Improving DuckDuckGo (2019) | Hacker News Reader

Improving DuckDuckGo (2019)

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23 pointsfreedomben6 comments

I'd trade some privacy for opt-in but full-transparency, and filters to prevent certain regexes, or sites from being stored at all, as long as the search experience was well beyond google's...because right now to me it seems all search is just about unusable, unless searching a specific site like stackoverflow, reddit, or github... and that's a sorry state for the web in 2022.

Sadly DDG sometimes doesn’t work for very specific searches too. I have DDG as my default search in all browsers, but find myself typing !g too often.

For example, today I searched for “Salzstiegl ski club”. Not even on the first page in DDG, but the first result for Google. It makes me sad.

Preumably because the site is in German -- https://www.sc-salzstiegl.at/

If my country is set to Germany it's the first result in DDG

If my country is set to the UK I get lots of pages in English about it which are probably more likely to be what I would want

If I search for "Skiclub Salzstiegl" though, it is the first result

I disagree. I specifically searched for Salzstiegl ski club, I don’t really care about the language, just return the website I am looking for. Why does Google return the correct result first, regardless of language?

I also tried setting DDG to “All Regions” and the results were not better.

By phrasing it that way you're searching in English, it seems a reasonable choice to return sites that are in English.

If I search DDG for "US President", the first results are the English Wikipedia page for "President of the United States" and "List of presidents of the united states"

If I search for "US-Präsident", I get "Liste der Präsidenten der Vereinigten Staaten" and "Präsident der Vereinigten Staaten - Wikipedia" from Germany wikipedia, and fairly high up is a link to zeit [0]

That Zeit link doesn't appear if I search in English.

It seems that DDG puts the language used of the search fairly high in the weighting. That's reasonable to me. If I search "Nicolas Sarkozy im Gefängnis", I get German stories about the French President.

I can see both arguments, I don't think differing weights for language is an indictment of a search algorithm specifically though.

[0] https://www.zeit.de/politik/ausland/2022-02/joe-biden-us-pra...

The duck email addresses are really something but they should stop the waiting list and just open it up to anyone.

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