271–280 of 490 posts
https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/1220768243318571008
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Agreed. Each time I see something about DDG on HN I try to switch and it never lasts. I don't like the results on DDG and as much as I'd like to move away from Google they've got search on lock.
I don’t fully buy the whole “need to move away from google” part. Yes privacy, yes ads, yes SEO gaming, yes monotechopocolpyse. But the reality is they don’t sell my data, they’ve been a good steward of my search queries over the years (and have tools to clear my history or log me out and not save them), and their product is still the best over two-ish decades. If you’re going to convince me to move away from them, y…
The fact that you don't start all your searches in Google is sufficient reason. You could always jump to Google if DDG has bad results, but for many searches you don't need to leave Google traces.
I'll believe this when the third result for "filled torus" isn't "Cum Filled Pussy Porn Videos" unless safe search is enabled. DDG's contextual awareness is abysmal.
Maybe you just under-estimate the prevalence of porn searches on the Internet? Once could easily argue that your esoteric geometry search is likely not nearly as common as the results they returned you on what they surmised was a porn search with a typo for instance.
A DDG search for "full prison" with safe search off returns, in order: xvideos.com, pornhub.com, xnxx.com, xnxx.com, serco.com (holy shit something actually about prisons sort of), xxxparodyhd.net, pussyspace.com, fox.com/prison-break, youtube.com, youtube.com
That's ridiculously bad. I'm not sure it could be worse if they tried.
If there's one astoundingly obvious way that Google's results are superior, it's that apparently they first ask themselves "is the user looking for porn? [Yes/No]" and then proceed from there.
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No offense, but I literally cannot find anything on GitHub with this search engine.
It's tuned towards discovery, so if you search a topic you'll get results for smaller, new repos that do something around that topic. We deliberately hard downranked common repos but it's also 2 months out of date now since that was to test the waters and we didnt set up recrawling at the time. That said we shared your concerns and have changed things up with how we are approaching it for the beta
Wasn't google criticized here on HN for downranking specific results? If I'm looking for something, probably I'm looking for the most common, I think
A few years ago I switched my desktops to use DDG while leaving my phone using Google. At first I had to !g all the time. Now that’s rare. Now I’m starting to have the other problem. If I search for a company, product, person, etc., on DDG it’s the first hit. But on google I just get a wall of ads and videos, and it’s hard to tell where the actual homepage is for the thing I’m looking for. So as of now I would say, g…
For something obscure, Google ignores three out of four keywords and just produces drivel.
I have noticed that Google's ads have gotten harder and harder to distinguish from the valid results. I use DDG until I have an obscure question, then I have to go back to Google.
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> Don’t use natural language So... its worse. People want to use natural language.
It depends on how you look at it. I want to be specific in my searches, which is why I often use quotes, things like `site:somedomain.com`, etc. That said, that means that DDG is not for everyone. If people want to use Google because they prefer NLP, that's fine, but Google users who trash DDG because it's not smart like Google are totally dismissive of DDG's utility or why people choose it. DDG users on HN, on the o…
this might be true for technical people that don't need accessibility. Nowadays people prefer to use natural language to search, with many people using voice search, either because of preference, or because they need to
I think I've figured out what is happening when people tell me that DuckDuckGo's results "aren't good enough". What's really happening is that they've been trained to search a certain way to using Google and because DDG doesn't have all the historical data of your searches on their platform they can't fill in the gaps as well. After a couple days using DDG I found the right vocabulary to get good local results and wh…
When I search for Fish Tacos on DDG's maps and Google, it's night and day. DDG gave me 4 results, none anywhere near me. Do you have a suggestion for how I could have been more effective?
I'll believe this when the third result for "filled torus" isn't "Cum Filled Pussy Porn Videos" unless safe search is enabled. DDG's contextual awareness is abysmal.
Maybe you just under-estimate the prevalence of porn searches on the Internet? Once could easily argue that your esoteric geometry search is likely not nearly as common as the results they returned you on what they surmised was a porn search with a typo for instance.
The safe search has three levels: "off", "moderate" and "strict".
I would call this the "Adult content" setting, and the choices would be "prefer", "neutral", and "suppress". These would just map exactly to the semantics of the current three choices.
Transitioning to the "prefer" option could require some dialog or check box tick-off to state that the search engine will emphasize adult material, and the user must confirm their adulthood to enable this mode.
Thus under the "Adult content: prefer" setting, you would then be getting what you asked for. Your queries are interpreted as searching for porn, and "filled torus" behaves accordingly.
Since the very presence of such an option might be seen as offensive, or as promoting pornography (i.e. that DDG is effectively a porn search engine since it has an option for preferentially finding adult material), that option could itself be hidden somehow. To access the option at all would require confirming through a dialog.
Also, there should be a "kid friendly" version of duckduckgo at an alternative URL, with immutably safe settings and and possibly altered search behaviors for even greater safety. Parents could point at that, and block/redirect the main one.
With that idea, what if simply one had to go to adult.duckduckgo.com to be able to search with safe-search "off", regardless of their settings? I.e. if you go to duckduckgo.com, then "off" is treated as "moderate". Only at adult.duckduckgo.com is it actually "off".
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When I search for Fish Tacos on DDG's maps and Google, it's night and day. DDG gave me 4 results, none anywhere near me. Do you have a suggestion for how I could have been more effective?
I find DDG more useful when I treat it like it's trying to help me use the internet, rather than like it's trying to replace the internet. try "fish tacos !yelp"