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Inside DuckDuckGo, Google's Tiniest, Fiercest Competitor

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Re: Inside DuckDuckGo, Google's Tiniest, Fiercest Competitor

#171

Post by cromwellian »

arca_vorago wrote: post #46
mscarborough wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can we stop with this "bill gates is watching your searches" nonsense? I know you're fascinating, but Brin and Gates may be concerned about many things not related your internet activity. Corporations in data monitoring projects, OK.

No, we absolutely cannot stop bringing up the privacy implications of an entity knowing more about us than they deserve to, and no amount of waving it away under the (false) pretense that they "need" it to do "other" things is going to work. I'll ignore the entire filter bubble issue and get right down to the privacy implications. When often people use search engines or other related websites (reddit search) to look…

The only way for search engines to get better is to model the mental state of the person making the query. If you were asking another human being to help you with a query, they'd take into account your mental state, conversation state, and what they know about you and the situation, to narrow down and disambiguate the query. When people can't do this kind of social modeling, we perceive them as autistic.

If you could fit an entire Google data center into your mobile phone, maybe this kind of digital personal assistant could be taken offline, but for the current state of technology, big data requires the cloud. Even in the 24th Century, the Enterprise Computer is a centralized data store which tracks queries made from com-badges.

Re: Inside DuckDuckGo, Google's Tiniest, Fiercest Competitor

#172

Post by dclara »

wslh wrote: post #63
tosseraccount wrote: post #11

Duck duck is barely usable ... but they don't spy on you. The !g and !b commands make it my first choice. If the results aren't getting what you want, try the search on google or bing. IF you don't mind Sergy Brin or Bill Gates tracking you. I still think there's room for a search engine that supports boolean(ish?) operations like AND, OR , NOT and NEAR. Providing links directly to the source and not a redirect to th…

Google supports AND, OR, NOT and NEAR. There is an AROUND operator that is similar to NEAR. I think the way DDG can gain more traction is motivating top sites to enhance their local search pagerank. It's incredible how Google search restricted to Stack Overflow works better than the Stack Overflow local search engine. I wrote a rant about this at Challenging Google’s Search Engine [1]. [1] http://blog.databigbang.com…

It's interesting that you are talking about "two-tiered search would decentralize efforts to improve algorithms". But you mentioned that "this solution does not need to be distributed: sites can share their local indexes and ranking algorithms with the routing search engine."

Can you elaborate a little bit about why it's not a distributed solution if sites share their local indexes with the routing search engine?

Re: Inside DuckDuckGo, Google's Tiniest, Fiercest Competitor

#173

Post by enneff »

Crito wrote: post #168
RandallBrown wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I search google for "flower" the first result is the wikipedia page for flower. While you might want the wiki page for flower when you search "flowers" I think most people might actually want to order flowers.

That plural/singular makes a difference there is something that I would consider to be a fault. "Llamas" gives me the page for "llama". Why should "flower" and "flowers" give me radically different results? If I wanted to buy flowers I'd search "florist" or "online florist". The wiki page for florists is surely of far less interest than the page for flowers. I suspect the google/ddg results for "flowers" are a result…

More likely: Google have noticed users that search for "flowers" typically go on to search for "flower delivery", and started showing them results relevant to their intent.

The Google result page for "flowers" also includes the wikipedia page for "Flower", btw.

Re: Inside DuckDuckGo, Google's Tiniest, Fiercest Competitor

#174

Post by coin »

josteink wrote: post #97
tosseraccount wrote: post #11

Duck duck is barely usable ... but they don't spy on you. The !g and !b commands make it my first choice. If the results aren't getting what you want, try the search on google or bing. IF you don't mind Sergy Brin or Bill Gates tracking you. I still think there's room for a search engine that supports boolean(ish?) operations like AND, OR , NOT and NEAR. Providing links directly to the source and not a redirect to th…

Duck duck is barely usable On the contrary, I find Google barely usable these days, with everything covered in layers and layers of horrible bloat, random UX mess of the week and constant pestering about G+. DDG is nice and clean, has features Google is (still) lacking and just gets me the results. I may resort to other search-engines (like Google) once a week or so, but at this point, there's no way I'm going back t…

I find the infinite scroll annoying, taking away from its otherwise clean feeling.

