“I don’t find their actual search engine very useful at all.” (me in 2009)
I'm quoted on here so I thought I should give an update! :-)
I still don't think DDG was very useful in 2009. A noble idea, but the quality wasn't there for the searches I did. In the past several years, I've found it to give Google a good run for its money, both through DDG's index getting better and Google's getting worse. I'm delighted they've made a real go of it.
I've tried so many times to make DDG work. In fact I'm currently commenting via Android DDG browser and still I find myself switching to Chrome/Google more than half of the time because the DDG search is just not working for me. I suspect the problem is I do a lot of geospatial type searches.
I understand why the results are worse but that doesn't really matter to the general populace.
I wish them the best though. We need search market fragmentation.
Same, I tried DDG a bunch of times over the years, maybe once every 2 years or so, but never got to the point where it felt it could replace Google.
Tried Kagi when it launched, and I'm not sure if it was because Google had deteriorated so much at that point, or Kagi was simply better, but I got way better results in Kagi, and still do. Kagi ended up being what I thought DDG was aiming for, but was never able to reach.
I tried kagi started years ago. It had some really interesting and deep results when I was planning my wedding but failed elsewhere. I should try it again.
I think Kagi is neat/fantastic but I also feel like unless you want extreme customizability, DDG is absolutely amazing and I really love DDG.
I also think that though its name might've hold it back a little bit but its absolutely great right now the way it is. I mean I am trying to remember the google proxy of sorts thing and I remembered it in way longer time than DDG (Mentioning https://www.startpage.com/)
So to me I remember duckduckgo a 1000x times more than startpage. Honestly not that big of a deal when you think about it as well but for what its worth, it was valid concern at the time.
Imagine if I create frogfrogjump as say idk an openrouter alternative and uploaded it as show HN. People would reasonably question its name don't you think.
Though to be fair frogfrogjump is sounding a lil cool when I am thinking about it...
Also an interesting story that I found trying to find the name origin behind DDG which I want to share which I found on wiki page of DDG
"We didn't invest in it because we thought it would beat Google. We invested in it because there is a need for a private search engine. We did it for the Internet anarchists, people that hang out on Reddit and Hacker News." - Fred Wilson, 2012 TechCrunch Disrupt Conference in New York[34] (Wikipedia)
This is pretty cool when one thinks about it and actually made me want to use DDG even more just seeing a mention of someone investing in DDG because they wanted people of hackernews wanting/seeing they might use it.
Although I think that people of HN love both DDG/kagi and I think both are acceptable decisions imho.
For those in countries that censor the Internet, such as the UK where I live, this page basically says what Anna's Archive is (very superficially), shares some useful URLs to accessing the data, asks for donations, and says an "enterprise-level donation" can get you access to a SFTP server with their files on it.
Well, you get the warning, but as long as HSTS is not active, you can still click on "Accept the risk and continue" …
[EDIT:] Just checked a bit closer, they are using an LetsEncrypt cert for "cuii.telefonica.de", which is obviously the wrong domain, but as I said above, as long as HSTS is not active for "annas-archive.li", you can still bypass via the button.
If the censoring is at the DNS level, can the admin please replace the domain name in the url with the ip address to which it should resolve? Thank you.
Your country's broken internet is your problem. If you are having DNS queries censored then change your DNS resolver on your client side. If you still get intercepted look into DoH.
its possible your browser used DoH. Some have started shipping it by default to encrypt DNS traffic (and use their own resolvers of course). Or maybe your ISP doesn't care
If it wasn't enough that half the internet gets unusable whenever there is football on TV (which is fucking stupid), now we're also getting rid of free (text!) information it seems.
Vodafone here seems more eager than other ISPs to block things, for some reason. I've had Telefonica, Orange, Jazztel and Movistar before and seemingly they weren't as eager, or there is a lot more blocking the last ~2 years which just happen to align with when we switched to Vodafone.
