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DuckDuckGo Raises $10M

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Re: DuckDuckGo Raises $10M

#21

Post by carterage »

news_to_me wrote: post #10
mLuby wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have the same muscle memory, but I don't think it's a bad thing. Basically I only use !g when normal DDG doesn't give me what I'm looking for, and half the time !g doesn't have it either. The only thing I can't abandon is !gmaps. And I'm just discovering a bunch of other ! commands that make DDG significantly more useful that Google (eg !esen).

I've found that "!w", which searches Wikipedia, is extremely useful.

One thing that consistently blows my mind is how readily an external search engine creates a better index, with more relevant recall, by scraping the published static pages of Wikipedia, such that it outperforms Wikipedia's own search,

Wikipedia should be able to search itself better than any external entity, but cannot. Wikipedia, in effect, is blind to its own data, and can deliver less insight into it's own content than multiple external Search entities.

If I use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search for anything, I get weaker results, than if I use search engines to locate wikipedia articles according to the same input string.

There's something wrong with that.

Re: DuckDuckGo Raises $10M

#22

Post by barking »

carterage wrote: post #21
news_to_me wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've found that "!w", which searches Wikipedia, is extremely useful.

One thing that consistently blows my mind is how readily an external search engine creates a better index, with more relevant recall, by scraping the published static pages of Wikipedia, such that it outperforms Wikipedia's own search, Wikipedia should be able to search itself better than any external entity, but cannot. Wikipedia, in effect, is blind to its own data, and can deliver less insight into it's own conten…

The same is true for every forum I know of, in fact a lot of them now have a google search box that gives site specific results

Re: DuckDuckGo Raises $10M

#23

Post by Larrikin »

carterage wrote: post #21
news_to_me wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've found that "!w", which searches Wikipedia, is extremely useful.

One thing that consistently blows my mind is how readily an external search engine creates a better index, with more relevant recall, by scraping the published static pages of Wikipedia, such that it outperforms Wikipedia's own search, Wikipedia should be able to search itself better than any external entity, but cannot. Wikipedia, in effect, is blind to its own data, and can deliver less insight into it's own conten…

Search isn't easy and I would fully expect a company that specializes in search to provide better search results than an entity that simply has search as a feature to their main product. Since Wikipedia provides all of their pages for indexing, unlike Facebook for example, a good search experience would be an MVP for any competent search company.

Re: DuckDuckGo Raises $10M

#25

Post by vzaliva »

When I noticed that DDG is using (among other sources) Yandex.ru (Russian search engine) index I've stopped using it.

It is not a question of privacy but rather a question of trust and bias. Of course YMMV.

Re: DuckDuckGo Raises $10M

#26

Post by fbreton »

mLuby wrote: post #7
newfocogi wrote: post #4

I have been using DDG for about a year now, although I had tried using it years ago. It works fine for simple queries( e.g. search name of company rather than typing out url). But I basically have !g programmed into my fingers for everything more complicated. Many times when I don't find the results I am looking for, I subconsciously assume that google would be able to find them. This is in comparison to when I canno…

I have the same muscle memory, but I don't think it's a bad thing. Basically I only use !g when normal DDG doesn't give me what I'm looking for, and half the time !g doesn't have it either. The only thing I can't abandon is !gmaps. And I'm just discovering a bunch of other ! commands that make DDG significantly more useful that Google (eg !esen).

You can use !m instead of !gmaps.

Re: DuckDuckGo Raises $10M

#30

Post by agrippanux »

mLuby wrote: post #7
newfocogi wrote: post #4

I have been using DDG for about a year now, although I had tried using it years ago. It works fine for simple queries( e.g. search name of company rather than typing out url). But I basically have !g programmed into my fingers for everything more complicated. Many times when I don't find the results I am looking for, I subconsciously assume that google would be able to find them. This is in comparison to when I canno…

I have the same muscle memory, but I don't think it's a bad thing. Basically I only use !g when normal DDG doesn't give me what I'm looking for, and half the time !g doesn't have it either. The only thing I can't abandon is !gmaps. And I'm just discovering a bunch of other ! commands that make DDG significantly more useful that Google (eg !esen).

I use !npm which is pretty great if you'd doing node dev
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