I don't get people who say Google is getting worse myself. If any of you know search engine building so well and aren't working for another search engine (like DuckDuckGo) why not take your expertise to Google and help fix the problem?
You bring up an interesting point. It would be nice if there was some sort of way real people could rank results. Even as an engineer, I am often frustrated by the results I get, but I have a hard time articulating what Google could do to show me what I wanted on the first page.
Actually, I passed patio11's blog post around widely within Google. Feedback like that is welcome because it prompts us to think about what we need to do better.
You passed patio11's blog post around before or after it hit HN front page? (If it was distributed inside Google before reaching HN front page, I was wrong.)
FYI DDG just uses the bing API and then does some fancy stuff on top of it, so technically they're not a "better search engine" they're just a prettier bing.
"hybrid search engine" is just worthless words, what does it even mean? If you want people to stop saying you're just syndicating others data publish the amount of others data you do use, but when I've compared bing.com searches with yours they're very similar whereas google is different, which would imply you're heavily taking from bing, whether or not you crawl yourself...
So I'm required to divulge information to stop you from spreading false claims?
You said "they're just a prettier bing." I have ~100K lines of code in front of me right now that has nothing to do with UI, although I think UI is tremendously important and has been a primary focus as well.
Nevertheless, I've talked about all of this at length numerous times -- in videos, on HN, my blog, etc. Bottom line though is you can compare for yourself. We do certainly draw on Bing, but its importance will heavily vary per query and for many queries we'll look completely different. It really depends.
False claims? It's what you've said[1][2], albeit a long time ago, but because I can't find any up to date information that you've published (care to link to it?) I can't suddenly know something else.
You're not required to do anything, you can tell me to piss off if you like, but if you want people to claim things and for them to be factually accurate you should publish this information, and if you have then please link to it because I'm struggling to find it.
If you want people to stop spreading misinformation (intentional or mistaken) then spread the correct information, otherwise learn to accept that when you say you use the bing api but refuse to explain to what extent, people will assume your site is entirely powered by it.
Yes, false claims. You claimed that "DDG just uses the bing API" to get results. That is false, and I don't remember ever saying that anywhere because it is false.
Those two posts do not say otherwise. They mention that we use BOSS, which is of course true. The distinction is that we do not just use BOSS by any means.
I actually started out crawling the Web before BOSS even existed, and still crawl quite a lot. As for recent info, look no farther than the DDG FAQ, or my HN comments. This is from just 3 days ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2184873
Note: no one was requiring you to make any claims, false or otherwise. So I still don't get why I need to divulge information to stop you from making false claims.
DDG does its own crawling in addition to using the Bing API. I'm unclear on how the meme that they don't do any crawling has gotten widespread enough to be brought up every time the site is mentioned.
Your claim that DDG uses bing API is like claiming how perfectly you know the back of your hand. You can only talk when you know some facts. And that facts can be acquired only when you work in that company.And please distinguish between fact and opinion. And your claim doesn't make any sense when the founder himself is claiming thats not true.
Well, how do you know what it does? Have you seen the code? Do you know what exactly it does? Making claims such as these without knowing the facts is certainly not professional behaviour.
