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I do searches for a lot of obscure stuff that only Google seems capable of finding right now (well, I haven't used Bing much, but I've been comparing the Google
by fl3tch 15y ago
I do searches for a lot of obscure stuff that only Google seems capable of finding right now (well, I haven't used Bing much, but I've been comparing the Google results to DDG, because people keep talking about it).
Here's an example. I remember reading a few months ago about how to do a hexdump on /dev/urandom to create a Matrix-style scroll, and to "look busy in front of your boss". So I did a Google search for "look busy with /dev/urandom" and sure enough the blog post I was looking for is the first result:
http://jeromenicholas.blogspot.com/2011/03/look-busy-when-your-boss-comes-around.html http://jeromenicholas.blogspot.com/2011/03/look-busy-when-yo...
Now, I don't know if it's just the first result for me (I'd like to hear what others get), but that post doesn't come up in the first 50 results on DDG, using the same search string. Whether Google's algorithms are better overall or they have been trained better by me after years of searching, the results for obscure searches are simply better 95% of the time.
Of course, there are still the 5% of searches that end in frustration. Example: there's an email product called Prayer. That's all I'm going to tell you. Go ahead, try to find it. The correct result is #1 for me right now, but that may be because I clicked through dozens of results before I found the right one. It wasn't on the front page the first time I searched for it.
- ward 15y agoI get the same result on google and in duckduckgo it doesn't appear. I think it's also worth pointing out that "/dev/urandom" doesn't show bolded (as in "we found the string in this particular search result") until the 25th or so result. I don't know if duckduckgo just shows the bolding less often or that it just sorts its results very awkwardly.
- pilooch 15y agoWe build a meta search open source layer called Seeks. We do naturally get to compare Bing, Google and Blekko on a daily basis. Bing (and thus bot ddg and Blekko that rely on it) lies behind for semi obscur queries. You can test by yourself on any Seeks instance such as seeks.fr.