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TBH, I don't want/need DDG's privacy. I'm working with VoIP - what I want to get when I look for "yate" is the softswitch, not the city. When I look for "asterisk", I want the pbx, not the page about "*". I'm ok with google knowing that - it's search profile works great for me.

I think we've got too many words with multiple meanings to accept the same results page for every person.



The word "asterisk" does indeed have different meanings that is why ddg uses this particular technique to disambiguate the query. Narrowing down the meaning is performed by the user's intelligence not machine intelligence. There on the first page one can see high level "asterisk" meanings including Asterisk PBX, one click away. Please note too that Asterisk the PBX is indeed top of the weblinks section.

Compare the usability to google search. Notice that a person searching for the song "Asterisk" by M83 can find it immediately on ddg. A google user would have to try different keyword combinations to eventually get the topic in question - say "what was the band's name again?" and you are off on a wild goose chase. In all honesty I would rather click that disambiguate menu than have to retype a whole bunch of search terms.

Secondly your "yate" query is in fact the first weblink result of ddg (http://yate.null.ro/pmwiki/), the other top bits help the user disambiguate the search as there are other meanings to the name Yate. A possible reason Yate the softswitch does not show up on the disambiguate menu, could be the same reason why Yate softswitch does not show up on a disambiguate menu in Wikipedia. If you create a well written wikipedia entry, I believe your softswitch would appear shortly in ddg disambiguate menu. It seems the only like to the Yate softswitch from wikipedia is this link http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jingle_(protocol)

As an experiment, try find those little Yate towns with the keyword "Yate" and the song Asterisk by the band M83 with the keyword "asterisk" in google.

How about one more thing: search for Asterisk in ddg, click on the disambiguate link for asterisk and notice that the results filter out non Asterisk PBX results. Quite handy if you are an Asterisk PBX professional.


Humans can't disambiguate in the sea of words as effectively as machines do. There is just too much results you have to sift through, every time you want to look up some little detail.


That is exactly what Google does: display too many results for a human to sort through effectively, and that is why ddg flattens google.

Wikipedia is humans disambiguating words; ddg is an abstraction of Wikipedia.

This ddg setup is the power of humans disambiguating words into a tree structure, and the power of machines indexing and querying this tree structure on behalf of humans.

I believe wikipedia would do well in copying ddg interface.

Generally, finding information in well structured trees is faster than one modge podge long list - hence the perceived better results.

tree power mate, tree power.


"I believe wikipedia would do well in copying ddg interface."

Of all things dukgo has going for it the interface IMO is not one of them.




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