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Inside DuckDuckGo, Google's Tiniest, Fiercest Competitor

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

#191

Post by protomyth »

Derbasti wrote: post #189
SomeCallMeTim wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 totally agree. In the beginning, I was !g a lot. These days, I mostly !g for more natural language kind of questions. For more technical searches, Google has become next to useless for me. "lupdate.exe not working Qt" transforms to "did you mean 'Update not working'?" (lupdate.exe is part of the Qt translation toolchain and Windows forces it to run as admin only because there is "update" in its file name. The Googl…

The second huge fail of google with technical queries is when it starts substituting synonyms for words in your query the make the search useless. It makes you not want to name commands in a common sense style.

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

#192

Post by ngpio »

joesb wrote: post #181
edj wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Duck duck is barely usable ... but they don't spy on you. The !g and !b commands make it my first choice. I keep leaving DDG for the not-always-super-relevant results, and I keep coming back for the privacy, clean interface, and !bang syntax. I love that using it means my searches are private by default. But the real killer feature is !bang. I find that it's faster to do a Google image search using DDG with "!gi" tha…

Why do people talk about this !bang syntax so much? I can do the same thing with search provider shortcut in my browser. For example, after setting up once, I can press "Ctrl+L" then type "gi" then "Tab" and start typing my search keyword. I don't even have to first go to Google or DDG.

Because setting up a shortcut once for many hundreds[1] of sites is more demanding work than typing ! each time.

There's a bang for almost every site I frequent, and when a site changes its domain or search URI the bang is updated to reflect it almost immediately with no work on my end.

After a few weeks of acquainting myself with the bang system, I started to see web search from a completely different perspective. I think of a search engine now as less of an "everything index" and more of an "index of contextual searches". My mind, instead of just thinking "I'll google it", thinks "I'll choose a context for it".

Google is like a system-wide grep whose output is altered by advertising, and DDG w/ bangs is like a vast collection of commands piped into a grep.

[1] https://duckduckgo.com/bang.html

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

#194

Post by kbenson »

patmcguire wrote: post #183
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.

You can't fight the SEO feedback cycle. W3 schools was linked to by some people, so it shows up on Google, so it gets linked to by more people...

Some people? By internet standards, w3schools is ancient, and has been linked by many people over the years. Here[1], I present you their main page from close to 14 years ago. The copyright notice says 1999-2000, and I think I first visited it in 1999, but I could be mistaken. That's a long time for links to accrue.

[1]: http://web.archive.org/web/20000815210025/http://www.w3schoo...

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

#196

Post by wslh »

dclara wrote: post #172
wslh wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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?

Yes, sure. I use the concept of distribution in the sense of separating a process within different entities (search router and local searches).

In the distributed case the "search router" queries other sites to determine the best results. For example, searching for code samples involved querying Stack Overflow, Code Project, Forums, etc. This approach is clearly expensive: you rely on the other sites speed, web service availability, etc.

The non distributed approach is just receiving their algorithms and data and processing everything in the router search engine. Obviously this solution can be implemented in a distributed way inside the search engine but it is not distributed in the sense of distributing the process within different entities.

In the two cases you are distributing efforts, one of the key goals of this approach because it is really difficult to compete with Google. Google "knows" how to give good results in diverse areas while in the proposed attack vector you rely on others for part of this optimization. A movie site should know how to give good results about movies while a site related to books knows about books.

It's important to note that the vast majority of search results ends in relatively few sites, so if the top visited sites implement this approach Google search market share can be challenged. Obviously we don't really know if this approach will work in practice until we see it.

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

#197

Post by pestaa »

est wrote: post #169
res0nat0r wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Im not sure where all of these cluttered Google search UI comments are coming from, this is what I see. Maybe a reality distortion field due to pent up HN Google hate? Just a few icons in the top right off screen with my profile pic and configuration wheel icon you can't see. Things look fine. http://i.imgur.com/J9AqaQK.png

The think I hate most about the UI is URL hijack, URL hijack everywhere! The second most stupid thing is if you are behind or corporate LAN/VPN you have to type CAPTICHA to search. The last stupid thing is its UI design, where's the page cache link? how to limit search time range and order results by time?

To be fair, most search engines do not support filtering by date range and ordering. I know it was added to Google but then most features seem to be jumping around there.

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

#198

Post by cerberusss »

protomyth wrote: post #191
Derbasti wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I totally agree. In the beginning, I was !g a lot. These days, I mostly !g for more natural language kind of questions. For more technical searches, Google has become next to useless for me. "lupdate.exe not working Qt" transforms to "did you mean 'Update not working'?" (lupdate.exe is part of the Qt translation toolchain and Windows forces it to run as admin only because there is "update" in its file name. The Googl…

The second huge fail of google with technical queries is when it starts substituting synonyms for words in your query the make the search useless. It makes you not want to name commands in a common sense style.

Yeah but DDG does this as well. Try searching for NSString. It'll actually search for strings.

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

#199

Post by lugg »

enraged_camel wrote: post #188
Crito wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would expect a glorified redirect to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flower That is what I expect for any search that is vague or generic. The results for "RTG" are pretty much my idea of what a set of results should look like. (Note that while DDG's results page for 'flowers' is cleaner, the actual results are similarly shit.)

>>I would expect a glorified redirect to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flower That is what I expect for any search that is vague or generic. If they wanted the wikipedia page, they would have performed the search directly on wikipedia. The question you have to ask is: what is the most likely thing they are looking to do? Is it to learn more about flowers (wikipedia) or is it to buy flowers (regular results with ads +…

I dont think I've ever used wikipedia's search. I just google "term wiki"

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

#200

Post by enneff »

username223 wrote: post #178
enneff wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

The quoted text includes "In an incident this spring..." I mentioned the article's year of publication to provide a chronological reference point for the quote.
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