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Google's dominance is almost entirely due to the fact that its by far the best at search. I use ddg, but I use google search via !g about 25-50% of the time aft

by bko 7y ago

Google's dominance is almost entirely due to the fact that its by far the best at search. I use ddg, but I use google search via !g about 25-50% of the time after a failed attempts. And 9 times out of 10 Google gives me exactly what I'm looking for. For instance: "the actor that plays the news guy in spiderman" ddg: Tom Holland (side bar) Spider-Man Homecoming (imdb) Tom Holland (wiki) Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (imdb) google: Jonathan Kimble Simmons (splash, link to wiki) J. Jonah Jameson (wiki) J. K. Simmons (wiki) The google result is exactly what I want. And the results were made in incognito mode so Google wasn't able to cheat with privileged information about me as a user. At the end of the day, most people care about the product. I'm only willing to sacrifice so much to satisfy the ideal that there should be less concentration. Make a better search engine but trying to pull at the heart-strings of users about how Google is an empire and too powerful just won't work and it undermines your product and mission.

xfitm3 7y ago
It is really good when you search for vague terms, but it seems to come at the cost of ruining precision technical search. Google also censors some results in controversial categories, where Bing/Yahoo return what I am looking for. I don't trust a search engine that censors entire categories of results. I am not an adwords user but anecdotes in another HN thread seems to affirm that Google is due to be disrupted: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21667484 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21667484
- 9588 7y ago
  to give a fun example for those who didnt run into this silly agenda. "free energy" use to produce countless results that now require extra keywords. Under "free energy suppression" you find professionally crafted hatemongering. The actual list of claimants is huge, non of it is here. https://peswiki.com/directory:suppression#Wiki_2796702 https://peswiki.com/directory:suppression#Wiki_2796702 "free energy device" also produces really crappy results compared to what it was. It only seems like things argued not to exist may or must be scrubbed from seach results. Astrology wasn't scrubed nor was any religion. Everything has its history too!
  - larnmar 7y ago
    I just searched for “free energy” with both google and bing and with both engines got a combination of the use in actual thermodynamics plus “omg free energy device exist coverup!” type results.
- theamk 7y ago
  What kind of technical queries are you running? I just searched for "HLCD0438 datasheet" on Google and DDG. I think it is a great example of very precise, and very techinical query. DDG's first page was only fake sites and wrong answers. Google gave me the right answer right away (in the positions 2 and 3) (for those who don't know legacy electronics: I was looking for the box with labeled pins, like on first page of https://www.turus.com.tr/class/INNOVAEditor/assets/PDF/MM58438.pdf https://www.turus.com.tr/class/INNOVAEditor/assets/PDF/MM584... )
throwthisaway2 7y ago
Antecdotal .. realize that google search links to usually three sites. Wikipedia, stackoverflow, and medium. If you just started your seatch there you would be good.
DyslexicAtheist 7y ago
> And the results were made in incognito mode so Google wasn't able to cheat with privileged information about me as a user. that's not what Incognito mode does. It prevents your search from being included in the browsing history and doesn't send cookies from active sessions, but that's about it. Google still knows this is you being unauthenticated. You don't need to be logged into google to be reliably targeted with ads that fit your profile.
- jefftk 7y ago
  Why do you think Google Search still knows who you are when you search in Incognito mode? (Or, in Firefox, if you open a private browsing window.) How would it know? There are advertising companies that use fingerprinting for ad targeting, but Google doesn't. (Disclosure: I work at Google on ads, speaking only for myself)
  - Terretta 7y ago
    How does it know to offer (in incognito mode) a list of your accounts you might want to re-login to? (Not always, but often enough to raise an eyebrow.) Seems like a pretty good reason to think it still knows who you are. As to how that works, you tell us.
    - jefftk 7y ago
      Are you talking about the browser's autocomplete? That's not something servers can detect unless you interact with it. Or do you mean something else?
      - hiccuphippo 7y ago
        No. On login Google shows you your email address so you can click on it and only fill the password. Which means it knows you were logged in on that browser previously.
