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> I think people will switch back to Google because they find the results more useful, even in privacy mode. I now use duckduckgo as default search engine and

> I think people will switch back to Google because they find the results more useful, even in privacy mode. I now use duckduckgo as default search engine and my experience is mixed. The problem with google is that sometime you search for something new and then you see the bubble very clearly, which applies non only to search but also to youtube (maybe even more). The problem with duckduckgo is that you are searching for something specific or something you saw months ago and don't remember well then google's index and tracking can be useful.

yourbandsucks 8y ago
Youtube in particular is terrible for filter bubbles. In the name of optimizing for 'engagement', my youtube recs are full of politically polarized clickbait. They're not merely reinforcing my existing beliefs, they're actively trying to push me into a bubble. At least facebook has the excuse of actual people pushing this stuff.
- slededit 8y ago
  I’ve noticed this too. I’ve never clicked any of them yet they keep getting recommended. My other favorite example is Netflix and WWII docs/movies. Watch just one and forever onward they will be half your recommendations.
GiuseppaAcciaio 8y ago
I keep on trying to love duckduckgo but find that often even typing the exact title of an article I'm looking for, it's not on the first page of results...
- hedora 8y ago
  Can you post an example? I’ve been using DDG for years, and have never encountered this. Also, the DDG devs are certainly lurking on this thread, and can fix the class of queries in question.
  - Kiro 8y ago
    No, they can't since DDG is a wrapper for Bing.
    - therein 8y ago
      I have been using DDG primarily ever since Google tried to pull that login shenanigan on Chrome users. Switched to FF and DDG and with the occasional !g, I'm content. Try !b and tell me it's the same as DDG's results.
      - mda 8y ago
        I think they sometimes mix yandex, yahoo and other stuff as well. There is a reason they never disclose what percentage of queries are served from which source, kinda spoils their magic i guess. Kudos to bing team though, they seem to improved quite a bit apparently.
      - Kiro 8y ago
        https://duck.co/help/results/sources 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.
        mda 8y ago
        So its 95% bing/yahoo. I wish they were more transparent. But it does not sound nice when they say do not useevilgoogle instead use our slightly modified bing/yahoo wrapper.
        therein 8y ago
- i_am_proteus 8y ago
  This happens to me sometimes, and is why "!g" is DDG's killer app.
- ergothus 8y ago
  I have Google routinely deciding that I didn't mean to use ALL three words I searched for and "helpfully" dropping them. Sure, I can tell it "no, I really want those", but the experience is definitely becoming more and more sub-par for me. As bad is when a search doesn't give me what I want, so I narrow it, only to find that Google uses my previous search to decide what I want to see so I still end up finding similar results. I remember when Google blew us away with Page Rank (goodbye Alta Vista!), but in the last few years Google has gotten so good on providing entry-level information that it's useless for finding specifics, so I expect the next Big Thing in search to come along, though I have no idea how far out it is.
  - kibwen 8y ago
