I went to set DDG on all my devices a few months ago because it was the "right" thing to do but expecting to get inferior results and needing to use the g bang a lot, surprisingly it turns out I never had to use it. Ordinary search has changed with the siloization of the internet: twitter, subreddits, stackow, github, official pages, all the big silos are easy to find and offer superior internal discovery, the fact that google might (or not) be better at ranking the long tail is losing relevance fast.
It's been my experience that Google has heavily deranked or outright delisted the long tail anyway. Almost all results are either major media sites, reddit, github, similar large sites, or blogspam. Older sites are often outright delisted, newer sites usually just have some sort of huge deranking penalty that often makes their results unfindable, unless you are able to search for an exact quote on that site. It's really bizarre, there are a TON of extremely valuable content-rich niche sites out there that are far better than, for example, the Wikipedia treatment of their subject, but Google search hates them.
I am actually quite puzzled by what they choose to index now or not - for example, you'll find that a lot - but not all - of HN comment pages are not indexed or delisted.
So it really doesn't seem surprising to me that Google search can fairly easily be beaten nowadays.
EDIT: Well, in my quest for an example of a delisted HN comment page, which I have run into before, I found something even more curious: a page that does appear in the index if I search by title, but not if I search by some of the page contents (eg site:news.ycombinator.com my username and the word 'eliding') reflected in the Google cached version of the webpage.
EDIT2: I checked on DDG and searching on site:news.ycombinator.com for amezarak eliding does turn up the comment that Google can't find.
I find image search to be almost entirely useless but the normal search is generally sufficient. The last time I used DDG the geographic results were frustratingly inconsistent. I’d get restaurants in different countries and whatnot.
Actually when you are searching for something to print (like coloring pages) DDG is much more useful as you can actually open the image as an image. Google seems to have stopped doing that.
I agree, and probably I may buy more coloring books if it weren’t for ddg. Although we have many and still my daughter wants a specific one with a unicorn and a princess and spends a lot of time picking one. The alternative to this is “take on from you coloring books you already have.” So I guess nobody is really losing anything in this case, except me, I pay for the toner in the printer as well as for the coloring books ;)
Whatever you think the Internet was built for doesn’t matter. Copyright exists and some people want to retain their rights to share an image without people just wholesale scraping it without even visiting the website.
This antisocial behaviour of walking in and taking whatever isn’t bolted down leads to an unfortunate arms race of watermarks, other technologies, and crappy laws that attempt to stop consumers from disrespecting the rights of producers.
Whether intended or not, Google at least makes you visit the website before taking the images. (Which is contrary to all the times google does this for its own benefit.)
The number of people who produce desirable content are drastically outnumbered by the number of consumers, so I’m very guarded about any rhetoric that fixates on consumer rights at the cost of producer rights. Naturally they don’t get an equal voice.
With real names, faces are just one google search away for most people (and we could debate further what would it mean if a face wasn't found).
Functionally the website would be a wasteland of white sameness without portraits, no way around that I think.
I'm not entirely convinced this service solves the linkedin pitfall of mingling jumphoppers racking up impressive paper stats and polluting the signal.
You can’t really stop people from finding your face online if it’s on social media, but you can present the information so that you’d first read the text and then see a photo.
Move the photo on the profile to the bottom of it, and make it optional.
> With real names, faces are just one google search away for most people
> You can’t really stop people from finding your face online if it’s on social media
Hey, some of us worked pretty hard for this to not be true, so at the very least the photo should be optional. I’m blessed with a common first and last name and outside of my HN username I am pretty un-Googlable. Someone very motivated could probably find an old photo of me or two but it’s not universally true that everyone’s photo is a simple search away.
Others aren't exactly common, but I spent a good bit of time a while back removing my own information from the public internet. It's not easy removing yourself from all the Spokeo clones, but most of them have some way to do so, or at least remove the information from the public.
I agree - like only show a persons face AFTER you’ve connected somehow (I agree we’re hardwired to recognize faces - but I don’t want to try to recognize all the people as I’m browsing etc. - but when they become part of my Rolodex, then I wanna recognize their faces)
> With real names, faces are just one google search away for most people (and we could debate further what would it mean if a face wasn't found).
But it becomes an added hassle for those people, thus making it UX hostile for stalkers. Who is actually going to Google each and every other name on somebody else's collaborator list? Some determined stalkers I guess, but they are not going to be deterred anyways.
On the point of faces not being found, as a counterexample, some of my former MDs did not put pics in their LinkedIn. Yet people in the industry knew them by name, even if they weren't rockstar investors or something. Having heard someone's name from other sources such as word of mouth or from newspaper articles is a much better signal than using names to recognize them.
Most people reviewing CVs don't need to see the real names. It'd be great to have a CV service that could render the CV either with or with out them.
Also, maybe I'm the only one, but I'm starting to experience a bit of 'mindfulness' fatigue. Seems like it's mindlessly being added to everything regardless of whether it makes any sense or not, so I dislike 'Mindful professional profiles' as a subhead.
Social media obsessed people who are great at clicking buttons and getting followers but add no value to the network. They only fill up a feed with noise.
> regional locale detection and user choice to make fake names
Presumably you're talking about locale detection of the hiring company/reviewer rather than locale detection of the CV submitter.
I really like the idea, although practically it's probably not a good one in small companies where people are likely to actually work with the person whose CV they're reviewing.
I would say stick to placeholders that are obviously placeholders in order to avoid confusion. And obviously there are some people who do need to see the real names, so give them a clear deanonymise step.
My understanding is that it gets a bit faster and you get a few extra perks if you purchasea (pretty cheap) subscription. Not a bad deal for an awesome newsreader.
Right now chrome performance makes other browsers irrelevant.
No amount of features would convince me to roll back to something that takes 5 full seconds to start.
