31–40 of 99 posts
This is awesome... I was always pushing for non-JS versions of products and was always met with the dumbest reasons... 'the only reason someone wouldn't run JS is if they're hacking'
As someone who's just written about the "small web" [1], this warms my heart. The lite version is probably a little too bare-bones for most people's tastes, but it sure is tiny -- great for people on very slow or flakey connections. Some numbers: HTML homepage transfers 34KB (94KB uncompressed) over 6 requests. HTML search results page transfers 133KB (248KB uncompressed) over 31 requests. Lite homepage transfers 13K…
These are great, and I’m glad to be able to use them without direct contact with “Big Tech” and the tracking bloat that entails, but as I understand it DuckDuckGo is more or less a glorified — albeit relatively glorious and pleasant — proxy to Big Tech’s Bing (well, more, not less, because it does add some great conveniences like the IIUC formerly open source Instant Answers¹ and !bangs, and some fraction of results…
Holy shit the lite version is fast. Comparing to google search it's not even close...wow.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
These are great, and I’m glad to be able to use them without direct contact with “Big Tech” and the tracking bloat that entails, but as I understand it DuckDuckGo is more or less a glorified — albeit relatively glorious and pleasant — proxy to Big Tech’s Bing (well, more, not less, because it does add some great conveniences like the IIUC formerly open source Instant Answers¹ and !bangs, and some fraction of results…
Yeah, I wonder what their long-term plan is there. Surely to get substantially better, they'll have to move off Bing at some point (or buy Bing off Microsoft!). In any case, as long as DDG is a "privacy-stripping proxy" (which I believe it is), it's just using Bing technology as a search API, which doesn't seem too problematic.
> DuckDuckGo gets its results from over four hundred sources. These include hundreds of vertical sources delivering niche Instant Answers, DuckDuckBot (our crawler) and crowd-sourced sites (like Wikipedia, stored in our answer indexes). We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we also source from multiple partners, though most commonly from Bing (and none from Google). — https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/so...
I find their instant answers fairly useful, enough to often not use the other results at all — unfortunately for them enough to use some of the sites some answers are sourced from directly, in particular often using my browsers’ built in Wikipedia searches.
DuckDuckBot I can’t judge, because I don’t know which results come from it (previous comments on HN seem to show the amount of difference between DDG and Bings results vary between search terms¹), but it seems that non-Bing links are a thing and DDG can adjust what fraction of the page they take as whatever gap there is between them and the bigger crawlers’ narrows or widens.
1: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
What’s the point otherwise?
As someone who's just written about the "small web" [1], this warms my heart. The lite version is probably a little too bare-bones for most people's tastes, but it sure is tiny -- great for people on very slow or flakey connections. Some numbers: HTML homepage transfers 34KB (94KB uncompressed) over 6 requests. HTML search results page transfers 133KB (248KB uncompressed) over 31 requests. Lite homepage transfers 13K…
DDG lite works great in Lynx! I hope it never goes away.
I can't find this page on JS DDG, but it's the first result on HTML DDG.
Query: carving a violin bridge
Desired URL: https://trianglestrings.com/carving-a-violin-bridge/