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I have tried not to use Google, but I always come back. Results from Altavista, Bing and DuckDuckGo are so much worse. Note, it's not that Google has personal

by haglin 9y ago

I have tried not to use Google, but I always come back. Results from Altavista, Bing and DuckDuckGo are so much worse. Note, it's not that Google has personal information on me. I'm not logged in, my cache is cleared, I use a VPN and google.com/ncr when it was available. Not sure how they do it. Perhaps their tracker sees how long people have visited a page and then they give those pages higher priority. Perhaps other search engines can do a better job, but they had over a decade to improve their results and they are still far off.

RandomInteger4 9y ago
Perhaps it's canvas fingerprinting. [1] I saw an article from 2014 saying ghostery works to defeat it, but haven't looked further and I don't use ghostery, so not sure if that's true still. You can test it here: https://browserleaks.com/canvas https://browserleaks.com/canvas [1] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/02/now-sites-can-fingerprint-you-online-even-when-you-use-multiple-browsers/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/02/now-s...
477353468463695 9y ago
In my experience, the main-difference between Google and other search engines, aside from personalized results, is that Google tries very hard to interpret your query. For example, if you search for some programming topic, it will generally pull results more towards the top, if they reference the current or a recent version of whatever programming language/tool you're searching for. That helps, if you just want to type in "how do i do this? [programming language]" or similar. In other search engines, you'll instead first search "how do i do this? [programming language]", then possibly not really get any good results and then instead search for "how do i do this? [programming language] [current version]". This is how Google worked as well, some few years ago. Knowing what keywords to type in to get the right results was an actually valuable skill ("Google-fu"). Today's Google is instead designed to minimize the need for skill in phrasing your query. Great for the average user, but in my experience, if you do still possess Google-fu, then this interpretation actually hinders you. With other search engines, you get the results that your query asked for. You know immediately when your query was ambiguous or just bad and can adjust accordingly. And with that, you can more easily narrow down the results, given that you know how to narrow down the results. So, maybe give other search engines another try, while keeping that in mind. I personally very much prefer other search engines, because of that, even if I sometimes have to type one word more.

by haglin 9y ago

RandomInteger4 9y ago

Perhaps it's canvas fingerprinting. [1] I saw an article from 2014 saying ghostery works to defeat it, but haven't looked further and I don't use ghostery, so not sure if that's true still. You can test it here: https://browserleaks.com/canvas https://browserleaks.com/canvas [1] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/02/now-sites-can-fingerprint-you-online-even-when-you-use-multiple-browsers/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/02/now-s...

477353468463695 9y ago

In my experience, the main-difference between Google and other search engines, aside from personalized results, is that Google tries very hard to interpret your query. For example, if you search for some programming topic, it will generally pull results more towards the top, if they reference the current or a recent version of whatever programming language/tool you're searching for. That helps, if you just want to type in "how do i do this? [programming language]" or similar. In other search engines, you'll instead first search "how do i do this? [programming language]", then possibly not really get any good results and then instead search for "how do i do this? [programming language] [current version]". This is how Google worked as well, some few years ago. Knowing what keywords to type in to get the right results was an actually valuable skill ("Google-fu"). Today's Google is instead designed to minimize the need for skill in phrasing your query. Great for the average user, but in my experience, if you do still possess Google-fu, then this interpretation actually hinders you. With other search engines, you get the results that your query asked for. You know immediately when your query was ambiguous or just bad and can adjust accordingly. And with that, you can more easily narrow down the results, given that you know how to narrow down the results. So, maybe give other search engines another try, while keeping that in mind. I personally very much prefer other search engines, because of that, even if I sometimes have to type one word more.