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We can do better than DuckDuckGo

drewdevault.com

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Re: We can do better than DuckDuckGo

#241

Post by chris_f »

bscphil wrote: post #179
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…

> 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 I think what I'd say in defense is that we've misunderstood what search engines are useful for. They're really bad at helping us discover new things. Your blog might be awesome, but it's not going to be easy for a search engine to tell that it's awesome. It's going t…

> For example this is the #2 result for "python f strings" on DDG[1]. It's total garbage, and, quoting the blog, "we can do better". (This result is also on page 1 for the same query on Google.)

There are other options that may be better, but in general, very few people are looking for them.

Here's your "python f strings" query on Runnaroo:

https://www.runnaroo.com/search?term=python+f+strings

I'm the creator of Runnaroo.

Re: We can do better than DuckDuckGo

#242

Post by switch11 »

I agree 100% with the fact that we can do better than DuckDuckGo

A) DDG is already better than Google for some search queries

B) I use Epic Search and that is good, though it just uses Yahoo or Bing results (not sure which)

C) We should have a lot of search engines

It should not be Google paying $8 billion a year to Apple and $X a year to Firefox/Mozilla and leveraging Google Search as Default in Chrome

and monopolizing search

Re: We can do better than DuckDuckGo

#243

Post by soraminazuki »

kringdom89 wrote: post #222
jimnotgym wrote: post #207

> The search results suck Do they really though, for normal people that is?. Some of my searches today below, can't remember the exact terms I used. Mix of DDG and Google. 1) Walt Whitman, I wanted a basic overview of his work to satisfy some idle curiosity. DDG gave me his wikipedia page. Bingo 2) EAN-13 check digit. First result wikipedia telling me how to calculate it. I see it is simple and I have a long list in…

I suspect that anyone who claims that Duckduckgo "Just works" only do english search. I usually do "english" / "mother tongue" searchs all day. Everytime, I need to remember to toggle the regional button otherwise I get attrocious results. Whereas google simply understand that if I'm searching using the english language it should prioritize english results while if I'm searching in another language it should prioriti…

On the contrary, I like the explicit language toggle because some search terms have better results with a specific language. I get annoyed when I enter a programming related search term and get non-English results.

Re: We can do better than DuckDuckGo

#244

Post by absolutelyrad »

visarga wrote: post #173
jbay808 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I have had a similar idea, what you're proposing is essentially a ranking/filtering customisation. The internet is a big scene, and on this scene we have companies and their products, political parties, ad agencies and regular users. Everyone is fighting for attention, clicks. Google has control over a ranking and filtering system that covers most searches on the internet. FB and Twitter hold another ranking/filterin…

Would you pay $10/yr for this feature?

Re: We can do better than DuckDuckGo

#245

Post by 6510 »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #203
6510 wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like this idea! Have the usual official results... then have an option to go to level 2, level 3, level 4 etc (lvl 1 is not included in lvl 2) You can have really biased technically terrible filters that for example put a site on level 4 because it is to new, to small and any number of other dumb SEO nonsense arguments. (The topic was not in the url! There was poor choice of text color!) I think wikipedia has a lot…

Per your 2nd para Google used to have some options to tailor the results more, like allinurl or inurl or title or link (IIRC the word had to be in a link pointing to that page) or whatever . I expected that to evolve to get more specificity but things went completely the otherway and we can't even specify a term is on a page reliably with Google now. Similarly, I was all in on xhtml and semantics (like microformats)…

I use to use inauthor: a lot.

I imagine for a FOSS solution we would have to make configurable every separable ranking algo and the option to toggle them in groups as well as build cli like queries around them (with a gui)

I'm starting to see a picture now. In stead of wondering how to build a search engine we should just build things that are compatible. A bit like The output of your database is the input of my filter.

Take site search, it is easy to write specs for with tons of optional features and can easily outperform any crawler. Meta site search can produce similar output. Distributed diy cralwers can provide similar data.

