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DuckDuckGo – two non-JavaScript versions of search results

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Re: DuckDuckGo – two non-JavaScript versions of search results

#51

Post by userbinator »

boogies wrote: post #29
benhoyt wrote: post #17

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…

I've been using Bing, directly, more and more in the past few years, when Google either gives no useful results at all, or blocks me for trying to use it with more precise queries. Overall its breadth is still lacking, but occasionally it finds useful things which Google doesn't (or won't?) find. It also doesn't try to mangle (only truncates when too long) URLs.

Re: DuckDuckGo – two non-JavaScript versions of search results

#52

Post by senux »

freediver wrote: post #48
benhoyt wrote: post #17

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…

I'll play devil's advocate as an engineer. "HTML" version shows no images, just text and favicons. The total size of visible text content shown on the page is about 4KB (just did a count of characters on the page for "steve jobs" query). DDG shows those 4KB using 248KB of data. 1. That is not _that_ small. It's only small compared to the rest of the web, but not in absolute numbers, or in comparison to useful content…

Can you give a more coherent comparison? For example, between a term search in DDG HTML vs the JS version or DDG HTML vs Google.

Comparing the search results page with a wikipedia page is hardly any sort of evidence.

On a side note, saying "as an engineer" doesn't mean anything on HN, especially if you don't even say what type of engineer you are.

Re: DuckDuckGo – two non-JavaScript versions of search results

#53

Post by Semaphor »

freediver wrote: post #47
aerovistae wrote: post #26

Holy shit the lite version is fast. Comparing to google search it's not even close...wow.

Looking at the network inspector, "lite" version search results load in about 900ms - 1.4sec for non-cached queries. That is fast only compared to the rest of the "big web" maybe, but not _that_ fast in absolute terms (and for context, Google full search results load in usually that much). The bottleneck for DuckDuckGo is probably the Bing API (usually 600-700ms response) for which there is no way around. If you want…

740ms for a new search without local caching and for a query that was probably not searched for. Not amazing, but a lot faster than your result.

rightdao is 755ms, no real difference I’d say.

Re: DuckDuckGo – two non-JavaScript versions of search results

#54

Post by freediver »

Semaphor wrote: post #53
freediver wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looking at the network inspector, "lite" version search results load in about 900ms - 1.4sec for non-cached queries. That is fast only compared to the rest of the "big web" maybe, but not _that_ fast in absolute terms (and for context, Google full search results load in usually that much). The bottleneck for DuckDuckGo is probably the Bing API (usually 600-700ms response) for which there is no way around. If you want…

740ms for a new search without local caching and for a query that was probably not searched for. Not amazing, but a lot faster than your result. rightdao is 755ms, no real difference I’d say.

Rightdao is about 70ms for me, could be they are in bay area and not world-wide. Impressive nevertheless, nothing on the web loads in 70ms for me. That is 10x faster than DuckDuckGo Lite.

Re: DuckDuckGo – two non-JavaScript versions of search results

#55

Post by kube-system »

franklampard wrote: post #36

Maybe for people who disabled JavaScript, DDG should present in the search results only sites that functions without JavaScript. What’s the point otherwise?

Is there any easy way to determine that? I’m not aware of one. The presence of JavaScript is not always enough to determine that the page is not usable without JavaScript.

Re: DuckDuckGo – two non-JavaScript versions of search results

#56

Post by encryptluks2 »

CodeHz wrote: post #21
encryptluks2 wrote: post #20

Can you please add a dark theme like your JS-based site? Just cause you don't use JS doesn't mean they can't use CSS.

You can achieve it without CSS actually (in chrome) Just put to It will also make vanilla scrollbar into dark theme

That is freaking awesome. I learned something new today and it is much simpler than trying to manage inverted colors in CSS.

Re: DuckDuckGo – two non-JavaScript versions of search results

#57

Post by newsbinator »

WrtCdEvrydy wrote: post #3

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'

I take that a step further and push for non-CSS and non-HTML versions as well.

People should be able to get all the info they need via curl in the terminal.

HTML and CSS are too easy to exploit for tracking users.

Re: DuckDuckGo – two non-JavaScript versions of search results

#58

Post by dredmorbius »

benhoyt wrote: post #17

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…

lite is amazeballs as a command-line utility (leveraging any of several console-mode browsers, including w3m, lynx, links, elinks2, etc.).

As a bash (or zsh) function:

  ddg ()
  {
      /usr/bin/w3m "https://duckduckgo.com/lite?q=$*&kd=-1"
  }
Note that this enables any bang searches as well, though you'll need to single quote these to avoid attempted history expansion.

lite is also my default w3m search bookmark entry.

So:

   ddg '!w foo' # Wikipedia article on foo
   ddg '!dict foo' # Dictionary search on foo
   ddg '!etym foo' # Etymology Dictionary search on foo
Note that if the endpoint itself relies on JS for local search, the bang won't be successful (though DDG will do its bit). Reddit, and HN/Algolia, I'm looking at you.

I happened to be running some quick lookups a few days ago while a friend was watching, and they 1) wondered how I was doing that and 2) if they could have a similar feature. Power of the shell.

Re: DuckDuckGo – two non-JavaScript versions of search results

#59

Post by cookiengineer »

This seems nice in theory but reaches the wrong audience.

Since a couple months ago DDG decided to block TOR Browser users, so I would guess that most people that were concerned about their privacy already moved on to the competition.

Though it's nice to see better support for 2G slow networks, even when it's not for the sake of privacy as they claim.

Re: DuckDuckGo – two non-JavaScript versions of search results

#60

Post by dredmorbius »

boogies wrote: post #29
benhoyt wrote: post #17

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…

Among other characteristics, I'm finding DDG works when searched via a Tor proxy, and even offers an Onion URL (https://3g2upl4pq6kufc4m.onion/).

Google 1) fails to work without JS for me much of the time and 2) throws up endless ReCAPTCHAs, so I generally don't bother (not just for GWS, but Scholar, Ngram viewer, and other actually-useful tools). My preferred response (https://toot.cat/@dredmorbius/104371588129861216) produces very faded joy over Tor.

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