Re:Inside DuckDuckGo, Google's Tiniest, Fiercest Competitor
by howeyc on Thursday February 20, 2014 @03:21PM
(#7273278)
"Mr. Babage if I were to feed wrong inputs to that calculation machine will it still produce correct outputs?"
Re:Inside DuckDuckGo, Google's Tiniest, Fiercest Competitor
by untog on Thursday February 20, 2014 @04:00PM
(#7273551)
...but Google does do that.
Re:Inside DuckDuckGo, Google's Tiniest, Fiercest Competitor
by comex on Thursday February 20, 2014 @06:41PM
(#7274453)
That would be more analogous to Google correcting input for perceived spelling errors. Putting in garbage as a query isn't wrong, it has a well-defined answer for the vast majority of garbage.
Re:Inside DuckDuckGo, Google's Tiniest, Fiercest Competitor
by vacri on Thursday February 20, 2014 @05:32PM
(#7274156)
And yet the commentor is claiming that the other tool is able to produce useful output from those inputs.
Re:Inside DuckDuckGo, Google's Tiniest, Fiercest Competitor
by enneff on Thursday February 20, 2014 @07:06PM
(#7274570)
"correct" is not equivalent to "helpful"
Re:Inside DuckDuckGo, Google's Tiniest, Fiercest Competitor
by KiwiCoder on Thursday February 20, 2014 @04:53PM
(#7273904)
The better part of this quote is the sentiment that follows;
I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.
Re:Inside DuckDuckGo, Google's Tiniest, Fiercest Competitor
by streetnigga on Thursday February 20, 2014 @03:53PM
(#7273493)
"Look at this! If I mash gibberish into a search engine it returns the same."
One example I can remember:
I was working on some linux V4L2 code and wanted to get more informations on the "buf_queue". By mistake I searched for "vbuf_queue". Google's results:
https://encrypted.google.com/search?q=vbuf_queue
It only shows 3 results where I am (and 0 a few months ago when the problem occured) which makes it pretty obvious I'm not searching for the right thing.
As for DDG:
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=vbuf_queue
It displays a pageful of garbage that I will parse for a while until it occurs to me I made a typo.
And it does it for pretty much any bogus query as well, compare:
https://encrypted.google.com/search?q=aoeulcrnh34ui345u34iyi...
with:
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=aoeulcrnh34ui345u34iyi3euieuiaeoua...
In this case ddg happily outputs what appears to be misinterpreted binary files.
Maybe DDG works well for non-technical contents but 90% of my queries at work are obscure programming/electronics stuff, component datasheets and the like. For that ddg is simply not usable by my standards.