One of the issues with Duck Duck go is that it does filter results to the country of the user. As an UK user, when I put in the word flowers or "local programmers", I expect the results to be inclined towards UK pages as this is what will help me. Google does this well! There is no point in showing me stuff in NJ or Canada.
Giving up on Google
121–130 of 192 posts
Re: Giving up on Google
#122I left a few comments below, but I wanted to say thanks for mentioning some searches that Google didn't do well on. They're interesting searches, so I thought I'd break them down: - [avaya 103r manual] It's a fair complaint to say some low-quality results are returned, but there's a reason. Do that search and Google says "About 1,510 results." That's a minuscule number of results--it usually means the web has very li…
>My point on this query is that you can use the left-hand search bar to restrict the results to a certain time range (e.g. only results from the last week, month, or year).
I am amazed at how many users still don't know about this feature. It is one of the best features in google search (that was added recently). Google should promote it better to its users.
Re: Giving up on Google
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
From your mouth to Marissa Meyer's ears. My ultimate Google fantasy: An account setting called "2008 mode." No instant search. No fancy, annoying endless scroll Google image search. No word clustering/auto-substitution. It would be awesome.
Yes, please. The image search has been a pet peeve of mine, especially because of the way the results are provided to the end users. It seems they do everything they can to stop people from visiting actual websites through the image search. Instant search was fun for about 30 seconds. Then it's back to work and then it is rather annoying. At least you can disable it (just to the right of the search bar there is a lit…
I can't think of one time in the 100's of times I've used image search that I cared at all about the actual web sites that the images are from. I wish it was even more direct, right to the images, than it still is, with a small link to the site if I'm interested.
Re: Giving up on Google
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
For me, I remember how great Google was when I started using it around 1999, compared to AltaVista or Metacrawler; it was great because it was able to find results that the other two just couldn't, and it did it quickly. Lately, I've found myself feeling like search is back in 1999 again.
thaumaturgy, if it makes you feel better, search is much better than in was in 1999-2000. When I joined Google in 2000, one thing I did was run a bunch of searches and save the results. When I went back and looked at the data, Google2000 can't compare to Google2010. Google2000 still had lots of spam--it was much, much better than Altavista or other competitors at the time, but the results weren't nearly as good as th…
Those examples would definitely be interesting to read. I'm one of the many people who feels search results have gotten worse, but since I don't have any actual saved search results from 10 years ago it's really hard to say if I'm right or misremembering. Some concrete examples of what Google2000 looked like might be good for jogging the memory.
One example category does come to mind, which is a frequent pet peeve: lyrics searches. They definitely return sort of crappy results currently, but I can't say for sure what they returned in 2000, since I didn't save any results.
Examples:
Imo [joy division walked in line lyrics] should return a page like http://www.joydiv.org/shadowplay/joyd/walkedline.html. Instead it returns a bunch of sites like lyricsfreak.com, sing365.com, lyricsdepot.com, metrolyrics.com, etc.
The case is even stronger if there's actually an official site for the musician with official lyrics. An example of that: [vnv nation fragments lyrics] should return http://www.vnvnation.com/Webfiles/lyrics/fragments.htm, but instead it again returns the usual lyrics-site suspects.
I think my recollection is that I used to get fan sites more than lyrics aggregators in 2000. That might be more due to web changes than Google changes, admittedly, since many of these lyrics aggregators didn't exist in 2000, and hobbyist fan sites may have been more vibrant. The fact that the same lyrics-aggregator sites dominate for almost all the searches seems weird, though; it seems that basically all lyrics searches return "big lyrics site", rather than trying to retrieve a site specializing in the band I searched for.
Re: Giving up on Google
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wow. So, this whole thing started out as a brief rant that's been in my head for a couple of months. Also, I wanted to get rid of those tabs that had been on the far left side of Firefox for ages. I'm not even sure why I posted it to HN; I just did it and then intended to head out the door afterward, except that all of a sudden my web server became unresponsive. Anyway: the ability to get results from the past year i…
People in Google's search quality team really do like to read posts like this as long as someone mentions the searches they were doing. Most feedback posts don't give us enough specifics to go back and figure out what went wrong and how to make things better. We do have a "Give us feedback" link at the bottom of each search results page which does some neat AJAX-y things. But even then, we get a lot of "Hi, I'm tryin…
I have given feedback on search for "BMTC" not returning the official website of BMTC (bmtcinfo.com). (2-3 months back). But the search results haven't changed since then.
