Is there any search engine which is NOT backed by an extremely heavyweight player?
"We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we also source from a variety of partners, including Verizon Media (formerly Yahoo) and Bing."[0]
[0]https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/so...
That's ok though - a privacy respecting proxy to a decent search engine is a useful thing. You get all the search results and they don't get to track you.
BTW, there is also similar private search that proxies queries to google - https://www.startpage.com/
> Is there any search engine which is NOT backed by an extremely heavyweight player?
Global search of most web pages worth finding is a heavyweight task.
https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/duckduckgo.com
It's also built into browsers. So, whatever they're doing, it's working.
I've been using it full time for a bit longer than two years. In the beginning I think I had to use "g!" to search on google maybe 1 / 5 times, now I really only search on google maybe once a month and when I do I often don't find any better results. It's really come a long way from the first time I tried using it 5 or 6 years ago.
At this point it's good enough that I think I could recommend someone else switch to it without needing to change their search habits.
As to DDG vs. Search, maybe this is a bit programmer leaning; however, I'd say that was some of the draw that got Firefox and Chrome to own the web browser market. They presented products that developers and techies enjoyed using and always kept them (initially) in their vision. I recall telling my parents they needed to switch from IE to Chrome because "it was just better" a decade ago. So, while this brutalistic terminal version of DDG only caters to a niche market, it's the same niche market that ends up spreading why it's the "better" product.
DDG has so much momentum behind it now I dont understand why they dont do all they can to create a search engine all their own(bulk up search engineers.. bulk up on venture funding...make acquisition that improve its search, etc). One that is as good or better then Google. I so want to be able to keep recommending it yet not have to hear friends/family say its not as good as Google.
I've got a bash function wrapper around w3m that fires off searches from the shell. It's not a dedicated DDG client, but then again, after you hit the search results, the goal is to view the results page. This does use the "lite" page, which is console-browser friendly-er
ddg ()
{
w3m https://duckduckgo.com/lite?q="$*&fd=-1"
}
Nothing for number of results on page, that I see, though I've just added the toggle for no redirect ("&fd=-1", included above now).
Thanks!
https://api.duckduckgo.com/api
>This API does not include all of our links, however. That is, it is not a full search results API or a way to get DuckDuckGo results into your applications beyond our instant answers. Because of the way we generate our search results, we unfortunately do not have the rights to fully syndicate our results, free or paid. For the same reason, we cannot allow framing our results without our branding. Please see our partnerships page for more info on guidelines and getting in touch with us.
1. Feedback isn't being sent anywhere (looking at the network requests.)
2. Searching for sum or difference of numbers (eg. 2-1) returns [Object].
3. Typing / or ' invokes the browser's quick find option
4. I can never search for the letter M (or m, or 'm' inside quotes) because it always gives "-- End of search results." instead of the search results.
5. I can never search for a URL (say, http://duckduckgo.com) as a keyword. No results at all.
6. Pressing CTRL-L after typing some text clears the text as well (unlike any other terminal)
7. Pronounce doesn't work at all (audio plays well on Forvo)
Discoveries:
1. Searching for \anything takes you to the first result (on a popup that's blocked by the browser).
2. [Added] A `duck` CLI would be useful.
Ok looks like CMD-L and CMD-K also clear the terminal in iTerm. But we're talking about "ctrl" here
Now, please make this an actual CLI. I want to type `search "performant c hash table"` from my command line and get back results. I can open the resultant link in something like lynx, as all I need is probably textual. This is perfect for development use cases.
I think this is hitting a caching/prefetch layer and not actually querying the main index.
My theory:
- this was a hackathon/weekend/20%(ish) project...
- ...using JSON for simplicity...
- ...said JSON endpoint needs to be exposed in a straightforward way...
- ...without implementing authentication/obfuscation (which would have blown the allotted time budget)...
- ...and so the decision was made to "break" the results in some way instead, so that once you realize https://duckduckgo.com/?q=test&o=json is EXTREMELY easy to parse, it's of no value.
> Because Devdas uses vimperator with Google?? I don't think they mix well. Devdas, you should try this instead.
I'm not sure this was ever intended to be more than just a quick project. It breaks because parsing has a lot of edge cases, and this was done quickly.
Could I use this on my Terminal now?
Though you might appreciate https://duckduckgo.com/lite
Google assistant is also lacking a client for web browsers, or desktops in general...
It appears free to use the assistant API for non commerical purposes. Until it gets randomly deprecated.
Why can't I just search normally and the list is a list of the actual results of my query.
Now you navigate to the ddg search results page and have to then browse as usual. Almost useless. You'd think this would be made to skip that step.
JS hijacks pretty much every event, and cursor is just a styled span, not a real input, which introduces a bunch of usability bugs.
Pretty sure that can be fix though.