Re: Inside DuckDuckGo, Google's Tiniest, Fiercest Competitor

#175

Post by nilkn »

streetnigga wrote: post #133
cpncrunch wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not that they're not top ranking - they don't appear anywhere in the first few hundred results. DDG must be filtering them because those sites are at the top of yandex and DDG says it is getting the results from yandex. As for "perfectly usable", mountaindragon (result 2) and codesinhtml.com (result 3) are atrocious. And makemyownwebpage.com (result 10 or so) looks like a homepage from the 90s. I think the issue…

Please explain this theory of filtering results out some more.

I don't know at all if this is true, but his argument seems to just be that DDG is pulling its results from yandex, yandex shows w3schools at the top, and DDG doesn't have it in the first few hundred results--therefore DDG is filtering or significantly reordering the yandex results.

Re: Inside DuckDuckGo, Google's Tiniest, Fiercest Competitor

#176

Post by nly »

Aldo_MX wrote: post #157
mverwijs wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can't duckduckbot just present itself to the webserver as GoogleBot?

In our company we do a forward-confirmed DNS to verify whenever a bot is who it claims to be. Oddly enough we have blocked legit googlebot/bing/baidu servers, because they fail to properly configure their servers...

Their servers are probably configured fine. They likely have a pool of servers with no reverse DNS to try and catch servers issuing different content to Googlebot

Re: Inside DuckDuckGo, Google's Tiniest, Fiercest Competitor

#177

Post by bhrgunatha »

SomeCallMeTim wrote: post #109
josteink wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Duck duck is barely usable On the contrary, I find Google barely usable these days, with everything covered in layers and layers of horrible bloat, random UX mess of the week and constant pestering about G+. DDG is nice and clean, has features Google is (still) lacking and just gets me the results. I may resort to other search-engines (like Google) once a week or so, but at this point, there's no way I'm going back t…

I've been using DDG as my primary search from desktop for several years now, and I find its results to be equivalent to or better than Google's most of the time. When I can't find something, I'll try a !g, but only rarely does that help any more.

I agree completely. In fact I'll also say that when I first switched I used the !g pretty often - maybe even as much as 20%-30%.

These days I rarely use !g - the results have improved considerably and the bang searches are a very clever way of not requiring me to change search engine to search another site specifically.

Re: Inside DuckDuckGo, Google's Tiniest, Fiercest Competitor

#178

Post by username223 »

enneff wrote: post #162
esemiss wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From http://gawker.com/5637234/gcreep-google-engineer-stalked-tee... In at least four cases, Barksdale spied on minors' Google accounts without their consent, according to a source close to the incidents. In an incident this spring involving a 15-year-old boy who he'd befriended, Barksdale tapped into call logs from Google Voice, Google's Internet phone service, after the boy refused to tell him the name of his new g…

Note this article is from 2010.

So? It's not as if they're collecting less information about you now, or are subject to any more legal restrictions (such as those imposed on credit reporting agencies).

Re: Inside DuckDuckGo, Google's Tiniest, Fiercest Competitor

#179

Post by username223 »

cromwellian wrote: post #171
arca_vorago wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, we absolutely cannot stop bringing up the privacy implications of an entity knowing more about us than they deserve to, and no amount of waving it away under the (false) pretense that they "need" it to do "other" things is going to work. I'll ignore the entire filter bubble issue and get right down to the privacy implications. When often people use search engines or other related websites (reddit search) to look…

The only way for search engines to get better is to model the mental state of the person making the query. If you were asking another human being to help you with a query, they'd take into account your mental state, conversation state, and what they know about you and the situation, to narrow down and disambiguate the query. When people can't do this kind of social modeling, we perceive them as autistic. If you could…

> The only way for search engines to get better is to model the mental state of the person making the query.

No. Another way is to make their behavior more predictable. If I type "Chinese" into the search box, Google may tell me about the Chinese language, or it may send me some ads for local take-out places. Either it guesses which I want, or it makes it easy for me to specify what I'm asking; I know which I'd prefer.

Re: Inside DuckDuckGo, Google's Tiniest, Fiercest Competitor

#180

Post by [deleted] »

nostrademons wrote: post #150
DanBC wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lots of people complain about W3Schools. Some of those people say the Mozilla pages are a bit clunky. Seems like a nice passive income project - man pages for HTML / CSS aimed at beginners but with advanced information too. I'm surprised it hasn't already been done. Perhaps it has and I just don't know the URL.

http://html5index.org/

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