        leni536 7y ago
lucb1e 7y ago
To be fair, that example query is more of a personal assistant kind of question. If I want to know who played in that movie, either I know which site has that information (IMDB) and go there directly, or I search for something like "actors spiderman movie <year>". If you want DDG to understand natural language queries, I think their privacy policy may need to be adjusted so that our queries can actually be used to develop that, and then they need a boatload of funding to catch up with Google's semi-ethical money-generating practices.
- FabHK 7y ago
  Indeed. I'm happy to forego Google and then (in cases like this) click once more to figure it out myself.
  - lucb1e 7y ago
    Also because AI (if I may even call it that) is not yet good enough to answer these things with high accuracy, let alone judge sources. I don't use Google much so I can't really speak for it, but from what I've seen, I'd estimate that 20% of the answers (for non-mainstream topics) are either misleading or false.
- input_sh 7y ago
  I type "name of the movie !imdb", which takes me straight to IMDB's search results for that name. !bangs are the main reason why it's always going to be difficult for me to switch from DDG to anything else.
  - heisenhuegel 7y ago
    https://beta.cliqz.com https://beta.cliqz.com has some support for bangs. Not as many as DDG but adding !g (google), !s (startpage), !d (duckduckgo), !so (stackoverflow), !w (wikipedia), etc works for me. Needs to be at the end, not at the start.
- lolinder 7y ago
  Like it or not, NL queries are exactly what most internet users want. Without them, any search engine is doomed to remain a niche product used exclusively by the very privacy-conscious.
noncoml 7y ago
Don’t use incognito mode, use the tor browser.
beatgammit 7y ago
Have you considered using !sp (StartPage) instead? It essentially does "incognito mode" for you.
- FabHK 7y ago
  Can use the !s bang in DuckDuckGo.
troubler 7y ago
Also, lot of links are hidden in Google by DMCA requests. PR firms use it a lot to hide "bad" information about their clients. Some countries (e.g. Russia, China) bans everything that doesn't fit their propaganda. Google is useless now for many kind of politic-sensitive searches or for investigations.
chinesempire 7y ago
You're helping google by tagging its searches, so many people ask for this kind of things that they can prioritise results that gets the most clicks (people rank searches for google everytime they click). By contrast, the new privacy friendly search engine from the article, with a lot less money and users, can answer a simple question like "news guy actor in spiderman" with Cliqz: - And the new actor playing Spider-Man is... this guy (www.foxnews.com) - J. Jonah Jameson (J.K. Simmons) | Spider-Man Films Wiki (spiderman-films.fandom.com) Not bad for a small German company uh... And even if it didn't, when I know it's Jonah Jameson, I can search for the actor that played Jonah Jameson. Search engines are not about having "the answer to life the universe and everything" but helping users refine their searches until they find what they were looking for.
- lolinder 7y ago
  That may have been what search engines were for, but Google changed that. Very few people have the patience any more to try multiple queries to get an answer. When DDG fails, as it inevitably does, I don't spend time refining my query: I repeat the search on Google and get my answer.
  - chinesempire 7y ago
    It's true. But Google fails as well. Most of the world population is not native english speaker. Try "attore che recita la parte del giornalista in spiderman" (the actor that plays the journalist in spiderman) in Italian - Spider-Man: Homecoming - Wikipedia (https://it.wikipedia.org https://it.wikipedia.org) - James Franco - Wikipedia (https://it.wikipedia.org https://it.wikipedia.org) - Spider-Man film: tutti gli attori | Popcorn Tv (https://popcorntv.it https://popcorntv.it) - Martin Sheen, dieci ruoli per scoprire un grande attore ... (https://www.consigli.it https://www.consigli.it) Or the simplified version "attore che fa il giornalista in spiderman" (same meaning as before, just more down to earth) - J. Jonah Jameson - Wikipedia (https://it.wikipedia.org https://it.wikipedia.org) - J. Jonah Jameson - Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org https://en.wikipedia.org) - Spider-Man: Far From Home, nel cast anche l'attore ... (https://tg24.sky.it https://tg24.sky.it) Refining is still a very present need, it's simply that for common searches on common topics in english it's less so... It's more or less the same in German, French, Spanish, Portuguese... I can't even imagine the results in languages like Arabic, Indonesian or Balinese. Local, culture aware, search engines are the future, despite Google efforts, the generalist "one size fits all" search engine is not.
FabHK 7y ago
