Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A Duck & a Wiki Team Up Against the Content Farms

readwriteweb.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 68 posts

Re: A Duck & a Wiki Team Up Against the Content Farms

#41

Post by benologist »

epi0Bauqu wrote: post #39
benologist wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure it was bad - but was every decision* they ever made so fundamentally wrong that they couldn't possibly have improved? The world wrote them off completely 8 minutes after they launched, and they were a meme like the next day . (* in search, not their ridiculous perks etc) When I search for online games on DDG I get stuff like this in the first 'page' of results: - http://onlinegames.innovative-solutions-group.com…

Thx for the specific example, always very helpful! But in this case, I'm having trouble reproducing. Do you have a region set or something? I'm looking at http://duckduckgo.com/?q=online+games and don't see those domains. I'm not saying the other domains are good :), but I just want to understand what you're seeing. We definitely have a problem right now of over-weighted the domain name in the url.

I'm in latin america (Nicaragua) which might hurt a lot if it's trying to pull localized results from this little corner of the world heh.

http://playtomic.com/ddg.png is what I'm seeing.

Edit:

I'm doing a search from one of my US-based servers and seeing those same sites?

http://playtomic.com/ddg2.png

Re: A Duck & a Wiki Team Up Against the Content Farms

#42

Post by epi0Bauqu »

benologist wrote: post #23
citricsquid wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think so, the people using DDG are still a tiny tiny minority. If they did what google did with the browser market when they released Chrome then you would be warranted in saying they blew it wide open, but for what DDG has done with search? I don't think so, not yet anyway. Maybe when they've penetrated beyond the tech "elite" they might get somewhere, but right now if I ask any of my friends (who are relati…

I think the difference is the attitude is different now - when Cuil launched the world laughed and said nothing could be as good as Google. Almost 3 years later a small, insignificant yet maybe not, number of people are starting to use alternatives. A good parallel could be Firefox - Internet Explorer was the way to browse the internet, now they're just a way. If Google wants to be the search engine a decade from now…

The difference is Matt_Cutts, moultano, nostrademons (Google employees) et al. are all over DDG threads, but weren't on Cuil ones as much, e.g. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=258737 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1255122.

I agree though, that DDG is a blip -- a teeny tiny blip in the search engine market -- so, quite frankly, I'm not sure why they care so much, or at all.

Re: A Duck & a Wiki Team Up Against the Content Farms

#43

Post by epi0Bauqu »

benologist wrote: post #41
epi0Bauqu wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thx for the specific example, always very helpful! But in this case, I'm having trouble reproducing. Do you have a region set or something? I'm looking at http://duckduckgo.com/?q=online+games and don't see those domains. I'm not saying the other domains are good :), but I just want to understand what you're seeing. We definitely have a problem right now of over-weighted the domain name in the url.

I'm in latin america (Nicaragua) which might hurt a lot if it's trying to pull localized results from this little corner of the world heh. http://playtomic.com/ddg.png is what I'm seeing. Edit: I'm doing a search from one of my US-based servers and seeing those same sites? http://playtomic.com/ddg2.png

Ahh, thx. Turns out I was the one with the settings set :). Duly noted!

Re: A Duck & a Wiki Team Up Against the Content Farms

#44

Post by benologist »

epi0Bauqu wrote: post #42
benologist wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the difference is the attitude is different now - when Cuil launched the world laughed and said nothing could be as good as Google. Almost 3 years later a small, insignificant yet maybe not, number of people are starting to use alternatives. A good parallel could be Firefox - Internet Explorer was the way to browse the internet, now they're just a way. If Google wants to be the search engine a decade from now…

The difference is Matt_Cutts, moultano, nostrademons (Google employees) et al. are all over DDG threads, but weren't on Cuil ones as much, e.g. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=258737 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1255122 . I agree though, that DDG is a blip -- a teeny tiny blip in the search engine market -- so, quite frankly, I'm not sure why they care so much, or at all.

They care because maybe tomorrow you're not just a tiny blip and they're not as entrenched as they are today. Unlikely? Sure, but it does happen.

Re: A Duck & a Wiki Team Up Against the Content Farms

#45

Post by epi0Bauqu »

zone411 wrote: post #30

I'm sorry but I have big problems with calling DDG a real search engine. Their page states "DuckDuckGo is a search engine like Google." BS. It's a meta search engine that relies on other real search engines, such as Bing, to get the results. If ever becomes a threat to Bing, they'll cut them off in a second. DDG doesn't do the hard and resource-intensive work of crawling and ranking the pages, they just tweak the res…

For the record, I've been crawling the Web since the beginning of DDG (and before the BOSS or the Bing APIs existed). Yes, a one FTE, self-funded search engine, does not have the capacity to spend millions of dollars on crawling (does Google spend billions?).

