431–440 of 1001 posts
I've been using duckduckgo and bing for a while now. Google is just a fallback.
Going back to Google is actually frustrating for me.
Their results are so badly presented and the number of ads so onerous to scroll through...
I wish there was a way to directly help Bing/DuckDuckGo/Yandex improve their search results. I've tried both, and it's just not the same. Google I can bang in cryptic queries like > centos 7 tuned no daemon and get the 3rd link about how to run tuned in a no daemon mode. Bing/DuckDuckGo have the article at around 7th or 8th place, but prefaced by a lot of "while technically not wrong, not what I'm looking for" links.…
I can pretty much only use Google in verbatim mode now
Reminder that almost every Google search bashing thread on HN is most probably injected by DDG. They have been doing that for years and years and it proved to be very effective. It's a amazing that such a mediocre search engine like DDG can be popular only based on rants and accusations on the big guy. But it seems really to be a very effective marketing technique.
Certainly the case for me.
Many don't like Google's new design. Rather than resort to hacks, try an alternative search engine. There are many and you might even find one you like. https://www.qwant.com/ https://www.ecosia.org/ https://duckduckgo.com/ https://www.startpage.com/ https://swisscows.ch/ ...
Qwant, Ecosia, and (to an extent) DDG share the same Bing backend for web results, so if you're particularly interested in trying out alternatives, here are some others. All of these have their own search indexes. https://yippy.com - ugly, but probably the best independent search engine outside the "big ones" and DDG https://private.sh/ - Run by PIA as a proxy for Gigablast, small index but rapidly getting better htt…
The blog referred to: https://0x65.dev/
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Well, as a user, I care about not announcing loudly to Google every single step I take on the web.
Then why are you searching on Google? That's where you would see an AMP page served from a Google AMP cache. If you searched on Bing, you would get AMP pages served from a Bing AMP cache instead.
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> Specifically they also measure metrics like "regret" I explicitly addressed this: > clicking on many results can indicate that they're bad (I click another result because the previous wasn't good), or because they're good (I'm browsing choices). You don't know the reason why I clicked back. Maybe I got what I needed at a glance, and I'm browsing to the next thing to see if there's more of what I need. You don't kno…
I just think you're assuming these search engines are using way fewer factors than they actually use. It's probably exceptionally easy to tie your search behavior to someone else who's much more like you than "the average", unless you're using a search engine like DDG, Qwant, etc. Maybe the best bet is for a search engine to try to include a simple, non-intrusive method of getting user input to determine the usefulne…
I should, then, expect dramatically different results when I use someone else's PC or a public computer. I have not witnessed dramatic differences.
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I understand why it's happening and I mentioned it in my comment. However, I just find it incredibly inappropriate that... 1. When I search an exact domain Google will take money from a competitor and show their "advertisement" first. I say that in quotations, because it looks like they're showing a search result, not an advertisement. At this point it feels like companies are paying for their search placement. Pay e…
To play devil's advocate, these kind of brand ads are usually very cheap and frequently generate some incrementality - you're basically paying to have your links take over a larger part of page 1. Even if competitors weren't going to advertise, it might be worth it.
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Thanks for posting, it's nice to hear from someone on the inside! Downvoters: why on earth are you downvoting Analemma's post? It's constructive, on point and overall the kind of post which makes HN comments valuable.
What I'm about to say will probably get downvoted as well, but I've noticed HN getting more polarized in terms of votes in the last maybe 2 years. Because of the way that downvoting works on HN, the few times I use it, my thought is "nobody should see this comment". Because enough downvotes delegitemize and hide a comment, it's effectively telling other people that it's not worth being read. I don't know if that's ac…
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> I used to work at Bing. If you really want Bing to improve, the best thing you can do is just use it: clicks on search results, plus backs and dwell times, are vital training data. A million flies are attracted to shit. I don't believe this sort of training data will ever become useful if it's in the same pool with the rest of the world. See also: voting with your wallet against the tyranny of the majority of uninf…
A lot of this does, in fact, get solved through machine learning. If one search query is conducted a hundred times by different people with otherwise similar profiles, the machine learning can constantly modify the results until the hundredth person sees the best results first. For example, if the first 25 people all click on the 2nd, 4th, 5th, and 8th result and then stop, it can modify the order of the results for…