you've reminded me to go back to webcrawler. omg it actually works! and it gives a nice clean, clear set of results compared to google.

to be fair i've lately got annoyed with google and bing giving me what i consider to be crap results, either inappropriate locations or too much driven by adverts and optimisation.

i never got into duckduckgo because when i tried it, it found sod all compared to google/bing.

bakemono wrote on 2022-03-27, 15:18:

I'll put English search terms into DDG and get Russian results. I'll put Russian search terms into Startpage and get English results. It is apparently not possible to put Japanese search terms into youdoob and NOT get Chinese results (put as many kana as you want, it doesn't care).

Heh. http://bash.org/?428468

ratfink wrote on 2022-03-27, 15:25:

you've reminded me to go back to webcrawler. omg it actually works! and it gives a nice clean, clear set of results compared to google.

to be fair i've lately got annoyed with google and bing giving me what i consider to be crap results, either inappropriate locations or too much driven by adverts and optimisation.

i never got into duckduckgo because when i tried it, it found sod all compared to google/bing.

Nope, more of the same. Watertown, MA, fifth result. I guess they all do it. It's a conspiracy. A plot to make you believe you're stupid (and we are), and we need their handholding to get us through.

chris2021 wrote on 2022-03-27, 05:03:

Ok. I'm asking a question here. Could someone tell me how on earth this could make any sense.

are you sure this wasn't autocorrect on your device jumping in?

if I search for "waretown" on duckduckgo there isn't a single result mentioning "watertown" anywhere in sight

I fail to see how autocorrect, which is turned off, could alter the results in whatever way you're suggesting, being most of which initially do pertain to waretown.

Look, please I've searched for people's names, even in quotes, and from the getgo gotten back the most spurious nonsense imaginable. It's a pattern across all these stupid sites. Some sort of tactic that will hopefully increase traffic. So they can learn more about you I guess.

I think we've been slowly moving back towards "keyword engines", coupled with spell check. I don't know how many times I have used a search engine myself, type a completely legitimate word that is not in their curated database, and it is changed to something else. Even if I click on "did you really mean", and get a different set of results, it pretty much returns garbage because they don't know what it is. This really hurts when you are searching for a technical term. Also, it's getting harder to search a phrase, it starts punting after the first few words, even if you try to force it in quotes. This again shows they care more about the word matching against their database.

The thing that set google apart in 2000 from the rest of the search engines (well almost all of them, a few were doing the same, but google had a 100% clean site) was that they crawled the web and saved down copies of the pages it came across, and actually did a legitimate search within the content of the pages. You could find anything then. I think they've essentially dumped that capability due to abuse and that they'd rather use keywords so they can sell them to advertisers (which is like the old 90's walled gardens if you think about it)

DDG has been sliding into complete garbage results for the past few years. Initially they were more of a search engine aggregator, but then they seemed like they wanted to be the next google, and were actually producing decent results. But now they are about the worst of the "big" search engines now. I have been thinking the reason is whoever they were using to collect data was sabotaging the data fed to them, because it was that bad the last couple years I used them. I haven't even really used them for about a year now. Even google is better, yes.

DDG also decided to do some censoring.

Try Altavista?

The Serpent Rider wrote on 2022-03-28, 04:40:

DDG also decided to do some censoring.

the duck merchant pic lmfao so good

The Serpent Rider wrote on 2022-03-28, 04:40:

DDG also decided to do some censoring.

good 😀

now if only they could start censoring sites like pinterest, worthpoint and the like.

I so wish there were a function to "always exclude these sites" from search results... having to handle massive strings of syntax just to get any tangible results is so exhausting sometimes.

They won't, obviously.

Every search engine seems to go though the same progression, first becoming popular by delivering accurate results, but then gradually showing you ever more unrelated results (usually advertising-related), increasingly wasting your time.

The search algorithms of YouTube and Windows have the same problem.

Errius wrote on 2022-03-28, 15:47:

Every search engine seems to go though the same progression, first becoming popular by delivering accurate results, but then gradually showing you ever more unrelated results (usually advertising-related), increasingly wasting your time.

Most search engines never seem to even get to the part in bold...

Startpage it is then. Since DDG is now playing politics and taking sides.

I was just thinking this earlier! I'm tired of falling back to google all the time for better results than the duck.

It seems that the approach is "some content, any content is better than no content". More things to click that will show more ads maybe, also promoted results.
They can deduce so well what you are trying to search when they want to, that there is no chance they don't know they are returning tons of garbage.
Remember when google removed support for the "+" operator? Sorry you can't be that specific so we can serve you what we want.

Yes that was along the lines of the explanation I volunteered. But it's absolute utter ****ing madness. Yeah, oh well there aren't enough results pertinent to what I was looking for, so I'll just spend my time staring at this other bullcrap.

Oh well, now DuckDuckGo is censoring results for pirate sites. Or it's Bing fault and they had to find new alternative for indexing.