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Twitter CEO Endorses DuckDuckGo

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Re: Twitter CEO Endorses DuckDuckGo

#121

Post by seattle_spring »

arthurcolle wrote: post #110
twblalock wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I like DuckDuckGo. But unless they build their own search - I think the fundamental problem has not been tackled. There is no good, independent, private search alternative. There isn't going to be, because it's really hard and expensive to do that. I don't see how any startup could even begin to compete with their own search engine. The barrier to entry is extremely high: Bing probably would not have survived long…

Respectfully, I think you are definitely overestimating the cost of building a search engine. Do you have experience in search specifically? Asking in good faith here. I think you're absolutely right that it's not trivial , but it isn't a completely unsolvable problem only addressable by the major spyware corporations like Facebook, Google, etc. I think you could build a decent search engine in about 6-18 months if a…

Wouldn't there be a ton of search startups if it were actually this easy?

Re: Twitter CEO Endorses DuckDuckGo

#122

Post by cheez »

Seb-C wrote: post #120

I did try DDG and Startpage a few years ago but ultimately gave up because the results were not good. I gave another try to DDG since about 3 weeks and so far the results are pretty good. Not only they got better on the last few years, but for me Google got worse at the same time. Almost everytime I search in Google nowadays, I have to reformulate my search 2~3 times to get decent results. I often need to add double…

Dude, Google is so much worse now... I have no idea what has happened.

Re: Twitter CEO Endorses DuckDuckGo

#123

Post by Waterluvian »

I've heard about Duck Duck Go for a while and just never bothered. But I finally decided to try it. It was easy. Settings -> Search Engines -> DuckDuckGo.

And so far it's just fine. Gives me great results when searching for coding stuff.

Re: Twitter CEO Endorses DuckDuckGo

#124

Post by kelnos »

__ka wrote: post #36

I have mixed feelings about this. If you recommend DuckDuckGo, Qwant, Ecosia you're essentially recommending Bing. Each of them have to show bing ads, forward the users' IPs as per Bing's terms of service (to fight ad fraud etc). Similarly, if you recommend StartPage, you're recommending Google. Same drill with ads. I like DuckDuckGo. But unless they build their own search - I think the fundamental problem has not be…

> Try to run this test: If you query "what is my ip" in duckduckgo (DDG)

I tried that, and did not see 207.* anywhere on the page. It displayed my IP address above the results list, and then a list of reasonable results for that query, without any IP addresses listed in any of the descriptions.

Re: Twitter CEO Endorses DuckDuckGo

#126

Post by pedro2 »

zepearl wrote: post #90
__ka wrote: post #36

I have mixed feelings about this. If you recommend DuckDuckGo, Qwant, Ecosia you're essentially recommending Bing. Each of them have to show bing ads, forward the users' IPs as per Bing's terms of service (to fight ad fraud etc). Similarly, if you recommend StartPage, you're recommending Google. Same drill with ads. I like DuckDuckGo. But unless they build their own search - I think the fundamental problem has not be…

Does anybody have any infos about Qwant? It's the only EU-based search engine with its own indexing engine ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qwant ) I don't care if it's EU or not, but is the index real or kind of half-fake? (like "yes, we have an index, but it's 10MBs big...") I started using Qwant ~2 months ago and it isn't bad: the snippets that are shown in the search results often don't contain the search terms th…

I would like to know too. I read someone on social media alleging they also used Bing behind the scenes, without attribution, but I haven’t researched further.

Re: Twitter CEO Endorses DuckDuckGo

#127

Post by arthurcolle »

seattle_spring wrote: post #121
arthurcolle wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Respectfully, I think you are definitely overestimating the cost of building a search engine. Do you have experience in search specifically? Asking in good faith here. I think you're absolutely right that it's not trivial , but it isn't a completely unsolvable problem only addressable by the major spyware corporations like Facebook, Google, etc. I think you could build a decent search engine in about 6-18 months if a…

Wouldn't there be a ton of search startups if it were actually this easy?

The only honest answer to that question depends entirely on one's interpretation of the strong efficient market hypothesis.

Re: Twitter CEO Endorses DuckDuckGo

#128

Post by Thorrez »

kelnos wrote: post #124
__ka wrote: post #36

I have mixed feelings about this. If you recommend DuckDuckGo, Qwant, Ecosia you're essentially recommending Bing. Each of them have to show bing ads, forward the users' IPs as per Bing's terms of service (to fight ad fraud etc). Similarly, if you recommend StartPage, you're recommending Google. Same drill with ads. I like DuckDuckGo. But unless they build their own search - I think the fundamental problem has not be…

> Try to run this test: If you query "what is my ip" in duckduckgo (DDG) I tried that, and did not see 207.* anywhere on the page. It displayed my IP address above the results list, and then a list of reasonable results for that query, without any IP addresses listed in any of the descriptions.

I see it in the 3rd result:

https://i.imgur.com/HbhvISk.png

This means DuckDuckGo uses Bing for its results. But it doesn't mean DuckDuckGo is forwarding your IP to Bing.

Re: Twitter CEO Endorses DuckDuckGo

#129

Post by Thorrez »

godelski wrote: post #70
ac29 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we also source from a variety of partners, including Verizon Media (formerly Yahoo) and Bing" https://help.duckduckgo.com/results/sources/

That doesn't suggest anything that the OP is saying. Google does similar things. We wouldn't say that searching DDG is like searching Stack Overflow. Or it is like searching Yelp.

There's a difference between getting results from sites that contain content (Wikipedia, Stack Overflow, Yelp) and sites that are pure search engines (Bing).

Re: Twitter CEO Endorses DuckDuckGo

#130

Post by Semaphor »

unicornporn wrote: post #81

Honest question: how do you people even cope with the crap results? I'm a StartPage user, but decided to try DDG for some time after the System1 debacle [1]. The Swedish localized search results are downright unusable compared to StartPage/Google. I'm really trying to give it a chance, but I keep reaching for SP in every other search. [1] https://reclaimthenet.org/startpage-buyout-ad-tech-company/

Because they aren’t crap for me the vast majority of the time. I often hear about local results, but flipping the "Germany" switch gives me great German results.

There are 2 cases when I need to use !g, both of them are when there aren’t many results:

1. Rare error, simply not in their index

2. Ambiguous term and I need to force a part of the query to appear. Because DDG thinks it’s perfectly fine to ignore the user sometimes and show you completely unrelated things even if you tried your best to tell them what you are looking for and it’s in their index.

Sadly recently google started doing that as well. Not as bad as DDG, the first few results are still an answer to my query, but then they decide to spam the results with useless sites that don’t have the term.

edit: formatting

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