> Google's dominance is almost entirely due to the fact that its by far the best at search. Yeah, and due to economies of scale and network effects it will stay that way, unless some people are willing to suffer the minor inconvenience of using a slightly inferior competitor.
- behnamoh 7y ago
  Why would they tho?
  - Kaiyou 7y ago
    Because they have the ability to use available information to predict the future and don't like what they see if they continue to use Google?
goatinaboat 7y ago
Google's dominance is almost entirely due to the fact that its by far the best at search. But is it? I find myself often having to fight it to search for what I entered into the box, rather than what it thinks I really meant. If you know what you want just not where it is, DDG and Bing are both superior.
johnpowell 7y ago
I tried using DDG and found myself using !G a lot for simple things. Then I switched to Bing about six months ago and have only had to use google a few times. I know, Bing.. But I have used Windows for about 30 minutes in the last year and that was just to help my mom fix her printer. I don't think I have ever had a Microsoft related account since Hotmail. I know they track me but I don't use MicrosoftDrive or WintowsTube so I can live with it.
3xblah 7y ago
"... so Google wasn't able to cheat with privileged information about me as a user." The way they "cheated" was to look at the tens, hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands of previous queries that matched yours in substance. If the competing websites for "web search" had the same volume of submitted queries that are substantially similar to yours, then they too would be able to give you "exactly" what you are looking for "9 times out of 10". If all people submitting queries on the web are somehow convinced to visit only one website and submit a majority, (hypothetically let's say 93%) of their queries there, then it should be no surprise when that website "magically" starts becoming more "predictive" than other websites in returning "exactly" what searchers are looking for and becomes "by far the best at search".[1] The question raised by the blog post is whether enabling such "magic" is worth the trade-off of also creating a "panopticon" in that single website. Giving this level of visitation and query traffic to a single website makes any competing website (working off less than 7% of people's queries) seem irrelevant, maybe even pathetic. Without the enormous traffic, I would surmise the glory of the "empire" (to use the author's chosen term), and its appeal to "followers" (e.g., those who marvel at its "magic"), might dissipate rather quickly. 1. Especially the part of "search" that involves dealing with repeated, similar queries for popular information.
- mantap 7y ago
  Knowing what the most common questions are doesn't help you find the corresponding answers. At best you can find the result that users click on most frequently, but if all of the results in the result page suck then that's not going to help. Google's advantage is simply billions of dollars and 20 years of R&D into NLP tech.
  - pizza234 7y ago
    > Knowing what the most common questions are doesn't help you find the corresponding answers. At best you can find the result that users click on most frequently I doubt that users have a strict expectation of finding the correct (interpretation of "corresponding") answer. Even if the most clicked answer[s] are still not correct, they may still be the ones who suck less, which can still be acceptable/desirable. Keep in mind that in this perspective, the concept is similar to Google Translate - Google built a translator that, at least originally, doesn't understand language, instead, it applies (applied) a static model on a large amount of documents. While they certainly poured a large amount of money on it, it's success can't be centered purely on the economical factor.
solso 7y ago
The claim: "Google's dominance is almost entirely due to the fact that its by far the best at search." is, and I'm sorry to say, a make-believe Google's quality is better than anyone else, that is a fact. Let's go to the point. [[I work on Cliqz, and in search]] Do you know how much Google pays apple to be the default search engine? According to you, nothing, because people will go to Google because it's the best. Well, it turns out that last year was more than 9 Billion (with a B). Quite a lot of money poorly spend, someone should really get fired :-)
- quickthrower2 7y ago
  This is business. Apple and Google bring something to the table and they meet in the middle. For zero dollars Apple could just let the user choose from a randomised list which is arguable better and more impartial.
  - solso 7y ago
