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by bryanh 5620 days ago
DDG is supplanting labor intensive algorithmic improvements with manually manicured search results. Compared to Google's vast network of resources, it is a logical step for DDG to take. It is, essentially, a fast fix to a real problem.

Google has to do things the hard (and dare I say... proper?) way.

1 comments

DDG is supplanting labor intensive algorithmic improvements with manually manicured search results.

This sentence is a paradox.

To illustrate what he meant, I'll give an example. Assume someone entered a search, "What are the best dog breeds?". Would it be easier to:

1. write an automated system which could dynamically deduce what the answer to this question is and/or what pages to return in the results, based on dynamically crawling the web, indexing, analying link structure, ranking, filtering, etc.

-or-

2. have a human write an answer to this fricking question and enter it into the database as the result for this search

hint: pick 2

it doesn't scale up to handle bazillions of different searches, but on a smaller scale and in tactical cases it's far simpler and easier to implement and can produce better results.

Of course by manicuring search results I mean blacklisting domains.