    Fun example of this: last week I was trying to figure out all the floating point operations that can produce NaN. Go ahead and try searching Google for "ways to make nan"; it's going to show you dozens of pages of naan recipes, and there isn't even a link to click to make it actually search for what you've typed (instead there's a link for Did you mean "ways to make naan"?, which shows a different set of naan recipes).
    - noxToken 8y ago
      Although the tailored results have been useful, I think I still like the days back when you needed search operators. I was once looking up stuff about electrons (the particle). A plain query of electron only returned results for the framework on my first page. Understandable. The other annoyance is the lack of Wikipedia results. For a general topic, I like to have a few pages to chooses from about the topic in addition to Wikipedia. Rarely are Wikipedia results in my organic listing unless I specifically add wiki or Wikipedia. By the way, this[0] is how to search your query. [0]: https://www.google.com/search?q=ways+to+make+%22nan%22+-%22naan%22 https://www.google.com/search?q=ways+to+make+%22nan%22+-%22n...
      - dhimes 8y ago
        Interesting. Wikipedia what my top result when I DDG'd "floating point operations that produce NaN"
- JumpCrisscross 8y ago
  I use DuckDuckGo as my main search engine. One place it drops the ball is in searching for anything health related. Top of the page: homeopathy, conspiracy theories and supplement salesmen.
random878 8y ago
I tried duckduckgo, but wasn't pleased with the results. I switched to startpage which has been very good.
rayvy 8y ago
> The problem with duckduckgo is that you are searching for something specific or something you saw months ago and don't remember well then google's index and tracking can be useful. At this point I don't treat search engines as some sort of dichotomy (Google or DDG or Edge, etc). Rather, I try to use them as a nice blend : Google for when I'm throwing darts at the dartboard and have no idea what I'm looking for, DDG for when I know exactly what I'm looking for (to the point where I can type in the url), so on and so forth. There's absolutely nothing wrong with using multiple search platforms. Obviously Google is great for when you don't really quite know what you're looking for, but if I want to read Deadspin, typing "deadspin.com" into Google will be the exact same experience on DDG. Seeing as how most people visit the same websites over and over again, it doesn't make since to just have 1 single search engine (e.g., a Google).
- Larrikin 8y ago
  Sounds like it would be nice to have a resurrection of Dogpile with a combination of Google and DDG.
  - striking 8y ago
    You can use the !g bang to search Google from ddg.
  - IIsi50MHz 8y ago
    searx offers this, has multiple independent servers, and you can even run your own if you don't trust any of them not to aggregate/sell your search data. One is searx.me (which is almost like telling someooe "Search me!" when you mean "I dunno."). Startpage is basic'ly Google results, but the filter bubble is "all Startpage users". Also brings back some of the search operators that Google disabled. Qwant is a European search engine that brags about privacy, but the results are hit-and-miss for me so far...haven't used it much.
- dhimes 8y ago
  I use ddg as my primary, and one thing it's brilliant at is Mozilla Dev Network. I append my question with mdn (not !mdn- the bang uses mozilla's search and it's not as good) and I usually get my answer at the top. DDG is so reliable now that when I occasionally do have trouble in, say, a non-mdn related search) I fool around a while before I remember that I can try google.