    Of course it's business, but it invalidates the premise that people chose "mostly" because of the quality. If that was the main driver, Google could just pay zero, 9 Billion for few hundred million users is quite an hefty sum. The other option is that Google does not pay to get the Apple users, which might come otherwise, but to prevent Apple to try something funny, either directly or indirectly. In any case, the "build a better product and people will come" mantra is flawed when companies in the space pay each other billions for distribution.
- theamk 7y ago
  This logic is only valid if you assume Apple cares a lot about their users getting the best search results. I don't think this is the case. Instead, Apple has a thing to sell -- "position of default search engine" -- and it is selling it to highest bidder. I bet if Bing would offer 10 Billion, they'd make Bing default instead. Hey, if DDG could offer them 10 Billion, I am sure they would set it as default, easily ignoring the fact that many people say they do not like its results.
  - 7y ago
anigbrowl 7y ago
The google result is exactly what I want. Yes, when what you want happens to be the lowest common denominator - in this case, the most recent Spiderman movie. When the next movie in the franchise comes out in a few years and you don't like it so much because the news guy is now played by someone else, you'll be complaining that your preferences have stayed the same but Google no longer handles them as well.
- joshuamorton 7y ago
  This implies that the results won't change.
mrweasel 7y ago
When DDG doesn't yield the results I'm looking for, I will frequently try Google, but more and more I find that if DuckDuckGo can't find the results that I want, then neither can Google. What Google can do however, is annoy me with results that it knows to be wrong, because it is excluded the most specific part of my query. Google will remove the bit that absolutely had to be in the query, to get more hits on the majority of the remaining words. In the end, I think most people could use either Google, Bing or DuckDuckGo and be happy with the results. It's just that we're stuck on "Google is the best search engine", and while that may be true in some technical sense, many of the other search engines are just as good for most of us.
- weberc2 7y ago
  I’ve found the opposite. For the last year, I have to resort to Google more and more often. DDG was on par with Google when I started using it a couple years ago, but it has managed to get worse and worse over time. Note that I’m specifically claiming DDG’s performance has degraded; not just that it has remained the same while Google’s has improved.
  - smartasspolice 7y ago
    try startpage
- Laakeri 7y ago
  For the "most of us" point, keep in mind that Google has a superior international infrastructure. At least in Finland, DuckDuckGo's loading time for search results is about 2 seconds compared to Google's <0.5s. This makes using ddg surprisingly annoying.
  - yabadabadoes 7y ago
    Google? No, Yandex.. obviously not blocked in Russia, also not blocked in China. I don't really notice any infrastructure problems for ddg in Europe though, so Finland may be atypical?
  - 7y ago
ummonk 7y ago
I don’t think it played a role here but note that incognito mode doesn’t mask your IP so the results will still be somewhat personalized.
ljm 7y ago
Same here, more or less. DDG is 'good enough' in a lot of instances but I think it's more that Google has taught some 'bad' searching habits. When I type a random Google search I'm basically expecting it to read my mind (and essentially it does through all of the tracking and analytics); DDG has none of that so the method of searching has to be more specific. That said, it does't prevent the situation where searching for certain gifs or images gives you a page full of softcore porn, even with the moderate safe search enabled.
mikorym 7y ago
I used to do that, but it's not necessary anymore. You can almost always, by phrasing more carefully, get exactly what you need with DDG. I also think that it's better to learn to search properly than finding the best search engine.
ace_of_spades 7y ago
Not to sound presumptuous but what are you working as that this is a query that’s representative of your search engine use habits? I am using ddg for a few years now, I don’t revert to google (except google scholar) and I don’t feel like my life has gotten worse due to lesser quality search results. Maybe it’s denial or weirdness on my side... after all I am also a vegan because I don’t want to hurt animals or other people just for a little bit of taste and convenience and most people seem to think that’s stupid on my side.
maremp 7y ago
In my experience, this was true maybe a year ago or before. But nowadays ddg is quite good at providing what I was looking for. If it can't, google isn't much better either, but makes it look like it is, making me spend more time sifting through the information all over the place. The "People also ask" is a huge distraction, why is that immediately after the first result? It can be maybe at 5+ place, but not at the top.