Sorry? I don't care what Cloudflare opposes, that half of the websites I use stop working during La Liga matches + Vodafone apparently goes above and beyond to block sites for knowledge sucks, regardless if CF or Trump are involved or not.
uno.uk have a policy of not censoring things unless they absolutely have to. they're supporters of the Open Rights Group, and they're the only residential isp I've found that give me a /29 ipv4 block on the standard order form.
they're a small outfit, been with them for years and on first name terms with the main support guy. great for the kind of nerds who prefer you to skip the flow chart if you and then the logs from your router and hint that you know what you're doing.
>In December 2024, the UK Publishers Association won an order from the High Court of Justice requiring major ISPs to block Anna's Archive and other copyright-infringing sites, extending a list of sites blocked since 2015 under section 97A of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act
I'm going to guess the key differentiator here is "major ISPs". I can see the page fine using a Zen Internet connection, but from my phone, which uses EE, it's blocked.
Others have already posted, but the biggest domestic British ISPs block a variety of things, like SciHub, Libgen, Pirate Bay, or Anna's Archive. Coverage varies a lot though, so I assume ISPs have some discretion and enforcement is patchy.
Implementation of this stuff must be very patchy then as both are off on my top 5 provider until I use a VPN. Which makes me wonder why any of the ISPs bother blocking at all, if they can just pick and choose?
I've just seen there is a court order against the .org site, going back to 2024. So presumably some ISPs are more proactive about extending the ban to backup domains.
> AI optimism requires believing that you … are not among those who will be driven to psychosis, to violence, or even to suicide by LLM usage. At the very least, this means you feel secure in your own mental health
This has echoes of moral panic to me. We hear about mental health crises triggered by LLMs in the media because they’re novel, uncommon and the stories grab attention. The modern equivalent of video games cause violence, or jazz is corrupting the youth?
I’ll concede AI has many perils, and I doubt we’ve even broken the surface of it yet, but I don’t think user psychosis is either now, or going to be, a common one.
This isn't to the level of the OP, but I just asked Claude "Are there any interesting Bluetooth devices in my vicinity which aren't actually mine or ones I am connected to?" and it downloaded a tool called `blueutil` and identified a variety of things.
When I complained that the results were boring, it installed a Python package called 'bleak', found a set of LED lights (which I assumed are my daughter's) and tried to control them. It said the signal was too weak and got me to move around the house, whereupon it connected to them, figured out the protocol, and actually changed the lights while I was sat on her bed - where I am right now. Now I have a new party trick when she gets home! I had no idea they were Bluetooth controlled, nor clearly without any security at all.
I want to congratulate you on your efforts, but with some pointers. Don't automate so much, and take care over presentation. Like this post, for example, which renders as a wall of text on HN.
I was also about seven of the newsletters you sent emails to, all in the same format, one after another ;-) I didn't reply this time as we actually featured you way back in September already.
I'm a driver, not a cyclist, and I'm behind those interventions. People are on the wrong side of the road at a blind corner. If I were turning out, I could end up with someone facing me head on.
On the phone stuff, I support him too, but that law needs a serious tweak to cover emergencies that require less than a 999 call. Stopped at lights, I saw a hit and run, instinctively reached for my phone for a picture, but stopped myself. That's not a net good for society IMO, but it's the law.
Dashcams are the best bet for recording evidence like that. We don't want to create loopholes for drivers to pay even less attention to driving safely.
A fine instruction following task but if harry potter is in the weights of the neural net, it's going to mix some of the real ones with the alternates.
It's interesting to see something through someone else's lens. Nearly all the things they complain about in this post are things that I like about Letterboxd, yet I can also see why they don't like them. I don't think that should mean death to Letterboxd, though, but more "let's make more alternatives for other people's tastes."
I'm quoted on here so I thought I should give an update! :-)
I still don't think DDG was very useful in 2009. A noble idea, but the quality wasn't there for the searches I did. In the past several years, I've found it to give Google a good run for its money, both through DDG's index getting better and Google's getting worse. I'm delighted they've made a real go of it.
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