> Interestingly enough where Google shines is finding pages that I sort of know exists.
Well, they are in your browsing history, and Google knows it?
Well, they are in your browsing history, and Google knows it?
So unless Google have started to do browser fingerprinting, which I don't think they have, that shouldn't be the answer. At some level I believe that Google is just better at understanding my request, regardless of how poorly I formulated it, while DuckDuckGo just returns pages where some of the word match. Given that I don't know how any of the two search engines work I may be completely of.
Google clearly uses these logs to "customize" your search results, even when you check the placebo button to "disable" your history in the google account options.
Not having an account (or deleting local history) doesn't matter much, as they reconstruct a PK from all the entropy your browser leaks. (see their recent "we already ID your browser" reCAPTCHA update that no longer shows a scrambled image)
Harder to tell for Google Search - unlike YouTube I never see any indication that search results are based on my history, so any manipulation that's happening is opaque (I never search while logged in, so I don't know if the behavior is different in that case)