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We can do better than DuckDuckGo

drewdevault.com

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Re: We can do better than DuckDuckGo

#61

Post by ufo »

iuqiddis wrote: post #41
ufo wrote: post #13

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

I'm aware of that. The problem is that you have to manually add all the keywords yourself. AFAIK, there isn't an easy way to import a large list of curated keywords like the DDG bang list.

Re: We can do better than DuckDuckGo

#63

Post by Kiro »

andreareina wrote: post #4

DDG does operate their own crawler[1], though they also do still rely on third parties[2]. [1] https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/du... [2] https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/so...

Their own crawler is only used to fetch things for the widgets, not the search index.

Re: We can do better than DuckDuckGo

#64

Post by flas9sd »

is somebody aware of a project where the end-user Browser acts as a Crawler? it already spent the energy to render the content. Readability.js extracts page section, does some processing for keywords, hashes anchor links, signs it and sends it off. Cache-Control response headers indicate if the page is public or private. Of course, where it is sending to will have an electricity bill to pay to index the submissions.

Re: We can do better than DuckDuckGo

#65

Post by detaro »

ufo wrote: post #61
iuqiddis wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I'm aware of that. The problem is that you have to manually add all the keywords yourself. AFAIK, there isn't an easy way to import a large list of curated keywords like the DDG bang list.

They are bookmarks you can export/import from Firefox, so someone could easily make a Firefox bookmark file for a large set of them.

Re: We can do better than DuckDuckGo

#66

Post by lixtra »

joosters wrote: post #55
mixologic wrote: post #12

How would anybody ever know what the server is running and/or doing with the data you send it, regardless of if it is running open or closed source code? A service, running on somebody else's machine, is essntially closed. I think the only way to have an 'open' service is to have it managed like a co-op, where the users all have access to deployment logs or other such transparency. Even then, it requires implicit tru…

In theory , this is the kind of thing that the GPL v3 was trying to address: roughly speaking, if you host & run a service that is derived from GPL-v3'd software, you are obliged to publish your modifications. But, I agree with you - and I don't think the author had really thought through what they were demanding, they made no mention of licensing other than singing happy praises of FOSS as if that would magically me…

> In theory, this is the kind of thing that the GPL v3 was trying to address: roughly speaking, if you host & run a service that is derived from GPL-v3'd software, you are obliged to publish your modifications.

You mean AGPL https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affero_General_Public_Licens...

Re: We can do better than DuckDuckGo

#67

Post by jedimastert »

flas9sd wrote: post #64

is somebody aware of a project where the end-user Browser acts as a Crawler? it already spent the energy to render the content. Readability.js extracts page section, does some processing for keywords, hashes anchor links, signs it and sends it off. Cache-Control response headers indicate if the page is public or private. Of course, where it is sending to will have an electricity bill to pay to index the submissions.

That's an interesting point...I wouldn't trust the `Cache-Control`, unfortunately, but a distributed indexing model might be interesting...

I know there have been talks of set-ups that essentially take a web archive of your entire history to search back through...

Re: We can do better than DuckDuckGo

#68

Post by jedimastert »

joosters wrote: post #55
mixologic wrote: post #12

How would anybody ever know what the server is running and/or doing with the data you send it, regardless of if it is running open or closed source code? A service, running on somebody else's machine, is essntially closed. I think the only way to have an 'open' service is to have it managed like a co-op, where the users all have access to deployment logs or other such transparency. Even then, it requires implicit tru…

In theory , this is the kind of thing that the GPL v3 was trying to address: roughly speaking, if you host & run a service that is derived from GPL-v3'd software, you are obliged to publish your modifications. But, I agree with you - and I don't think the author had really thought through what they were demanding, they made no mention of licensing other than singing happy praises of FOSS as if that would magically me…

> In theory, this is the kind of thing that the GPL v3 was trying to address: roughly speaking, if you host & run a service that is derived from GPL-v3'd software, you are obliged to publish your modifications.

Why would I trust someone to do that, though?

Re: We can do better than DuckDuckGo

#69

Post by buzzerbetrayed »

mekster wrote: post #56
jedimastert wrote: post #50

> Instead, it should crawl a whitelist of domains, or “tier 1” domains. These would be the limited mainly to authoritative or high-quality sources for their respective specializations, and would be weighed upwards in search results. 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 trustw…

But the email is already like this. It's the inbox providers who choose what domain is legit and new domains start from negative rating. Treating the web the same way doesn't sound too unnatural. It would be bad if those in the positions profit by "authorizing" who is good though.

I'm not sure why email should be an example of the correct way to do it. And with email I can check my spam folder and see exactly what has been rejected. So unless the search engine has a list of sites that aren't deemed worthy included with every search (which probably wouldn't happen), I think this solution has some pretty big flaws. It should be noted that the current system also has these flaws, as Google and DDG can show you whatever they want base don whatever criteria they see fit.

Re: We can do better than DuckDuckGo

#70

Post by eqv »

mekster wrote: post #52
andreareina wrote: post #4

DDG does operate their own crawler[1], though they also do still rely on third parties[2]. [1] https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/du... [2] https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/so...

Author didn't even DDG to find this out?

Drew has a longstanding history of ill-informed rants ([1] [2]) about technology. He's also quite willing to lie about the facts[3].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24121609

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23966778

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24023998

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