Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

We can do better than DuckDuckGo

drewdevault.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

301–310 of 383 posts

Re: We can do better than DuckDuckGo

#301

Post by justinclift »

3np wrote: post #284
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…

They do. Something fundamentally changed at some point during the past couple of years. It used to be that DDG was the best for verbatim search (meaning I want to only have results were the exact words I search for are included). Now, even with quotes, I routinely get a whole first page of results where my terms are not included anywhere. Google generally respect the quotes.

Agreed. Getting results which don't include the quoted terms is mind bogglingly useless.

I thought the whole point was to improve over time, not get worse. :(

Re: We can do better than DuckDuckGo

#302

Post by potatoman22 »

ddingus wrote: post #253
mr_toad wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 embarr…

This. We do not have machines able to sort meaning out yet, so why bother?

For most information retrieval purposes, Google's NLP algorithms can effectively determine the meaning of your query thanks to BERT

Re: We can do better than DuckDuckGo

#303

Post by justinclift »

nl wrote: post #220
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…

In consumer search there is a really long tail of questions (in 2017 15% of Google's daily queries have never been seen before[1]) and performance on this is very important. I just searched for "lockdown rules for SA" (I'm in South Australia and we just had a new 20 person cluster, so we are going back into lockdown). On DDG the first results was a Guardian article which was good, but then the rest were a mix of Sout…

Interesting. Good example. :)

Searching for "lockdown rules" "sa" (together) just now gave a bunch of South Australian specific results with the "Australia" localisation setting enabled.

With the localisation setting disabled, all the results were indeed about South Africa instead.

Re: We can do better than DuckDuckGo

#304

Post by [deleted] »

mr_toad wrote: post #248
carom wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 embarr…

[deleted]

Re: We can do better than DuckDuckGo

#305

Post by thayne »

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…

> Who chooses the white list, and why should I trust them?

That's part of the point. There could be different search engines that run the same code, but have different sets of tier 1 domains that cater to different audiences. And if you have the resources, you could set up your own engine with a set of tier-1 domains that you chose.

Re: We can do better than DuckDuckGo

#306

Post by JProthero »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #212
bscphil wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> You do that by having a list of known good sites to answer specific types of questions, and looking at the sites they link to. I mean, that's basically the core of original Google pagerank, right? A "good" site linking to another site is what makes that other site some amount of "good" too, links from better sites carry more 'juice'. "good" is of course not just binary, but a quantitative weight. I don't know to wh…

That was exactly my thought on reading that part of the article: that the author was describing Pagerank, but substituting Pagerank's design objective of algorithmically outsourcing quality judgments to the global community of website publishers with the programmer's prejudices instead.

I hope the project of improving on DuckDuckGo is successful though, and some of the other proposals in the article sound promising to me.

In the future I would like to see an open source search engine 'paid for' using some combination of homomorphic encryption, blockchain and Tor-style technologies to trade bandwidth and processing power with its userbase in exchange for search results and other services, but I don't have the expertise to assess how feasible that might be.

Re: We can do better than DuckDuckGo

#307

Post by miccah »

sightmost wrote: post #299
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 am typing this from India. DDG never provides satisfactory results for anything country specific. As an example, point 6 above is a failure. I used to have DDG as my default, but my workflow got so convoluted that I would search first on DDG, see that the results as not good, open google and search again. It is so frustrating that I switched back to Google even when I didn't want to. Edit: typos.

I'm sure others have commented this elsewhere, but DDG has bang operators.

For your use case, simply append !g to the DDG search and it will do a Google search instead.

Re: We can do better than DuckDuckGo

#308

Post by bigdict »

miccah wrote: post #307
sightmost wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am typing this from India. DDG never provides satisfactory results for anything country specific. As an example, point 6 above is a failure. I used to have DDG as my default, but my workflow got so convoluted that I would search first on DDG, see that the results as not good, open google and search again. It is so frustrating that I switched back to Google even when I didn't want to. Edit: typos.

I'm sure others have commented this elsewhere, but DDG has bang operators. For your use case, simply append !g to the DDG search and it will do a Google search instead.

Right, but Google supports Google search without bang operators.

Re: We can do better than DuckDuckGo

#309

Post by fourtens »

Guest19023892 wrote: post #176

What about a curated search engine? Allow anyone to curate the results and define a custom list of allowed URLs. Then, others can use their list. For example, I decide Google is terrible when I'm searching for product reviews, and all I get are results to Amazon referral websites and spam blogs that never owned the products to begin with. So, I find 200 sites or forums that actually have quality reviews and I create…

I really like your idea and had similar thoughts - curious how you would build this, and if you planned to? I saw in your comments you ran a website that sounded like an earlier version of Reddit - could you share the name of the site? My email is orangegummy@gmail.com if you aren't interested in publicly posting that info ( I would have emailed you but there's no contact info I could see)

Re: We can do better than DuckDuckGo

#310

Post by fourtens »

MayeulC wrote: post #239

Hmm, I have been thinking about this more lately. How to get quality results, and a sustainable, community-led search engine? === Contexts === A "search engine" such as Google is good at many things, and extremely bad at others. The main issue with it in my view is that it lacks context about what you are looking for. The main context you can ask for is "Videos", "Pictures", etc. * Specifying context takes time, so i…

Is your reticence due to your far of others implementing your ideas?
Post reply on HN