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Comment by ggrot | Hacker News Reader

Maybe a minor quibble, but isn't DDG powered by Yahoo BOSS with features added on top? Yet, Rob then goes on to say "Yahoo can't be taken seriously" and points out queries where Yahoo does a poor job of handing synonyms - DDG has the same problem for the exact same query if you try it. Furthermore, the other queries which he suggests give irrelevant results on Google seem to give me irrelevant results on DDG.

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DDG is actually a hybrid of my own crawling/indexing and BOSS/Bing/others. Additionally, I don't use the others straight up. So for some queries they may look similar and for others they will look completely different.

Wrt to spam sites, DDG often looks a lot different because I maintain a large database of spam sites that I remove from results. I see these crop up all the time in the API feeds I use. It's over 60M in just the main tlds (non country level domains).

Among the differences, DDG blocks MFA content mills and junk sites. If you report one they add it quite fast.

Yahoo certainly tries to do that too, although I guess you're getting the union of yahoo/bing's spam-fighting and DDG's spam fighting.

I suspect that of the two, yahoo's has a much bigger impact given the size of the teams involved.

Actually I remove tons of spam from the Yahoo, Bing & other feeds.

What order of magnitude is tons? Not to take away from what you're doing, but historically 90% of new domains are spam.

I'd have to check for exact numbers, but for a large % of searches I'm removing links from those APIs.

> If you report one they add it quite fast.

Probably because few people report sites.

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