Arguably top websites should not be indexed at all. They should provide their own search api.

The end user puts in a query and gets a bunch of results. It goes into a table with a colum for each unique property. The properties show up in the side bar to refine results (sorted by howmany results have the property) Clicking on one/filling out the field/setting a min max displays the results and sends out a new more specific query looking for those specific properties. New properties are obtained that way.

Re: We can do better than DuckDuckGo

#246

Post by lukestateson »

Drew in his blog post talking about DuckDuckGo privacy issues, but his commercial startup Sourcehut does not offer the Privacy basics:

1. Account deletion

2. GDPR data request

3. Option to unsubscribe from emails

So right now his blog reminds me one famous US politician Twitter account. Never fix your own problems, just blame others more often.

Re: We can do better than DuckDuckGo

#247

Post by jbay808 »

867-5309 wrote: post #224
jbay808 wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might have misread. My proposal is an alternative to inferring user preferences based on their search history.

any type of profiling, opt-in or not, may be used to identify users

I mean, hacker news can probably also identify users based on which articles they click on, and how often they jump straight to the comments. I hope they don't.

But a system such as I'm describing is probably the only one that can be entirely consistent with the two disparate requirements of fully anonymizing users, and being useful to both programmers and ophiologists studying different things called "python".

Re: We can do better than DuckDuckGo

#248

Post by mr_toad »

carom wrote: post #231
ddingus wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use ddg often myself. Google does infer purpose better, and if someone is looking to buy something, it does well there too. Ddg is very good at info queries and the more one uses it, the better it is. What they could do is exactly what google did and that's to review those uses and improve. But what they have right now is solid, given just a tiny bit of work.

The biggest habit I had to break moving from Google to DDG was phrasing everything as a question. If anyone is thinking of making the switch, you can always redirect your searches to Google by throwing a g! in the query.

> phrasing everything as a question.

I wonder if this is generational or cultural?

Personally, I dislike trying to interface with a machine using natural language, because I know it can’t really understand me, and I’d rather read and interpret the results for myself than have an algorithm pick the “best”.

I actually find speaking to machines (e.g. automated phone systems, Siri etc) using natural language quite embarrassing, as if we were pretending that real life was like Star Trek.

Re: We can do better than DuckDuckGo

#249

Post by phire »

lambda_obrien wrote: post #22

Why couldn't several coordinating specialized search engines share their data via something like "charge the downloader" S3 buckets? Then you get an org like StackExchange who could provide indexed data from their site and the algorithms to search the data the most efficiently, GitHub can do the same for their specific zone of speciality, Amazon, etc. Then anyone who wants to use the data can either copy it to their…

I think your idea has merit.

Though it would require development of the "charge to download" S3 buckets and infrastructure to support payments.

There is also an economic issue where you have to calculate the download cost to also cover storage costs.

Re: We can do better than DuckDuckGo

#250

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

Thinking you can design a better search engine by yourself is either egotism or ignorance. Assuming you based it on state of the art search engine research, and could somehow avoid patent encumbrance, it'd still take you 5 years to match Google's results (and even then not likely) sans all the SEO bullshit.

Most people still believe that it's possible for one search engine to help anyone find anything without it knowing anything about them, which is just ridiculous. To get good search results you practically have to read someone's mind. Google basically does this (along with their e-mails, and voicemails, and texts, and web searches, and AMP links, and PageRanked crawls, and context-aware filters) and they still don't always get it right.

There is no magic algorithm that replaces statistical analysis of a large corpus along with a massive database of customized rulesets.

> We should also prepare the software to boldly lead the way on new internet standards. Crawling and indexing non-HTTP data sources (Gemini? Man pages? Linux distribution repositories?), supporting non-traditional network stacks (Tor? Yggdrasil? cjdns?) and third-party name systems (OpenNIC?), and anything else we could leverage our influence to give a leg up on.

Oh, great, so become the Devil himself, then. Count me out.

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