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We can do better than DuckDuckGo

drewdevault.com

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Re: We can do better than DuckDuckGo

#181

Post by eyelidlessness »

beckingz wrote: post #167
eyelidlessness wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Any system that ranks things purely based on votes or view counts can have a feedback loop that can amplify "bad" results that happen to get near the top for whatever reason. I think this is a place where Google has pretty obvious algorithm problems. For example, I’m building a personal website for the first time in many years, and obviously that means I’m doing a fair bit of looking up new or forgotten webdev stuf…

Is w3schools that bad? for some languages, W3schools is as good a reference or better than the official documentation. And they're definitely better than most seospam.

W3Schools is awful. The official documentation is hard to navigate, but W3Schools is notorious for misleading and poor quality examples and advice. MDN, caniuse, CSS Tricks and such are much better resources.

Edit: I semi-intentionally forgot to mention Stack Overflow because it’s so unpredictable in terms of quality.

Re: We can do better than DuckDuckGo

#182

Post by jlarocco »

neurobashing wrote: post #77

Am I the only person who just doesn't have problems with DDG search results? What am I doing wrong (or right), here? I put a thing in and find it. I just don't use Google any more. Genuinely curious why it's working for me and such garbage for everyone else.

Yeah, I'm with you.

I can think of some improvements (better forum/mailing list coverage), but it's generally pretty good. Lately if I don't find it on DDG I probably won't have much luck anywhere else, either.

Re: We can do better than DuckDuckGo

#183

Post by 6510 »

buzzerbetrayed wrote: post #69
mekster wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the email is already like this. It's the inbox providers who choose what domain is legit and new domains start from negative rating. Treating the web the same way doesn't sound too unnatural. It would be bad if those in the positions profit by "authorizing" who is good though.

I'm not sure why email should be an example of the correct way to do it. And with email I can check my spam folder and see exactly what has been rejected. So unless the search engine has a list of sites that aren't deemed worthy included with every search (which probably wouldn't happen), I think this solution has some pretty big flaws. It should be noted that the current system also has these flaws, as Google and DD…

I like this idea! Have the usual official results... then have an option to go to level 2, level 3, level 4 etc (lvl 1 is not included in lvl 2)

You can have really biased technically terrible filters that for example put a site on level 4 because it is to new, to small and any number of other dumb SEO nonsense arguments. (The topic was not in the url! There was poor choice of text color!)

I think wikipedia has a lot of research to offer on what to do but also what not to do. Try getting to tier 2 edits on a popular article? It would take days to sort out the edits and construct by hand a tier 2 article.

Re: We can do better than DuckDuckGo

#184

Post by jbay808 »

867-5309 wrote: post #123
jbay808 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe instead of hard-coding these preferences in the search engine, or having it try to guess for you based on your search history, you can opt-in to download and apply such lists of ranking modifiers to your user profile. Those lists would be maintained by 3rd parties and users, just like eg. adblock blacklists and whitelists. For example, Python devs might maintain a list of search terms and associated urls that g…

> to guess for you based on your search history, you can opt-in to download and apply such lists of ranking modifiers to your user profile pro-privacy does not sit well with terms such as search history and user profile

You might have misread. My proposal is an alternative to inferring user preferences based on their search history.

Re: We can do better than DuckDuckGo

#185

Post by grey_earthling »

djsumdog wrote: post #127
jron wrote: post #60

SEO is crushing the utility of Google. It is pretty telling when you need to add things like site:reddit.com to get anything of value. Harnessing real user experiences (blogs, etc) is the key to a better search engine. This model unfortunately crumbles under walled gardens which is increasingly the preferred location of user activity.

> Harnessing real user experiences (blogs, etc) This is what we need more than anything. More independent blogs. The ability to search events now, or 10 years ago, mass indexing of RSS feeds, etc. A general search engine is kinda way out of the ballpark for now. But you could specialize for long form blogs, from all sides, hard-left, hard-right, women in tech, white supremacists, all the extremes and moderates. I've…

> This is what we need more than anything. More independent blogs. The ability to search events now, or 10 years ago, mass indexing of RSS feeds, etc.

Thought experiment: what would a search engine look like if it only indexed RSS and Atom feeds?

Re: We can do better than DuckDuckGo

#186

Post by api »

A major challenge with search in 2020 is that it's adversarial. Any open source search engine that gets popular is going to be analyzed by black hat SEO people and explicitly targeted by spam networks. Competently indexing and searching content is really only a small part of the problem now, with the adversarial "red queen's race" against black hat SEO and spam being the more significant issue.

Re: We can do better than DuckDuckGo

#187

Post by Eeems »

djsumdog wrote: post #163
Eeems wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just don't give him IRC ops and then get into a private argument with him. https://www.omnimaga.org/news/omnomirc-moved-to-new-server/m...

Wow. I'm honestly not surprised. That's ... that's pretty shitty.

Knowing a bit of his personal history I can kind of understand why he acts the way he does, and has the opinions he does. Doesn't excuse some of it, but at least I kinda get why.

I just wish his name would stop coming up for me tied to opinion pieces like this. I'd rather just see things about how some project he's working on is doing great and being widely adopted.

Re: We can do better than DuckDuckGo

#188

Post by [deleted] »

RileyJames wrote: post #126
Shared404 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Who chooses the white list, and why should I trust them? Is it democratically chosen? You could have user compiled lists of sites to show in search results. Let the users pick the lists they want to see, and communities can create and distribute lists within themselves.

Great idea, but why build a search engine at all in this case? You can use DDG + your filter and see only the results from your whitelist. Could easily be implemented for any current search engine. To a large extent, this is what you already do when you view a page of search results. Filter them based on your understand of what sites / results hold value.

[deleted]

Re: We can do better than DuckDuckGo

#189

Post by 6510 »

benmller313 wrote: post #16

I think this person actually means "We can imagine doing better than DuckDuckGo".

The right question is: How to do search using open source tools?

If your goal is "to make something better than the Duck" and you succeed, the Duck dies... what is your goal now?

Re: We can do better than DuckDuckGo

#190

Post by todd3834 »

Aren't the secrets of the algorithm what prevent people from gaming the results? While I love the idea of search becoming fully open source I'm skeptical it could be done. I hope I'm wrong and I'd love to dedicate time to an open source project with this goal if anyone presents a convincing plan.
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