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We can do better than DuckDuckGo

drewdevault.com

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Re: We can do better than DuckDuckGo

#131

Post by Aeolun »

dumbfounder wrote: post #85

Yes, we can do better than DDG. But if you are expecting to fund a real search engine with a few hundred thousand dollars you are insane. It will take a ton of development and a ton of hardware to create an index that isn't a pile of garbage. This isn't 2000 anymore. You need to index >100 billion pages and you need it updated and you need great crawling and parsing and you need great algorithms and probably an entir…

If you want a good engine there is no need to index 100B pages, since 99% of the pages are blogspam.

Re: We can do better than DuckDuckGo

#132

Post by x87678r »

I dont want privacy, I want competition. Which is why I use Bing and honestly it works virtually all the time.

Maybe there could be some pure anonymous ad-free search engine but it more realistic to have alternative commercial one. I really dont care that people are looking at my searches for how to resize an array or cheap hotels in Florida.

Re: We can do better than DuckDuckGo

#133

Post by SNosTrAnDbLe »

wcerfgba wrote: post #105

I wonder if instead of another search engine we would benefit from a directory, like DMOZ, or perhaps something tag based or non-hierarchical. Sometimes I find better results by first finding a good website in space of my query, and then searching within that site, as opposed to applying a specific query over all websites. Once example would be recipes: if you search for "bean burger recipe" you will get lots of resu…

Yeah. Exactly my thoughts. I really liked the concept of del.icio.us. where humans could bookmark and tag web sites.

dmoz looks pretty great but the categories look limiting.

Re: We can do better than DuckDuckGo

#134

Post by staunch »

We have to make sure to include highly relevant advertisements in the search results, at least 50% of the results should be ads. So there needs to be a marketplace for buying/selling ads.

We can't have a search engine that is only useful for finding the most relevant web pages for a given query. People love highly relevant advertisement in their search results.

Re: We can do better than DuckDuckGo

#135

Post by djsumdog »

neurobashing wrote: post #77

Am I the only person who just doesn't have problems with DDG search results? What am I doing wrong (or right), here? I put a thing in and find it. I just don't use Google any more. Genuinely curious why it's working for me and such garbage for everyone else.

I say about 50% I'm good with DDG. About 1/3 of the time I add !g, usually for weird error messages and tech stuff.

Honestly we shouldn't be using Google for everything. Why not just search StackExchange or Github issues directly for known bug problems? If you need a movie, !imdb or !rt forward you to exactly where you want to really search on.

If DDG or Google also included independent small blogs for movie results, I could see the value in that. I'd prefer someone's review on their own site or video channel, but it doesn't. We've kinda lost that part of the Internet.

Re: We can do better than DuckDuckGo

#136

Post by pizza234 »

neurobashing wrote: post #77

Am I the only person who just doesn't have problems with DDG search results? What am I doing wrong (or right), here? I put a thing in and find it. I just don't use Google any more. Genuinely curious why it's working for me and such garbage for everyone else.

I've tried DDG for a while, around a couple of years ago, and I had lower-quality results particularly for technical subjects (which are the vast majority of my searches). I will give DDG another shot, though.

Re: We can do better than DuckDuckGo

#137

Post by abalaji »

This is why search is hard: 15% of Google searches are new each day. [1] And, with over 1.7+ billion web pages, [2] it would take a gargantuan open source effort to put something together like this.

Not to mention the cost, not sure something like this could be sustained with a Wikipedia-esque "please donate $15" fundraising model.

[1] https://searchengineland.com/google-reaffirms-15-searches-ne...

[2] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/09/chart-of-the-day-how-...

Re: We can do better than DuckDuckGo

#138

Post by ricardo81 »

dumbfounder wrote: post #85

Yes, we can do better than DDG. But if you are expecting to fund a real search engine with a few hundred thousand dollars you are insane. It will take a ton of development and a ton of hardware to create an index that isn't a pile of garbage. This isn't 2000 anymore. You need to index >100 billion pages and you need it updated and you need great crawling and parsing and you need great algorithms and probably an entir…

Agreed, it's going to require significant investment in hardware and software.

The recent UK Competitions and Market Authority report evaluating Google and the UK search market came to the conclusion a new entrant would require about 18 Billion GBP in capital to become a credible alternative search engine, in terms of size, quality, hardware, man hours making it.

Remember Cuil? Had the size, the fanfare but unfortunately not the quality.

Re: We can do better than DuckDuckGo

#140

Post by ablanco »

x87678r wrote: post #132

I dont want privacy, I want competition. Which is why I use Bing and honestly it works virtually all the time. Maybe there could be some pure anonymous ad-free search engine but it more realistic to have alternative commercial one. I really dont care that people are looking at my searches for how to resize an array or cheap hotels in Florida.

This "nothing to hide" argument has been pretty analized, and in my opinion, it's really dangerous. https://spreadprivacy.com/three-reasons-why-the-nothing-to-h...
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