4 ms·

What you mean by minus operator? If one that exclude word from search results, you're wrong https://imgur.com/a/mOYUGsG https://imgur.com/a/mOYUGsG

by psydvl 4y ago

hericium 4y ago
Yup. Those work as intended with DDG: hacker news -site:ycombinator.com office -microsoft picard -"star trek" japanese fish and rice -sushi
- autoexec 4y ago
  heh, not only was: 'office -microsoft' filled with microsoft links but when i tried 'office -microsoft -site:microsoft.com' all I got was a blank page! I'll give them some credit though, using duckduckgo.com I only got a page full of Microsoft that shouldn't have been there. It looks like it's https://html.duckduckgo.com/html/ https://html.duckduckgo.com/html/ that has the blank page problem
  - duckmysick 4y ago
    Are you talking about duckduckgo? I tried `office -microsoft` just now and got the expected results: tv series, tv series podcast, government sites, bunch of businesses named Office. Nothing about Microsoft Office.
    - Thorrez 4y ago
      Huh, it's showing Microsoft stuff for me: https://i.imgur.com/jrNw5LX.png https://i.imgur.com/jrNw5LX.png https://duckduckgo.com/?q=office+-microsoft&t=h_&ia=web https://duckduckgo.com/?q=office+-microsoft&t=h_&ia=web
      - duckmysick 4y ago
        Interesting. I clicked your second link and I still got the results respecting the negative operator I mentioned in my post above. Edit: To confirm, `office` alone returns a page full of Microsoft results. If anyone from DuckDuckGo is lurking by any chance, I'd love to hear what makes it different.
      - anonymoushn 4y ago
        I have these same results. Maybe there's an active A/B test where one bucket has a working search engine.
    - autoexec 4y ago
      Yeah. For a site that claims to help people escape the filter bubble this seems like evidence that they don't. Maybe it's your location, or your typical searches that are giving you better results, but duckduckgo fails that test for me every time.
Lio 4y ago
I'm sorry but that behaviour is very, very flaky in Duckduckgo and breaks for me regularly. Filtering retailers out of search results in Duckduckgo can be very difficult because of it. An trivial example that springs to mind recently was trying to search for information on the manufacturer of Hycosan Extra eye drops. The results are swamped by ecommerce sites with no actual information on them. Adding terms like "-pharmacist" or "-retailer" actually boosts sites with pharmacist in their URL to the top of the results. I sometimes have the same issue searching for programming topics where the results are swamped by Microsoft related tech. That would be fine if that's what I was searching for but when it's not it's a real pain in the arse. Using "-microsoft" or some other exclusion just boosts the incorrect results from Microsoft's own site even further. Sometimes Duckduckgo fix this behaviour but it seems to break randomly for me.

What you mean by minus operator? If one that exclude word from search results, you're wrong https://imgur.com/a/mOYUGsG https://imgur.com/a/mOYUGsG

by psydvl 4y ago

What you mean by minus operator? If one that exclude word from search results, you're wrong https://imgur.com/a/mOYUGsG https://imgur.com/a/mOYUGsG

hericium 4y ago

Yup. Those work as intended with DDG: hacker news -site:ycombinator.com office -microsoft picard -"star trek" japanese fish and rice -sushi

autoexec 4y ago
heh, not only was: 'office -microsoft' filled with microsoft links but when i tried 'office -microsoft -site:microsoft.com' all I got was a blank page! I'll give them some credit though, using duckduckgo.com I only got a page full of Microsoft that shouldn't have been there. It looks like it's https://html.duckduckgo.com/html/ https://html.duckduckgo.com/html/ that has the blank page problem
- duckmysick 4y ago
  Are you talking about duckduckgo? I tried `office -microsoft` just now and got the expected results: tv series, tv series podcast, government sites, bunch of businesses named Office. Nothing about Microsoft Office.
  - Thorrez 4y ago
    Huh, it's showing Microsoft stuff for me: https://i.imgur.com/jrNw5LX.png https://i.imgur.com/jrNw5LX.png https://duckduckgo.com/?q=office+-microsoft&t=h_&ia=web https://duckduckgo.com/?q=office+-microsoft&t=h_&ia=web
    - duckmysick 4y ago
      Interesting. I clicked your second link and I still got the results respecting the negative operator I mentioned in my post above. Edit: To confirm, `office` alone returns a page full of Microsoft results. If anyone from DuckDuckGo is lurking by any chance, I'd love to hear what makes it different.
    - anonymoushn 4y ago
      I have these same results. Maybe there's an active A/B test where one bucket has a working search engine.
  - autoexec 4y ago
    Yeah. For a site that claims to help people escape the filter bubble this seems like evidence that they don't. Maybe it's your location, or your typical searches that are giving you better results, but duckduckgo fails that test for me every time.

Lio 4y ago

I'm sorry but that behaviour is very, very flaky in Duckduckgo and breaks for me regularly. Filtering retailers out of search results in Duckduckgo can be very difficult because of it. An trivial example that springs to mind recently was trying to search for information on the manufacturer of Hycosan Extra eye drops. The results are swamped by ecommerce sites with no actual information on them. Adding terms like "-pharmacist" or "-retailer" actually boosts sites with pharmacist in their URL to the top of the results. I sometimes have the same issue searching for programming topics where the results are swamped by Microsoft related tech. That would be fine if that's what I was searching for but when it's not it's a real pain in the arse. Using "-microsoft" or some other exclusion just boosts the incorrect results from Microsoft's own site even further. Sometimes Duckduckgo fix this behaviour but it seems to break randomly for me.