Moved from DDG to Brave Search about 6 months ago and haven't missed DDG at all. I can still use the !bangs I was accustomed to.
Given that Brave uses its own search index, and only a few times do I need to fall back to Google, it feels good to have a measure of independence from the Google/Bing dominance in search
Did not know that. I immediately grabbed some recent "poor result" Google searches from history and tried them at search.brave.com — so far ALL results are better. Reminds me a bit of Google from ten years ago.
Google's decline into its present inability to NOT show only "assumed popular content" created a huge time sink in my life that wasn't there before. Not a fan of the over- and inaccurate use of "disruption" but it was a legitimate description for what Google did to other search engines, and this feels like a similar level of improvement. I'm frankly amazed at how good the search results are in my initial test.
> I immediately grabbed some recent "poor result" Google searches from history
Did you revisit every query from your recent Google searches (or) Is it that you have a good memory that you were able to remember poor results from looking at the query?
I'm asking this because, I've been contemplating a 'Search Engine Wall of Shame'[1] where people can submit their poor search results for the engines to make actionable changes towards improving them.
I re-opened several Google SERPs from my history and compared to Brave.
I often find NO results relevant to my query on the first three pages of search Google results, often seemingly because there is a "more common/popular" aspect of the topic I am searching about, and everything is about the common and related aspects and none about my use case.
Would you be willing to submit your bad search results to such forum? I welcome you to post your bad search results with the queries to that needgap thread for the time being unless there's a dedicated forum for that.
Brave automatically changed my default search engine on private tabs to their search. I don't know if it was a bug or feature, but this kind of behaviour keeps me wary from committing.
Why hasn't DDG grown internal search competency? It's been years, and there's still no sign of search being a first class concern at DDG. That seems like a number one must have for any search product company.
Rebranded Bing with a new interface isn't hard tech. It risks so much on the business relationship. They should be staffing for this yesterday.
Hire more search folks, DDG! Also, ditch that awfully long name.
would also like to hear from DDG ppl. On another note, Really appreciate DDG's map functionality using apple map with iaxm query parameter set "maps" and q set to whatever you want to search for:
They are welcome too, but perhaps are restrained by their stakeholders.
Looking at the suggestions in the blog, and for transparency - Mojeek CEO:
> Stop trying to look like Google.
Agreed. We and our users still believe that "10 blue links" have great value. But drowning these out with too many of things like Ads, Videos and Answers on the page helps pretty much just Google.
> Arrange that algorithm to make it less vulnerable to SEO hacking.
Admittedly we don't yet have that problem yet. Still there are plenty of measures that we provide, and will expand upon to mitigate that. Without going into details these generally amount to giving users, and API customers, more control over searching and ranking.
> Discard AI-generated text.
A good idea. But can also be done on the SERPs. Do users benefit from AI answers? Mojeek is a search Engine not an answer Engine.
> Results in other languages.
Bing?
> New opportunities.
DuckDuckGo is doing a great job of providing new and improved privacy products. We stand with them on many things. I am sure they appreciate the opportunity also in providing more informational (search) diversity from and with a fully independent search stack (infrastructure, crawler, index, ranking).
This seems to be the gist of the response you've linked:
> mobile searches are the largest category of searches, and local searches are the largest category of searches within mobile. Instead our local search content is a combination of our own indexes in partnership with Apple, TripAdvisor, and others.
This suggests Bing isn't used for local searches, but it is still used for mobile and desktop searches that aren't local. If I am searching for a tech problem or how to tie a knot or recipes or the history of hair metal, I'm getting Bing results wrapped in DDG. Is that inaccurate? Is Bing still used for searches that aren't local searches?
We've indexed billions of pages already at you.com to avoid this situation.
The majority of our apps like Stackoverflow and Medium etc, we've indexed ourselves.
IANAL, but “evade law enforcement” seems inaccurate.
> HKMAP helps residents comply with the wishes of law enforcement (who communicate their demands by colored flags quickly raised in the dark).
> …[the app] doesn't contravene any Hong Kong law that I am aware of. This app helps answer questions like "will I get shot with a bean bag round if I come out of this MTR station, because the police raised a colored flag I can't see".
—Maciej Ceglowski, the American who runs the Pinboard bookmarking service, who has been in Hong Kong for a while now, to follow the protests.
Can you expand on your Google comment re. RCS? All I’ve seen recently is that they’re taking the reins from the carriers (at least outside of the US) to speed-up rollout.
Arguably, Apple already offers a version of a “pre-load” button in Safari (on iOS and macOS), with the setting to “Automatically save Reading List articles for offline reading”. (Not on by default, but the user sees a prompt to turn it on the first time they add an article to the Reading List.)
Ideally, you could add an article to the Reading List on your computer, and then view it later on your phone that downloaded it in the background when it still had network access.
In practice, my quick testing results just now were mixed: Safari kept saying that a Medium article wasn’t available offline, a Quartz article only loaded the header (with what looked like a fully-opaque white overlay covering the content itself), but a Daring Fireball post (i.e., without any JavaScript trickery) loaded just fine.
I realize that you’re referring to traditionally-typed text, but Monotype was recently commissioned to design a typeface for the illustrator of Roald Dahl’s books, and they did indeed include alternates for each letter (along with variations in kerning):
>…He selected four subtly different alternates for each character that, combined, would make the text look random enough to look authentic while keeping the glyph set manageable
My parents' handwriting was borderline illegible, so they took to typing letters on a manual typewriter. Typewriters suffering from all the problems of complex finicky mechanisms, and being a write-only medium, resulted in a pleasing quirkiness that is completely absent from email. Read enough typed text, and you begin to recognize a person's particular "hand" at the typewriter, as well as the machine's individual quirks. Electric typewriters put an end to most of that, and email finished it off.
Ugh. I’m disappointed that they’re referring to storage capacity as “memory capacity”, perpetuating the pervasive confusion amongst non-technical users.
You can download Neo Network Utility from https://www.devontechnologies.com/apps/freeware