• meseek #2982@lemmy.ca
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    1 year ago

    Edgy. DDG queries Bing and Yahoo mostly. All they do is anonymize the query before it’s sent to keep your searches private.

    Show me the DDG search engine.

    • illectrility
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      1 year ago

      DuckDuckGo’s results are a compilation of “over 400” sources according to itself, including Bing, Yahoo! Search BOSS, Wolfram Alpha, Yandex, and its own web crawler (the DuckDuckBot); but none from Google. It also uses data from crowdsourced sites such as Wikipedia, to populate knowledge panel boxes to the right of the search results.

      (Wikipedia)

        • illectrility
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          1 year ago

          Hang on, I’m really trying to understand.

          According to Wikpedia,

          A Web crawler, sometimes called a spider or spiderbot and often shortened to crawler, is an Internet bot that systematically browses the World Wide Web and that is typically operated by search engines for the purpose of Web indexing.

          DDG operates a crawler just like that which is a characteristic of a search engine.

          A search engine is defined by Webster as

          computer software used to search data (such as text or a database) for specified information also : a site on the World Wide Web that uses such software to locate key words in other sites

          Which is what DDG is and does. How is DDG not a search engine?

          • LinkOpensChest.wav@lemmy.one
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            1 year ago

            On one hand, you’ve provided sourced information with supporting details, and I’ve also successfully used DDG as a search engine.

            On the other hand, ultratiem on Lemmy says it’s not a search engine, so I don’t know who to believe…

          • meseek #2982@lemmy.ca
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            1 year ago

            DDG talks to all the search engines. It uses tons of them. Everyone except Google it looks like.

            Before sending the query on your behalf, they simply anonymize it. Then return the results. DDG doesn’t actually perform a single search. So how can it be a search engine??

            I know this is splitting hairs but I don’t get what many of you are struggling with. DDG just talks to existing engines on your behalf.

            • EddoWagt@feddit.nl
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              1 year ago

              That would mean pretty much none of the search engines on this list are search engines

            • illectrility
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              1 year ago

              It does that, too, yes. But as I mentioned above it in fact does have its own web crawler and search algorithm, just like other search engines. It combines the results which makes DDG technically a true search engine, even though it improves its results by utilizing other search enignes, too. Shall we agree to this?