Elevating original reporting in Search • Hacker News Board

Re: Elevating original reporting in Search

#161

Post by concordDance » Sun, Sep 15, 2019, 10:04 AM UTC

manfredzab wrote: post #85

frogpelt wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same here. Often, I have to rephrase my search 5-10 times before I see a result worth clicking on.

Hey -- do you have an example? (I work on Search.)

Not the parent, but a recent example of a failed search for me was:

"Saerang story lord of the rings"

The most important term got dropped and needed to be quoted to actually find what I wanted.

A separate and more concerning problem with Search is the emphasis on shallow information without outgoing links for more depth. The majority of searches on many topics (medical topics for example) will have the top results be "terminal" webpages that offer only a very shallow look at a topic without any way of finding more detailed information.

For example, when I attempted to look for a comprehensive breakdown of biodegredation of plastics (e.g. what kinds of environments reduce/increase biodegrading time, what types of plastics have longer times and why) I just kept finding pages by various advocacy groups that talked in vague generalities and offered no opportunities for further research.

Re: Elevating original reporting in Search

#162

Post by crispinb » Sun, Sep 15, 2019, 11:52 PM UTC

rjf72 wrote: post #158

crispinb wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When trying DDG again for a while, my use of g! gradually increases as a necessary tactic to surface what I'm looking for. When it gets to over about 80% I go back to using Google again with a sigh.

Can you give some examples? I think a few years ago this was somewhat reasonable but in my opinion DDG has not only matched but surpassed Google for most searches. As an example (to not make this as if I'm only asking you to do the lifting) a random search that's relevant for me would be 'spacex rocket thrust.' Since Google's results are based on arbitrary tracking and whatever per user magic marketing metrics they d…

No I don't have examples to hand. Search isn't something I'm interested in really - it's just a kind of commodity to me that I want to get out of my way.

The trend is entirely clear for my search usage though - I just don't find what I'm looking for much of the time with DDG, so end up g!'ing. When that usage reaches a certain subjective redundancy threshhold I switch back to google.

Re: Elevating original reporting in Search

#163

Post by sails » Wed, Sep 18, 2019, 7:41 PM UTC

nvrspyx wrote: post #55

sails wrote: post #48

I'm all in on DuckduckGo. No longer doing !g as I don't accept the Google privacy policy (although I have peaked behind the popup using Ublock)

If you ever need Google results, just use !s for Startpage instead. It pulls Google results in a privacy respecting way, similar to DDG.

thanks!