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If you can't use it for all sites you want to search, then what's the point? I'm sure python isn't the only site with a bad search.
I really have to ask if your point is that because a feature isn't universally useful it's automatically pointless?
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Or he is a Python developer(I know I work with him). Searching the python docs or the Internet for some module is a pretty common use case.
True, but I think DDG is smart to pursue the bigger market of "people who want to find stuff on wikipedia, youtube, and google image search" and wait for DuckDuckHack to come up with a plugin that does skillful python searches.
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I really have to ask if your point is that because a feature isn't universally useful it's automatically pointless?
I think that the approach that DDG is taking is wrong. Relying upon individual sites search engines isn't going to lead to uniform results because they are always going to vary in quality.
Search quality is more important than privacy, and Google is better at most of my searches. Also, Google crawls and index's new content within 1-3 minutes. DDG takes 10+ minutes.
I have to ask, what sort of things are you searching for that you require it to be indexed in 3 minutes? The only thing i can think of is news which i generally get via twitter links these days.
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I have to ask, what sort of things are you searching for that you require it to be indexed in 3 minutes? The only thing i can think of is news which i generally get via twitter links these days.
And in that case, you can use !twitter to go directly from twitter via DDG
Its either some use case that everyone needs im ignorant of, or one so small its not a market worth chasing.
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I really have to ask if your point is that because a feature isn't universally useful it's automatically pointless?
I think that the approach that DDG is taking is wrong. Relying upon individual sites search engines isn't going to lead to uniform results because they are always going to vary in quality.
DuckDuckGo won't ever be able to compete with Google as a general search engine. Google already pretty much solved that problem, and even if they haven't they have a huge head start and a much bigger bankroll. If DuckDuckGo is going to succeed on it's search principles it's going to be as a curated search engine. That's a game where they can still compete with Google.
I completely agree with you about the lack of uniformity in search results. Curation is hard. It requires that a good source exist, that the curators are aware of it, and that it's amenable to being added to your system (technically and legally). Only one of these is under the direct control of the curators.
The reason the Python search sucks in DuckDuckGo the people running the curated Python search have a crappy search engine. Obviously either a better choice doesn't exist (probable), the DuckDuckGo curators don't know about it (very likely), or the better source isn't technically or legally accessible to the DDG curators (unlikely but possible).
Unlike the problems of a crawling and building general search index (where even to enter the market you need to have a massive infrastructure investment), these smaller problems of curation are attackable by a smaller team with limited resources. To improve the search results for !python they won't need to re-engineer their entire crawl/index infrastructure, they will simply need to pick a better third-party source once they are aware of it existing.
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In this context, all search engines are "3rd party".
If you want to search amazon, or the python website, why give your query to ddg? Especially if you don't have to when you use browser keywords.
Amazon is probably always going to be the most relevant search engine for their site, but the current choice for python searches may not be.
An example similar to python but that I have first hand experience with is Perl's CPAN searches. There are two search engines for CPAN, http://search.cpan.org and http://metacpan.org. DDG's !cpan originally defaulted to the first one, but at the time it's results were not as accurate or informative as the second one. Upon appeal the DDG people switched the default to http://metacpan.org providing everyone who used the !cpan results with what they felt was a better result.