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To be honest I've never noticed the filter bubble everybody is talking about with Google. They can infer a lot from context, like city or previous searches, how

To be honest I've never noticed the filter bubble everybody is talking about with Google. They can infer a lot from context, like city or previous searches, however that's primarily helping users, because coming up with precise search queries is not something that normal people can do and even power users like us fail at it. 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.

1001101 8y ago
> To be honest I've never noticed the filter bubble everybody is talking about with Google. Filter bubbles are personalized, so YMMV.
- rocqua 8y ago
  Nice Kafka trap!
  - dvtrn 8y ago
    That's not what a Kafkatrap is. Though I suppose if one stretches the metaphor far enough...
- bad_user 8y ago
  I agree that it might not be as bad outside the US, as in the US they have more data to analyze and I'm in the EU, being more interested in news related to the EU. 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.
- MattSayar 8y ago
  True, but I've often switched back and forth between Personal Results and Global Results and rarely see a difference.
orwin 8y ago
If you're not a native english speaker working in tech, google will sometime show you (in my case) French forums or websites even if the query was entirely written in english. It is quite annoying, and i often get better results using ddg and !g than using google itself.
- bad_user 8y ago
  I have the opposite problem. 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.
- reaperducer 8y ago
  I have a similar problem sometimes. 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.
Taylor_OD 8y ago
I felt like Google only worked well for things I'd done extensive searches on in the past. Like once they collected enough data on me to know WHAT I wanted to know about that topic the search results were better. Otherwise they were not very good. 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?
freeflight 8y ago
> To be honest I've never noticed the filter bubble everybody is talking about with Google. 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".
- marcoperaza 8y ago
  You can specify a date range in Google btw. You click “tools” and then it will present a date option.
  - kyrra 8y ago
    This is exactly what I do as well. Date range filter in on Google is excellent to find old news.
  - Rebelgecko 8y ago
    Unfortunately on mobile you can only use the date ranges that Google suggests (last hour, day, week, month, or year). Which is unfortunate since half the time I want to filter by date it's so I can exclude recent results.
  - freeflight 8y ago
    I remember it being there, but for whatever reason, I was always looking for it under "extended search". Thanks for pointing me in the right direction!

1001101 8y ago

> To be honest I've never noticed the filter bubble everybody is talking about with Google. Filter bubbles are personalized, so YMMV.

rocqua 8y ago
Nice Kafka trap!
- dvtrn 8y ago
  That's not what a Kafkatrap is. Though I suppose if one stretches the metaphor far enough...
bad_user 8y ago
I agree that it might not be as bad outside the US, as in the US they have more data to analyze and I'm in the EU, being more interested in news related to the EU. 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.
MattSayar 8y ago
True, but I've often switched back and forth between Personal Results and Global Results and rarely see a difference.

orwin 8y ago

If you're not a native english speaker working in tech, google will sometime show you (in my case) French forums or websites even if the query was entirely written in english. It is quite annoying, and i often get better results using ddg and !g than using google itself.

bad_user 8y ago
I have the opposite problem. 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.
reaperducer 8y ago
I have a similar problem sometimes. 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.

Taylor_OD 8y ago

I felt like Google only worked well for things I'd done extensive searches on in the past. Like once they collected enough data on me to know WHAT I wanted to know about that topic the search results were better. Otherwise they were not very good. 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?

freeflight 8y ago

> To be honest I've never noticed the filter bubble everybody is talking about with Google. 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".

marcoperaza 8y ago
You can specify a date range in Google btw. You click “tools” and then it will present a date option.
- kyrra 8y ago
  This is exactly what I do as well. Date range filter in on Google is excellent to find old news.
- Rebelgecko 8y ago
  Unfortunately on mobile you can only use the date ranges that Google suggests (last hour, day, week, month, or year). Which is unfortunate since half the time I want to filter by date it's so I can exclude recent results.
- freeflight 8y ago
  I remember it being there, but for whatever reason, I was always looking for it under "extended search". Thanks for pointing me in the right direction!