Improving DuckDuckGo

Re:Improving DuckDuckGo by beachwood23 on Monday November 12, 2018 @05:13PM (#18436441)

Personally, I love that DuckDuckGo gives me a usable alternative to Google that is privacy focused. It might be better if they were open source, but I'll take what I can get from the industry regarding advertising practices at this point.

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Re:Improving DuckDuckGo by cpeterso on Monday November 12, 2018 @05:19PM (#18436490)

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.

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Re:Improving DuckDuckGo by brentadamson on Monday November 12, 2018 @05:43PM (#18436687)

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.

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Re:Improving DuckDuckGo by gregknicholson on Tuesday November 13, 2018 @04:36AM (#18439775)

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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Re:Improving DuckDuckGo by brentadamson on Tuesday November 13, 2018 @09:03AM (#18440965)

I've opened up an issue: https://github.com/jivesearch/jivesearch/issues/83

I didn't see the "!" documented anywhere but it seems to work at DDG. (We'll also add "\example" to do the same). https://duck.co/help/results/syntax

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Re:Improving DuckDuckGo by brentadamson on Wednesday November 14, 2018 @10:55PM (#18456745)

Just got done adding it. Let me know if there are any issues.

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Re:Improving DuckDuckGo by h1d on Monday November 12, 2018 @05:34PM (#18436607)

Won't open sourcing the code make sites get to cheat their ranking by trying to make it rank logic friendly?

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Re:Improving DuckDuckGo by daveFNbuck on Monday November 12, 2018 @05:40PM (#18436669)

They could open source everything else. I'm pretty sure they don't do their own ranking anyway.

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Re:Improving DuckDuckGo by brentadamson on Monday November 12, 2018 @05:41PM (#18436673)

You can make the ranking configurable. Once we get our own index built we will go back to doing this. The way we used to do it was by having a PostgreSQL function that is customizable once you get everything set up...I'm sure there are other ways to do it as well.

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Re:Improving DuckDuckGo by Kiro on Tuesday November 13, 2018 @03:04AM (#18439428)

No, they get their search results (and rankings) from Bing and Yandex so it wouldn't matter.

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Re:Improving DuckDuckGo by rvnx on Monday November 12, 2018 @05:41PM (#18436677)

No because DDG is a frontend to Bing results. The ads are different (DDG shows Yahoo ads, which also shows Bing ads) and Bing shows Bing ads only.

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Re:Improving DuckDuckGo by walty8 on Monday November 12, 2018 @09:35PM (#18437974)

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.

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Re:Improving DuckDuckGo by Kiro on Tuesday November 13, 2018 @03:05AM (#18439437)

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

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Re:Improving DuckDuckGo by walty8 on Tuesday November 13, 2018 @03:34AM (#18439545)

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'?

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Re:Improving DuckDuckGo by Kiro on Tuesday November 13, 2018 @06:52AM (#18440297)

It depends. For me, a search engine is about the organic search results and they get all their organic search results from Bing, Oath and Yandex. The 400 sources they talk about are used for Instant Answers, boxes and stuff like that.

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Re:Improving DuckDuckGo by Mauricio_ on Friday November 16, 2018 @02:33PM (#18471332)

Essentially it's Bing for the web results. The other 399 sources seem to be for non web things.

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Re:Improving DuckDuckGo by phinnaeus on Monday November 12, 2018 @05:55PM (#18436764)

Source?

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Re:Improving DuckDuckGo by gregknicholson on Tuesday November 13, 2018 @04:41AM (#18439795)

Not available. DDG is closed source.

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Re:Improving DuckDuckGo by Kiro on Tuesday November 13, 2018 @03:07AM (#18439448)

https://duck.co/help/results/sources

> 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.

They do not have their own search index.

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Re:Improving DuckDuckGo by mrweasel on Tuesday November 13, 2018 @05:22AM (#18439970)

Really... You read the last part of that paragraph, but no the first?

>In fact, DuckDuckGo 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).

Kinda silly to have a crawler that doesn't index anything.

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Re:Improving DuckDuckGo by Kiro on Tuesday November 13, 2018 @06:50AM (#18440287)

They have an index but just for their Instant Answers (for which they have 400 sources) and not the organic search results. The last paragraph is what's relevant to the actual search index.

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Re:Improving DuckDuckGo by rvnx on Monday November 12, 2018 @06:39PM (#18437007)

Easy way to verify this, right-click on the ads, paste link

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Re:Improving DuckDuckGo by chme on Tuesday November 13, 2018 @02:26AM (#18439290)

I agree.

There is also searx: https://github.com/asciimoo/searx

It has a couple of instances, like: https://searx.me/

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Re:Improving DuckDuckGo by moollaza on Tuesday November 13, 2018 @01:05PM (#18443146)

Hey there,

To clarify, we haven't closed anything that was previously open, and all open source Instant Answers will remain open.

For now, we've paused community contributions for new Instant Answers and non-essential changes, until we can find a better way to work with the community and their contributions.

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Re:Improving DuckDuckGo by brentadamson on Tuesday November 13, 2018 @04:14PM (#18444961)

A better way than open sourcing it?

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Re:Improving DuckDuckGo by sdinsn on Monday November 12, 2018 @05:06PM (#18436383)

They've got to protect their IP somehow.

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Re:Improving DuckDuckGo by yjftsjthsd-h on Monday November 12, 2018 @05:14PM (#18436450)

Do they? Their selling point is trustworthiness and privacy, not the software.

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Re:Improving DuckDuckGo by devwastaken on Monday November 12, 2018 @05:30PM (#18436579)

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 and have it automagically be searching through specific sites like Soundcloud and Youtube and such.

Like if they're reading this, DDG is very unique and if they were to focus upon reducing costs, making efficient software, and better algorithms, DDG could be the service we shove into apps.

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Re:Improving DuckDuckGo by Kiro on Tuesday November 13, 2018 @03:09AM (#18439457)

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.

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Re:Improving DuckDuckGo by kevinali1 on Tuesday November 13, 2018 @02:03PM (#18443771)

Their selling point is trustworthiness, privacy and usefulness. To be useful, they must have quality software/IP. And in their opinion, that should be protected.

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Re:Improving DuckDuckGo by kgraves on Monday November 12, 2018 @05:33PM (#18436602)

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

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Re:Improving DuckDuckGo by GordonS on Monday November 12, 2018 @06:15PM (#18436888)

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

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Re:Improving DuckDuckGo by gregknicholson on Wednesday November 14, 2018 @01:39PM (#18452490)

If the code was AGPL'd and included contributions for which DDG didn't own the copyright (so DDG would be using the code under the terms of the AGPL), they'd be breaking the licence terms if they failed to disclose any changes.

It wouldn't be proof, but it would be a fairly strong commitment.

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Re:Improving DuckDuckGo by enriquto on Tuesday November 13, 2018 @03:55AM (#18439626)

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

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Re:Improving DuckDuckGo by type0 on Monday November 12, 2018 @06:30PM (#18436962)

Will they protect my IP somehow?

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