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We can do better than DuckDuckGo

drewdevault.com

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Re: We can do better than DuckDuckGo

#311

Post by numpad0 »

3np wrote: post #285
kringdom89 wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect that anyone who claims that Duckduckgo "Just works" only do english search. I usually do "english" / "mother tongue" searchs all day. Everytime, I need to remember to toggle the regional button otherwise I get attrocious results. Whereas google simply understand that if I'm searching using the english language it should prioritize english results while if I'm searching in another language it should prioriti…

I also find that even with the regional toggle off, my results are still skewed towards my location or the native language of it. This is true for both DDG and Google. I want results completely agnostic of where my IP happens to be positioned.

And your account histories as well! It sucks(more than sucks) when Google only lets me what I want from someone else’s browser.

Re: We can do better than DuckDuckGo

#312

Post by jbay808 »

867-5309 wrote: post #281
jbay808 wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, hacker news can probably also identify users based on which articles they click on, and how often they jump straight to the comments. I hope they don't. But a system such as I'm describing is probably the only one that can be entirely consistent with the two disparate requirements of fully anonymizing users, and being useful to both programmers and ophiologists studying different things called "python".

what you are describing is relevance based on user input (be that cookies, search history, interests, a preference for x over y) that may be used as identifying information, which vastly de-anonymises the service. if a search query is too ambiguous then it can be refined. if the user knows they want a programming language and not a snake, they can let the search engine know themselves. don't sacrifice their anonymity…

Presumably, the most common search preference lists would be used by very large numbers of people -- for example, almost all programmers would rather see Python (language) queries over Python (snake) queries and would probably all be using whichever search preferences become the most popular and well-maintained, like "mit_cs_club.json". A subset of those would also be into anime and enable their anime search preferences (probably more particular), and some of them will also like mountaineering, pottery, and baking, and will have such preferences configured as well. Yes that might be enough to identify you (just like searching for your own name would be) but those preferences don't need to be attached to you, just your query, and you could disable or enable any of them at any time.

It would basically be like sending a search query in this form:

"Python importerror help --prefs={mit_cs_club, studioghiblifans_new, britains_best_baking_prefs, AlpineMountaineersIntl}"

If you like baking, anime, and mountaineering, it's probably convenient to leave all those active for your searches, even your purely programming-focused searches. But you could toggle some of them off if articles about "helping to protect imported mountain pythons" are interfering with your search results, or if you want to be more anonymous. If you're especially paranoid you could even throw in a bunch of random preferences that don't affect your query but do throw off attempts to profile you. You could pretty easily write a script that salts every search with a few extra random preference lists, for privacy or just for fun, and make that an additional feature. The tool doesn't need to maintain any history of your past activity to cater to your search, so I think it would be a good thing for privacy overall.

Re: We can do better than DuckDuckGo

#313

Post by JauntyHatAngle »

qiqitori wrote: post #270
nl wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In consumer search there is a really long tail of questions (in 2017 15% of Google's daily queries have never been seen before[1]) and performance on this is very important. I just searched for "lockdown rules for SA" (I'm in South Australia and we just had a new 20 person cluster, so we are going back into lockdown). On DDG the first results was a Guardian article which was good, but then the rest were a mix of Sout…

Hrm, I think it's extremely iffy to abbreviate South Australia like that in a search query. You don't need the "for" either. BTW, when I perform the same search, Google's first result is "What Are the Lockdown Rules for South Africa? A Guide for ..." and all the other results on the first page are about South Africa too. (Note: I'm in Japan)

SA is how all Australians would word that.

Re: We can do better than DuckDuckGo

#315

Post by Semaphor »

kringdom89 wrote: post #222
jimnotgym wrote: post #207

> The search results suck Do they really though, for normal people that is?. Some of my searches today below, can't remember the exact terms I used. Mix of DDG and Google. 1) Walt Whitman, I wanted a basic overview of his work to satisfy some idle curiosity. DDG gave me his wikipedia page. Bingo 2) EAN-13 check digit. First result wikipedia telling me how to calculate it. I see it is simple and I have a long list in…

I suspect that anyone who claims that Duckduckgo "Just works" only do english search. I usually do "english" / "mother tongue" searchs all day. Everytime, I need to remember to toggle the regional button otherwise I get attrocious results. Whereas google simply understand that if I'm searching using the english language it should prioritize english results while if I'm searching in another language it should prioriti…

For me (German) it’s different. With DDG, I can easily choose to search for German content (by using !ddgde), with google I have to hope that they search for what I want. Sometimes google does, sometimes it does not. And if it doesn’t I’m out of luck unless I go into the settings and look for a way to tell it what to do.