by bko 7y ago

xfitm3 7y ago

It is really good when you search for vague terms, but it seems to come at the cost of ruining precision technical search. Google also censors some results in controversial categories, where Bing/Yahoo return what I am looking for. I don't trust a search engine that censors entire categories of results. I am not an adwords user but anecdotes in another HN thread seems to affirm that Google is due to be disrupted: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21667484 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21667484

9588 7y ago
to give a fun example for those who didnt run into this silly agenda. "free energy" use to produce countless results that now require extra keywords. Under "free energy suppression" you find professionally crafted hatemongering. The actual list of claimants is huge, non of it is here. https://peswiki.com/directory:suppression#Wiki_2796702 https://peswiki.com/directory:suppression#Wiki_2796702 "free energy device" also produces really crappy results compared to what it was. It only seems like things argued not to exist may or must be scrubbed from seach results. Astrology wasn't scrubed nor was any religion. Everything has its history too!
- larnmar 7y ago
  I just searched for “free energy” with both google and bing and with both engines got a combination of the use in actual thermodynamics plus “omg free energy device exist coverup!” type results.
theamk 7y ago
What kind of technical queries are you running? I just searched for "HLCD0438 datasheet" on Google and DDG. I think it is a great example of very precise, and very techinical query. DDG's first page was only fake sites and wrong answers. Google gave me the right answer right away (in the positions 2 and 3) (for those who don't know legacy electronics: I was looking for the box with labeled pins, like on first page of https://www.turus.com.tr/class/INNOVAEditor/assets/PDF/MM58438.pdf https://www.turus.com.tr/class/INNOVAEditor/assets/PDF/MM584... )

throwthisaway2 7y ago

Antecdotal .. realize that google search links to usually three sites. Wikipedia, stackoverflow, and medium. If you just started your seatch there you would be good.

DyslexicAtheist 7y ago

> And the results were made in incognito mode so Google wasn't able to cheat with privileged information about me as a user. that's not what Incognito mode does. It prevents your search from being included in the browsing history and doesn't send cookies from active sessions, but that's about it. Google still knows this is you being unauthenticated. You don't need to be logged into google to be reliably targeted with ads that fit your profile.

jefftk 7y ago
Why do you think Google Search still knows who you are when you search in Incognito mode? (Or, in Firefox, if you open a private browsing window.) How would it know? There are advertising companies that use fingerprinting for ad targeting, but Google doesn't. (Disclosure: I work at Google on ads, speaking only for myself)
- Terretta 7y ago
  How does it know to offer (in incognito mode) a list of your accounts you might want to re-login to? (Not always, but often enough to raise an eyebrow.) Seems like a pretty good reason to think it still knows who you are. As to how that works, you tell us.
  - jefftk 7y ago
    Are you talking about the browser's autocomplete? That's not something servers can detect unless you interact with it. Or do you mean something else?
    - hiccuphippo 7y ago
      No. On login Google shows you your email address so you can click on it and only fill the password. Which means it knows you were logged in on that browser previously.
      - leni536 7y ago

lucb1e 7y ago

To be fair, that example query is more of a personal assistant kind of question. If I want to know who played in that movie, either I know which site has that information (IMDB) and go there directly, or I search for something like "actors spiderman movie <year>". If you want DDG to understand natural language queries, I think their privacy policy may need to be adjusted so that our queries can actually be used to develop that, and then they need a boatload of funding to catch up with Google's semi-ethical money-generating practices.

