Adieu google
kitenet.net
kitenet.net
It was bad enough not being able to search for strings.
What I'd really like is an uncrippled search engine that lets people be very specific in their searches. I'd really like support for simple regexes.
"See results for: $home unix"
Which leads to this:
http://www.google.com/search?q=%24home+unix
I.e. if you want a unix-related result, say unix.
Here's an example of how ridiculous Google has gotten about search queries:
http://www.google.com/search?q=gaps - top hit is The Gap store
http://www.google.com/search?q=%2Bgaps - top hit is gaps.cgi
http://www.google.com/search?q=gaps - top hit is gaps.cgi
Now who would search for "gaps" when they wanted to get to The Gap? And worse, if you add terms that are on the gap page when trying to look for, say, something about the income gaps between men and women (gaps men women), the store is the #1 hit.
Possibly someone searching for "Gaps summer range". There are a LOT more people who look for The Gap than for gaps.cgi, and it's quite likely some of them can't punctuate their sentences properly.
Weird.
Google is fast approacting too good to be true status, at least for me personally: I use google voice, gmail has become my primary email client (including letting it manage my own domain email), I use google docs to edit documents on the fly, and was probably one of the first people to download chrome and chrome os.
That is far, far more information than I feel comfortable letting any one company have about me.
they're still small, they still listen to feedback.
Could we have an ad & donation supported open source search engine running on top of AWS or Google Apps? (Yes, the 2nd one would be ironic, if even allowed to exist by Google.) Perhaps this would be a way to combine the responsiveness of Duck Duck Go or the early Google with the infrastructure and computational horsepower of Google/Bing ca. 2009?
Personally I've found that the extra features on top of Yahoo's results that DDG gives aren't usually very useful, but it's nice and fast with a simple, usable interface. For the few weeks I had it as my Firefox search box default, the only thing I felt was missing was how Google includes results from Google News and Image Search right on your search results page.
Also, the founder of DDG posts here on HN, which is one reason why you'll hear about it around here more often than other places.
Curious, what do you think the plethora of other alternatives are? I've been pretty unimpressed by the small search engines trying to use their own indexes (Cuill) and even less impressed by the "human-powered" engines (Mahalo). I haven't seen anyone else really come close to Google, Yahoo, Bing, and Ask.
However, we do not use BOSS straight up. We re-rank, omit, edit, merge, etc. in ways (I think and hope) yield much more relevant results, especially for more specific queries.
The Yahoo/MS search deal shouldn't effect us. We already have Bing in place as a backup and could easily switch to Ask's feed as well. We treat them as somewhat of a commodity, i.e. an output of the Web link graph, with our ranking stuff on top doing the important "last mile" work.
Thx for your feedback about news & images.
We've tried to achieve that goal via UI and a number of features that may or may not appeal to you individually. We also try to concentrate on features that the major search engines won't do because of their business position. A lot of those features are listed here: http://duckduckgo.com/about.html
What's not listed there that I think appeals to this crowd in particular is the background relevancy stuff I mentioned in my other comment and answer to your other question: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=979479
I think what also appeals to people like me (and by extension, I assume a lot of HN types) is keyboard shortcuts, aggressive filtering of parked/spam domains, and disambiguation.
We do have our own index and use it to improve relevancy as well as to add our own Zero-click Info and links to search result pages. Search any major topic and you should see a red box on top with a quick snippet and related topics. We also use it to build our own category and disambiguation pages, e.g. http://duckduckgo.com/c/Social_bookmarking
Our most recent major feature launch was Duck It!, a search view accessible from our homepage that features more topic summaries, e.g. http://duckduckgo.com/?q=tinychat&v=d. HN feedback link here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=919505
Of course, we'd welcome suggestions for additional features/improvements!
If I accidentially do this at home, or if I find that I have to use tor too often while in coffee shops to ensure I see all search results, (or if I use tor and some idiot has forced it on for those IPs), that could be a problem.
Also, I wonder how hard it would be to spoof packets to kill IPs one doesn't even have access too? Do you send a nonce back to the user and check it before completing the banning process?
I wanted to try the extreme case (at least for a time) to see if a lot of schools and businesses that use one static IP would find the process super simple and just use it. After all, they could set all their computers to safe search in one click. This experiment is ongoing, but it will probably evolve into a program where we have more of a back and forth opt-in process.
I hope this addresses your concern!
Yes, Google knows all your secrets (even if you never went online, they'd probably have enough data from your contact with the rest of the world to reconstruct a profile). No, they have not shown any inclination to misuse this information. Privacy is dead - luckily, it was killed by Google and not MSN. Welcome to the 21st century, learn to cope.
