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DuckDuck..Gone: "Why not signal" (archive.ph)

submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

16 comments fedilink hide all child comments

So, this is interesting. I wanted to find that essay by @[email protected] outlining the many issues of Signal and suggested alternatives, but DuckDuckGo had nothing for me. Not on the first page, not on the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th page.

I thought maybe I just imagined the title, but sure enough, on searching lemmy posts, it was right there. Then I thought "hang on, there's hardly a mention let alone criticism of signal on any page of those search results!".

Hmm.. the wording might be a bit ambiguous, but let's compare:

DuckDuckGo "why not signal" - NOTHING
Google "why not signal"
- Plenty of results! Dessaline's essay is first up, followed by a plethora of discussions about the essay on HN, Reddit, lemmys, mastodons, and more. Not evil! ..this time.
DuckDuckGo "why not signal" dessalines
- Okay, so DDG has indexed it just fine. Maybe dessalines is "downranked" à la RT.com?
DuckDuckGo "why not market socialism"
- Nope, finds one of dessalines' socialism essays just fine, half way down the page.

All of the following except Gigablast returned a healthy list of results including the original essay:

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (2 children)

I tried a couple more:

DDG why not signal (no quotes) = same result as original.
DDG why "not" signal = gives the essay as the first result and a bunch of other signal-related results.

..looks like DDG has an undocumented NOT operator, which for some reason is not deactivated when in a long quote, but is deactivated when the phrase is bracketed in quoted nothings. "" ""

But still doesn't quite explain how "why not signal" dessalines does return a result.

"regex is hard", I guess.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

DDG: why not signal dessalines
- Good results.
DDG: dessalines why not signal
- No good results. The hint (Not many results contain signal Search only for dessalines why "signal"?) gives a clue that not has a special interpretation and that the parsing algorithm is very confused about what it's being told to do.

Tinfoil hat or Hanlon's razor? :-P

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 years ago

Wow! You are on to something. I triedit with a couple of search strings and it looks like the not operator is working, e.g. reeperbahn not hamburg returns results which are not related to hamburg. And two quotes will ignore the not operator