FabHK 7y ago
Indeed. I'm happy to forego Google and then (in cases like this) click once more to figure it out myself.
- lucb1e 7y ago
  Also because AI (if I may even call it that) is not yet good enough to answer these things with high accuracy, let alone judge sources. I don't use Google much so I can't really speak for it, but from what I've seen, I'd estimate that 20% of the answers (for non-mainstream topics) are either misleading or false.
input_sh 7y ago
I type "name of the movie !imdb", which takes me straight to IMDB's search results for that name. !bangs are the main reason why it's always going to be difficult for me to switch from DDG to anything else.
- heisenhuegel 7y ago
  https://beta.cliqz.com https://beta.cliqz.com has some support for bangs. Not as many as DDG but adding !g (google), !s (startpage), !d (duckduckgo), !so (stackoverflow), !w (wikipedia), etc works for me. Needs to be at the end, not at the start.
lolinder 7y ago
Like it or not, NL queries are exactly what most internet users want. Without them, any search engine is doomed to remain a niche product used exclusively by the very privacy-conscious.

noncoml 7y ago

Don’t use incognito mode, use the tor browser.

beatgammit 7y ago

Have you considered using !sp (StartPage) instead? It essentially does "incognito mode" for you.

FabHK 7y ago
Can use the !s bang in DuckDuckGo.

troubler 7y ago

Also, lot of links are hidden in Google by DMCA requests. PR firms use it a lot to hide "bad" information about their clients. Some countries (e.g. Russia, China) bans everything that doesn't fit their propaganda. Google is useless now for many kind of politic-sensitive searches or for investigations.

chinesempire 7y ago

You're helping google by tagging its searches, so many people ask for this kind of things that they can prioritise results that gets the most clicks (people rank searches for google everytime they click). By contrast, the new privacy friendly search engine from the article, with a lot less money and users, can answer a simple question like "news guy actor in spiderman" with Cliqz: - And the new actor playing Spider-Man is... this guy (www.foxnews.com) - J. Jonah Jameson (J.K. Simmons) | Spider-Man Films Wiki (spiderman-films.fandom.com) Not bad for a small German company uh... And even if it didn't, when I know it's Jonah Jameson, I can search for the actor that played Jonah Jameson. Search engines are not about having "the answer to life the universe and everything" but helping users refine their searches until they find what they were looking for.

lolinder 7y ago
That may have been what search engines were for, but Google changed that. Very few people have the patience any more to try multiple queries to get an answer. When DDG fails, as it inevitably does, I don't spend time refining my query: I repeat the search on Google and get my answer.
- chinesempire 7y ago
  It's true. But Google fails as well. Most of the world population is not native english speaker. Try "attore che recita la parte del giornalista in spiderman" (the actor that plays the journalist in spiderman) in Italian - Spider-Man: Homecoming - Wikipedia (https://it.wikipedia.org https://it.wikipedia.org) - James Franco - Wikipedia (https://it.wikipedia.org https://it.wikipedia.org) - Spider-Man film: tutti gli attori | Popcorn Tv (https://popcorntv.it https://popcorntv.it) - Martin Sheen, dieci ruoli per scoprire un grande attore ... (https://www.consigli.it https://www.consigli.it) Or the simplified version "attore che fa il giornalista in spiderman" (same meaning as before, just more down to earth) - J. Jonah Jameson - Wikipedia (https://it.wikipedia.org https://it.wikipedia.org) - J. Jonah Jameson - Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org https://en.wikipedia.org) - Spider-Man: Far From Home, nel cast anche l'attore ... (https://tg24.sky.it https://tg24.sky.it) Refining is still a very present need, it's simply that for common searches on common topics in english it's less so... It's more or less the same in German, French, Spanish, Portuguese... I can't even imagine the results in languages like Arabic, Indonesian or Balinese. Local, culture aware, search engines are the future, despite Google efforts, the generalist "one size fits all" search engine is not.

