At some point, we're going to cut the branding middle-man, and put Bing on the front page of HN as a viable alternative to Google Search. Not as sexy as the high-minded front organizations that reskin it, but it'd be nice if we could be honest with ourselves about the beasts we were feeding.
I just did a search on our business and the results were not the same, just like DDG and Bing isn't the same. From best to worst result on the same search string: Google > Startpage > Qwant > Bing > DDG But even if they were 100% identical, it has some privacy unlike 3 out of the other 4.
Qwant: The Search Engine That Respects Your Privacy
61–70 of 110 posts
Re: Qwant: The Search Engine That Respects Your Privacy
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
The main barrier to enter the search market is not tech, it's money: https://0x65.dev/blog/2019-12-22/google-competition-is-just-... And of course there are lots of other issues. For example the Web is very hostile when you are not Google Bot (i.e. there are a lot of big sites that will forbid you from crawling their content, unless you are Google, or Bing).
The money mentioned in that article is about being the default search engine, not being a functional one. Basically the question I'm asking is why DDG has to outsource to Bing. > there are a lot of big sites that will forbid you from crawling their content, unless you are Google, or Bing If you're talking about robots.txt, that's just a suggestion. It doesn't hold any actual preventative power.
Re: Qwant: The Search Engine That Respects Your Privacy
#63Re: Qwant: The Search Engine That Respects Your Privacy
#64Maybe this is naive, but I don't understand what Google's impenetrable moat is around search. It's a hard technical problem, but not one with a concrete barrier to entry. And there are lots of really smart people solving really hard technical problems out in the open. On top of that, much of the recent progress in AI is open-source. Surely that could help? I guess indexing at that scale takes a lot of hardware. This…
Re: Qwant: The Search Engine That Respects Your Privacy
#65I use the putlocker test to determine if/when a search engine ceases to provide useful results. If a search for putlocker only yields .com domains and the like, it no is longer prioritizing the most useful results. Google long ago stopped returning useful results for my academic research. For example, it never returns Wikipedia articles unless I explicitly use Wikipedia as a keyword, which I now have to do for most o…
Re: Qwant: The Search Engine That Respects Your Privacy
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's just a front for Bing. The company is pure hype, no results.
lol you're right. The results are identical.
Re: Qwant: The Search Engine That Respects Your Privacy
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
DDG isn't just a rebrand of Bing (and wouldn't be even if they did all searches via Bing); they don't pass personal information along to Bing that would allow Microsoft to track the user.
So just like Qwant except no ties to the US.
But since that country is part of 9-eyes IIRC, I wouldn't place a lot of faith on that
Re: Qwant: The Search Engine That Respects Your Privacy
#68Re: Qwant: The Search Engine That Respects Your Privacy
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
Startpage.com's new owner makes it less private than doing a search on Facebook while logged into your Google Chrome account.
What is a "Chrome account"? Web browsers ask users to "sign-up" now? For what?
Re: Qwant: The Search Engine That Respects Your Privacy
#70Maybe this is naive, but I don't understand what Google's impenetrable moat is around search. It's a hard technical problem, but not one with a concrete barrier to entry. And there are lots of really smart people solving really hard technical problems out in the open. On top of that, much of the recent progress in AI is open-source. Surely that could help? I guess indexing at that scale takes a lot of hardware. This…
Indexing isn't the hard part. Ranking is. For any given query, there are probably millions of web pages that match. How do you pick the best ones to show the user? How do you do that even when most people are really bad at expressing what they want? Even if all websites were acting in good faith, this would be a really hard problem. Now add in the fact that there's an $80 billion industry devoted to gaming search res…
(Maybe that’s what the average users are looking for, though.)