DDG is great - have been using it for months and I really enjoy the results. Google searches seem to be more of an echo chamber whereas DDG results seem to be more representative across a broad spectrum of sites.
I have been using DuckDuckGo because I'm making health related queries and I'm pretty scared of companies profiling me based on that.
But the experience with DDG has been worse, although it is definitely improving. And it's bearable, plus protecting my privacy is worth it.
Filter bubbles are personalized, so YMMV.
But if we exclude location as a factor, it's not much of an argument because I have the benefit of constantly using both Google and DuckDuckGo, where DDG is now the primary search engine and Google is the fallback.
If Google personalizes the results in a way as to bias the information based on my political views or whatever, that's not something I have noticed. And believe me, I'd like more ammo when I criticize Google, but this ain't it in my experience.
I'm Romanian and when searching in Romanian on DuckDuckGo I often get results in English, Spanish, Italian or French, because Romanian is a romance language.
Local searches are terrible on DDG.
When I'm in Japan, Google seems to try hard to give me results localized to Japan.
When I'm in the United States and need to get information about something in Japan, it can't cope with the fact that I'm not in Japan. Where Google thinks I am (even with location tracking turned off) is paramount. Even if I search google.co.jp, I get American results.
DDG feels like it gives me the same search results every time. Typically they are more helpful than google would have been early on but less helpful than googles were later on.
This is entirely anecdotal... Anyone else experience something similar?
It's extremely obvious/bad when you try Googling some old article about an topic, often political, that has recently regained popularity.
You can try adding all kinds of words from the headline, certain terms will always lead to the results being dominated with "current news", like with Russia/Ukraine or more recently with China.
Which is made worse by the inability to specify a time-frame for the search. In that regard, the best Google can do is narrow it down to "last changed" with the extended search, which only goes as far back as "last year", anything further back than that and you might as well have to find the needle by manually looking trough the haystack of pages upon pages of search results.
It can be extremely frustrating how search results are seemingly dominated by the very same, handful, of articles offering only the very same takes, with only slight variations. It feels quite similar to how YouTube keeps recommending the same kind of weird videos to a large amount of people, like you are being "funneled".
Which from the outside feels very similar to how YouTube tends to "harmonize" it's dynamic playlists aka "mixes" to such a point that all of them end up being the same after the first 1-2 songs because everything after that seems to be strictly based on personalization and not the original song the mix was created on.
Basically I would be interested in a sample where say a democrat gets different opinion pieces versus a republican, on the same search query.
I feel that such samples could exist, but I haven't witnessed such instances in my daily use.
Never said a thing about filter bubbles, but in a way, it feels like a self-reinforcing loop:
0 An article gets clicked often
1 Google ranks it higher in the results based on those higher click counts
2 It gets clicked even more often due to being ranked higher in the results
3 goto 0
Behavior like that might be fine when one is looking for something obscure technical to surface more relevant results.
But when it's applied to news articles it creates the impression of a bias/funnel as the top results will regularly consist of the same, slightly altered, headlines and conclusions. Which in part is probably the result of a lot of news-outlets just copy&pasting AP releases.
Note: I'm not saying this is done on purpose, it might very well just be a manifestation of the increased use of AI/ML where the end results often can't be properly explained/reasoned as the ML has become sort of a blackbox optimizing towards a given goal, like giving results that are more likely to be clicked.
Funny how I still don't see two links: 1. Google search for a keyword 2. DDC link for the same keyword
As I said, it's posturing.
Usually when I search for something I don't care about any of that, I just want to see the organic matches, not "People also ask" and "People also search for" widgets that are of no value to me.
DDG only has the wikipedia widget (which I actually find pretty useful generally) and sometimes the video or image carousel at the top which is sometimes relevant and doesn't waste a lot of screen real estate. I hope it'll continue that way.
Does this work? I was under the impression that had little to no impact on their tracking/suggestions for "personalization" purposes
Both have in common that if they don't know the answer to your query, they assume they know better than you and give you unrelated results. I'd prefer if they'd just print "Can't find anything" and let me tweak my query instead of sending back random results.
Perhaps search engines could just not show you lower confidence results, but then you risk making it impossible to find certains kinds of content, and you forgo the rarer, but still extant wins, you get from showing those results.
Users can generally tell when results aren't relevant and will reformulate anyway.
I’m as de-Googled as I can be. I caught a lot of slack (?) from some people over it. But it’s a relief for me.
The main things I find myself still using the !g code for is news and maps. But for other searches I finally find I get just as good results.
https://duck.co/help/results/sources
> In fact, DuckDuckGo gets its results from over four hundred sources. These include hundreds of vertical sources delivering niche Instant Answers, DuckDuckBot (our crawler) and crowd-sourced sites (like Wikipedia, stored in our answer indexes). We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we also source from a variety of partners, including Oath (formerly Yahoo) and Bing.
What this means is that they use 400 sources for things like Instant Answers and other widgets but Yahoo and Bing for all their organic search results.
So, the DuckDuckBot that you cited doesn't contribute to DDG's organic results?
90% of what Google returns to me is Wikipedia, IMDB, and other verticals anyway, so it's not that much different IME.
Correct.
> We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we also source from a variety of partners, including Oath (formerly Yahoo) and Bing.
Traditional links = organic results.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DuckDuckGo [2] https://duck.co/help/results/sources
I never felt google searches were bad, nor do I have problems with the results from ddg. This was just a privacy decision I guess, one that is easy to make with little sacrifice.
I like that it uses Yelp vs Google listings. Yelp has its issues but Google listings are usually less reliable.
they really have been upping their game and continue to do so. the other day, I was looking for a specific paper, not so old, from 2012. admittedly, for papers, I still use Google, I guess because of the link to G scholar.
I couldn't find it within about 5mins and switched to DDG. it was on p.1 of DDG. that was really great to see.