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Improving DuckDuckGo

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Re: Improving DuckDuckGo

#81

Post by ObsoleteNerd »

kraig911 wrote: post #52
ObsoleteNerd wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I agree with your position. I'm trying to figure out how to limit my kid from seeing any ads at all. Where can I get more information for this beyond adblock and host file manipulation?

I have Pi-Hole on the network that every device in the house runs through, with extra blocklists and a year or so of manual tweaking, that covers most stuff. I also run ad block plugins just in case, don't allow commercial TV (they only watch Netflix or ABC Kids app), and that pretty much covers everything for our family.

It's also just a thing we keep in mind and work around in life. We won't use any service that has ads, or any site that finds ways around the Pi Hole, or watch shows/movies with heavy product placement, etc etc. It's just part of mine and my wife's core beliefs (privacy in general) so we just guide our kids towards "good" content and taught them from the minute they could understand, that "ads are bad, we don't like ads".

Re: Improving DuckDuckGo

#82

Post by [deleted] »

Kiro wrote: post #79
devwastaken wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As most business's their internal code is probably a giant ball of mud that runs on caffeine and poor amounts of sleep. It works, but it probably wouldn't be reasonably releasable without refactoring and reworking a lot of the source so that it's componetized in some way. Personally I just want DDG to make a search API that is free and doesn't require API keys. That way I can setup search in mobile or desktop apps an…

That won't happen as every API call to DDG would result in an API call to Bing/Yandex/Yahoo which they have to pay for.

[deleted]

Re: Improving DuckDuckGo

#83

Post by walty8 »

Kiro wrote: post #77
walty8 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

just open a guest window from chrome, and type the same search terms in the two different search engines, and you would see different results. it's not hard to verify.

What are you saying? That DDG is not getting their search results from Bing and Yandex?

From your source:

In fact, DuckDuck Go gets its results from over four hundred sources. These include hundreds of vertical sources delivering niche Instant Answers, DuckDuckBot (our crawler) and crowd-sourced sites (like Wikipedia, stored in our answer indexes). We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we also source from a variety of partners, including Oath (formerly Yahoo) and Bing.

We continue to partner with more and more sources to bring you the best Instant Answers from the best sources. Our focus is on synthesizing it all together into a superior search experience.

I suppose that's quite different than 'DDG is a frontend to Bing results'?

Re: Improving DuckDuckGo

#84

Post by enriquto »

GordonS wrote: post #28
kgraves wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I much rather trust a product that is open source, which makes me slightly uncomfortable and concerned about DDG.

So let's say they release their source code - how can they possibly prove that their servers are running that same code?

at least for some functionalities, you can run it on your computer and observe the same behavior

Re: Improving DuckDuckGo

#85

Post by TheGrassyKnoll »

wvenable wrote: post #69
userbinator wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who mainly uses DDG when Google decides to block me for "searching too hard", one thing that would make me switch over to DDG completely is advanced search operators --- boolean expressions, exact match (no, not the stupid sort-of-exact one Google has), etc. Basically features that will let you "grep the Web" the way old search engines do, and what new search engines are even trying to forbid.

The problem is that isn't how things are indexed, so "grep the web" is a hard problem. Grep on your machine just scans through every byte, doesn't care how long it takes, and doesn't care how much computing resources it uses (preferably, as much as it can).

These are pretty good tools for 'grepping' on file systems:

  https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep

  https://github.com/ggreer/the_silver_searcher

Re: Improving DuckDuckGo

#86

Post by enriquto »

wvenable wrote: post #69
userbinator wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who mainly uses DDG when Google decides to block me for "searching too hard", one thing that would make me switch over to DDG completely is advanced search operators --- boolean expressions, exact match (no, not the stupid sort-of-exact one Google has), etc. Basically features that will let you "grep the Web" the way old search engines do, and what new search engines are even trying to forbid.

The problem is that isn't how things are indexed, so "grep the web" is a hard problem. Grep on your machine just scans through every byte, doesn't care how long it takes, and doesn't care how much computing resources it uses (preferably, as much as it can).

How can possibly things be indexed so that exact grep is slow but "intelligent grep" is instantaneous?

Re: Improving DuckDuckGo

#87

Post by dingaling »

userbinator wrote: post #57
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…

As someone who mainly uses DDG when Google decides to block me for "searching too hard", one thing that would make me switch over to DDG completely is advanced search operators --- boolean expressions, exact match (no, not the stupid sort-of-exact one Google has), etc. Basically features that will let you "grep the Web" the way old search engines do, and what new search engines are even trying to forbid.

Also, if I input n-number of words then search for those words.

Recently DDG has been Googleifying by dropping one or more search words with an explanation "Not many results contain ____". So I have to click a link to search again for the words I entered. Quite annoying when it happens repeatedly each day.

Re: Improving DuckDuckGo

#88

Post by dbrgn »

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.

White listing only helps them if you then actually click on ads, since advertising networks usually pay per click, not per view.

Re: Improving DuckDuckGo

#89

Post by dna_polymerase »

> To be clear, this means we cannot ever tell what individual people are doing since everyone is anonymous

Nope. This means that they tell us that they cannot tell what individual people are doing. But as they said right in the sentence before that, we are supposed to believe that they don't store IP addresses.

> And like with all other requests to DuckDuckGo, there is no personally identifiable information embedded in them, and we do not store IP addresses associated with them.

That is an outright lie even. HTTP Headers contain enough data already to make individuals distinguishable. Add some data science and you got some fancy profiles of your users.

I don't know what's going on with HN and DDG, but seriously is everyone just buying into this marketing bs? Why should I trust DDG with their claims about privacy instead of Google, Bing, or any other company?

Re: Improving DuckDuckGo

#90

Post by gregknicholson »

brentadamson wrote: post #24
cpeterso wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just DDG and have found !bang shortcuts that are broken or 404 for weeks. I've tried reporting the problems on their feedback forms or Reddit, but never got any responses. If it was open source, I could have submitted a pull request to fix them. I'm surprised they don't have automatic heartbeat queries with expected results for every bang shortcut, at least.

I had the same issue with them back when I was a user. If you find any broken !bangs at Jive Search feel free to submit a pull request.

Is there a way to go straight to the first result using Jive Search? With DuckDuckGo searching for "example !" does this. (This is the main reason I don't use Searx.)
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