the reliable data that you seem to think they've successfully pulled over on everyone, at least if I understand your comment correctly which I'll admit I'm hav…

Just being devils advocate here, but wouldn't the cache rate be more or less uniform and able to be interpolated out into real traffic numbers?

If yahoo observes that every 1 in 3 yahoo.com requests in NS lookups then they could still figure out the traffic?

In practice.... i doubt this is valuable data at all.

Re: DuckDuckGo announces partnership with Yahoo

#43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comment is puzzling, since authoritative nameservers only see actual end-user traffic on an occasional basis given the cornucopia of resolver caches in near-unanimous use (as well as the fat TTL on the yahoo.net side of the delegation). This denies Yahoo! the reliable data that you seem to think they've successfully pulled over on everyone, at least if I understand your comment correctly which I'll admit I'm hav…

Just being devils advocate here, but wouldn't the cache rate be more or less uniform and able to be interpolated out into real traffic numbers? If yahoo observes that every 1 in 3 yahoo.com requests in NS lookups then they could still figure out the traffic? In practice.... i doubt this is valuable data at all.

I can't grok what you're asking me but I'm almost certain the answer is no, as you've already inferred. Extrapolating DNS analytics to actionable intel is incredibly misleading in nearly every case on the service side, particularly since there are a number of caches that consider TTL a guideline and since large shared caches are commonplace.

Understanding what your company is doing if you run the resolver is where it makes more sense. But on the service side? You might as well hire a cat to report metrics by pawing a ouija board, and then you at least get cuddles with your random numbers.

Think of it this way: DNS is basically a different form of ARP, in a certain manner of speaking. I wouldn't try to quantify performance data from either except to troubleshoot operations.

Re: DuckDuckGo announces partnership with Yahoo

#44

Yeah been seeing the Yahoo logo on the bottom right of my DDG results, for a couple weeks now. Not going to be moving away because of this, we'll see if it gets even better.

I'm still getting Yandex, guess Gabe's algo suspects I'm not much of an ad clicker :-)

Which is funny since I have changed my hosts file and use uBlock Origin and extensions like that for anything that might have missed.

Re: DuckDuckGo announces partnership with Yahoo

#45
I want to use DDG. I've made it my default search engine. But the result page is just so slow. Both in slow to load (v Google), and actual responsiveness. It's just slightly laggy, or at least it feels like that. Google has neither problem. I'm willing to put up with not-excellent relevancy, but the slowness is killing me.

I'm using FF 49 64-bit on Win8. Am I anomalous or does anyone else feel this at all?

Re: DuckDuckGo announces partnership with Yahoo

#46
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good things dont scale. Sergey Brin & Larry Page could have been the old Japanese man in the subway station sushi joint making the the best bites of a lifetime for a few hundred humans a day. They decided to go a different route.

I don't think I follow. A good web search engine cannot be a niche product with a few users. The bigger the resources, the better the results. That's an impossible problem to overcome by merely being really good at something. DDG overcomes it, reasonably effectively, by getting results from a huge list of partners. If there weren't huge companies offering search APIs, DDG simply couldn't compete with Google (without…

[deleted]

Re: DuckDuckGo announces partnership with Yahoo

#47
post #11
post #9

Always loved DuckDuckgo - kinda came across as a search engine that didn't seek to takeover the world, and only sought to fill a (necessary) niche. That seems more genuine than "don't be evil".

Google originally won everyone over with superior results, the rest of it came pretty organically. The underdog is always everyone's favorite until they somehow wind up on top.

Seems the key is to continually use the underdog.

Re: DuckDuckGo announces partnership with Yahoo

#48
DDG is a meta search engine that uses mainly Yahoo and/or Yandex (depending on the region).

Yahoo had turned their Yahoo BOSSS API (acccess to Bing search engine) from free to pay-for-each-1000-queries and completely discontinued the API earlier this year. So now we learn DDG gets access, but no one else of the smaller fishes (other meta search engines, etc).

Re: DuckDuckGo announces partnership with Yahoo

#49

I want to use DDG. I've made it my default search engine. But the result page is just so slow. Both in slow to load (v Google), and actual responsiveness. It's just slightly laggy, or at least it feels like that. Google has neither problem. I'm willing to put up with not-excellent relevancy, but the slowness is killing me. I'm using FF 49 64-bit on Win8. Am I anomalous or does anyone else feel this at all?

I generally have no problems with it. I've tried FF/Chrome on Win8/10 and Arch. The load time might be marginally slower than google but the UI is fine.
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