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Improving DuckDuckGo

duck.co

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Re: Improving DuckDuckGo

#44

Post by iKenshu »

pbreit wrote: post #40
driverdan wrote: post #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 h…

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

I really don't think that the results on DDG are inferior, but I'm comfortable with the results. If I want something more personalize or near for my location(Venezuela is not available on DDG) I just go to Google directly or with !g

Re: Improving DuckDuckGo

#45

Post by jononor »

pbreit wrote: post #40
driverdan wrote: post #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 h…

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

The times DDG does not find what you want, add a !g to the query.

Re: Improving DuckDuckGo

#46

Post by wpdev_63 »

I love duckduckgo and I feel I can almost replace google completely with it. I only have the following comments on it.

1. They're hosted in the US. I wish the company would pick up and move to a country not within the 14 eyes and out of jurisdiction of the cyber super powers(US, China, and Russia). Maybe panama? At least move it virtually with a warrant canary in place.

2. The search results need better contrasting colors for glancing through. Google is noticeable better with it's bolder fonts and better typeface/colors. I feel this would be easy place to innovate in over google.

3. Better site specific searches. Right now you can search a specific site for results. For example right now you can search specific sites using `site:ycombinator.com rust programming langugage` and you will only get results from hackernews. It works great right now and I use daily in my workflows but it would be great to do this from the search bar for firefox or some better way.

Search engines have _alot_ of areas they can innovate in and I feel google with all its controversy(prism program, chinese state surveillance, etc) that many people would prefer to have their searches(and their life stories) in a company that values their users privacy to a fanatical extent.

Re: Improving DuckDuckGo

#47

Post by ObsoleteNerd »

nashashmi wrote: post #27
turc1656 wrote: post #15

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.

I vehemently disagree with advertising in general, and go to efforts to make sure myself and my wife/kids see ads as little as possible (Pi-Hole, adblock plugins, no TV other than as a NAS screen, etc). I very much believe it is a form of malicious brainwashing.

But, I very much want to reward the people who create the things I use.

So I'll never whitelist any site or service, but I'll absolutely donate or make sure they get paid in other ways (and usually willingly donate more than they'd get from showing me ads).

Re: Improving DuckDuckGo

#48

Post by snazz »

wpdev_63 wrote: post #46

I love duckduckgo and I feel I can almost replace google completely with it. I only have the following comments on it. 1. They're hosted in the US. I wish the company would pick up and move to a country not within the 14 eyes and out of jurisdiction of the cyber super powers(US, China, and Russia). Maybe panama? At least move it virtually with a warrant canary in place. 2. The search results need better contrasting c…

For your second concern, did you know that you can change the colors and fonts on DDG from its settings? Once you do, it provides a couple of methods to sync it to each of your devices.

Re: Improving DuckDuckGo

#50

Post by pokemongoaway »

sdinsn wrote: post #8
brentadamson wrote: post #4

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.

Interesting premise... What if they open source some small subset of their code and then track their stock price, usage, and ad revenue as they release more. It could be done in a measured process. I would be more interested in them demonstrating an increasingly distributed, uncoupled, and failure-tolerant infrastructure. I'd like to see them compete with Google's caching too.
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