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Comment by hoorayimhelping | Hacker News Reader

In the past couple of years, search has reverted to late 90s levels of result quality. Google used to get you exactly what you wanted for close to 20 years. Now you have to cross reference several search engines to find something other than terrible blogspam and obvious advertisements disguised as reviews. Search seems primed for disruption again.

I appreciate DDG's privacy focus, but their results are often crap.

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This is true. These days, Google does very poorly with the tail, and may not even index a lot of sites...definitely some older sites that are still up just drop out of the index, and cannot be found even with exact phrase searches.

If there was one open source project that I'd support would be an open search, but are there any serious, well funded efforts?

https://yacy.net

https://searx.me/

Try the semantic map of https://swisscows.ch/ While usually DDG is sufficient for my uses i'm noticing falling back more and more often to the swiss cows. This map thing really helps to separate that which is of interest to you, from unrelated things. Be it the same abbreviations used across different fields, names of persons or corporations across history, ...

I'd be very happy if DDG had that, since i'm so used to it. But it doesn't.

I think https://www.qwant.com/ had something very simialar many years ago, but now it's gone, or i'm mistaking it for some other prototype/beta which had that.

> Try the semantic map of https://swisscows.ch/

Was excited to try it more after an initial impression, but this is a no-go for me:

> 1. We promote moral values.

Which of course is code word for "We promote our values". Can't believe we're in 2020 and this is part of a pitch.

I didn't even notice that! OTOH doesn't everybody promote his values in some (hidden) way? At least they say so.

For me it is there, useful, and free to use.

Take it, or leave it, so to speak :-)

They block certain results because of that, and there is no option to disable that. That's a big no to me. How do I know what results do they consider moral enough to show me?

I always use Safe Search when using Google. I've never watched porn and don't plan to start now, so I appreciate that I know my results from this site will be SFW.

They cite “family values” and have an illustration of a heteronormative family on the “morals” page. Does that mean they filter gay-related results? Gay marriage related results? Would you prefer them to filter it?

I have no idea if they do, but it’s foolish to even cause such questions and disambiguation with your brief (which you inevitably do when you do “morals”)

Thank you for the link, the mapping of sub-topics looks interesting and promising. Reminds me of HotBot circa 1995.

I feel the same. Recently I started using Reddit for finding niche topics.

Interesting that I'm not alone in this.

I was recently searching for information on how Slot Machines are programmed. I had questions about the OS that they run, the languages used to program them, information about the random number generators, etc.

There was a reddit post by someone in the industry that answered some of those questions. Unfortunately, it's quite old.

That makes me think, maybe I should write up a blog post about this as I find the answers I'm looking for. I'm certainly not an expert, but the information in search engines is lacking or I'm searching for the wrong things.

The most niche things I search for are typically career-related, so software questions. I'd guess more than 9 out of 10 queries, the result that I am looking for (i.e. the result that helps me) is on stackoverflow, github, or some apache mailing list.

A search engine just for software, that crawls a whitelisted set of platforms and provides more relevant results (github's search is very poor, for example) would be perfect. Google seems to be the "best" at this right now, so while I use DDG to search most of the time, when I'm working I end up routing most of my queries to Google.

Somewhat tangential, but the word "niche" made me think about this.

you should build this! building a search engine today is no doubt an uphill battle, but the move toward more specialized platforms feels inevitable as there gets to be more and more of the web to index, search, and discover.

site:github.com | site:stackoverflow.com keyword

I use reddit for reviews of products. There's usually some subreddit for that company or line of devices.

Hard to tell what's authenticate or not in Amazon and even blog reviews found on Google.

I wonder how much of that is technology, and how much is actually inherent to the privacy.

Google collects your data to show you ads, but it also uses that to inform its search algorithm. Exactly how it does so is deliberately opaque, but it's no surprise that it knows that you probably mean the local restaurant rather than the one in Indiana by the same name -- and even that you mean that restaurant despite having mistyped it as the name of a different restaurant.

There is assuredly more to it than that, and it's not really a surprise that it can give you better search results if it knows who you are. Whether that's worth your privacy is up to you -- though many people don't really make that choice consciously.

I tend to blame the tech (or lack of indexing-resources) since often it's not finding something I'm sure exists despite plenty of exact keywords.

To use the restaurant example, I'd be putting in the city-name explicitly.

To me, the main source of the problem is that Google (and other search engines) began returning different results for different users:

https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/4/18124718/google-search-re...

So instead of returning a canonical list of the best results for a given subject, they use the copout that people want to see different things. IMHO this has led to problems like politicizing science to cover "both sides" when there is actually consensus. It's institutionalized ignorance.

I agree that search is primed for disruption though. The endgame for search is an artificial general intelligence (AGI) that acts as an oracle to answer any question put to it better than any human. Search is just a query over a very large search space, and is the basis for rational thought (or at least human memory). What we have today is more like a library of books where the user is forced to learn the categorization system and perform the librarian's job manually much of the time.

I've always thought that google had a conflicting business model - on the one hand search brings people in, but on the other it competes with ads. The better the search, the less useful the ads. Given this, google might be indirectly incentivized to only have search good enough to be better than competition, but not the best. Not saying they're actively doing that, but seems like something.

Try to use https://yandex.com/ (Russia) or https://beta.cliqz.com/ (Germany), results are much better than DDG.

Using Yandex for privacy reasons is quite possibly best joke I've ever heard.

Recommending Cliqz that is owned by Hubert Burda, a global media conglomerate which couldn’t care less about your privacy, and where every player is sorely focused on getting a bite of Google’s cake, is also hypocrisy.

I mostly agree, although I think that isn't totally clear yet. I only mentioned Yandex because they're the most egregious example. They are significantly worse than Google in user privacy and general evilness, which I don't think you can clearly say about Cliqz, if only because they haven't mattered enough to have the chance to abuse real users.

> In the past couple of years, search has reverted to late 90s levels of result quality.

The problem is that despite google doing that (I wouldn't be as hard as you, but there was definitely a decrease in quality), they're still SO far ahead of everyone else ...

Just goes to show exactly how far ahead of the competition they were all that time.

Bad DDG results are a myth at this point. It was true a couple of years ago. But they’ve improved a lot and last few months I rarely use google as a fallback.

I've also seen DDG improve over the years but there are still cases where I can't find some obvious things I'm looking for. Unfortunately I can't provide an example. Sorry.

In that case I fallback to Google which is usually helpful even though I have the feeling that it's getting less good.

In the end, my default search engine is becoming Wikipedia... (Mostly kidding, of course, even though I rely to Wikipedia for an increasing number of searches.)

It also sometimes "corrects" queries, forcing one to click to rerun the original query as intended. This very infuriating.

If you put the term in quotes, it disables the correcting of your term.

IMO, correction is a feature. I'm more likely to typo a search term (especially on mobile) than to actually be looking for something with a deliberate mispelling or strange set of letters/numbers.

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