41–50 of 383 posts
One thing I always wished for is if there were a way to use duckduckgo bang searches in my browser without sending them through DDG. But apparently it's harder to implement than it sounds.
I'd love a truly open source world class search engine. Curious how both the crawler and the search index / search is done by the likes of Google/Bing/DDG. Eventually someone will make an oss version of it that can compete. The beauty of such oss solution maybe the custom heuristics that can be created based off the crawled data.
The challenges to OSS developers are numerous. First of all, many popular sites on the internet block crawlers other than Google and Bing, because only those ones seem to matter to their business, and any small upstart would be assumed to be a dodgy bot. Secondly, Google amasses the database it has only with vast data centers, incredible amounts of bandwidth, and power requirements unavailable to a startup.
> they’ve demonstrated gross incompetence in privacy Not sure I buy the example that is given here. 1. It's an issue in their browser app, not their search service. 2. It's not completely indefensible: it allows fetching favicons (potentially) much faster, since they're cached, and they promise that the favicon service is 100% anonymous anyway. 3. They responded to user feedback and switched to fetching favicons loca…
Maybe instead of hard-coding these preferences in the search engine, or having it try to guess for you based on your search history, you can opt-in to download and apply such lists of ranking modifiers to your user profile. Those lists would be maintained by 3rd parties and users, just like eg. adblock blacklists and whitelists. For example, Python devs might maintain a list of search terms and associated urls that g…
Just do it.
One thing I always wished for is if there were a way to use duckduckgo bang searches in my browser without sending them through DDG. But apparently it's harder to implement than it sounds.
In Firefox you can right click on a search field and add a keyword bookmark. Once saved, you can type 'kw search query', where kw is your defined key word, in the address bar to directly search the relevant site
> they’ve demonstrated gross incompetence in privacy Not sure I buy the example that is given here. 1. It's an issue in their browser app, not their search service. 2. It's not completely indefensible: it allows fetching favicons (potentially) much faster, since they're cached, and they promise that the favicon service is 100% anonymous anyway. 3. They responded to user feedback and switched to fetching favicons loca…
Maybe instead of hard-coding these preferences in the search engine, or having it try to guess for you based on your search history, you can opt-in to download and apply such lists of ranking modifiers to your user profile. Those lists would be maintained by 3rd parties and users, just like eg. adblock blacklists and whitelists. For example, Python devs might maintain a list of search terms and associated urls that g…
As I understand it, you'd want to continue to search the whole "unbiased" web, then apply different filters / weights on every search. I really do like the idea, but I imagine we'd be talking about an increase in compute requirements of several orders of magnitude for each search as a result.
Maybe something like this could be made a paid feature, with a certain set of reasonable filters / weights made the default.
I think this person actually means "We can imagine doing better than DuckDuckGo".
I like this idea. It would be interesting to see the domains of every search query that I have clicked on and see what the distributions is like. I suspect there would be a long tail but I wonder how many domains actually need to be indexed for 99% of my personal search needs. Does anyone have data like this?
Not a big fan of this conclusion. Who chooses the white list, and why should I trust them? Is it democratically chosen? Just because a site is popular very clear does not mean it's trustworthy. Does it get vetted? by whom? Also, who's definition of trustworthy are we trusting?
If I want my blog to show up on your search engine, do I have to get it linked by one of those sites, or can I register with you? Will I be tier 1, or