Re: Giving up on Google
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
> (BTW, do you have any idea how much extra time you > noscript guys add to web development efforts? Ugg.) I can't quite form words around the feeling, but this feels like a very backwards statement to me.
It's relatively easy these days to make sites that use JS in a smart way to dynamically load content. In the case of this personal site, if JS is on, then all the links do is request a "stripped-down" version of only the content of each post, and then swap that into the main content area. There are no http requests then for the images, background, css, and so on, which is nice for the server. That's all well and good…
I think that's the "backwards" he was talking about. You're building your links to call javascript, then scrambling later to find ways to make them work without.
The accepted way of doing this is to build your links to point to URLs, then use script to override them with whatever dynamic wackiness you think is helpful. You get all sorts of bonuses by doing it that way (such as ctrl-click, save target as, etc.) without any of the downside you go on about.
And it's not any harder to implement.
Re: Giving up on Google
#127Well, as a single sample, I tried the first thing that came to mind in google and duckduckgo. "breast shimming" which refers to the process of adjusting the magnetic field of a MRI scanner to obtain images of the breast (relevant to a project I'm working on). Every single duckduckgo result is irrelevant. Most of googles results are relevant. It's too bad because google is somewhat hit or miss for me. Someone needs to…
Did you turn safe search off on DDG? When I gave these queries a go, I noticed that DDG stripped "breast" out of the query. The results seemed much more relevant once safe search was disabled.
Not that I'd want to go around with safe search disabled all the time...
Re: Giving up on Google
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
Personally, I wish someone I like, like Colin Percival, would start an email service. I like the way he runs Tarsnap.
The problem with starting an e-mail service is the crazy level of administration and sysadmin headaches it induces merely to be able to reliably send e-mail to 90%+ of endpoints.. let alone anything else. The engineering problem is a pretty interesting one, but the headache of ensuring your users can actually get their mail someplace makes it seem dull or insurmountable to solo developers.
Yeah, I second this. Handling people's email is not fun at all, and 90% is way too low IMO. 90% would mean that 1 in 10 of someone's emails wouldn't make it to where it was supposed to.
Users start to get annoyed if you do any worse than 99.9%, and they don't like receiving any spam at all, and to make matters worse, "the other end" can be anything from a creaky old sendmail server to an Exchange monstrosity, either of which can communicate in odd ways or drop a message altogether.
I keep expecting to see email go the way of Usenet, but it keeps refusing to die.
Re: Giving up on Google
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wow. So, this whole thing started out as a brief rant that's been in my head for a couple of months. Also, I wanted to get rid of those tabs that had been on the far left side of Firefox for ages. I'm not even sure why I posted it to HN; I just did it and then intended to head out the door afterward, except that all of a sudden my web server became unresponsive. Anyway: the ability to get results from the past year i…
People in Google's search quality team really do like to read posts like this as long as someone mentions the searches they were doing. Most feedback posts don't give us enough specifics to go back and figure out what went wrong and how to make things better. We do have a "Give us feedback" link at the bottom of each search results page which does some neat AJAX-y things. But even then, we get a lot of "Hi, I'm tryin…
People in Google's search quality team really do like to read posts like this as long as someone mentions the searches they were doing.
Okay, here goes. Lately I have been doing a lot of C# searches. Google suggest strips out the hash (#) from the suggest items, so I keep getting faked out by likely C programming matches. Can you please stop stripping off the "#"? Otherwise, I'll need to attach a hot wire to my down arrow to break the habit. Thanks.
Re: Giving up on Google
#130Not going to comment on Google, but about Duck Duck Go, I really like the service! Especially the !Bang feature and the keyboard shortcuts. I'm using it as a secondary search engine (after Google that is ;)) If someone wants to add Duck Duck Go to search engines in Opera, here's how (my own screenshot): http://twitpic.com/24ex2e
>If someone wants to add Duck Duck Go to search engines in Opera, here's how (my own screenshot):
No such hackery required - it's Opera after all! There's a "Create Search" context menu these days, and it works on any text box.
In summary, just right click the search text box, click "Create Search". Even the DDG homepage says so!
I've been using it for quite some time now, but my gripe about DDG still remains; javascript should not be essential for a search engine.