231–240 of 245 posts
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The second huge fail of google with technical queries is when it starts substituting synonyms for words in your query the make the search useless. It makes you not want to name commands in a common sense style.
Yeah but DDG does this as well. Try searching for NSString. It'll actually search for strings.
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My experience with exactly these and related terms has been almost opposite. Lately I needed to look up info on HTML and CSS a lot and not only am I constantly getting MDN results at the top, I usually get a snippet from the MDN page in the "instant answer" (or whatever it's called) box. Before searching for this stuff on DDG I never even realized how good of a resource MDN is (not that I actually needed much info on…
Try logging out of your DDG account (if you have one), and searching for "html table tag" (without quotes) and you'll see what I mean. MDN is nowhere to be found. If you see it, then DDG must be showing us different results for some reason. I find MDN and w3schools about equal, although I do find w3schools is a bit better laid out and quicker to get the info I'm looking for. MDN certainly isn't perfect...I just had a…
I agree with what you write about w3.org, it's almost painful to navigate when you just need a quick reference.
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I've already said that I believe the most likely thing they are looking for is the wikipedia page. How many times do people actually buy flowers? Once or twice a year? If they are doing it any more often than that, then they shouldn't need to google "flowers" each time....
> If they are doing it any more often than that, then they shouldn't need to google "flowers" each time.... Why not? Computers are better at memorizing things than people; it shouldn't be a human's job to remember a site URL (and browser bookmarks are less useful than intelligent search engines).
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> Duck duck is barely usable ... but they don't spy on you. 1. You don't know that. 2. No search engine ever spied on you when they started.
I wonder if it's possible to make a search engine that people can verify is not spying on them. One where the source is truly open source. Not just on github, but where anyone who wants to can ssh into the server and have full read-only access to the whole system to verify that the code they see is really what's running. Sure, there'd be some security things to work out to make it balance how easy it'd be to hack it,…
[1]. yacy.net
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> If they are doing it any more often than that, then they shouldn't need to google "flowers" each time.... Why not? Computers are better at memorizing things than people; it shouldn't be a human's job to remember a site URL (and browser bookmarks are less useful than intelligent search engines).
I imagine after a few times they would have a particular business or location in mind, and use google to search for that instead. For instance, if I googled "flowers" a few months ago and found "Joes Flower Shop in Seattle", if I wanted flowers again I would google "joes flowers seattle" instead of "flowers".
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It's interesting that you are talking about "two-tiered search would decentralize efforts to improve algorithms". But you mentioned that "this solution does not need to be distributed: sites can share their local indexes and ranking algorithms with the routing search engine." Can you elaborate a little bit about why it's not a distributed solution if sites share their local indexes with the routing search engine?
Can you elaborate a little bit about why it's not a distributed solution if sites share their local indexes with the routing search engine? Yes, sure. I use the concept of distribution in the sense of separating a process within different entities (search router and local searches). In the distributed case the "search router" queries other sites to determine the best results. For example, searching for code samples i…
I'm very interested in this topic because I've proposed my solution for how to improve search engines, not from algorithm point of view, but from systematic point of view. And making it fully distributed is the key.
While you mentioned about the 2-level search and "receiving their algorithms and data ...", I don't think it's very feasible. Do you agree? So vertical distributed architecture across various industries is not a feasible solution. But we can do a horizontal distributed architecture which will collect data from geographic locations. In each location, there will be many different verticals. It's matter of time if Google cannot find a better solution, search engine will be improved in certain way.
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Can you elaborate a little bit about why it's not a distributed solution if sites share their local indexes with the routing search engine? Yes, sure. I use the concept of distribution in the sense of separating a process within different entities (search router and local searches). In the distributed case the "search router" queries other sites to determine the best results. For example, searching for code samples i…
Thank you for your explanation. Now I understand better. But a distributed system is usually defined in the second meaning of what you said inside the search engine, instead of across different websites. I'm very interested in this topic because I've proposed my solution for how to improve search engines, not from algorithm point of view, but from systematic point of view. And making it fully distributed is the key.…
Why not? I don't get it.
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Thank you for your explanation. Now I understand better. But a distributed system is usually defined in the second meaning of what you said inside the search engine, instead of across different websites. I'm very interested in this topic because I've proposed my solution for how to improve search engines, not from algorithm point of view, but from systematic point of view. And making it fully distributed is the key.…
While you mentioned about the 2-level search and "receiving their algorithms and data ...", I don't think it's very feasible. Do you agree? Why not? I don't get it.
Duck duck is barely usable ... but they don't spy on you. The !g and !b commands make it my first choice. If the results aren't getting what you want, try the search on google or bing. IF you don't mind Sergy Brin or Bill Gates tracking you. I still think there's room for a search engine that supports boolean(ish?) operations like AND, OR , NOT and NEAR. Providing links directly to the source and not a redirect to th…
'barely usable'
results than compromise privacy.
It is not so much that I am not willing to share stuff (even with the government). I used to run a small SaaS for a specific legal industry, and I was subpoenas by the attorney general's office. So I am well aware of the process and I do think in some cases, government do need access to our data to ensure security.
The difference is to ask for permission (court order and transparent due procedure) and have transparency. Maybe the big difference is the exercise of Power instead of Force.
And power is a word with many means, so to be rigorous, this is what I meant by power:
"Power means pretty much the same thing as freedom. Power is a thing that everybody wants the most they can possibly have of. That is, skiing is power, sex appeal is power, the ability to make yourself heard by your congressman is power. Anything that comes out of you and goes out into the world is power and in addition to that, the ablity to be open, to appreciate, to receive love, to respond to others, to listen to music, to understand literature, all of that is power. By "power" I mean human faculties exercised to the largest possible degree. So, in a way, in a large sense, by power I mean individual intelligence. Now when you reach out to another person through the energy or creativity that is in you and that other person responds, you are exercising power. When you make somebody else do something against their will, to me that is not power at all, that is force, and force to me is the negation of power." - Charles Reich
And Free Software (Free as in freedom) is a good real world exercise in power.
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While you mentioned about the 2-level search and "receiving their algorithms and data ...", I don't think it's very feasible. Do you agree? Why not? I don't get it.
Because to my understanding, 2-tiered search means that the routing search engine scrapes data from the second level search engines and return it to the users. The second level search engines, e.g., Stack Overflow, are usually running by separate entities from the routing search engine, say DDG. If DDG does not own all the second level search engines, how can they get the local indexes and ranking algorithms from the…
1) Google quality of indexing doesn't have any competition yet.
2) They can calculate a page rank across different domains
3) No single entity can make the same efforts or is so smart to build a similar thing
If you follow the 2-tier route:
1) Each entity takes responsability to optimize the quality of search locally.
2) They know their own domain or they can learn how to optimize their page rank at a local level instead of a global level
So, at the end you have distributed the work of local optimization across different intelligent entities. For example, when you look at the Linux kernel or other open source projects you can count million of man hours that are difficult to have if you run a single entity.