So, this is interesting. I wanted to find that essay by @dessalines@lemmy.ml 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:

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

  • beta_tester
    9·
    3 years ago

    Don’t ask me why but try ""why not signal"" with two quotation marks at the beginning and the end

    • rcbrkOP
      7·
      3 years ago

      I tried a couple more:

      …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.

      • rcbrkOP
        11·
        3 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

      • beta_tester
        6·
        3 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