It's a little weird, you'd think that it would be easy to spot the sites that just copy text from Stack Overflow or the Python documentation and drop them from the index entirely, but apparently not.
It’s like asking someone in the street for directions and they’re embarrassed they don’t know the way so point you in a random direction. Not helpful!
This is an extremely good explanation of what is going on and why it drives me crazy.
I argued this with a search engine employee once and he said others had told him they expected them to do this.
Well, here's the point: If you go this direction the engine become unusable for certain jobs.
If - on the other hand one respect user queries one maybe also have to tell users how to get the results they want.
That is a tradeoff, I admit that. But one of the solutions builds a fantastic tool that might require a tiny tiny bit of training.
The other solution builds a toy that also works as a tool in simple cases.
Why do search engines go that way?
Seems to be short time optimizations all the way:
- making it absolutely idiot proof means more usage
- annoying power users doesn't have any effects until alternatives exist.
Now however Kagi exist and I have left DDG (and Google but they only used to be a fallback anyway) and I will go around tell everyone there is a new search engine in town - and I will enjoy it!
Perhaps that's what analysts and management believes publicly within search companies, but I don't think even normies believe that crappy search results is better than none. There's a few things that may be happening that explain why filler search results creates more engagement.
A non-power-user may perceive a search engine that returns crappy results to have more pages indexed over a search engine that returns no results for the same query, even though the latter would return more accurate results for a different query.
Users may also return to the search engine more because they click on these filler results expecting to find what they want, but they don't, so they click on the back button and click on another result. I suspect that analysts may conveniently omit this information when presenting their fancy graphs showing increased engagement to management, and that's because I've seen this sort of shenanigans in real life. Management either way may just not care as long as the ads being displayed in search results are being viewed or clicked more often.
Also it seems to sometimes throw in my location information when I didn’t ask.
Yeah, the content is there, but with a ton of hoops to jump through.
I've become almost dependant on uBlock Origin for adblocking. Thus this isn't a problem for me but I agree with the general problem.
WTF happened? When Google bought Postini, the spam filter got awesome...
Somehow, in the last 12 months - google has been infecting my inbox with spam...
Whats funny is that MANY people used to have yahoo or hotmail dumpsters for spam/sign-ups etc... but now gmail is my spam dumpster, and protonmail is my pref.
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EDIt: After thinking on it a sec.. I think I know whats up: Inboxing.
Recall how Friendster, HI5, tagged, etc "scaled" -- by being a stupid platform for you to effectively give your details and contacts to so they could scale. Lets not forget what v.01 social media was -- They were all spammers only harvesting email databases... which for ad rev is what built them
Clearly, Google is trying to harvest more ad-rev through killing their spam filter.
Do no evil, much?
Step 1: Click the result...
Step 2: Ugh, swipe back
Step 3: Click "Report poor result" > "SEO spam"
Step 4: Click next relevant link
I think we need to stop using search so much. Curated indexes of information are often better for finding what you need. They organize bodies of knowledge that enable us to do more than just play detective and scavenger hunt.
Take a library for example. To find out how to repair a stuck brake caliper, you don't go to the library and tell the librarian "stuck caliper fix". You say "Can I have a book on auto repair, or on repairing car brakes?" You get the book, and it's an index of organized knowledge. In that book you'll learn how to fix the stuck caliper, but also see what causes stuck calipers and how to prevent them - because it's not blog spam designed to fix one error, it's organized knowledge.
Wikipedia is a great curated index. It is literally a giant list of links, with paragraphs summarizing what you can find in different pieces of the links. (it's also an entire semantic database, but ignore that) If you suggested starting Wikipedia to people today, they'd probably say it was crazy and nobody would use it because of how difficult it would be and that the results wouldn't be useful or accurate. And in spite of all that being true, people today probably can barely imagine life without Wikipedia.
Most of my problems with Google isn't about spam sites.
Most of my problems with Google are because half the pages they show me doesn't include my search terms.
This isn't a hard problem and I'm tired of hearing people defend it.
Yes, years ago people would keyword stuff pages with white text on white background. I haven't seen this in years.
[1]: https://guides.rubyonrails.org/ [2]: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-search-from-address...
[1]: https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/95426?hl=en&co=GENI...
If a site is found in more than x blacklists, manually take a look at it and decide either to remove it or keep it.
Sure, you could game the system. But the drag on your finances would be that you would have to manage thousands of paid DDG accounts.
Price. You have to be seriously dedicated or have serious economic muscles to pull this off.
1. even enabling personal blacklists would be a huge benefit to power users even if they aren't aggregated.
2. the user I replied to above suggested running n 1000 vps-es or using a criminal botnet. Both of these are significant hurdles.
