Earlier quoted context omitted.
Documentation suggests Google never stopped doing this. https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/2466433?hl=en suggests "phrase inside quotes" is still exact match. And if you put a single word in "quotes", that indicates to Google the word must be included in the results (I determined this by searching for something where some words were omitted, then clicking the small "Must include:" link under a result and not…
You can go test it for yourself: it definitely no longer works!
Nothing Can Stop Google. DuckDuckGo Is Trying Anyway
241–250 of 252 posts
Re: Nothing Can Stop Google. DuckDuckGo Is Trying Anyway
#242Earlier quoted context omitted.
My guess, <1%. I would be happy to be refuted with real data. Creating and maintaining a global scale high quality search engine requires a huge team with billion dollar level resources. They have neither, for now.
Expressing cynicism and demanding to be proven wrong is not an effective argument strategy. If your goal is to convince others, you should collect the data yourself and share it with them.
Apparently they only use this data for simple question and answer queries, because they do not disclose breakdown of query types i can not certainly know the numbers, and i made an optimistic guess. Also i don't think my points regarding building a real search engine were unfair. Do you disagree with any of these? I express cynicism because of lack on transparency on their side.
Re: Nothing Can Stop Google. DuckDuckGo Is Trying Anyway
#243Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wish I could tell ddg that I only care about postgresql. It seems heavily skewed to oracle/ms server when searching anything sql related. Perhaps because it's powered by Bing?
I wish I could tell DDG that I don't give a shit about Python 2.7. Stop linking me to the Python 2 doc! I haven't used Python 2 in five years!
It's the same for postgresql. Search 'postgresql select' and the first result is to a 9 year old postgresql version's docs.
Re: Nothing Can Stop Google. DuckDuckGo Is Trying Anyway
#244Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wish I could tell DDG that I don't give a shit about Python 2.7. Stop linking me to the Python 2 doc! I haven't used Python 2 in five years!
You do realize what you're asking for is personalization, right?
Personalization would be asking the system to learn that I don't want Python 2.x. I want to be able to tell the search to exclude Python 2.x results. It's like the difference between me creating a bookmark and the browser generating a "favorite sites" list.
Re: Nothing Can Stop Google. DuckDuckGo Is Trying Anyway
#245Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can go test it for yourself: it definitely no longer works!
Works for me. Link to a query?
Here is a great example:
https://www.google.com/search?q=%22Documentation+around+this...
Links to this page, but says "no results found, showing related results"
Re: Nothing Can Stop Google. DuckDuckGo Is Trying Anyway
#246Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh? Let's pick an easy market to judge this against, then. I know! Let's talk about smartphones. Surely the largest company on the planet is a quasi-monopoly in this space... oh, but they're not. In fact, Apple's not even a majority leader in just the USA, and the numbers favor them even less globally. There is clearly a choice in the cell phone market between privacy, quality and cost, and people are making those ch…
It depends on the market really. In some markets, there are strong effects where anybody but the market leader is at a super strongly disadvantageous position. In the smartphone market this is not the case. You can buy from various SOC vendors, you can put Android onto your phone, you can do all of this while competing with other companies. There isn't much of an intrinsic benefit that e.g. Samsung has. For search, i…
Fair points, also depressing ones.
Re: Nothing Can Stop Google. DuckDuckGo Is Trying Anyway
#247Earlier quoted context omitted.
Works for me. Link to a query?
Here is a great example: https://www.google.com/search?q=%22Documentation+around+this... Links to this page, but says "no results found, showing related results"
Interesting. If the bolding of the match is to be believed, it looks like the algorithm is dropping joining words and words too common to provide useful search signal, but as a result doesn't have enough data in the backing corpus to be confident it has an exact match, as you requested.
DDG on the same query gives exactly that page but nothing else. I wouldn't be surprised if Google finds that to be an inferior experience (because the common use case is people kind of remember a quote, but don't remember it exactly, so a few words out of place would false-negative the search where the answer the requester is looking for is edit-adjacent to the input).
Re: Nothing Can Stop Google. DuckDuckGo Is Trying Anyway
#248Earlier quoted context omitted.
Here is a great example: https://www.google.com/search?q=%22Documentation+around+this... Links to this page, but says "no results found, showing related results"
Interesting. If the bolding of the match is to be believed, it looks like the algorithm is dropping joining words and words too common to provide useful search signal, but as a result doesn't have enough data in the backing corpus to be confident it has an exact match, as you requested. DDG on the same query gives exactly that page but nothing else. I wouldn't be surprised if Google finds that to be an inferior exper…
It looks like this particular example is actually due to the "+word" in the quote.
Here's everything up to but excluding "+word": https://www.google.com/search?q="Documentation+around+this+i...
And including "+word":https://www.google.com/search?q="Documentation+around+this+i...
Re: Nothing Can Stop Google. DuckDuckGo Is Trying Anyway
#249Back in the day, before I just defaulted to using Google, I remember checking multiple search engines to find the thing I was looking for. You'd check Yahoo/Google/Lycos, try a couple of different phrasings, and then if that didn't work try searching on a few other search engines. Somewhere along the way, Google had won me over, because I almost always found my answer. I had stopped even considering other search engi…
The main reason that forces me to extend my search from ddg to google is when I need to filter by past year. Why doesn't ddg have this ability yet?
Me too. I want to see last year very often, last month not so much.
Re: Nothing Can Stop Google. DuckDuckGo Is Trying Anyway
#250Earlier quoted context omitted.
FWIW, I do recall DDG regularly giving me results for Melbourne, Florida (when I actually want Melbourne, Australia). E.g. if I search for "Melbourne" rel="nofollow">https://duckduckgo.com/?q=melbourne+restaurant&t=ffab&atb=v1... Restaurant" , the first result is FL. "Melbourne Indian Restaurant" is a bit better, but half of the front page results are still FL. "Melbourne weather" always used to return FL, but that l…
Interesting, where are you searching from? This is what I see when searching from the UK: https://i.imgur.com/XIxo4Jx.png Quite clearly Melbourne, Australia. Maybe if you're in Florida it'll bias towards there.
Searching from Melbourne, Australia.
Screenshot here:
https://imagebin.ca/v/4UYChGqqIEQy
(The ad is geolocating correctly, but the first actual search result is "Melbourne Brevard County Florida")