Comment by adrianomartins | Hacker News Reader

Comment by adrianomartins | Hacker News Reader

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Although it's true that google results for subreddit in the specialty I'm looking for are (to me) top results (because I know I'll probably read from knowledged people on what I'm looking for), most of my queries are more about general trivia and other stuff that no platform like reddit can really encompass better than google it self.

I pretty much throw everything at google (like grammar, quotes, places, trivia in general, tech questions - reddit still isn't as good as stack-overflow for developers), Brave browser will take the ads out, and I get to choose my result. It's quite a nice experience.

(And no, I don't recommend Duck Duck Go either. It fails to show obvious results every now and then. I learned that the hard way.)

You can add !g to a DDG search and it will pull from Google. I'd say the quality of DDG is slightly less than that of Google, but not so often that sometimes having to !g the search is an appreciable problem. I've heard people say that DDG just uses Bing, but I'm not entirely sure how true that is.

The general problem with all search engines is that the moving target of the search algorithm often doesn't move fast enough anymore, and there's so much data that you're virtually guaranteed to have an overwhelming amount of wildly off-topic results. SEO farming has significantly damaged the utility of search engines, too. Finding obscure material is difficult because keywords are swamped, and it's exacerbated by the fact that the overwhelming use of search engines is for common URL lookup or to replace whatever invariably godawful embedded search a website might have. It's mostly DNS for people rather than a tool to actually search the web.

Speaking of, why is embedded search so invariably godawful? It's really quite impressive how useless it usually is.

Embedded search in arbitrary web sites sucks because it's a hard problem. The naive solution is to put all text in a database table keyed by "page" and do a sql "like" query. Don't ever do this. Some db's have full text search nowadays. I've implemented "embedded" search a few times in the past and I used Lucene, which actually works pretty well.

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