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DDG has been my search engine of choice for the past few years and in my experience it is pretty rare that I have to use google for better results. In general I
by wila 11y ago
DDG has been my search engine of choice for the past few years and in my experience it is pretty rare that I have to use google for better results. In general I'm quite happy with it.
One thing I would love to see as a feature is the ability to add under settings a list of sites I'd prefer not to see any results from.
For example experts-exchange where they want you to sign up to see the answer. There's also a bunch of scraping websites that don't have actual answers which just pollute the results. Being able to suppress that kind of site would be wonderful.
I'm aware you can use an option on the search itself, problem is that the list of sites I like to remove from the search is too long to type each time.
- mrspeaker 11y agoI'd love there to be a "I'm a developer" mode: I know it goes against the point of not tracking people but there are so many tech words that are common nouns etc, and providing a bit of context would prevent a lot of g! searches from me (see example: https://twitter.com/mrspeaker/status/672115832772784128/photo/1 https://twitter.com/mrspeaker/status/672115832772784128/phot...)
- ScottGillis 11y agoSounds like you need to hack together a search engine for hackers.
- wila 11y agoYou could use the bangs for that: https://duckduckgo.com/bang?c=Tech https://duckduckgo.com/bang?c=Tech
- _dark_matter_ 11y agoThey could also use this as another signal of the quality of a link for other users.
- wila 11y agoThat is not my main motivation for asking this, but yes you are correct. If DDG wants to use such a list as a signal then they would have to check it a bit for potential abuse. For example to only count the excluded sites that are in active accounts used for searching, but it could indeed have other potential search improvements.
- dheera 11y ago> There's also a bunch of scraping websites that don't have actual answers which just pollute the results. Being able to suppress that kind of site would be wonderful. The funny thing is, Google's targeting algorithms actually do a wonderful job of alleviating this problem just by studying what you and other people click on. It depends on whether you see it as a privacy invasion or as a prerequisite for machine learning and providing better results.
- wila 11y agoPrivacy invasion yes in a way, can't say I appreciate them tracking every search result I click on. What is even more annoying that google gives you a link to the search result and pretending it to be http://www.example.com http://www.example.com but when you copy & paste it to use it elsewhere it suddenly becomes a urlencoded parameter to their tracking mechanism. They do display the link itself as text, but shorten it if it is over 20 or so characters. Duck duck go doesn't do that (thankfully)