Gab, DuckDuckGo .. internet alternatives

[silentreader]

Possibly they are drastically improving their technology. But this thread is actually not even a year old yet, so that's very recent if it has improved.

"not even a year" is a long time in computer tech fields.

[Josh]

I generally find DuckDuckGo to not be very helpful when searching obscure technical topics, and it also doesn't do as good of a job as Google of filtering out spammy results. It can tend a bit to feel like searching in the early 2000s, when a typical Google search just returned a lot of SEO material and not too much of what you actually wanted to find.

[shadrach]

Yes, Google's engine is very smart, because of the information it collects from/about everyone. That makes it the superior filter, with the exception of privacy violations. Therefore I don't use it. I kind of know what you mean, that it doesn't bring all the results you might think it could. But I'm not willing to make the sacrifice of all my data to the world's largest data-monster. Also, I think DDG uses Google's search engine API at least to some degree? So results would be similar--but I guess I should just find out for myself.

[francis]

I have been using duckduckgo lately but I find that I do not get the search results I am looking for the way I would with google, which is really disappointing (harder to sort by specific sites, etc.)

I've been using DuckDuckGo for most searches for a couple of years. It's fine for basic stuff, but Google really is better for more complex or difficult searches.

(joining the discussion year(s) later...)

Can you share examples of searches that DuckDuckGo is not useful for?

I would challenge those opinions; (1) because I have no difficulty finding what I want, and you can search by site (https://duckduckgo.com/?q=duckduckgo+si ... fab&ia=web) and (2) Google's results are actually not always unbiased results. The engine uses what it knows about you, what you have searched for, and so forth, to determine what you can see in the results. For example, imagine a leftist and a rightist searching for information about a political issue. In an ideal world, we would expect them to both find the facts. But the truth is, that if Google knows how they view they issue, it will give them the "facts" (aka lies) that they are looking for. So neither is likely to find the facts, and the results they see will not be identical. I don't think this is satire.

In spite of what I know about Google and what it knows about people, I do cave in now and then and use Google maps. Because of the huge amount of information it collects, the map engine is the most accurate in finding the best route, etc. I don't know why my convictions aren't strong enough not to do that though.

When I am searching for a book's quote, google has a book index it can search while Duckduckgo does not.

[Neoanabaptist]

Gab is gone for now, due to the fact that Robert Bowers of the Pittsburgh massacre had a Gab account. (He is said to have had accounts with Facebook and Twitter, too, but I don't know.)
Gab wants to find a new host, but this will probably be difficult, because the new host will probably be held accountable (morally and by law) for anything an extremist who is freely speaking via Gab, might do.
My personal idea about such massacres was always that we should have a kind of telephone counseling/crisis line for people who consider massacres, as we have for people who consider suicide. Both states of mind are perhaps not so much different, which means that interference is not hopeless.
Under that condition I think it is rather better to find such people by giving them opportunities to publish their thoughts. Even if sifting the Internet through for to find possible perpetrators meant that they end in psychiatric custody, this may be the lesser evil.