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Peer-to-peer Information Retrieval is one of those old research topics that face the difficult to solve problem of scalability. YaCy is yet an early contributo

Peer-to-peer Information Retrieval is one of those old research topics that face the difficult to solve problem of scalability. YaCy is yet an early contributor to this research but we've yet to make something to my knowledge that gives comparable results to centralised search engines, is fast and scales well.

fiatjaf 10y ago
Any search engine is good enough, but no one, centralized or decentralized, is even close to Google. Google is our wonder and our curse.
- p4bl0 10y ago
  That's why I use startpage.com, it returns Google results while protecting your privacy :).
  - DarkLinkXXXX 10y ago
    I use searx.me for that. It's open-source, and it's a meta-search engine that returns results from more than just Google.
- bobajeff 10y ago
  >Any search engine is good enough That's simply not true. Things we take for granted like true multi-query search and sub-second results speeds simply aren't seen in distributed search engines.
- eggie 10y ago
  I actually think that the duck (ddg.gg) is better. I now find it difficult to use google, which feels clunky and capricious. I make thousands of queries a day for work, so I really can't excuse poor performance. For a while I would switch back to google when my searches failed and I wanted to check if the duck was getting me equivalent or better answers. In the past year and a half I've completely stopped. It is simply a high-quality product that exceeds google in what it offers. Maybe you'll respond that "it just doesn't 'feel' high quality". OK, I can't argue with that because it's your opinion... but as long as we collectively decide to believe this fantasy we will continue to be locked into the search juggernaut. You can help improve the diversity of options by using something different and get to use a better product. The only thing that I can't do on the duck is search academic papers. Google scholar is still the best thing of its type.
  - toolz 10y ago
    Just another data point but I use ddg exclusively because it's more flexible. Do I get the results I'm looking for? Great. Do I not? I just use to bang syntax to query somewhere else without having to change sites. It's more convenient than google for me to use, therefore better for my needs. I've been using ddg long enough now that I often refer to "searching the internet" as "ducking" rather than "googling" xD but I'm sure that's just because it makes me feel cool, rather than me naturally thinking about ddg before google, haha.
  - johnnydoebk 10y ago
    This is exactly my experience. As for the disadvantages of ddg, it's difficult to find some regional results from not-so-popular websites. This is not where ddg shines. Apart from that, I like ddg's results more than google's ones.
  - ulrikrasmussen 10y ago
    I second that! I changed a month ago, and have been pleasantly surprised with the quality of search results. It should be noted that it is possible to adjust the theme so it looks almost exactly like Google, which helped me shake that "unfamiliar" feeling when transitioning. By the way, for academic papers, Microsoft Academic Search seems promising, although it means moving from one juggernaut to another.
  - Mithaldu 10y ago
    The problem is, DDG is not a search engine. It is a UI on top of other search engines. (Yes, you may say it has DuckDuckBot, but ask around people who run websites if they've ever seen a hit from it.)
    - erikpukinskis 10y ago
      I feel like that's equivalent to saying "DDG is not bread, it's a sandwich built on top of other breads" Maybe Google makes the best bread, but it might be true that someone might make a sandwich on inferior bread that makes for a better overall snack.

fiatjaf 10y ago

Any search engine is good enough, but no one, centralized or decentralized, is even close to Google. Google is our wonder and our curse.

p4bl0 10y ago
That's why I use startpage.com, it returns Google results while protecting your privacy :).
- DarkLinkXXXX 10y ago
  I use searx.me for that. It's open-source, and it's a meta-search engine that returns results from more than just Google.
bobajeff 10y ago
>Any search engine is good enough That's simply not true. Things we take for granted like true multi-query search and sub-second results speeds simply aren't seen in distributed search engines.
eggie 10y ago
I actually think that the duck (ddg.gg) is better. I now find it difficult to use google, which feels clunky and capricious. I make thousands of queries a day for work, so I really can't excuse poor performance. For a while I would switch back to google when my searches failed and I wanted to check if the duck was getting me equivalent or better answers. In the past year and a half I've completely stopped. It is simply a high-quality product that exceeds google in what it offers. Maybe you'll respond that "it just doesn't 'feel' high quality". OK, I can't argue with that because it's your opinion... but as long as we collectively decide to believe this fantasy we will continue to be locked into the search juggernaut. You can help improve the diversity of options by using something different and get to use a better product. The only thing that I can't do on the duck is search academic papers. Google scholar is still the best thing of its type.
- toolz 10y ago
  Just another data point but I use ddg exclusively because it's more flexible. Do I get the results I'm looking for? Great. Do I not? I just use to bang syntax to query somewhere else without having to change sites. It's more convenient than google for me to use, therefore better for my needs. I've been using ddg long enough now that I often refer to "searching the internet" as "ducking" rather than "googling" xD but I'm sure that's just because it makes me feel cool, rather than me naturally thinking about ddg before google, haha.
- johnnydoebk 10y ago
  This is exactly my experience. As for the disadvantages of ddg, it's difficult to find some regional results from not-so-popular websites. This is not where ddg shines. Apart from that, I like ddg's results more than google's ones.
- ulrikrasmussen 10y ago
  I second that! I changed a month ago, and have been pleasantly surprised with the quality of search results. It should be noted that it is possible to adjust the theme so it looks almost exactly like Google, which helped me shake that "unfamiliar" feeling when transitioning. By the way, for academic papers, Microsoft Academic Search seems promising, although it means moving from one juggernaut to another.
- Mithaldu 10y ago
  The problem is, DDG is not a search engine. It is a UI on top of other search engines. (Yes, you may say it has DuckDuckBot, but ask around people who run websites if they've ever seen a hit from it.)
  - erikpukinskis 10y ago
    I feel like that's equivalent to saying "DDG is not bread, it's a sandwich built on top of other breads" Maybe Google makes the best bread, but it might be true that someone might make a sandwich on inferior bread that makes for a better overall snack.