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DuckDuckGo removed the ability to filter search results

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Re: DuckDuckGo removed the ability to filter search results

#23

Post by TobyTheDog123 »

I'm not entirely sure what market DuckDuckGo is trying to serve.

- Non-privacy-conscious people are just going to use Google.

- Privacy-conscious people know enough to realize that DuckDuckGo isn't really protecting your privacy, and that it's akin to using ExpressVPN or NordVPN to "hide your IP address".

Didn't they also have some kind of censorship uproar back in the day?

Re: DuckDuckGo removed the ability to filter search results

#24

Post by justinclift »

Buildstarted wrote: post #2

It seems duckduckgo removed all the operators like -, +, and, intitle, inurl and others

Seems to have been a while ago.

Was swearing at it only a few days ago due to stupid results it was showing, while completely ignoring the "-" sign.

Search term:

  solar panel array concrete flat -roof -roofs
Notice how the majority of results still include either "roof" or "roofs" in it?

Fucking useless. :( :( :(

Had to switch to Kagi, which at least seems to honour the negative signs.

Re: DuckDuckGo removed the ability to filter search results

#25

Post by nashashmi »

12907835202 wrote: post #14
hk1337 wrote: post #9

Looks like they just rewrote the markdown file and the exclusion looks is still there in the additions? Maybe it was reworded, or an attempt to reword it, because of this issue: https://github.com/duckduckgo/duckduckgo-help-pages/issues/1...

It looks like it never worked and the docs were wrong or out of date. How few people were using duckduckgo with these filters for it not to be noticed until now? Stranger still that the author noticed the change to the docs but not that it didn't work previously

I noticed it (only knew of site filter). But could not understand why it worked the way it did. In the end I used it seldom.

The other filters are cool.

Re: DuckDuckGo removed the ability to filter search results

#27

Post by hedora »

I’ve also noticed that “”’s stopped working as expected there recently.

Sample query: “lowes pet bedding”. The quotation marks do something; they remove some results from tractor supply and home depot. However, many results don’t contain the word “lowes” or “bedding”. For example:

https://animalcare.lacounty.gov/licensing/

And, none contain the exact phrase. Google does the expected thing (return one result). Annoyingly, the last time I checked, the situation was reversed, and Google search is now useless for other reasons.

Thirty seven spam results surround the one organic google search result for the query. For the love of all that is good and proper, thirty seven?!? Who thought that was a good number?

That result page would make 90’s era pay-for-placement search engines blush!

Re: DuckDuckGo removed the ability to filter search results

#28

Post by throwfaraway9 »

ploxiln wrote: post #13
JasonFruit wrote: post #6

Things like this seem so arbitrarily hostile to intelligent people who just want to find what they're looking for in an efficient way. Why does this keep happening? Who benefits from these developments?

There are 10x the customers who don't have any idea about these search operators, and sometimes accidentally include one, and are dissatisfied with the results. Companies can't help but cater to the 10x bigger market. They probably spend money less carefully too, so are more valuable to advertisers. I don't attribute any malice to this kind of thing. I just expect that if a project or product is trying to be more eas…

[flagged]

Re: DuckDuckGo removed the ability to filter search results

#29

Post by claaams »

TobyTheDog123 wrote: post #23

I'm not entirely sure what market DuckDuckGo is trying to serve. - Non-privacy-conscious people are just going to use Google. - Privacy-conscious people know enough to realize that DuckDuckGo isn't really protecting your privacy, and that it's akin to using ExpressVPN or NordVPN to "hide your IP address". Didn't they also have some kind of censorship uproar back in the day?

ExpressVPN is still good for hiding your IP if you torrent.
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