Google automates, DDG leaves me to choose. I prefer the 2nd approach every time.

Re: We can do better than DuckDuckGo

#316

Post by Semaphor »

sightmost wrote: post #299
jimnotgym wrote: post #207

> The search results suck Do they really though, for normal people that is?. Some of my searches today below, can't remember the exact terms I used. Mix of DDG and Google. 1) Walt Whitman, I wanted a basic overview of his work to satisfy some idle curiosity. DDG gave me his wikipedia page. Bingo 2) EAN-13 check digit. First result wikipedia telling me how to calculate it. I see it is simple and I have a long list in…

I am typing this from India. DDG never provides satisfactory results for anything country specific. As an example, point 6 above is a failure. I used to have DDG as my default, but my workflow got so convoluted that I would search first on DDG, see that the results as not good, open google and search again. It is so frustrating that I switched back to Google even when I didn't want to. Edit: typos.

Did you use localized search or the general search? For me 6 works great with !ddgde

Re: We can do better than DuckDuckGo

#317

Post by Semaphor »

chris_f wrote: post #232
krick wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, all of these are quite DDG-friendly searches. It is my default engine and, yes, some results do suck quite consistently. I'm a bit lazy right now to remember all the problems it has, but some of the most obvious are looking up for news on recent events (especially something small, stuff that doesn't appear in reuters and these sorts of media) and trying to find out some basic stuff about local shops and such (o…

> Yeah, all of these are quite DDG-friendly searches... This is exactly correct. Excluding poor local search results (which is understandable bc of the privacy aspect), Bing/DDG has trouble with long tale search query relevance (5+ word queries), and also finding results from small or obscure sites. The later is simply because Bing's organic index is not as large as Googles. Bing/DDG's organic results are still very…

> Bing/DDG has trouble with long tale search query relevance

The last time I did a comparison, Bing did better (I don’t know what DDG does with the Bing results exactly, everyone says they just show Bing results, but no one knows and it simply doesn’t mesh with my experience).

Because Bing does not randomly filter out half my terms while DDG does even for "-forced terms. This is my #1 problem with DDG and I complain about it in pretty much every DDG thread (while otherwise loving DDG).

For few result searches, DDG shows you essentially random stuff even if they have the result I want (which can be tested by searching for an exact sentence from the result page). On the other hand doing the search on Bing gives me the result without neutering my query.

Re: We can do better than DuckDuckGo

#318

Post by mschulze »

Semaphor wrote: post #316
sightmost wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am typing this from India. DDG never provides satisfactory results for anything country specific. As an example, point 6 above is a failure. I used to have DDG as my default, but my workflow got so convoluted that I would search first on DDG, see that the results as not good, open google and search again. It is so frustrating that I switched back to Google even when I didn't want to. Edit: typos.

Did you use localized search or the general search? For me 6 works great with !ddgde

Thank you, I didn't know that feature. I almost always used g! to switch to Google when searching for country specific terms, guess I can change that now.

Re: We can do better than DuckDuckGo

#319

Post by marc_abonce »

flas9sd wrote: post #64

is somebody aware of a project where the end-user Browser acts as a Crawler? it already spent the energy to render the content. Readability.js extracts page section, does some processing for keywords, hashes anchor links, signs it and sends it off. Cache-Control response headers indicate if the page is public or private. Of course, where it is sending to will have an electricity bill to pay to index the submissions.

Yes. Both PeARS[1] and Cliqz[2] tried to do that. Both got direct support from Mozilla[3][4] but it looks like neither really kicked off.

PeARS was meant to be installed voluntarily by users who would then choose to share their indexes only to those they personally trusted, so the idea is very privacy conscious but also very hard to scale.

Cliqz, on the other hand, apparently tried to work around that issue by having their add-on bundled by default in some Firefox installations[5] which was obviously very controversial because of its privacy and user consent implications.

I still think the idea has potential, though, even if it's in a more limited scope.

[1] https://github.com/PeARSearch/PeARS-orchard [2] https://cliqz.com/en/whycliqz/human-web [3] https://blog.mozilla.org/press-uk/2016/06/22/mozilla-gives-3... [4] https://blog.mozilla.org/press-uk/2016/08/23/mozilla-makes-s... [5] https://www.zdnet.com/article/firefox-tests-cliqz-engine-whi...

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