How is search so bad? A case study

Re:How is search so bad? A case study by soheil on Sunday January 19, 2020 @03:27PM (#22093805)

> At any rate, I got annoyed at this point (mentioning for those who couldn’t tell), so I switched to DuckDuckGo.

For those who might be misled like I used to be DuckDuckGo is just a proxy for Bing.

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Re:How is search so bad? A case study by EternalAugust on Sunday January 19, 2020 @03:40PM (#22093898)

Yes, it gets the majority of its results from Bing. But it's not _just_ a proxy, it's an anonymizing proxy, at least if we believe their pinky swear.

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Re:How is search so bad? A case study by krastanov on Sunday January 19, 2020 @03:33PM (#22093851)

This line from the wikipedia article about DDG somewhat contradicts you, but it is rather vague:

> DuckDuckGo's results are a compilation of "over 400" sources,[15] including Yahoo! Search BOSS, Wolfram Alpha, Bing, Yandex, its own Web crawler (the DuckDuckBot) and others.

Could you elaborate on your comment, I am sincerely interested in learning the details.

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Re:How is search so bad? A case study by EternalAugust on Sunday January 19, 2020 @03:42PM (#22093911)

You can open up two web pages side by side, search the same term in both Bing and DuckDuckGo, and see many of the results are the same in similar order (at least they were the last time I did this, maybe two months ago). DuckDuckGo appears to get most of its results from Bing.

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Re:How is search so bad? A case study by reaperducer on Sunday January 19, 2020 @03:45PM (#22093931)

For those who might be misled like I used to be DuckDuckGo is just a proxy for Bing.

Every time the topic of search comes up on HN, someone always jumps in and says this.

Then there are a bunch of other people who jump in and say that Duck is much more than that.

So, which is correct?

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Re:How is search so bad? A case study by Kiro on Sunday January 19, 2020 @03:50PM (#22093975)

https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/so...

Interpret it as you wish. To me it sounds like they are using 400 sources and their own crawler for the Instant Answers stuff but get all their "traditional links in the search result" from Verizon(?) and Bing.

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Re:How is search so bad? A case study by soheil on Sunday January 19, 2020 @04:23PM (#22094192)

Well, of course, it can be "much more than that" depending on how you interpret that statement. When I hear marketing blurbs like _"over 400" sources,[15] including Yahoo! Search BOSS, Wolfram Alpha, Bing, Yandex"_ I inevitably start yawning and realize "much more than that" for what is is, marketing that worked on people.

You can run an experiment: would you ever have to be persuaded that for instance Google is much more than just X? Well, no because it's usually proven that it is without someone on the internet having to tell you about it.

Crawling most of the web on a regular basis is incredibly difficult and requires resources that only a company like Google can provide.

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