Eg, If facebook bought or built a search engine, it could be 'game on'.
And you'll notice at the bottom it says "Powered by Bing."
http://www.google.com/intl/en/privacypolicy.html -> grep Information Sharing.
That said, I switched my default Firefox search to Clusty yesterday. This morning, I searched for a vendor of old Rudger Mark II magazines/clips. I clicked on a paid link, and ended up spending a fair amount of money. Clusty got a profit slice that Google would have got if their privacy issues had not caught my attention.
The sci-fi author David Brin (a cool guy, BTW) advocates for no privacy as long as everyone has an equal amount of "non privacy" - the problem as I see it is the corporations, who profit by knowing everything about you via discount cards at supermarkets, the web, etc. I'll stop complaining when we have the ability to know private corporate details, have congress people have to wear Nascar-like advertisements on their clothes, etc.
I've always had the "they're watching you" thought running in the background of my mind. But, I have always ignored those thoughts.
Then I saw the Chrome logo. To me, it very blatantly looks like an imposing robotic eye, watching every move. I said: screw this, too f'n much. And I, incidentally, also moved on and also use Duck Duck Go. But, I still use Google as a spell checker every once in a while.
----
Addendum: Google has the uncanny ability of making bad logos look nice.
Link to robotic eye logo: http://www.gadgetzone.ro/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/chrome-l... .
edit: Huh? I upvoted your comment because I felt it was a somewhat valid question but the site still shows it at 0. Well, maybe someone downvoted just in the same second. Unlikely though.
http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&client=firefox-a&#...
Come on in, the water's warm.
And if I am going to have a last straw, the thing that removes that piece of straw must be eccentric. Yet, vaguely resemble truth. The point is to have prepared a retort to "why don't you use Google search?" Because people will ask with the intent to condescend.
I find myself smug about the robotic eye logo because I think it is ironic. It is as if a totalitarian government plastered posters onto drab brick walls. The posters say: "big brother respects your privacy." And on the poster, above those words, is a picture of a robotic eyeball staring at the citizens who stopped to read.
I'd much rather have a fun reason to change loyalties, so I don't have to go into the many details.
It'll keep me from receiving the same flak as when I switched to Linux.
Why worry about flak? Use what works for you. If people get bitchy about that, tell them you like it, and if they push it tell them to fuck off. End of every pointless tech debate you'll ever have. If you're going so far as to build defenses you're worrying too much.
But, it is intrinsically me to worry too much. Sardonic fun.
I don't know why I've explained here... but in real life the almost-joke would stop the conversation before there was even a debate. Which is valuable to me because hearing people's inane remarks is worse than fingernails on a chalkboard.
I enjoy the company here.
Open Options from the tool menu. On the Basic tab, locate "Default search" and click the Manage button. In the list of "Other search engines", select bing.com and click Make Default.
On the one hand, once you sign over your email, you've signed over verification on any site. On the other, it's pretty jarring to see all the personal information (CC and address) and relational data (contacts, RSS subscriptions, purchase history) Google owns.
"You can delete information from Web History using the remove feature, and it will be removed from the service. However, as is common practice in the industry, and as outlined in the Google Privacy Policy, Google maintains a separate logs system for auditing purposes and to help us improve the quality of our services for users."
* It's completely separate from your Google Account and Web History (which are only available to signed-in users). You'll know when we customize results because a "View customizations" link will appear on the top right of the search results page.
Why can't Google [surreptitiously?] rank search results by actual relevancy (e.g. clicks & abandons)? And don't tell me because of voting rings: I have seen "voting ring detection" often as a common screening problem for job interviews.
This. While humanity has uploaded a lot of valuable, worthwhile information online in the past decade, that's just a blip compared to the amount of totally useless junk online. That makes things harder for all search engines. It also will be interesting to see how search engines cope with the internet as the number of websites/pages continues to grow in the next fifty or so years.
In a way I cope with that problem by searching for "keyword + name of site that I trust". For example "cross domain javascript fade quirksmode". It works better that way, but it assumes that you already know the names of major "solution providers."
I thought this is what PageRank was supposed to determine algorithmically. I don't trust two out of three of your listed trusted websites, so this would devalue their service to me. Then again, they probably don't care much what I think, since I switched search engines months ago.
Oh, wait. The more searches they do, the more impressions they see. The more impressions they see, the more likely they are to click on an ad. More ad clicks, more money.
Hypothesis: Price, efficiency, benefits to the consumer all oscillate over the years, never to converge, as competition naturally enter and exit the field.
The respondent felt that the original post contained the answer to its own question. Therefore, the respondent said, "This," pointing to the answer.
Shouldn't it then be "that", or have the quote come after "this"?