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I understand the point being made, but it's arguably irrelevant why Duckduckgo's results are lower in quality - the switch still involves the loss of not insign

I understand the point being made, but it's arguably irrelevant why Duckduckgo's results are lower in quality - the switch still involves the loss of not insignificant utility, which goes against the experiences I'm reading here from all the people here saying how great their search results were. Moreover, I'm not convinced it's entirely due to my search history, location or other online history. It's definitely not search skills, or inspecificity of search terms that's the problem. IMHO, it's mostly poor coverage. In my casual experience, it's particularly evident in academic journal articles, but there's definitely poorer coverage in general. Even when I know the web page I'm looking for, I can't get it to show up in the search. Or, as I mentioned, a blanket search will bring up a page or so of relevant links, compared to many pages from google. The elephant in the room here is Bing. Bing is an objectively worse search. There's no way around that, and no ideological dressing that can change the fact.

bad_user 8y ago
I did tests for a keyword I'm interested in and DuckDuckGo definitely doesn't rely only on Bing. I've brought this discussion up because at that time (4 months ago) the results on DuckDuckGo were worse than Bing's: https://www.reddit.com/r/duckduckgo/comments/9j5f1p/duckduckgo_vs_bing_vs_google/ https://www.reddit.com/r/duckduckgo/comments/9j5f1p/duckduck... But nowadays they are better for that same keyword. Whether somebody on their side noticed my issue on Reddit and manipulated this particular result, I don't know. But they definitely aren't just a shell over Bing. Google provides the best results in this case, without doubt. For a software company of their size, hiring some of the best engineers and specialized in ML, I wouldn't have expected otherwise. I still use Google's Search for double checking whenever I don't find something, but as I said, I increasingly find that for my search queries Google can't help me in finding anything that DuckDuckGo can't. I don't search academic papers so of course we have a different experience. --- Btw, I don't think caring about privacy is an ideology. I've worked in the advertising industry and I still do, although I'm on the publisher's side now. Companies are carelessly trading user data and if that happens to me (1) I need to be informed and (2) I need a substantial reward in return to outweigh the risks and as long as there are cost effective alternatives that protect privacy, I'd rather use those, voting with my wallet and all that.
- Kiro 8y ago
  https://duck.co/help/results/sources https://duck.co/help/results/sources Money quote: > 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. The other 400 sources are just used to widget stuff while the organic links are mostly from Bing and Oath. So it's a mash-up.

bad_user 8y ago

I did tests for a keyword I'm interested in and DuckDuckGo definitely doesn't rely only on Bing. I've brought this discussion up because at that time (4 months ago) the results on DuckDuckGo were worse than Bing's: https://www.reddit.com/r/duckduckgo/comments/9j5f1p/duckduckgo_vs_bing_vs_google/ https://www.reddit.com/r/duckduckgo/comments/9j5f1p/duckduck... But nowadays they are better for that same keyword. Whether somebody on their side noticed my issue on Reddit and manipulated this particular result, I don't know. But they definitely aren't just a shell over Bing. Google provides the best results in this case, without doubt. For a software company of their size, hiring some of the best engineers and specialized in ML, I wouldn't have expected otherwise. I still use Google's Search for double checking whenever I don't find something, but as I said, I increasingly find that for my search queries Google can't help me in finding anything that DuckDuckGo can't. I don't search academic papers so of course we have a different experience. --- Btw, I don't think caring about privacy is an ideology. I've worked in the advertising industry and I still do, although I'm on the publisher's side now. Companies are carelessly trading user data and if that happens to me (1) I need to be informed and (2) I need a substantial reward in return to outweigh the risks and as long as there are cost effective alternatives that protect privacy, I'd rather use those, voting with my wallet and all that.

Kiro 8y ago
https://duck.co/help/results/sources https://duck.co/help/results/sources Money quote: > 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. The other 400 sources are just used to widget stuff while the organic links are mostly from Bing and Oath. So it's a mash-up.