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Comment by rmunn | Hacker News Reader

I've been using DuckDuckGo for years now, ever since it became noticeable that two different people searching for the same search term would get two different results back from Google. Meaning they were no longer completely reliable: they might show one person a result that they hide from the other person by burying it on page 3 where few people ever look.

DDG's search results have been poorer recently than they used to — I often see completely unrelated results (to the point of my saying "Why in the world did that come back as a search result??!?") starting from page 2. And yet, I still use them, simply because they aren't Google.

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Speaking of page 3, Google's been asking me to sign in if I try to go beyond page 2 of search results. What a wonderful modern WWW we live in.

That somehow hurts me to hear more than anything. I remember days spent in my youth trawling through Google search for anime fandoms and homework answers. Joke used to be that beyond page 1 is the definition of desperation and in the 00s that was definitely true but I discovered a lot of cool distractions in that desperation. This feels like they killed Google Reader again.

Don't know how modern this is, but I remember being disappointed that despite Google claiming it had billions of results, you could only see a few pages' worth.

Looking now, I've just noticed they no longer give a count of results.

Click on "Tools", you'll see the old number and search time if you so desire

I don't know how global consistency is actually useful, but I can easily think of ways it is less convenient.

For example, DST starts and ends on different dates in the UK and the US. Which dates should google return when someone from either country searches for just "DST end date?" Someone lives in Orange County and searches for "Orange County Sheriffs," which one of the eight Orange Counties should google return?

These are both examples where a localized — not even customized, just localized based on IP addresses — search results will easily help reduce headaches.

I wouldn't mind that one. That a man in the US and a woman in Japan would get different results for a search for "sushi restaurant" is perfectly reasonable (even if the woman in Japan was searching in English).

It's when two people in the same neighborhood got different results for the same search that I said "wait a minute, they're personalizing search results now for ad-targeting purposes" and ditched them. The potential for them to deliberately hide things from you was too great.

I understand the potential for abuse, but it is useful when I search for python and get programming languages and someone else gets snakes.

When I search Python I should get the programming language but when my neighbour searches Python he should get snakes. That is a valid use of personalised search.

Good example, which is why both you and the other commenter gave it. And if that's as far as it went it wouldn't have bothered me so much; it was when conservative people I know were getting different results from liberal people for the same search terms that I started to realize the potential for an echo chamber, and decided it was a bad idea.

It's good for your mental health to be exposed to arguments you disagree with. Many times they will be bad arguments and you can dismiss them, but it's good to know what the people who disagree with you actually believe. And sometimes, just sometimes, you might see something that makes you realize that it's your own worldview that was mistaken, and adjust your worldview to better fit reality. If your search results only show you echo-chamber results that already agree with yours, you'll rarely learn the areas where you were mistaken. (And nearly everyone is mistaken about some things; the person who is right about everything is a rare creature indeed, and you should never gamble that you're that person).

If the query is just 'python', then both you and your neighbour should get some links for the language and some for the animal.

If it only gives you the one you already know about, it's a useless tool.

The age of internet search is over. The age of Cloudflare has begun. It wouldn't be possible to build a search engine now if they wanted to... and there wouldn't be anything to search for anyway. The non-corporate internet withered into dust and blew away in the wind.

If you could find what you want, how would they ever sell you what they want you to buy? And I'm not just talking merchandise, though that too. Your political narratives, your values, opinions, everything. And everyone likes it so much they just sit there scrolling and swiping and tapping.

I'm hoping for a future where we create static HTML pages again styled with a bit of handmade CSS, because we're so tired of bot attacks and long loading times. Then suddenly a Cloudflare network becomes absolet.

people have been putting their fuckass blogs with 0.5 visitors a day behind Cloudflare long before the increase in bot traffic. and that increase makes fuck all any difference for them anyway.

Cloudflare is quite easy to bypass.

Do you have a source for this claim? Cloudflare gives me endless captchas on almost any website.

Yes, I bought a cheap residential proxy service and used it to scrape a site.

