Let's start using DuckDuckGo more often • Hacker News Board

Re: Let's start using DuckDuckGo more often

#61

Post by lucb1e » Sat, May 18, 2019, 2:34 PM UTC

looeee wrote: post #43

lucb1e wrote: post #14

Going one step further, I removed my websites from the Google index: https://lucb1e.com/?p=post&id=130 If you want to find my stuff, you now have to use DDG or some other search engine. Hopefully we can signal to Google that we are not okay with monopolistic behaviour (that's why I blocked them, not just for being the biggest or monopolist, but for also behaving like it -- see the blog post for details).

I mean, that's great and all. But I actually want people to use my website.

So do I, but my livelihood does not depend on it, so I can safely do this and encourage people to use another search engine. Any other search engine. Even if you fall back to Google if you can't find something, at least use another search engine by default. I don't think that's too harsh to ask of a tech audience (which is the audience of my websites).

Of course, if your websites generate income based on people that came from google, I would not expect you to follow suit. As I mentioned in the post, the idea is that there are lots of resources on the web that are not there to turn a profit, but that are still valuable to people. Google is not listening when we use words, so I took action.

Re: Let's start using DuckDuckGo more often

#62

Post by temp » Sat, May 18, 2019, 2:35 PM UTC

If it offered results that even began to resemble relevance, I would, but Google's the only one covering my country's market with good results.

Re: Let's start using DuckDuckGo more often

#63

Post by grimgrin » Sat, May 18, 2019, 2:38 PM UTC

lucb1e wrote: post #35

fareesh wrote: post #26

For the uninitiated, !bang is a pretty great feature: https://duckduckgo.com/bang

Am I the only one who really doesn't like having to prefix that symbol and never types bangs? I type faster than most other tech people but putting my whole left hand on the left side of the keyboard to press Shift with my pinky and 1 with my ring finger is more trouble than adding a keyword for the search in Firefox ( http://kb.mozillazine.org/Using_keyword_searches ). Especially because I type the G, Y, and W (goog…

That’s an odd complaint when I first read it

Maybe it relates to hand pain and stuff

You could use right shift, also, though that’d be tricky for my brain

Re: Let's start using DuckDuckGo more often

#64

Post by kitotik » Sat, May 18, 2019, 2:38 PM UTC

hjek wrote: post #28

DDG is just a proxy for Bing. Yes, let's degoogle our lives, but why not start using a free/libre metasearch engine (like Searx[0]), while you're at it? [0]: https://asciimoo.github.io/searx/

Citation needed.

They use Bing Ads, but I’m not sure if their actual search results are just proxied Bing results.

Re: Let's start using DuckDuckGo more often

#65

Post by lucb1e » Sat, May 18, 2019, 2:39 PM UTC

tonfa wrote: post #57

lucb1e wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I match the user agent string on containing "Google". It seems that Google Chrome only includes "Chrome", so I don't block users this way. Here is an overview of all Google crawlers' user agent strings: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1061943 As you can see, they all include Google (capitalized). I don't use robots.txt because they say that doesn't stop them from including the site in search results: htt…

The documented way is the noindex tag (in html or http headers): https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/93710?hl=en

Not all resources are HTML so I couldn't use the meta tag, but the header looks interesting! Reading up on it, it seems to achieve pretty much the same thing as my current solution. Would you say this is better for some reason? Nobody should encounter my server's 403 response except those with a Google user agent anyway.

The page doesn't say whether this works the same as the robots.txt disallow, where you may still appear in results because other pages link to you. The 403 might be more effective, but I can't really tell either way.

Re: Let's start using DuckDuckGo more often

#66

Post by lelf » Sat, May 18, 2019, 2:39 PM UTC

lucb1e wrote: post #35

fareesh wrote: post #26

For the uninitiated, !bang is a pretty great feature: https://duckduckgo.com/bang

Am I the only one who really doesn't like having to prefix that symbol and never types bangs? I type faster than most other tech people but putting my whole left hand on the left side of the keyboard to press Shift with my pinky and 1 with my ring finger is more trouble than adding a keyword for the search in Firefox ( http://kb.mozillazine.org/Using_keyword_searches ). Especially because I type the G, Y, and W (goog…

You can surely think of a better choice

,⟨prefix⟩ for example

Re: Let's start using DuckDuckGo more often

#67

Post by 0xcde4c3db » Sat, May 18, 2019, 2:39 PM UTC

I use DDG regularly. It's fine for casual "was that company's domain a .net or .com" kinds of searches, but it struggles for more specific or obscure content. My biggest problem with it is that the "advanced" operators are extremely buggy. Quotes and minus sometimes seem to be treated more as suggestions than requirements. Other times they return no results when omitting them returns results that should match. Sometimes a term with a minus is instead treated like there's no minus, i.e. ranking results with that word higher. This seems to have gotten worse over time. I don't have examples for this because the behavior is not consistent at all. The "inurl" and "intitle" operators exist but seem to only work for a single word/instance (e.g. "functional intitle:Haskell" works as expected but "functional intitle:Haskell intitle:reactive" returns a bunch of results without either of those words in the title).

Re: Let's start using DuckDuckGo more often

#68

Post by owlrobot » Sat, May 18, 2019, 2:41 PM UTC

I would but one of the biggest problems I have with it is how I can't look up info. in certain areas like Reddit which I use a lot because it only gives one link even if I include the word "reddit".

Re: Let's start using DuckDuckGo more often

#69

Post by lucb1e » Sat, May 18, 2019, 2:41 PM UTC

_qxjp wrote: post #54

lucb1e wrote: post #14

Going one step further, I removed my websites from the Google index: https://lucb1e.com/?p=post&id=130 If you want to find my stuff, you now have to use DDG or some other search engine. Hopefully we can signal to Google that we are not okay with monopolistic behaviour (that's why I blocked them, not just for being the biggest or monopolist, but for also behaving like it -- see the blog post for details).

From what I recall, Bing also displays AMP pages. Wouldn't you want to block crawls from Bing too?

I didn't know that, though Bing is not in enough of a position of power to abuse it. If they suddenly take over the vast majority of search queries from Google, this might become relevant, but that seems unlikely. For now, I'm happy if some competition is reintroduced in the search engine 'market'.

Re: Let's start using DuckDuckGo more often

#70

Post by skellera » Sat, May 18, 2019, 2:41 PM UTC

octosphere wrote: post #3

I like DuckDuckGo if it wasn't for their data centers being in the U.S. My problem lies in the fact that they could have an intelligence agency like the NSA in their data centers and they could attribute specific queries to specific users by looking at the originating IP. I'm not even sure they have a canary[0] [1] implemented. This is why combining DDG with an anonymous mixer network like Tor is useful (or even a VP…

What search engine do you use then?