Also while running n 1000 vps-es isn't a significant hurdle in todays clouds if it is a one time job, it at least becomes expensive if the blacklists are generated based on active users at random times around the clock forcing would-be abusers to not only fire up their vps-es, running a couple of queries and shut them down but also to keep them running around the clock, or rather in 8 hour shifts to not trigger abuse detection.
This needs to be done server side so that blank result pages are avoided. It would improve service for all as it'd be a better product all around.
I try very hard to always use the "Report Bad Results" in those circumstances
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=web+worker+message+transferable&t=...
vs actual content on YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=web+worker+mess...
Bing is for some reason pretty bad at indexing programming related queries.
I'd love for there to be a "permanent !g" option, because Bing (DDG's default engine) just doesn't cut it. Like, at all. And it's not like I do fancy searches all the time, or ever really. But unless I am searching for a very popular, basic term, most of the time DDG's results either show nothing relevant at all on the first page, or there's one or two results that are relevant, often times the most relevant (like, say, a product page for a product I'm searching for) being shown pretty far down on the page, with third party sites being up top.
In either case, I try !g and immediately find what I'm looking for on the front page. Like it's a whole new world. At this point I am using !g 90% of the time and it gets frustrating; I have half a mind of switching back, but I really don't want to do that, because Google needs to go.
Even when I add "site:xyz.com" or (gag) "site:reddit.com", while DDG's results are better in these cases, just in case I'll try "!g" to see if I missed anything and... bam, even more relevant results I never saw before.
I think Apple needs to enter the search engine business. Bing is just not good enough, and Google is evil. I've moved away from Google Maps, Gmail, Chromecast, and anything else Google I can move away from... but it's the best search engine by far and it's the one instance where it really does make me less productive if I use the alternative.
My DDG experience is awesome and Google could die tomorrow for all I care. Not sure if my experience is due to the domains I typically search for though, which are highly scientific/engineering related.
Relevant: https://www.macrumors.com/2022/01/05/google-pays-apple-stay-...
Only reason to use Google for me is some extra features like site:xxx (it looks like they added this one to DDG finally).
I am honestly very happy that DDG is so great and I can't stop supporting dark Google patterns.
The faster way to get to django docs would be: !dj queryset model update
For python it's !py3
There are thousands of these, and they're awesome.
Just do these redirections locally and send them to the appropriate site directly, skipping yet another unnecessary and potentially-meddling middleman.
Most damning is !g where both DDG and G get to see your query , offering zero privacy benefit and double the risk.
I know people who use ddg only for bangs. They do all their web search with Google by prefixing them with !g.
EDIT: WOW it's right there in the search field when you right click it and choose 'add a keyword for this search' !!!! thanks.
“Remember, though, because your search is actually taking place on that other site, you are subject to that site’s policies, including its data collection practices”
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/g-search-filt...
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublacklist/ [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29794372
I'm not suggesting this be done for commercial sites, just neutral documentation sites for languages and frameworks. This would be strictly better from the perspective of the searcher.
I'd argue that simply doing that for the top 10 programming languages or frameworks will make a huge difference and is relatively easy to do. Low effort but very high impact.
Turns out making a search engine is a whole lot of work, I genuinely hope they keep working on it!
It works about as good for (simple) French as for English in my experience, but is absolute garbage for Russian—because, I suspect, of all the noun morphology. But, to be fair, the moment Google started becoming comparable to Yandex for Russian was the moment it started to randomly substituting terms in my English searches, like switching “Fréchet space” for “Banach space” in complex queries (they are both things in functional analysis, good job Google, but they are not the same). So looks like it’s either the heavy-handed clustering we hate about the current Google, or difficult linguistic work and tuning for every language in the world.
(Is there a way to stop DDG from ignoring the quotes in my searches? At this point I sometimes get better results from Gigablast than from Google or DDG when searching for a quote.)
I’m in the same boat. I am also not going to switch because Google is getting consistently worse and filled with rubbish SEO click farms. That’s why I am surprised by
> This has gotten somewhat better recently, but it's still not nearly as good as Google.
Google is really quite bad.
Same, but I’ll usually give DDG a try first. If the search fails you can prepend “!g “ to your query and it’ll redirect you to Google.
Generally I want my tools to "just work".
If there's an option to get good search results, why isn't it the default?
They have more of those too, they’re pretty neat. For example: Typing “United States Capitol !w” will bring you directly to the Wikipedia results page for that search.
Also works for amazon: !a for amazon.com, !ade for German amazon.de, etc.
I'm usually frustrated with the technical searches the most. If I do something simple like search for "django queryset model update" I will get nearly a full page of SEO spam that's literally just copies of the real django docs site before I even get to the actual docs page. This has gotten somewhat better recently, but it's still not nearly as good as Google. Maybe because Google knows what I click on when I search for these things so it just goes right to it. It's a tradeoff, I guess. Although I do often feel like I'm punishing myself with this.