I now focus my crawling efforts where I see they can add significant value, namely on spam removal and zero-click info. Our index actually shows the top result about half the time, which is not from any external API. Given that most people click the top result most of the time, this is not an insignificant addition.

We of course use external sources, but I think your comment is too dismissive of the intelligence we've woven on top and through them. I'm not interested in sharing all of DDG's trade secrets just to prove a point, but needless to say, you can simply compare the external APIs to our results across a swath of different types of queries and see the differences.

Finally, I find the premise of your comment a bit short-sighted, but I'm actually OK with being dismissed as a toy. In the eyes of the average user, they don't care where results came from at all. They just want the right information faster. So quite frankly, I think it is a reasonable move to use external APIs and focus on things like the top result, UI, etc. More recently, Yahoo and Ask seem to agree. Most people are dismissive of them too, but they've been doing a lot of innovative UI things, which matter a lot to end users.

Re: A Duck & a Wiki Team Up Against the Content Farms

#46

Post by tectonic »

tectonic wrote: post #34
citricsquid wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, Gabriel Weinberg: http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/

While I'm kind of frustrated by the anti-Google marketing, I'm impressed by how productive Gabriel clearly is.

Why was this down voted?

Re: A Duck & a Wiki Team Up Against the Content Farms

#47

Post by dschobel »

epi0Bauqu wrote: post #42
benologist wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the difference is the attitude is different now - when Cuil launched the world laughed and said nothing could be as good as Google. Almost 3 years later a small, insignificant yet maybe not, number of people are starting to use alternatives. A good parallel could be Firefox - Internet Explorer was the way to browse the internet, now they're just a way. If Google wants to be the search engine a decade from now…

The difference is Matt_Cutts, moultano, nostrademons (Google employees) et al. are all over DDG threads, but weren't on Cuil ones as much, e.g. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=258737 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1255122 . I agree though, that DDG is a blip -- a teeny tiny blip in the search engine market -- so, quite frankly, I'm not sure why they care so much, or at all.

I think the difference in engagement by those guys is that Cuil was trying to be stealth and downplay the hype of being "google 2.0 by ex-googlers" whereas your marketing has been squarely aimed at them.

Re: A Duck & a Wiki Team Up Against the Content Farms

#48

Post by greenyoda »

zone411 wrote: post #30

I'm sorry but I have big problems with calling DDG a real search engine. Their page states "DuckDuckGo is a search engine like Google." BS. It's a meta search engine that relies on other real search engines, such as Bing, to get the results. If ever becomes a threat to Bing, they'll cut them off in a second. DDG doesn't do the hard and resource-intensive work of crawling and ranking the pages, they just tweak the res…

I don't really care whether they're a "real search engine" or not. In my experience, they give better results than Google (less spammy content-farm stuff), and they disclose less of my personal information, so I use them instead of Google.

Re: A Duck & a Wiki Team Up Against the Content Farms

#49

Post by mahmud »

zone411 wrote: post #26
redthrowaway wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google's ranking of Wikipedia articles is due in large part to Wikipedia's great PageRank ranking. I don't think Google is giving Wikipedia any sort of singled-out treatment, Wikipedia just ranks highly on Google's relevance metrics.

The problem with Wikipedia is that many of their articles are poorly regurgitated versions of other source articles from the Web and that these source articles get no Google credit at all, even if they are linked from the Wikipedia articles, since Wikipedia uses no-follow links. Wikipedia ranks near the top in Google for almost any term for which it has an article, regardless of its quality.

Not always. Just yesterday I was knee-deep in wikipedia for linear algebra stuff and was surprised to find it more thorough than MathWorld.

Re: A Duck & a Wiki Team Up Against the Content Farms

#50

Post by mkramlich »

InfinityX0 wrote: post #25
bryanh wrote: post #24

DDG is supplanting labor intensive algorithmic improvements with manually manicured search results. Compared to Google's vast network of resources, it is a logical step for DDG to take. It is, essentially, a fast fix to a real problem. Google has to do things the hard (and dare I say... proper?) way.

DDG is supplanting labor intensive algorithmic improvements with manually manicured search results. This sentence is a paradox.

To illustrate what he meant, I'll give an example. Assume someone entered a search, "What are the best dog breeds?". Would it be easier to:

1. write an automated system which could dynamically deduce what the answer to this question is and/or what pages to return in the results, based on dynamically crawling the web, indexing, analying link structure, ranking, filtering, etc.

-or-

2. have a human write an answer to this fricking question and enter it into the database as the result for this search

hint: pick 2

it doesn't scale up to handle bazillions of different searches, but on a smaller scale and in tactical cases it's far simpler and easier to implement and can produce better results.

Post reply on HN