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Re: Advertise on DuckDuckGo Search

#121

Post by jll29 »

yegg wrote: post #67
Minor49er wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DDG grew up being a whitelabeled version of Bing. As far as I understand, DDG has since started implementing more of their own search patterns and results, but has not completely removed themselves from Bing

We actually always had a bunch of our own stuff, and still do, as well as work with other partners. For example, the number one module on mobile is local, and we don't get any local stuff from Bing at all. Similarly, the number one module desktop is knowledge graph, and we don't get that from Bing at all either.

Hi Gabriel, would you be potentially available to write a technical blog post about how DDG plugins are federated for The Informer, the blog of the British Computing Society's Information Retrieval specialist group (BCS IRSG)? (Is Kamyl Bazbaz the best person to discuss such requests, or how can you be reached? Thanks!)

Re: Advertise on DuckDuckGo Search

#122

Post by reducesuffering »

ummonk wrote: post #17
nomel wrote: post #2

I was able to convince my wife to switch for anything remotely "controversial", when, during the pandemic, we caught the relatively "real time" disappearance of several "against the grain" articles about covid [1]. By disappeared, I mean top results for the rough concept one day to not being able to find it, even with the exact title and text, the next. I want a search engine, more than a curated guide. [1] https://w…

It was crazy to see suggestions to wear masks or claims that covid was airborne getting "fact-checked" by the media only to reverse their position months later after WHO put out new statements. In particular, the phrase "no credible evidence" was wildly thrown around without mentioning whether there were any credible high-powered studies that had even attempted to find evidence of the phenomenon.

> the phrase "no credible evidence" was wildly thrown around

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/the-phrase-no-evidence...

Re: Advertise on DuckDuckGo Search

#123

Post by tangotango2 »

yegg wrote: post #113
zerr wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't DDG a Bing front-end? So did Bing improve recently?

No, we're not. See my comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35980451 But more to answer the OP, we've been making a lot of investments to improve our results (along with other things) -- high-level updates posted quarterly at https://duckduckgo.com/updates

Thank you, I'be been using ddg for last 3 years as default in my phone and pc and its been awesome, dont need google anymore.

Re: Advertise on DuckDuckGo Search

#124

Post by yegg »

nomel wrote: post #2

I was able to convince my wife to switch for anything remotely "controversial", when, during the pandemic, we caught the relatively "real time" disappearance of several "against the grain" articles about covid [1]. By disappeared, I mean top results for the rough concept one day to not being able to find it, even with the exact title and text, the next. I want a search engine, more than a curated guide. [1] https://w…

x-posting from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35980374

(I'm the CEO & Founder of DuckDuckGo.)

It is simply not true that we have censored anything or made ourselves "the arbiters of truth." I realized I previously explained how our news rankings work very poorly on Twitter but I subsequently put out a clarification in this help page with a much clearer (and detailed) explanation of how our news rankings actually work: https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/ne...

From that page: "When we apply our own ranking signals we do so in a strictly non-political manner, meaning we don’t evaluate or otherwise take into account any potential political bias or leanings of websites in our search result rankings."

Re: Advertise on DuckDuckGo Search

#126

Post by olyjohn »

vidarh wrote: post #88
mattkevan wrote: post #68

I've used DDG as my main search engine for about 4 years now. Until recently I found I was still having to go to Google for specific queries, mainly answering coding problems. But in the last 6 months or so, Google's results have gotten so bad and DDG has continued to improve to the point where I no longer bother with !g. When I do use Google I often find myself in the strange position of not actually being able to f…

The main thing I still use Google for is when I want to look up offline stuff near me. DDG uses a rough location, but even if I zoom in on their maps near me it's missing a whole lot of local stores etc. For other searches I usually try DDG first and only fall back on !g when the results are bad, and often the Google results are also bad in those cases.

I was just using Google maps yesterday to find a restaurant I knew was there. But it wasn't showing up on the map. Then I noticed it was omitting about half the restaurants in the area. The place I was looking for finally showed up when I zoomed almost all the way into it, and then clicked "search this area." I don't know why they are leaving out so many search results on maps these days.

Just a few weeks ago, I was on Capitol Hill in Seattle. Looking for a weed shop. The only ones it would show me were miles away, and I knew there were multiple near me within walking distance. It literally gave me 2 weed shops on the map across the entire city. None anywhere near by.

Their map search has started to really suck balls too.

Re: Advertise on DuckDuckGo Search

#127

Post by rippercushions »

thatnerdyguy wrote: post #92
ummonk wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was crazy to see suggestions to wear masks or claims that covid was airborne getting "fact-checked" by the media only to reverse their position months later after WHO put out new statements. In particular, the phrase "no credible evidence" was wildly thrown around without mentioning whether there were any credible high-powered studies that had even attempted to find evidence of the phenomenon.

Uh... are you suggesting that at some not-insignificant point into the pandemic someone credible was arguing COVID was NOT airborne?

Yes, in the early days of the pandemic there was a lot of official resistance to acknowledging this, mostly because doing so would have meant accepting that COVID was effectively unstoppable.

Re: Advertise on DuckDuckGo Search

#128

Post by yegg »

jll29 wrote: post #121
yegg wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We actually always had a bunch of our own stuff, and still do, as well as work with other partners. For example, the number one module on mobile is local, and we don't get any local stuff from Bing at all. Similarly, the number one module desktop is knowledge graph, and we don't get that from Bing at all either.

Hi Gabriel, would you be potentially available to write a technical blog post about how DDG plugins are federated for The Informer, the blog of the British Computing Society's Information Retrieval specialist group (BCS IRSG)? (Is Kamyl Bazbaz the best person to discuss such requests, or how can you be reached? Thanks!)

Yes, he is the best person to discuss such requests.

Re: Advertise on DuckDuckGo Search

#129

Post by yamtaddle »

chromakode wrote: post #99
yamtaddle wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But in the last 6 months or so, Google's results have gotten so bad and DDG has continued to improve to the point where I no longer bother with !g. One place that still consistently gives me trouble is Stack Overflow. More often than not, I DDG my search, get two SO links, one irrelevant and the other bad, repeat the search with "!g" and get a half-dozen SO links, 3-4 of which are relevant, and 1-2 of which are goo…

I wonder how much this can be explained by Google having a larger sample size of outgoing clicks to measure.

Could be that, but it feels like it weights search-term-proximity higher, and/or tracks more dimensions related to word-connectedness. Like, DDG is more likely to find me a page with all the words but with them scattered about, while Google will get more hits where the words are closer to one another, which is often better specifically for technical searches. Quoting rarely seems to help much, in either case.

[EDIT] Another poster mentioned searches for "X reddit" seeming to have a very-small cap on the number of results from Reddit that it'll display, and that might be part of my problem with SO results, too: maybe their algo prefers to avoid having too many results from one source, which is bad if you expect or want most results to be from one source. That would explain why Google sometimes finds me results with the exact language of my search, that were absent from DDG's listings—maybe it found them, but they got filtered out by a max-from-one-source preference.

Re: Advertise on DuckDuckGo Search

#130

Post by stonogo »

STM32F030R8 wrote: post #118
f6v wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> despite no proof that it isn't a possibility Because you don’t get to come up with a “theory” and dump the burden of the proof on someone else. That’s incredibly stupid. Not how how science and common sense work.

Since when? It may not be a good argument but should we be deplatforming people over it? Go to Reddit front page right now and try to find something that isn’t a poorly argued political post. What’s the difference? Just because you may disagree with someone it doesn’t mean they NEED to be silenced.

Politics is about how you think things should be run. Science is about what we have evidence for. They are not the same thing.
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