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Improving DuckDuckGo

duck.co

31–40 of 144 posts

Re: Improving DuckDuckGo

#31
post #7

One request I have is to be able to filter results by longer time ranges. If that was added I could switch over.

Yeah agreed. As a js dev any search that isn't limited to 1 year is pretty much useless, but 1 month isn't enough.

Re: Improving DuckDuckGo

#32
post #8

I run https://jivesearch.com , so I might be biased. The single biggest thing they can do to improve their product is open source everything. They've instead decided to move away from that by freezing their instant answers with no explanation as to if/when they will re-open source them. Makes me question their commitment to privacy and transparency.

They've got to protect their IP somehow.

Will they protect my IP somehow?

Re: Improving DuckDuckGo

#33
Goal #1 should be high quality search results while respecting privacy. Everything else should be secondary. The biggest thing DDG could do to improve their product is make it quick and easy for users to provide feedback about bad search results. I'd be happy to report searches that Google gives better results for but they don't have a mechanism to do so.

For example, search DDG for "odroid". The official domain is hardkernel.com. The first result from hardkernel comes up at #6 for me. I'd love to have a way to suggest the official domain for a product like that so it shows up as #1.

Re: Improving DuckDuckGo

#34

> All of these requests are all fully encrypted in transit to DuckDuckGo, such that nobody else but us can see them. And like with all other requests to DuckDuckGo, there is no personally identifiable information embedded in them, and we do not store IP addresses associated with them. They say they don’t Store IPs, but every request presumably has one. So it would be very easy for them to change this if they so wishe…

It's hard for Duck Duck Go to deliberately put themselves in a position where they're unable to collect IP addresses.

You could, however, use them via their Tor onion service: https://3g2upl4pq6kufc4m.onion/

It took me a while to find out somewhere where this is really run by them rather than a third-party proxy, but this seems to confirm it: https://www.reddit.com/r/duckduckgo/comments/1hdqs6/weve_upd...

Re: Improving DuckDuckGo

#35
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No because DDG is a frontend to Bing results. The ads are different (DDG shows Yahoo ads, which also shows Bing ads) and Bing shows Bing ads only.

Source?

Easy way to verify this, right-click on the ads, paste link

Re: Improving DuckDuckGo

#36

Goal #1 should be high quality search results while respecting privacy. Everything else should be secondary. The biggest thing DDG could do to improve their product is make it quick and easy for users to provide feedback about bad search results. I'd be happy to report searches that Google gives better results for but they don't have a mechanism to do so. For example, search DDG for "odroid". The official domain is h…

Validating that user feedback is legitimate and not from a bad actor sounds pretty hard.

Re: Improving DuckDuckGo

#37

Goal #1 should be high quality search results while respecting privacy. Everything else should be secondary. The biggest thing DDG could do to improve their product is make it quick and easy for users to provide feedback about bad search results. I'd be happy to report searches that Google gives better results for but they don't have a mechanism to do so. For example, search DDG for "odroid". The official domain is h…

FWIW in the cases where my DDG results are insufficient (which is happening a lot less often than it used to), I try to just go up and insert a "!g" before the same query.

I don't know if DDG is looking at their "!g" requests or not, but I'd be surprised if they weren't.

Re: Improving DuckDuckGo

#39

If anyone from DDG is watching this thread, thank you for your product and your commitment to privacy. As a privacy-conscious individual, I greatly appreciate your work. Is there a way to donate? I know you already monetize your product through ads, but I use an ad-blocker (among other things) because, well, most of the internet does not operate with the same values that you do. Since you aren't making any money off…

White list their page.

OP might prefer to give them money directly rather than seeing ads.

Re: Improving DuckDuckGo

#40

Goal #1 should be high quality search results while respecting privacy. Everything else should be secondary. The biggest thing DDG could do to improve their product is make it quick and easy for users to provide feedback about bad search results. I'd be happy to report searches that Google gives better results for but they don't have a mechanism to do so. For example, search DDG for "odroid". The official domain is h…

Are DDG users comfortable knowing that their search results are always going to be inferior?
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