Ironic that I'd need something like that to stop getting blocked from a residential IP

It's probably cheaper to switch your ISP to one that your target site does not block, than to pay someone else to buy that connection and proxy all your traffic through them.

Sorry, I don't consider that a bypass, or easy.

Using a real browser is also easy.

I have tried many, many, many browsers across multiple OSes and different hardware, and they all give me endless captchas.

Firefox, Waterfox, Iceweasel, Icecat, Seamonkey, LibreWolf, Pale Moon, Mullvad, Tor Browser

Chromium, ungoogled-chromium, Google Chrome, Edge, Brave, Falkon, qutebrowser

Safari, GNOME Web, Konqueror

No difference.

I am 100% certain it has nothing to do with my browser.

I think curated directories from prehistory might make a comeback eventually, maybe combined with a search engine that indexes only the whitelisted websites. ironically, we can use LLMs to filter out AI slop by measuring the signal-to-noise ratio, which is atrocious for AI slop and ESL slop that preceded it.

I’ve been using DDG for a long time now. Results are getting more and more spammy. Way too many AI-generated / scraped websites nowadays.

Try Brave.

Do they still mitm sites to put their brave crypto donation buttons on, so you think a content creator is getting the money?

I've never seen anything crypto related once I set up the browser. What happened wasn't a MITM but they fixed it, right?

It's the only recommended Chromium browser by Privacy Guides. https://www.privacyguides.org/en/desktop-browsers/#brave

They injected crypto donate buttons below, for example, tweets to make them look like twitter had a donate option. The sites were sent over https, it was mitm

2. They are MS Bing, how is that better?

DuckDuckGo is owned by Microsoft? Are you sure? You're not confusing them with Bing, by any chance?

No, sorry, it uses MS Bing as their main source, that also explains the low(er) quality

Ah, didn't know that. Then the main reason to use DDG would be if their "we don't track your searches" claim is honest. (Which I think it probably is; certainly I've seen no evidence that DDG is lying about not tracking your searches).

Even if they're only a layer around Bing, having your Bing searches coming from DDG's IP addresses rather than from your own IP address almost certainly makes it harder for Bing to track you, since your searches are being pooled with everyone else who uses DDG. Naturally, Google will track you, your computer, your phone, and would even track your dog and your Roomba if they could figure out how.

Personalized search results are not ipso facto unreliable.

It means they're capable of burying news stories that would contradict your worldview and pushing news stories that support your pre-existing biases, leading to more engagement from you (a win from their point of view) but also burying you in an echo chamber. And unless you were in the habit of doing the occasional search in Incognito Mode, you wouldn't know. (And even then, they probably would be able to put together enough clues to figure out your identity even without your Google login cookie).

Yes, the fact that they could do it does not prove that they were doing it, not right away. I ditched them as soon as I found out that they could do it, because I was absolutely certain that eventually, they would end up doing it. And I wanted neutral search results, not biased ones, even ones biased towards my own point of view.

I subscribe to The New York Times, if I am searching for a news event, I’d appreciate a site that’s not paywalled and I trust be the first result if it is reasonable.

The NYT watches an event like Trump making a crowd of supporters swear to "cheat like hell" and to vote even if they're not registered, and they turn it into headlines like "Trump leads supporters in a pledge to vote." They are no longer a reliable source of accurate information.

I am misunderstanding, I am seeing direct quotes, is it an unserious the tone that’s not in the article? Because they seem to be reporting his words accurately.

Anything that isn't repeatable is by definition unreliable.

Random number generators notwithstanding.

They’re unreliably unreliable.

Same seed gives the same sequence. Use that to debug Monte Carlo simulations all the time.

The definition of "not repeatable" or unreliable in an rng is if it was random sometimes, and predictable other times.

How u reliable personalised search results are depends on who controls the personalization and for what purpose.

I would love a search that lets me ban results from certain sites. I don't like search that's showing skewed results for reasons I don't know or control.

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