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

51–60 of 68 posts

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

#51

Post by babeKnuth »

greenyoda wrote: post #48
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.

amen brother.

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

#52

Post by babeKnuth »

CurrentB wrote: post #11

DDG has a laughably small market share. This doesn't necessarily make them a non-threat, but it's going to take more than this to change users' search behavior (ie convert them from Google to DDG) on even a minute level. I mean Google has the whole page preview thing now anyway, and the content farm thing should be fixed soon, as mentioned. Honestly, Google Instant is the best thing in search for a long time and it's…

their market share may be laughable, but that still doesn't eliminate the fact that many knowledgeable people prefer either blekko or duckduckgo over google.

it can definitely be viewed as a "calm before the storm". or if you're familiar with gentrification, the "cool cats" are living on this side of town.

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

#54

Post by babeKnuth »

epi0Bauqu wrote: post #37
Matt_Cutts wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know of a couple ways: - Adding affiliate codes to the search results: https://duckduckgo.com/privacy.html The relevant part is "we may add an affiliate code to some eCommerce sites (e.g. Amazon & eBay)". It looks like this is where most of the revenue comes from, according to http://blogs.wsj.com/venturecapital/2011/01/26/can-a-start-u... . Relevant part is "The site is self-funded and saw about $15,000 in revenue…

Wow, Matt, I'm not sure if I should be flattered or scared that you're paying this close attention to DuckDuckGo :). The $15,000 is less than my graduate school stipend was. Needless to say, we're not raking in the dough here. I just added this to the FAQ, i.e. how do you make money (I don't see any ads)? We'd like to show minimal advertising and make the venture more sustainable, for sure, but haven't been able to f…

he's apparently used duckduckgo. i can recognize it from a mile away because the stalking/wow factor that all us users experience after using it seems to have also bit him. :)

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

#55

Post by netdog »

petervandijck wrote: post #5

Google has mentioned they're working on the content farm problem. I would expect them to make some moves faster that are smarter than banning content farm X while partnering with content farm Y. Likely algorithmically, coz that's how they roll.

> Google has mentioned they're working on the content farm problem.

The irony is that is Google's own AdSense program is the incentive for the creation of airburger web sites, which otherwise have no reason to exist.

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

#56

Post by brianobush »

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…

DDG is a meta search engine now, but this is a step towards being a real search engine someday. Harvesting queries, click through analysis, etc is vital to the development of a real SE. I would call this method SE boot-strapping.

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

#57

Post by chc »

babeKnuth wrote: post #52
CurrentB wrote: post #11

DDG has a laughably small market share. This doesn't necessarily make them a non-threat, but it's going to take more than this to change users' search behavior (ie convert them from Google to DDG) on even a minute level. I mean Google has the whole page preview thing now anyway, and the content farm thing should be fixed soon, as mentioned. Honestly, Google Instant is the best thing in search for a long time and it's…

their market share may be laughable, but that still doesn't eliminate the fact that many knowledgeable people prefer either blekko or duckduckgo over google. it can definitely be viewed as a "calm before the storm". or if you're familiar with gentrification, the "cool cats" are living on this side of town.

Yes, many knowledgeable people prefer Blekko or DuckDuckGo. But that's "many" in the absolute sense, where "many" people are part of any arbitrary group on a planet of 7 billion.

Relative to the size of the group we're talking about, even among geeks, using DuckDuckGo as your main search engine is rare. It certainly doesn't look like DuckDuckGo has a glut of tech industry leaders using it exclusively — mostly just the odd geek here and there who wants to try something new or who has just decided he doesn't like Google.

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

#58

Post by ErrantX »

mahmud wrote: post #49
zone411 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That rough area of maths is one area well covered, after military and astrophyiscs I would say.

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

#60

Post by petervandijck »

timr wrote: post #35
petervandijck wrote: post #5

Google has mentioned they're working on the content farm problem. I would expect them to make some moves faster that are smarter than banning content farm X while partnering with content farm Y. Likely algorithmically, coz that's how they roll.

Google would do well for itself to stop horsing around with attempts to find 'algorithmic solutions' (if that's actually what they're doing), and in the short-term doing what's necessary to make a perceivable improvement in the quality of their product. Even if the content farms were changing domains regularly, Google could probably kill them faster than they'll find a way to algorithmically drop the ranking of their…

Yea, I think you're right there.

Although, perhaps we underestimate the scale they deal with. Plus, manually removing sites that are not clearly evil but on the border may become a PR nightmare.

Post reply on HN