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Giving up on Google

robsheldon.com

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Re: Giving up on Google

#141

Post by epi0Bauqu »

sagarm wrote: post #127
fluidcruft wrote: post #35

Well, as a single sample, I tried the first thing that came to mind in google and duckduckgo. "breast shimming" which refers to the process of adjusting the magnetic field of a MRI scanner to obtain images of the breast (relevant to a project I'm working on). Every single duckduckgo result is irrelevant. Most of googles results are relevant. It's too bad because google is somewhat hit or miss for me. Someone needs to…

Did you turn safe search off on DDG? When I gave these queries a go, I noticed that DDG stripped "breast" out of the query. The results seemed much more relevant once safe search was disabled. Not that I'd want to go around with safe search disabled all the time...

Yes, this is a safe search problem. Presumably http://duckduckgo.com/?q=breast+shimming&kp=-1 is what you want.

Edit: FWIW, I fixed this: http://duckduckgo.com/?q=breast+shimming should now work as well.

Re: Giving up on Google

#142

Post by epi0Bauqu »

ggrot wrote: post #33

Maybe a minor quibble, but isn't DDG powered by Yahoo BOSS with features added on top? Yet, Rob then goes on to say "Yahoo can't be taken seriously" and points out queries where Yahoo does a poor job of handing synonyms - DDG has the same problem for the exact same query if you try it. Furthermore, the other queries which he suggests give irrelevant results on Google seem to give me irrelevant results on DDG.

DDG is actually a hybrid of my own crawling/indexing and BOSS/Bing/others. Additionally, I don't use the others straight up. So for some queries they may look similar and for others they will look completely different.

Wrt to spam sites, DDG often looks a lot different because I maintain a large database of spam sites that I remove from results. I see these crop up all the time in the API feeds I use. It's over 60M in just the main tlds (non country level domains).

Re: Giving up on Google

#143

Post by epi0Bauqu »

moultano wrote: post #59
alecco wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Among the differences, DDG blocks MFA content mills and junk sites. If you report one they add it quite fast.

Yahoo certainly tries to do that too, although I guess you're getting the union of yahoo/bing's spam-fighting and DDG's spam fighting. I suspect that of the two, yahoo's has a much bigger impact given the size of the teams involved.

Actually I remove tons of spam from the Yahoo, Bing & other feeds.

Re: Giving up on Google

#144

Post by avar »

sandipc wrote: post #98
Jeema3000 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot has changed since 2004. Yahoo for example has 3 pane viewing, tabbed email and chat, you can scroll through and see every email in your Inbox ever received without having to click any links. It feels pretty much like a desktop application, actually...

threaded emails is a major reason to choose gmail over yahoo (in 2010)

GMail doesn't even respect In-Reply-To, and frequently screws up threading on any technical mailing list I subscribe to. It's good at its ad-hoc "conversation" grouping, not threading.

Re: Giving up on Google

#145

Post by epi0Bauqu »

Matt_Cutts wrote: post #96
alanh wrote: post #25

Just last Friday, I was pleasantly surprised to find Duck Duck Go is the only search engine (of those I tried) that shows me a hex color when I search it, e.g. http://duckduckgo.com/?q=%23004499 And not long before, I searched for my oldest still-surviving site (on Angelfire). I discovered that while Google returned 20 garbage sites, they didn’t include mine; my site was the only one DDG returned.

The balance is between offering a cool feature and the danger that all those features accrete into cruft. If you wanted something similar for Google, you can create your own "Subscribed Link" to do this: http://www.google.com/coop/subscribedlinks/ I've created a subscribed links to mimic the UNIX cal command, for example: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/add-calendar-shortcut-to-googl...

It's a case by case thing. In this case, the query space is pretty segmented to avoid cruft.

Re: Giving up on Google

#146

Post by epi0Bauqu »

nadam wrote: post #131

A comparison article on search not mentioning Bing? Yahoo and Duck Duck Go both use Bing as far as I know. Of course there are cases when Bing is weaker than Google. For example your 'streamline/streamlining' example. (As Duck Duck Go also uses Bing of course they have the same problem). On the other hand in other cases Bing is better than Google. I searched for this a while ago: 'impact of basic research on GDP' The…

DDG uses Bing, but usually not straight up. In this case, the first result is the same but others in the top ten are either different or in a different order. Not that they're necessarily better though :)

Re: Giving up on Google

#147

Post by daveungerer »

danilocampos wrote: post #15

I am often annoyed by Google. Its word clustering is too clever by half. At one point I was debugging, I think, an NSTableView object. Google says "eh, fuck it, iPhone dev is much more popular, here's UITableView. Have fun with that." And so then I have to wrap NSTableView in quotes to force Google to use my input as I've provided it. I wish I could turn this kind of stuff off.

Had a similar problem when googling ruby 1.9.2 slow snow leopard, since that describes the problem I had. There was no auto-correct, but somehow they decided to highlight the word low in the search results (which may or may not mean that the rankings were screwed as well). I guess slow is just the plural of low. Because of the s, you know. I mean, seriously, if there aren't enough relevant results with the word slow in them, why include a completely unrelated word?

Re: Giving up on Google

#148

Post by saulhoward »

jacquesm wrote: post #71
yellowbkpk wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if part of Google's speed increases involve dropping some of the more complex keywords while creating the index so that the search space is smaller.

Not that I can detect. For instance: หาเมนบอร์ดช๊อคเกต775 returns 42k results, and is not exactly a common combination of words on google.com. Extra points if you know what it stands for :)

> หาเมนบอร์ดช๊อคเกต775

'Haa men bord chok ket 775' = 'Find motherboard socket 775.'

I would have thought that 'socket' would be a direct English transliteration, and use ซ (s) not ช (ch) though.

Are you in Thailand, Jacques? Also, what makes you think this is such an uncommon phrase? It may not rival English, but there are plenty of Thai speakers out there, in many countries.

Re: Giving up on Google

#149

Post by clyfe »

I don't yet use duck duck go because of the tiny lag (couple ms) that takes to display the results. The google results are almost instant, and i'm relly annoyed by the ddg small lag.

Re: Giving up on Google

#150

Post by xentronium »

newman314 wrote: post #133
danilocampos wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From your mouth to Marissa Meyer's ears. My ultimate Google fantasy: An account setting called "2008 mode." No instant search. No fancy, annoying endless scroll Google image search. No word clustering/auto-substitution. It would be awesome.

That would indeed be awesome. Google Image Search also breaks horribly with FF and Ghostery installed. Google Instant still does horribly at my favorite test search word: Cardinal Do they know if I'm looking for a) the bird b) the team c) guy with the funny hat ? A: No.

You could as well be searching for: d) A term from the Set theory e) Integer type

Too much ambiguity.

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