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We can do better than DuckDuckGo

drewdevault.com

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Re: We can do better than DuckDuckGo

#351

Post by 867-5309 »

jbay808 wrote: post #312
867-5309 wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 preferen…

> Presumably, the most common search preference lists would be used by very large numbers of people

the more anonymous among us tend to opt for common IP addresses and common user agents to become the tree among the forest. adding a profile to that would, well, only add to a digital fingerprinting profile

> those preferences don't need to be attached to you, just your query

that's not how it works. preferences are by their nature personal. every transaction would have your interests and hobbies embedded, on top of metadata

> mit_cs_club, studioghiblifans_new, britains_best_baking_prefs, AlpineMountaineersIntl

you have voluntarily made yourself the birch among the ebony

> 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

how would they not affect the query? they complement the query. or rather, unnecessarily accompany the query. your results depend on your input. it doesn't matter what colour glove you wear to pull the trigger if you bury the gun with the body

> write a script that salts every search with a few extra random preference lists, for privacy or just for fun

just the latter. fuzzing would be pointless since the engine will have already identified you by now

it sounds like an annoying browser extension at best. to label it a pro-privacy tool would be ludicrous

Re: We can do better than DuckDuckGo

#352

Post by mcdevilkiller »

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…

Yep, DDG gives me much better results than Google. Even if I'm searching in Spanish.

Re: We can do better than DuckDuckGo

#353

Post by ddorian43 »

aembleton wrote: post #209
Mediterraneo10 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The challenges to OSS developers are numerous. First of all, many popular sites on the internet block crawlers other than Google and Bing, because only those ones seem to matter to their business, and any small upstart would be assumed to be a dodgy bot. Secondly, Google amasses the database it has only with vast data centers, incredible amounts of bandwidth, and power requirements unavailable to a startup.

Just use the string 'googlebot' in your user agent. After all, Google uses 'Mozilla' in their Google Bot user agent String for similar reasons - because sites might expect it.

https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/verifying...

Re: We can do better than DuckDuckGo

#354

Post by fsflover »

hysan wrote: post #298
nessex wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really wish Google would prioritize English results for English searches consistently. I'm living in Japan as a native English speaker, and have my OS, browser and logged in Google account all configured for English only. Despite that, Google search results always prioritize Japanese language content. Every now and then (though not consistently) it gives me a yellow popup asking if I'd like English results instead,…

Was going to post the exact same thing. This was my experience while living in Japan too. To me, the takeaway is that you simply cannot catch everyone with your defaults. Google and DDG have made different prioritization defaults and the result of that is what we see in anecdotes in this thread.

> To me, the takeaway is that you simply cannot catch everyone with your defaults.

You don't have to. DuckDuckGo allows [0] to create a link with settings: https://duckduckgo.com/?kl=jp-jp.

[0] https://duckduckgo.com/settings

Re: We can do better than DuckDuckGo

#355

Post by fsflover »

Semaphor wrote: post #315
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…

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.

Alternatively, you can go to the settings [0] and create a special URL: https://duckduckgo.com/?kl=de-de.

[0] https://duckduckgo.com/settings

Re: We can do better than DuckDuckGo

#356

Post by ddevault »

henry_bone wrote: post #297
ddevault wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I normally would not reply to someone who equates my blog posts with the ravings of a megalomaniacal fachist, but I will at least clarify for the benefit of onlookers that all three of these points are false. I handle account deletion and GDPR requests all the time, and every email you get from sr.ht (1) is not a marketing email and (2) can be trivially unsubsribed from, with the exception of payment notifications -…

Trump is not a fascist. He's not far-right. Mere nationalist tendencies do not make one a fascist. From wikipedia:- "Fascism (/ˈfæʃɪzəm/) is a form of far-right, authoritarian ultranationalism characterized by dictatorial power, forcible suppression of opposition and strong regimentation of society and of the economy which came to prominence in early 20th-century Europe. The first fascist movements emerged in Italy d…

Refusing to concede a fair election, using gerrymandering and electoral fraud to keep a conservative minority party in power, obstructing the political process, packing the courts as a political weapon, not to mention open racism, a cult of personality, fervent nationalism, and tacit endorsement of political violence? If you compare the rise of European facism to contemporary trends in US politics then the parallels are pretty stark.

If it walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck... it is, at the least, a precursor to fascism. It doesn't happen all at once, and if we wait until it's plainly obvious to call it like it is, then it'll probably be too late. And even if you don't want to call it facist, it's out of line to compare this shit to my personal blog. That's a baseless character attack, which is a dick move, not to mention against the HN guidelines.

Re: We can do better than DuckDuckGo

#357

Post by pbhjpbhj »

6510 wrote: post #245
pbhjpbhj wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Per your 2nd para Google used to have some options to tailor the results more, like allinurl or inurl or title or link (IIRC the word had to be in a link pointing to that page) or whatever . I expected that to evolve to get more specificity but things went completely the otherway and we can't even specify a term is on a page reliably with Google now. Similarly, I was all in on xhtml and semantics (like microformats)…

I use to use inauthor: a lot. I imagine for a FOSS solution we would have to make configurable every separable ranking algo and the option to toggle them in groups as well as build cli like queries around them (with a gui) I'm starting to see a picture now. In stead of wondering how to build a search engine we should just build things that are compatible. A bit like The output of your database is the input of my filt…

Yes, I was thinking along similar lines IIUC of a sort of federated search using common db schemas and search apis so that I could crawl pages and they could be dragged in to your SERP by a meta-search engine. I think the main thing you lose is popularity and ranking from other people's past searches - that could be built in but it relies on trusting the individual indices, which would be distributed and so could be modified to fake popularity or return results that were not wanted (though then one could just cut off that part of one's search network).

Re: We can do better than DuckDuckGo

#359

Post by buzzerbetrayed »

jesuscyborg wrote: post #217
buzzerbetrayed wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope to never use your search engine. I love hand written HTML as much as the next guy, but search engine's are made to find things. And useful information exists on web sites that use generated and/or minified HTML.

Thanks for that buzzkill. I guess the lesson is if you can't do everything Google does, don't even try.

> I guess the lesson is if you can't do everything Google does, don't even try

I don't agree with that at all. But if your goal is to make "a better search engine" as you said, it does actually have to be "better" and not just different.

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