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Comment by ssorallen | Hacker News Reader

I have tried multiple times to use DuckDuckGo over the years but used !g so often for programming queries that I questioned why I was forcing myself to use a plainly underperforming (for my use case) product. In other David vs. Goliath stories like Firefox vs. Chrome the competing product had verifiable advantages for me. For DDG the only edge is an unverifiable claim that the company doesn’t track me? Other than that I am resolving myself to a product that performs less well for my use case.

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> used !g so often for programming queries

Funny, I find google useless for programming queries lately.

Although, if you go past the beginner questions, all searches become useless. You want something exotic and android specific? Good luck wading through 3000 pages explaining you how to use Android. Even though you specified 'programmatically' or 'in code'. And 90% of the rest are SEO "tutorial" pages that don't answer your question either.

A million times this.

I recently had the misfortune of trying to learn Android app development and oh my GOD I can't describe how SEO-ridden it is. Basically any search that Google can surmise as being related to Android development (no matter if I'm searching for the fix for some error message, etc), I get almost a full page of results that are SEO'd "Android App Dev Tutorial For Beginners" that are all basically:

- 25 minute read of "how to install Android Studio"

- "Okay now that you have that, you can go off and start writing Android apps! Have fun!

Yeah; what the hell happened? Not just programming, but other technical things too. It's like everybody is gaming search so hard that search is going back to the days of AltaVista and Lycos.

I am in this box too. When I first started using ddg, I added !g to programming queries because it was better. Nowadays, I try ddg first and I'm disappointed, so I append !g and I still get sfa.

It would be nice if some decent entrepreneurial academics could create a web browser that was better than the SEOers and would aim to do no evil. Sigh. One can dream.

Links stopped mattering after Google killed blogs.

Now there is no mass of people verifying the quality of random sites, and search engines lost they anchor.

The now-defunct Advogato approached the question of reputation by having explicit reputation sources, with its founder the ultimate source.

Raph now works for Google AFAIA.

Reputation is a lousy replacement for page popularity. When Google started to apply their metrics over an entire domain, they already lost a lot of niche information.

Yes, it's better than nothing, but don't expect it to keep the same quality of results we got earlier. Google killed the golden goose when they decided do concentrate their results on the large sites only, and it will be very hard to make similar algorithms work that well again.

Pagerank is explicitly a reputation measure. It's proved somewhat manipulable and unreliable.

Levien's reputation graph needn't be slavishly followed, though it does suggest an alternative.

Don't sites like reddit, stackoverflow and twitter have an equivalent effect? (And I recall Google coming about before blogs. How did Google kill them?)

Google was founded on the answer on how do you deduce the value of a site based on an ecosystem of personal pages around it. (Blogs are simply what replaced personal pages later.)

Have you ever seen any study like that for reddit and twitter? Those have completely different characteristics. (SO looks similar enough, but it's not comprehensive.)

On how did Google kill blogs, looks like you haven't noticed they decided to concentrate their search results on a small number of sites a few years ago.Google just does not lead people to them anymore.

It can also be that employees are willing to have a lower salary because they are feeling they contribute to something meaningful.

When using DDG I also tend to fall back on !g but in my idealistic fantasy I imagine this to be okay because I provide DDG with search terms they can use to optimize their engine.

Would be interested in what that salary range is. I assume a larger part of their comp is RSU and options.

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