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Improving DuckDuckGo

duck.co

121–130 of 144 posts

Re: Improving DuckDuckGo

#121
post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have Pi-Hole on the network that every device in the house runs through, with extra blocklists and a year or so of manual tweaking, that covers most stuff. I also run ad block plugins just in case, don't allow commercial TV (they only watch Netflix or ABC Kids app), and that pretty much covers everything for our family. It's also just a thing we keep in mind and work around in life. We won't use any service that ha…

Can a pi-hole run without a raspberry-pi? I have a machine kept on all the time at home. Tried setting up pi-hole on docker with no veil.

It sure can. I have piHole running inside a virtual machine (Ubuntu 18.04).

Re: Improving DuckDuckGo

#122
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very hard to achieve considering they don't have their own search index. They are under the mercy of Bing, Yahoo and Yandex.

DDG has had its own crawler for a long time. It combines its data with 3rd party data.

Their own crawler is only used for Instant Answers, not organic search results.

Re: Improving DuckDuckGo

#123
post #60
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How are they going to make money from that?

I think someone from say MailChimp would be more qualified to answer this question than I would... :)

They make money from sending emails to lists. Very different business model to Gmail or the like.

Re: Improving DuckDuckGo

#124
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Search is significantly better when it can consider previous search history.

I actually think that breaks it, I like it better when everybody gets the same results for the same queries. People (via algorithms or directly) shaping what others get to see, rather than configuration and user empowerment, is something I reject.

I used to think that but now I see very little value in it to the current searcher. Why would you ever care what other people get?

Re: Improving DuckDuckGo

#125

I run https://jivesearch.com , so I might be biased. The single biggest thing they can do to improve their product is open source everything. They've instead decided to move away from that by freezing their instant answers with no explanation as to if/when they will re-open source them. Makes me question their commitment to privacy and transparency.

Hey there,

To clarify, we haven't closed anything that was previously open, and all open source Instant Answers will remain open.

For now, we've paused community contributions for new Instant Answers and non-essential changes, until we can find a better way to work with the community and their contributions.

Re: Improving DuckDuckGo

#126
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a "send feedback" button in the lower-right corner that does exactly what you're describing (I think it's hidden in the sidebar in the mobile version). I'm not sure how closely they actually pay attention to the feedback, but it's still worth doing.

Send feedback is not a simple process. The link takes you to a generic feedback page with fields you have to fill in. It should be much easier to report bad results.

We're working to improve our feedback process, but as mentioned, we have a "Feedback" button at the bottom right of every search result page.

Clicking this opens a form right on the results page which you can use to specify what the feedback is about (link results, image results, ads, etc.) and why you're happy/unhappy with what you're seeing.

This feedback is reviewed daily by our team.

Re: Improving DuckDuckGo

#127
post #99

I love duckduckgo and I feel I can almost replace google completely with it. I only have the following comments on it. 1. They're hosted in the US. I wish the company would pick up and move to a country not within the 14 eyes and out of jurisdiction of the cyber super powers(US, China, and Russia). Maybe panama? At least move it virtually with a warrant canary in place. 2. The search results need better contrasting c…

about 3: I have set DDG as default search engine and I can just type "site:ycombinator.com rust programming langugage" in the address bar and get the results from ycombinator only. Also lots of sites have !bangs available, like "!hackernews rust programming langugage" will go the the HN search directly. https://duckduckgo.com/bang Maybe that helps.

That's great feature but I would prefer to see search within duckduckgo as it's usually better at finding what I want and for privacy reasons.

There are so many ways these search engines can still innovate.

Re: Improving DuckDuckGo

#129
post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can a pi-hole run without a raspberry-pi? I have a machine kept on all the time at home. Tried setting up pi-hole on docker with no veil.

It sure can. I have piHole running inside a virtual machine (Ubuntu 18.04).

What does the virtual/physical network configuration look like? Are you routing all traffic into a physical server, then through a vnet/VM, and back out some other physical interface on the server?

Re: Improving DuckDuckGo

#130
post #40

Goal #1 should be high quality search results while respecting privacy. Everything else should be secondary. The biggest thing DDG could do to improve their product is make it quick and easy for users to provide feedback about bad search results. I'd be happy to report searches that Google gives better results for but they don't have a mechanism to do so. For example, search DDG for "odroid". The official domain is h…

Are DDG users comfortable knowing that their search results are always going to be inferior?

I consider results that are not ordered by who gave the search engine the most money to be superior.
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