yourbandsucks 8y ago

Youtube in particular is terrible for filter bubbles. In the name of optimizing for 'engagement', my youtube recs are full of politically polarized clickbait. They're not merely reinforcing my existing beliefs, they're actively trying to push me into a bubble. At least facebook has the excuse of actual people pushing this stuff.

slededit 8y ago
I’ve noticed this too. I’ve never clicked any of them yet they keep getting recommended. My other favorite example is Netflix and WWII docs/movies. Watch just one and forever onward they will be half your recommendations.

GiuseppaAcciaio 8y ago

I keep on trying to love duckduckgo but find that often even typing the exact title of an article I'm looking for, it's not on the first page of results...

hedora 8y ago
Can you post an example? I’ve been using DDG for years, and have never encountered this. Also, the DDG devs are certainly lurking on this thread, and can fix the class of queries in question.
- Kiro 8y ago
  No, they can't since DDG is a wrapper for Bing.
  - therein 8y ago
    I have been using DDG primarily ever since Google tried to pull that login shenanigan on Chrome users. Switched to FF and DDG and with the occasional !g, I'm content. Try !b and tell me it's the same as DDG's results.
    - mda 8y ago
      I think they sometimes mix yandex, yahoo and other stuff as well. There is a reason they never disclose what percentage of queries are served from which source, kinda spoils their magic i guess. Kudos to bing team though, they seem to improved quite a bit apparently.
    - Kiro 8y ago
      https://duck.co/help/results/sources 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.
      - mda 8y ago
        So its 95% bing/yahoo. I wish they were more transparent. But it does not sound nice when they say do not useevilgoogle instead use our slightly modified bing/yahoo wrapper.
        therein 8y ago
i_am_proteus 8y ago
This happens to me sometimes, and is why "!g" is DDG's killer app.
ergothus 8y ago
I have Google routinely deciding that I didn't mean to use ALL three words I searched for and "helpfully" dropping them. Sure, I can tell it "no, I really want those", but the experience is definitely becoming more and more sub-par for me. As bad is when a search doesn't give me what I want, so I narrow it, only to find that Google uses my previous search to decide what I want to see so I still end up finding similar results. I remember when Google blew us away with Page Rank (goodbye Alta Vista!), but in the last few years Google has gotten so good on providing entry-level information that it's useless for finding specifics, so I expect the next Big Thing in search to come along, though I have no idea how far out it is.
- kibwen 8y ago
  Fun example of this: last week I was trying to figure out all the floating point operations that can produce NaN. Go ahead and try searching Google for "ways to make nan"; it's going to show you dozens of pages of naan recipes, and there isn't even a link to click to make it actually search for what you've typed (instead there's a link for Did you mean "ways to make naan"?, which shows a different set of naan recipes).
  - noxToken 8y ago
    Although the tailored results have been useful, I think I still like the days back when you needed search operators. I was once looking up stuff about electrons (the particle). A plain query of electron only returned results for the framework on my first page. Understandable. The other annoyance is the lack of Wikipedia results. For a general topic, I like to have a few pages to chooses from about the topic in addition to Wikipedia. Rarely are Wikipedia results in my organic listing unless I specifically add wiki or Wikipedia. By the way, this[0] is how to search your query. [0]: https://www.google.com/search?q=ways+to+make+%22nan%22+-%22naan%22 https://www.google.com/search?q=ways+to+make+%22nan%22+-%22n...
    - dhimes 8y ago
      Interesting. Wikipedia what my top result when I DDG'd "floating point operations that produce NaN"
JumpCrisscross 8y ago
I use DuckDuckGo as my main search engine. One place it drops the ball is in searching for anything health related. Top of the page: homeopathy, conspiracy theories and supplement salesmen.

random878 8y ago

I tried duckduckgo, but wasn't pleased with the results. I switched to startpage which has been very good.

rayvy 8y ago

> The problem with duckduckgo is that you are searching for something specific or something you saw months ago and don't remember well then google's index and tracking can be useful. At this point I don't treat search engines as some sort of dichotomy (Google or DDG or Edge, etc). Rather, I try to use them as a nice blend : Google for when I'm throwing darts at the dartboard and have no idea what I'm looking for, DDG for when I know exactly what I'm looking for (to the point where I can type in the url), so on and so forth. There's absolutely nothing wrong with using multiple search platforms. Obviously Google is great for when you don't really quite know what you're looking for, but if I want to read Deadspin, typing "deadspin.com" into Google will be the exact same experience on DDG. Seeing as how most people visit the same websites over and over again, it doesn't make since to just have 1 single search engine (e.g., a Google).

Larrikin 8y ago
Sounds like it would be nice to have a resurrection of Dogpile with a combination of Google and DDG.
- striking 8y ago
  You can use the !g bang to search Google from ddg.
- IIsi50MHz 8y ago
  searx offers this, has multiple independent servers, and you can even run your own if you don't trust any of them not to aggregate/sell your search data. One is searx.me (which is almost like telling someooe "Search me!" when you mean "I dunno."). Startpage is basic'ly Google results, but the filter bubble is "all Startpage users". Also brings back some of the search operators that Google disabled. Qwant is a European search engine that brags about privacy, but the results are hit-and-miss for me so far...haven't used it much.
dhimes 8y ago
I use ddg as my primary, and one thing it's brilliant at is Mozilla Dev Network. I append my question with mdn (not !mdn- the bang uses mozilla's search and it's not as good) and I usually get my answer at the top. DDG is so reliable now that when I occasionally do have trouble in, say, a non-mdn related search) I fool around a while before I remember that I can try google.