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The world needs more search engines

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Re: The world needs more search engines

#291

Post by FabHK »

kinkrtyavimoodh wrote: post #128
abbadadda wrote: post #97

> There are only very few truly independent search engines in the world. Google, Bing, Yandex, and Baidu are the best known ones. Most other players only white label results from those four and are dependent on them and their business model. Does this mean the article is insinuating that DuckDuckGo is dependent on another search engine? Is this true? Or are DDG results organic?

There are prolly only 3 global English language indexes. Google, Bing, Yandex. DDG uses vague language to make themselves look like they are actual search engines, which would make you think they actually index the web. The truth is they rely largely on Bing and Google results and mostly just rerank them. That's why it's hard to take their PR seriously.

DDG's main selling point is that they respect your privacy. I could not care less where they get their results from. As such, I continue to take their "PR" seriously.

Re: The world needs more search engines

#292

Post by bagacrap »

beatgammit wrote: post #228
keepper wrote: post #71

It’s really sad to see the anti-success rhetoric. I was around during the “search wars”, and what’s usually forgotten is that well, they were by far the best behaved as a corporate entity. This “romantization” of this ideal state, devoid of historical context or acknowledgement of the world we live in is extremwly counter productive. Should google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple do better? Absofuckinglutely!!! Regulate them…

> Are billionaires awesome? Nope I disagree here. Billionaires are often pretty awesome. Once someone gets way more money than the could ever need, they tend to pursue other activities that they enjoy more than making money, which is frequently giving it away (Bill Gates, Warren Buffet) or starting moonshot space companies like SpaceX, Blue Origin, or Virgin Galactic. Even Zuckerberg donates to projects like these. R…

Yeah. And even if their hobby is tearing up cash to mulch their back yard, I don't think it inherently harms anyone. There's a lot of talk about a wealth gap but it still feels like those caught on the wrong side are more prosperous than they used to be (eg they have smart phones and many other modern conveniences which didn't exist a few decades ago).

Re: The world needs more search engines

#293

Post by chinesempire »

keepper wrote: post #71

It’s really sad to see the anti-success rhetoric. I was around during the “search wars”, and what’s usually forgotten is that well, they were by far the best behaved as a corporate entity. This “romantization” of this ideal state, devoid of historical context or acknowledgement of the world we live in is extremwly counter productive. Should google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple do better? Absofuckinglutely!!! Regulate them…

> It’s really sad to see the anti-success rhetoric

Oh, come on!

Google is not doing its job well, other could do parts of it much better, but Google is too big to allow others to enter its same space, so we need alternatives that can put pressure on Google more than we need Google.

The "people hate success" rhetoric is so sad it can't even be measured.

Re: The world needs more search engines

#294

Post by bogwog »

lucb1e wrote: post #163
bogwog wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you're confirming that Google tracks you without using fingerprinting methods? That's not really surprising considering how much they data have on people. It's also a good example of their monopoly position; Android, Chrome, Chrome OS, advertising and analytics code on almost every website, ownership of multiple of the most popular websites and services on the internet puts them in a unique position that no one co…

> So you're confirming that Google tracks you without using fingerprinting methods? That's literally the opposite of what s/he just said. The person you're responding asked "How would it know?", implying that they (while being on the Google ads team) think there is no way to know without fingerprinting (or cookies from non-incognito mode).

The phrasing in his comment was vague. The first part "Why do you think Google Search still knows" can be read like a rhetorical question, especially when combined with the outrageousness of the alternative (that Google isn't tracking you)

And if he really is saying that Google doesn't track you in incognito mode, then I'm going to go ahead and assume he's either lying, or he's not in a position to know about that system. This is Google we're talking about here.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/nov/22/google-tr...

Re: The world needs more search engines

#295

Post by markosaric »

s_dev wrote: post #21
meerita wrote: post #5

I'm more than happy with DuckDuckGo. I would love more specialized search engines. Back in the day I've used several search engines depending the task i needed to perform, from Altavista to Yahoo to Google.

