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Just an observation, Google Search is ready for replacement.
We're obviously being denied the benefits of so called advances in algorithmic search, as evidenced by the poor showing of Google Itself in unusual searches. For example, if you search images for "runners wearing green hats -shamrock -st. -patrick" Guess how many runners wearing green hats you get?
So search is hard? I think it's more likely that Google and everyone else is more interested in selling you a hat than helping you find a picture of a runner in a green hat.
Maybe soon that would be a great side project for Tildes. If Wikimedia doesn't beat them to it.
There are lots of alternatives to google search, such as duckduckgo and bing. Developing high quality search algorithms is very difficult, and starting from scratch requires a lot of data that most startups may not have. Even google is continually working on improving their search algorithm, to include edge cases, such as the search you posted.
Isn't duckduckgo just an anonymous wrapper on google's search results? I haven't used it in years, but that's the only thing I recall about it.
I think that startpage is anonymous wrapper on google search. Ddg search results are very different from Google ones (that's why you have !g bang).
Don't forget the !sp bang for startpage!
I seriously love bangs on ddg and its why it remains my default search engine. !w for wikipedia, !aw for Arch Wiki and !aur for AUR are great.
IIRC it's actually Yahoo/Bing, but I wouldn't be surprised if they hit both.
DDG serves Yahoo/Bing ads, but search results are generated from a mix of a number of sources. Most importantly, search results are the same for each user with the same query.
As I remember, they were scraping all sorts of sources, even back then, but their presentation of results has improved lately, and so have the results themselves. I think it's fair to say that DDG doesn't want to be just a portal to other engine's results anymore.
A good alternative I’d use is Qwant, very strong focus on privacy like DDG but better search results from what I’ve found.
I think the web as we know it is dying.
In the past the web is full of content by individual or groups. Thus a search engine even a directory service would do good.
However in today's Interweb, much of the content is buried deep in walled gardens, fb/tw/in or chat apps that requires login, or non-copy-pastable apps. Newer generation are less likely to host one's own content on a private server. God even MySpace were full of customization CSS and shit. Today's fb/tw pages are all the same level of boring.
Search engines are losing its source of content. The results are irrelevant day by day.
Thanks, that's what I've observed. My projection is that our frontier wild west days will soon tighten up and the web as we know/knew it will disappear from view, like the beaches of Biloxi which are mostly privatized by Casinos now.
For images, Bing is better. But for pages, Google search is still far more accurate than other search engines I've tried.