4 ms·

It is a problem. Things like MFA spam and Google's recent trend of being less useful as a Search Engine for Programmers (ignoring quotes, ignoring punctuation l

by arohner 16y ago

It is a problem. Things like MFA spam and Google's recent trend of being less useful as a Search Engine for Programmers (ignoring quotes, ignoring punctuation like ? and !) are enough to make me switch, if I find something better. This article has convinced me to try out DDG for a little while.

moultano 16y ago
>ignoring punctuation like ? and ! Google has done this since launch, I don't think it's a recent trend. I agree though that searching for programming information isn't great. (It's even harder with math.) I doubt you'll find MFA spam to be better on DDG than on Google, but please, if you see a query where they are beating us. Send it over. :) I can guarantee you that I'll get a lot of eyes looking at it.
- wanderr 16y ago
  Kudos, I was about to submit a longstanding complaint but it looks like it has been fixed. For a long time Google was autocorrecting my searches for gearman as "gearman" -- not just in a "Did you mean?" but actually giving me search results about germans instead of gearman. I'm not sure when it happened, but results are sane and accurate again, even for things like "gearman workers" and "gearman jobs".
  - wanderr 16y ago
    er, typo fail. They were correcting "gearman" to "german."
- pixelbath 16y ago
  DuckDuckGo is actually worse for this query (they seem to not be ranking as high as they used to in Google SERPS), but it brings up an issue that I've never seen satisfactorily answered anywhere. http://www.google.com/search?q=soap+with+flash+as3 http://www.google.com/search?q=soap+with+flash+as3 brings up the following link from bigresource.com: http://www.bigresource.com/FLASH-SOAP-with-flash-AS3-PvTRLrvdSe.html http://www.bigresource.com/FLASH-SOAP-with-flash-AS3-PvTRLrv... The BigResournce content is scraped from Actionscript.org and surrounded by BigResource's ads, which is pretty standard scraping. Clicking the link to "view original forum thread" redirects to a framed page with more BigResource ads, and the original content in a frame. The frame is handled internally by the site, so I'm doubtful they're even showing an actual link to their scraped content. I've seen this specific site debated in this thread: http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Web+Search/thread?tid=2fcbb7ec02a527b2&hl=en http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Web+Search/thread?tid=... and I know several users including myself have reported this site as spam (I even went the extra mile and changed Chrome to append "-site:bigresource.com" to queries using the default engine). My question is this: Is there something that BigResource is doing that exempts them from being classified as spam? As near as I can tell, they add no extra value to the content for the user, and push the legitimate results they scraped further down in results (because they have many, many pages).
  - pixelbath 16y ago
    Update: Google now ranks it as highly as DDG. Great job!
- alecco 16y ago
  It's over two weeks, but FWIW here it goes: I got fed up of searching for CPU instructions and compiler intrinsics in Google. You get mostly pointless forum discussions or MFA kind of results. Same happens with many other technical searches. It looks like the secret pagerank is gamed from both inside and outside. Note: DDG's search is Yahoo Boss/Bing.
roel_v 16y ago
Now that 3 comments in a row mention it, what's DDG?
- Tichy 16y ago
  DuckDuckGo
- pierrefar 16y ago
  Duck Duck Go: http://duckduckgo.com/ http://duckduckgo.com/ by Gabriel Weinberg: http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/ http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/ Gabriel has an awesome blog and is active here on HN.

by arohner 16y ago

moultano 16y ago

>ignoring punctuation like ? and ! Google has done this since launch, I don't think it's a recent trend. I agree though that searching for programming information isn't great. (It's even harder with math.) I doubt you'll find MFA spam to be better on DDG than on Google, but please, if you see a query where they are beating us. Send it over. :) I can guarantee you that I'll get a lot of eyes looking at it.

wanderr 16y ago
Kudos, I was about to submit a longstanding complaint but it looks like it has been fixed. For a long time Google was autocorrecting my searches for gearman as "gearman" -- not just in a "Did you mean?" but actually giving me search results about germans instead of gearman. I'm not sure when it happened, but results are sane and accurate again, even for things like "gearman workers" and "gearman jobs".
- wanderr 16y ago
  er, typo fail. They were correcting "gearman" to "german."
pixelbath 16y ago
DuckDuckGo is actually worse for this query (they seem to not be ranking as high as they used to in Google SERPS), but it brings up an issue that I've never seen satisfactorily answered anywhere. http://www.google.com/search?q=soap+with+flash+as3 http://www.google.com/search?q=soap+with+flash+as3 brings up the following link from bigresource.com: http://www.bigresource.com/FLASH-SOAP-with-flash-AS3-PvTRLrvdSe.html http://www.bigresource.com/FLASH-SOAP-with-flash-AS3-PvTRLrv... The BigResournce content is scraped from Actionscript.org and surrounded by BigResource's ads, which is pretty standard scraping. Clicking the link to "view original forum thread" redirects to a framed page with more BigResource ads, and the original content in a frame. The frame is handled internally by the site, so I'm doubtful they're even showing an actual link to their scraped content. I've seen this specific site debated in this thread: http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Web+Search/thread?tid=2fcbb7ec02a527b2&hl=en http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Web+Search/thread?tid=... and I know several users including myself have reported this site as spam (I even went the extra mile and changed Chrome to append "-site:bigresource.com" to queries using the default engine). My question is this: Is there something that BigResource is doing that exempts them from being classified as spam? As near as I can tell, they add no extra value to the content for the user, and push the legitimate results they scraped further down in results (because they have many, many pages).
- pixelbath 16y ago
  Update: Google now ranks it as highly as DDG. Great job!
alecco 16y ago
It's over two weeks, but FWIW here it goes: I got fed up of searching for CPU instructions and compiler intrinsics in Google. You get mostly pointless forum discussions or MFA kind of results. Same happens with many other technical searches. It looks like the secret pagerank is gamed from both inside and outside. Note: DDG's search is Yahoo Boss/Bing.

roel_v 16y ago

Now that 3 comments in a row mention it, what's DDG?

Tichy 16y ago
DuckDuckGo
pierrefar 16y ago
Duck Duck Go: http://duckduckgo.com/ http://duckduckgo.com/ by Gabriel Weinberg: http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/ http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/ Gabriel has an awesome blog and is active here on HN.