I use DDG but I still have to resort to Google for 5% of searches because it dosen't deliver the results as well. I desperately want to pay for something that has the quality of Google but the privacy of DDG.

There's the !sp on DDG which gives you Google results without all the profiling using StartPage.com

Re: The world needs more search engines

#296

Post by FabHK »

unnouinceput wrote: post #221

Quote: "There are only very few truly independent search engines in the world. Google, Bing, Yandex, and Baidu are the best known ones. Most other players only white label results from those four and are dependent on them and their business model" Well, DuckDuckGo is pretty known and independent of Google. Not long time ago was an article here on HN about how DDG operates and they have their own web crawler, not rely…

As others have pointed out, DDG appears to use Bing for the majority of their results, as such is not a "truly independent search engine[]".

Re: The world needs more search engines

#297

Post by markosaric »

tanilama wrote: post #8

Nah, two or more search engines all being the product of US big techs won't solve the problem. EU should have its own search engine. They should subsidize this effort and have Google pay for it.

There's https://www.qwant.com/ from France. They crawl the web on their own but it's a big job so they currently supplement with data from Bing.

Re: The world needs more search engines

#298

Post by Mirioron »

green1 wrote: post #219
antepodius wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US is far less restricted than europe for freedom of speech, the major principle that matters when you're talking about information technology. In the case of search engine balkanisation (I'd be in favour of it), I'd think that eurosearch would, on average, be more censorious than amerifind.

Aside from Holocaust denial, hate speech and libel how does the US differ from "Europe" in terms of free speech?

"Hate speech" is such a glaring flaw in "freedom of speech (EU version)" that it invalidates the concept. These laws differ by country, which makes it a nightmare to follow. Some of them have historically been quite silly. There was a case in 2008, where a protestor was fined because he wrote something along the lines of "get lost, jerk" on a sign directed at the president. This eventually got overruled, but it should never have been a case at all. Then there are also the obvious cases such as Count Dancula or whatever he's called.

Re: The world needs more search engines

#299

Post by saagarjha »

patient_zero wrote: post #193
keepper wrote: post #71

It’s really sad to see the anti-success rhetoric. I was around during the “search wars”, and what’s usually forgotten is that well, they were by far the best behaved as a corporate entity. This “romantization” of this ideal state, devoid of historical context or acknowledgement of the world we live in is extremwly counter productive. Should google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple do better? Absofuckinglutely!!! Regulate them…

Your post and post history is a great illustration of what I've talked about before here on ycombinator. Lots of your posts I can agree with, you're a reasonable individual. so why the huge blind spot when it comes to this topic? When they colluded to force wages down, you defended them. There is absolutely no need for you to. And yet I know you will not stop even after this comment to you. For what purpose have you…

> what I've talked about before here on ycombinator

Please don’t lower the quality of discussion like this. It’d be nice if you could discuss the content of the comment itself, politely, and refrain from attacking the poster by claiming they have a hidden agenda.

Re: The world needs more search engines

#300

Post by kbyatnal »

buboard wrote: post #288
teawrecks wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As long as you're ok with only searching reddit...

what else is there to search, honestly? 1000 headphone affiliate sites? "honest" reviews sponsored by sennheiser? Reddit at least provides generally-ungamed reactions and high density of opinions. Adding "reddit" is the default for any search that matters for me nowadays. I was just searching "game payment gateway" , reddit had the most informative comments.

Reddit is a great option (and this is exactly what I do for a lot of searches as well) but its only one of many forums. If you're a programmer searching for headphones, results from HN would be great. If you're a designer, then results from DesignerNews. If you're using them for travel, then you probably want /r/travel.

Reddit is a great option, but there's a TON of hidden forums out there that are gold mines for information, which is something I've been also keeping in mind while building this product.

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