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Google's AI jumbling up my search queries and insisting on answering entirely different questions from the one I asked has finally pushed me to duckduckgo (whic

Google's AI jumbling up my search queries and insisting on answering entirely different questions from the one I asked has finally pushed me to duckduckgo (which is greatly improved and not yet as botty.) So I bet you're right thinking it's a demented bot. Such bots (and especially, "forests" of bots) tend to punish anything that's sufficiently eccentric. This could be countered by a separate forest of bots that looks for and identifies "mere eccentricity" (such as very heavy internet search use that will inevitably trigger many false bot hits re terrorism merely due to the law of averages.) But we're not that sophisticated yet, it would seem, judging by results. [Run to the patent office! First to file means anyone can steal this idea!] Luckily, in this case, you won't be hit with a drone strike because you have an odd web site; but in other cases sudden death from the skies has been the result of bot analysis of mass intercepted communications targeting entirely innocent people. Just to be clear, I actually rather like the idea of drone strikes on bad guys, just not idiotic-algorithm-triggered drone strikes, thanks so much.

WalterSear 9y ago
Fwiw. Duckduckgo is using Bing under the hood I believe.
- vanderZwan 9y ago
  That's a bit of an oversimplification. From the FAQ page: > When people search, we believe they're really looking for answers, as opposed to just links. For many categories of searches (restaurants, game of thrones, code documentation, etc.), there is usually a specialized search engine (Yelp), content site or other source that does a better job at actually answering the searches than a general search engine does with just links. Our long-term goal is to get you Instant Answers from these best sources. > To do that, we've developed an open source Instant Answer platform called DuckDuckHack, which allows anyone to propose and develop Instant Answers for DuckDuckGo. On the backend, we have a classification and relevancy engine that selects the best sources for a particular search and displays answers to you in real time, be it for recipes, products, images, and hundreds of other categories. > In fact, DuckDuckGo gets its results from over four hundred sources. These include hundreds of vertical sources delivering niche Instant Answers, DuckDuckBot (our crawler) and crowd-sourced sites (like Wikipedia, stored in our answer indexes). We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we source from Bing, Yahoo, and Yandex. https://duck.co/help/results/sources https://duck.co/help/results/sources EDIT: changed link to more elaborate FAQ one.
  - mikedilger 9y ago
    This reminds me: google owns duck.com Don't mistype duck.co

WalterSear 9y ago

Fwiw. Duckduckgo is using Bing under the hood I believe.

vanderZwan 9y ago
That's a bit of an oversimplification. From the FAQ page: > When people search, we believe they're really looking for answers, as opposed to just links. For many categories of searches (restaurants, game of thrones, code documentation, etc.), there is usually a specialized search engine (Yelp), content site or other source that does a better job at actually answering the searches than a general search engine does with just links. Our long-term goal is to get you Instant Answers from these best sources. > To do that, we've developed an open source Instant Answer platform called DuckDuckHack, which allows anyone to propose and develop Instant Answers for DuckDuckGo. On the backend, we have a classification and relevancy engine that selects the best sources for a particular search and displays answers to you in real time, be it for recipes, products, images, and hundreds of other categories. > In fact, DuckDuckGo gets its results from over four hundred sources. These include hundreds of vertical sources delivering niche Instant Answers, DuckDuckBot (our crawler) and crowd-sourced sites (like Wikipedia, stored in our answer indexes). We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we source from Bing, Yahoo, and Yandex. https://duck.co/help/results/sources https://duck.co/help/results/sources EDIT: changed link to more elaborate FAQ one.
- mikedilger 9y ago
  This reminds me: google owns duck.com Don't mistype duck.co