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DuckDuckGo Raises $10M

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Re: DuckDuckGo Raises $10M

#31

Post by anonytrary »

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…

> There's something wrong with that.

I disagree, I think Wikipedia is akin to a collective blog where people just dump information to. Indexing is hard enough that it becomes a full-time job to do it well, and that takes time and money.

Search is so hard that external search is necessary for many websites to exist outside of a void. If we expect blogs to have their own searching functionality, we end up with a collection of disjoint webs, and that would basically kill the web as we know it.

Re: DuckDuckGo Raises $10M

#32

Post by mdaniel »

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 basically have !g programmed into my fingers for everything more complicated

This might be more energy than you're willing to expend, but just in case you were not already aware: there is a feedback icon in the bottom-left(!!!) corner of the page through which you can let them know about your bad experience. My interest in doing that is that in my life it is unreasonable to expect change without letting the other party know of your discontent.

I gravely wish it was just a one button sad-face, but at least it exists. I also would have previously guessed they could have used the presence of `!g` as a proxy for the sad-face, but that's certainly not true if users are preemptively `!g` based on an assumption about the results instead of trying the search first.

Re: DuckDuckGo Raises $10M

#33

Post by Doctor_Fegg »

sam0x17 wrote: post #11

The one thing I find really painful is when I want a localized search like searching for "[chain resturant name] grubhub" and I get results half way across the country. Other than that it's great.

Try using it outside the US. Then you get results halfway across the world. :(

Example: if I search DDG for "Worcester" (a significant city near my home in south-central England), 28 of the top 30 results are Worcester, Massachusetts.

There is a toggle at the top of the page where I can choose "United Kingdom". That fixes it. But the default should be "worldwide" or "localised by IP address", not "US".

Re: DuckDuckGo Raises $10M

#34

Post by carterage »

Larrikin wrote: post #23
carterage wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's a good point. Put another way, were I to run a local copy of a wikipedia mirror, right here in my own bedroom, I'd be putting myself eye-to-eye with any wikipedia employee or volunteer. I'd have the same tools in my hands, as they do. I'd be one person, a PHP script hosted by an apache process, and the wikipedia data set.

But, contrast that to Facebook, and the concept becomes more interesting. Facebook's search utilities are similarly unsatisfying, despite the massive resources of the company. This is probably not a blind spot, but more about the level of quality provided, for free-tier, unprivileged user utilities. Advertisers probably gain better reach, but perhaps without knowing exactly who they reach. Facebook's search tool can't be used to discern the capabilities or qualities of one or more of the indices Facebook uses to negotiate the landscape of their data.

Re: DuckDuckGo Raises $10M

#35

Post by mdaniel »

sam0x17 wrote: post #11

The one thing I find really painful is when I want a localized search like searching for "[chain resturant name] grubhub" and I get results half way across the country. Other than that it's great.

I promise I don't mean this in a snarky way, but: isn't the behavior you're describing almost the exact opposite of not being tracked?

Or, put another way: does "[chain name] grubhub [zipcode]" still do what you are describing?

Heh, as one might expect, "there's a bang for that" which will save you two characters: https://duckduckgo.com/bang?q=grubhub

Re: DuckDuckGo Raises $10M

#36

Post by interdocken »

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've exclusively used DDG for all mobile and desktop searches for years now. I haven't looked back at Google nor have I ever used !g.

Re: DuckDuckGo Raises $10M

#37

Post by cpeterso »

danielmorozoff wrote: post #28
anilshanbhag wrote: post #27

DuckDuckGo claims to be all for privacy. What it doesn't tell users is that it is just a wrapper around Bing search results. The $10M they plan to spend is just going to increase search traffic to Bing.

Is this actually true?

Wikipedia says DuckDuckGo generates "results from over 400 individual sources, including crowdsourced sites such as Wikipedia, and other search engines like Bing, Yahoo!, and Yandex." Even if it was just a proxy to the Bing Search API, DDG users would be unseen by Bing servers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DuckDuckGo

Re: DuckDuckGo Raises $10M

#38

Post by Kenji »

mdaniel wrote: post #32
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 basically have !g programmed into my fingers for everything more complicated This might be more energy than you're willing to expend, but just in case you were not already aware: there is a feedback icon in the bottom-left(!!!) corner of the page through which you can let them know about your bad experience. My interest in doing that is that in my life it is unreasonable to expect change without letting the other…

> My interest in doing that is that in my life it is unreasonable to expect change without letting the other party know of your discontent.

It is unreasonable to expect bad service without personal involvement to make it better. They could check "does a user search for [something], then they search for !g [something]? If yes, we are doing something wrong."

It's not rocket science.

Re: DuckDuckGo Raises $10M

#39

Post by mdaniel »

danielmorozoff wrote: post #28
anilshanbhag wrote: post #27

DuckDuckGo claims to be all for privacy. What it doesn't tell users is that it is just a wrapper around Bing search results. The $10M they plan to spend is just going to increase search traffic to Bing.

Is this actually true?

They cite Bing, Yahoo, and Yandex as "sourced from," and they do list DuckDuckBot as its own thing -- although I am pretty sure they don't have the same resources for running their own distributed crawls as the 3 sources they list:

https://duck.co/help/results/sources

Re: DuckDuckGo Raises $10M

#40

Post by jlarocco »

danielmorozoff wrote: post #28
anilshanbhag wrote: post #27

DuckDuckGo claims to be all for privacy. What it doesn't tell users is that it is just a wrapper around Bing search results. The $10M they plan to spend is just going to increase search traffic to Bing.

Is this actually true?

No, in general it's not. https://duck.co/forum/thread/4350/did-you-know-that-duckduck...

IME, inline results from third party sites (like StackOverflow, images, youtube videos, etc.) are pretty easy to notice when they're included and easy to tell where they came from.

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