News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:How to stop Apple from listening to your Siri recordings by Tomte on Thursday August 01, 2019 @01:23PM (#20586114)
Last time someone argued that point I did a short test. From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19043565

For example, just now, I came across "ED survivor". No idea what "ED" means here (it's eating disorder).

I just put it into DDG and got nothing on the first page that looked like it could be pertinent: A user name "ED survivor" on Instagram posting about vegetarianism, Ed Stafford on Wikipedia, "ED: The Survivor" (a mod for a computer game evidently), Devil Survivor Full HD (a film obviously, no idea what ED means here), a few more in this vein, until the page ends with the TV series Survivor on Wikipedia.

Google: First hit "Template:ED survivor" in Wikipedia (and that page contains the words "eating disorder". Second hit "Eating Disorder Survivors Wall", third hit "Surviving ED" from HealthyPlace (so it's health-related – and the snippet shown on the result page starts with "Eating Disorders recovery is a long road.).

The rest of the results on Google are all similar, all of them(!) clearly tell me what ED means in this context.

DDG gave me crap, none of the results(!) came even close to answering my question.

This is not a singular occurence, just a thing I wanted to know a few minutes ago. I'd love to take DDG's search results, but when not narrowed down to specific origins with bang commands, the results are usually worthless.

Edit: and before people tell me that I should have used quotation marks around my search terms, great, let's try that: Two results with "We would like to show you a description here but the site won't allow us.". From the top three results, one times out, one redirects to a sports betting site, and one to a product in an online apothecary (nothing to do with eating disorder). Then penis extension. Erectile dysfunction, something general about mental disorder, and again two results about penis enlargement.

Re:How to stop Apple from listening to your Siri recordings by godshatter on Thursday August 01, 2019 @02:51PM (#20587049)
Google worked great to give you information on eating disorder survivors, but if you were actually after the computer game mod you would have been out of luck (at least on the first page). More people have eating disorders than play whatever game that is, presumably, so you are stuck getting results for whatever the rest of humanity things is more important. Which is great if your query aligns, but not so much if you walk the least trodden paths more than most.

I agree that DDG might not be as useful for finding out what ED survivor might actually mean, but Google didn't list too many options, either, it sounds like. If you hadn't been wanting to know the most popular definition but a more obscure one, Google would have not been useful at all. This is something I run into a lot. Some popular uses for terms means I have to add extraneous search terms just to get around them.

Re:How to stop Apple from listening to your Siri recordings by Tomte on Thursday August 01, 2019 @03:15PM (#20587274)
But is "$computer_game_mod survivor" a probable phrase? I would agree for "ed", and I'm sure Google would give a more diverse range of results for that. Erectile dysfunction is a perfectly plausible result there.

But "ED survivor" is with very high probability not about that mod or erectile problems.

Not to speak of obvious spam sites, like DDG presented.

[dead]
Re:How to stop Apple from listening to your Siri recordings by stordoff on Thursday August 01, 2019 @01:46PM (#20586362)
You missed:

> No idea what "ED" means here

If you don't know what ED means, that doesn't help you.

Re:How to stop Apple from listening to your Siri recordings by hoobler on Thursday August 01, 2019 @01:57PM (#20586466)
As I said below, Google is not the be all end all of knowledge, you can use !bang commands to use different resources. If this is too inconvenient for you, you are free to give your browsing habits up for a better product.
Re:How to stop Apple from listening to your Siri recordings by Tomte on Thursday August 01, 2019 @01:33PM (#20586220)
Obviously, such a test isn't scientific, nor reproducible.

But more importantly, the search term was "ED survivor". If you enter the solution, I'm not surprised the solution comes out again.

Re:How to stop Apple from listening to your Siri recordings by hoobler on Thursday August 01, 2019 @01:46PM (#20586370)
You missed my point, which was that I don't mind being more specific in my searches if it means my privacy is respected. DDG doesn't work for you and you don't mind Google having a full profile of your web browsing habits in order to better target you for their advertising business? That's fine, but DDG is not without merit just because it doesn't work out of the box exactly as you expect it to.

EDIT: And as a response to the other comment pointing our that you didn't know what ED was in the first place, Google is not the be all end all of knowledge... type "ED !w" and figure it out based on the listing in Wikipedia. This is an inconvenience that I don't mind, that's my entire point.