Can anyone explain why Google and DuckDuckGo made this change? I don't see how this impacts them selling ads. My only thought is its technically expensive to support?
DuckDuckGo removed the ability to filter search results
51–60 of 341 posts
Re: DuckDuckGo removed the ability to filter search results
#52Things 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…
I think with a "privacy focused" search engine that isn't the default on virtually any device or browser, you get a pretty savvy subset of the general population. The 10x probably use whatever the default search is.
Re: DuckDuckGo removed the ability to filter search results
#53I’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). Annoyin…
Yeah I feel all search engines have had declining quality for some time now. Not sure if it's unintended consequence of fighting bots. Or unintended consequence of trying to remove some content from the results. I'm assuming it's unintentional.
Re: DuckDuckGo removed the ability to filter search results
#54Is there a decent search engine which still has filtering like this?
https://www.mojeek.com/ even has its own crawler
searx needs a shout out
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Searx https://github.com/searx/searx
Re: DuckDuckGo removed the ability to filter search results
#55Ah yes, the classic corporate footgun. I am sure power users who are alienated will most definitely stay quiet and not complain to their peers, damaging the reputation of a once reliable tool. This has never happened before after all. :')
There is no meaningful competition, so reputation doesn't matter. Those people already left Google to use DDG. Where are they going to go now? Some random individual's hobby search engine with a crappy index? Some shady startup's Bing wrapper that promotes a crypto scam? There is no real competition in search (and in social media, and in email, and in operating systems, and in browsers, ...). Companies can do whateve…
>There is no real competition in search (and in social media, and in email, and in operating systems, and in browsers, ...).
This is factually untrue. There's plenty of competition in social media and OSes, and Firefox still exists. For social media, there's Diaspora (yeah, I know, no one uses it), and for OSes you've got to be kidding: there's dozens of Linux distros out there or you can easily roll your own with various tools that are easily found. And despite its poor marketshare, Firefox still works quite well for me on Linux.
You have a valid complaint about search and email though, but for email it's understandable: the underlying protocol is broken beyond repair because its designers never anticipated spam so the current state is really unavoidable. Luckily, people have found alternatives to email and just don't use it much any more.
Re: DuckDuckGo removed the ability to filter search results
#56Since DDG is just a proxy for Bing, do they have a survival plan once Microsoft cuts them off? Is it a long-term contract?
Re: DuckDuckGo removed the ability to filter search results
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
Kagi. See: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/search-operators.html https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/filtering-results.html
$5/mo for 200 searches, $25/mo for unlimited? Loading more pages count as new search? Does anyone actually pay that? It looks like something a real search engine would post on April 1st.
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Re: DuckDuckGo removed the ability to filter search results
#58I’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). Annoyin…
Yeah I feel all search engines have had declining quality for some time now. Not sure if it's unintended consequence of fighting bots. Or unintended consequence of trying to remove some content from the results. I'm assuming it's unintentional.
it's intentional as a result of them making money off showing you bad results (ads)
after all, you aren't paying them
Re: DuckDuckGo removed the ability to filter search results
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I'm not keen on paying for search, but this kind of behavior is exactly the marketing Kagi needs to sway me over.
I'm actually tremendously keen on paying for search, since it means (at least in theory and currently in practice) that I don't have to worry about a paid search engine catering to advertisers instead of me.
Like, it'd be nice if everything were free, but sadly everything has a cost, and we can see what the cost of "free" search is and it kinda sucks.
Re: DuckDuckGo removed the ability to filter search results
#60Can anyone explain why Google and DuckDuckGo made this change? I don't see how this impacts them selling ads. My only thought is its technically expensive to support?
Boolean search is pretty expensive computationally. Maybe they are so far disconnected from that initial implementation that there is no semblance of support anymore?