FabHK 7y ago

> Google's dominance is almost entirely due to the fact that its by far the best at search. Yeah, and due to economies of scale and network effects it will stay that way, unless some people are willing to suffer the minor inconvenience of using a slightly inferior competitor.

behnamoh 7y ago
Why would they tho?
- Kaiyou 7y ago
  Because they have the ability to use available information to predict the future and don't like what they see if they continue to use Google?

goatinaboat 7y ago

Google's dominance is almost entirely due to the fact that its by far the best at search. But is it? I find myself often having to fight it to search for what I entered into the box, rather than what it thinks I really meant. If you know what you want just not where it is, DDG and Bing are both superior.

johnpowell 7y ago

I tried using DDG and found myself using !G a lot for simple things. Then I switched to Bing about six months ago and have only had to use google a few times. I know, Bing.. But I have used Windows for about 30 minutes in the last year and that was just to help my mom fix her printer. I don't think I have ever had a Microsoft related account since Hotmail. I know they track me but I don't use MicrosoftDrive or WintowsTube so I can live with it.

3xblah 7y ago

"... so Google wasn't able to cheat with privileged information about me as a user." The way they "cheated" was to look at the tens, hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands of previous queries that matched yours in substance. If the competing websites for "web search" had the same volume of submitted queries that are substantially similar to yours, then they too would be able to give you "exactly" what you are looking for "9 times out of 10". If all people submitting queries on the web are somehow convinced to visit only one website and submit a majority, (hypothetically let's say 93%) of their queries there, then it should be no surprise when that website "magically" starts becoming more "predictive" than other websites in returning "exactly" what searchers are looking for and becomes "by far the best at search".[1] The question raised by the blog post is whether enabling such "magic" is worth the trade-off of also creating a "panopticon" in that single website. Giving this level of visitation and query traffic to a single website makes any competing website (working off less than 7% of people's queries) seem irrelevant, maybe even pathetic. Without the enormous traffic, I would surmise the glory of the "empire" (to use the author's chosen term), and its appeal to "followers" (e.g., those who marvel at its "magic"), might dissipate rather quickly. 1. Especially the part of "search" that involves dealing with repeated, similar queries for popular information.

mantap 7y ago
Knowing what the most common questions are doesn't help you find the corresponding answers. At best you can find the result that users click on most frequently, but if all of the results in the result page suck then that's not going to help. Google's advantage is simply billions of dollars and 20 years of R&D into NLP tech.
- pizza234 7y ago
  > Knowing what the most common questions are doesn't help you find the corresponding answers. At best you can find the result that users click on most frequently I doubt that users have a strict expectation of finding the correct (interpretation of "corresponding") answer. Even if the most clicked answer[s] are still not correct, they may still be the ones who suck less, which can still be acceptable/desirable. Keep in mind that in this perspective, the concept is similar to Google Translate - Google built a translator that, at least originally, doesn't understand language, instead, it applies (applied) a static model on a large amount of documents. While they certainly poured a large amount of money on it, it's success can't be centered purely on the economical factor.

solso 7y ago

The claim: "Google's dominance is almost entirely due to the fact that its by far the best at search." is, and I'm sorry to say, a make-believe Google's quality is better than anyone else, that is a fact. Let's go to the point. [[I work on Cliqz, and in search]] Do you know how much Google pays apple to be the default search engine? According to you, nothing, because people will go to Google because it's the best. Well, it turns out that last year was more than 9 Billion (with a B). Quite a lot of money poorly spend, someone should really get fired :-)

quickthrower2 7y ago
This is business. Apple and Google bring something to the table and they meet in the middle. For zero dollars Apple could just let the user choose from a randomised list which is arguable better and more impartial.
- solso 7y ago
  Of course it's business, but it invalidates the premise that people chose "mostly" because of the quality. If that was the main driver, Google could just pay zero, 9 Billion for few hundred million users is quite an hefty sum. The other option is that Google does not pay to get the Apple users, which might come otherwise, but to prevent Apple to try something funny, either directly or indirectly. In any case, the "build a better product and people will come" mantra is flawed when companies in the space pay each other billions for distribution.
theamk 7y ago
This logic is only valid if you assume Apple cares a lot about their users getting the best search results. I don't think this is the case. Instead, Apple has a thing to sell -- "position of default search engine" -- and it is selling it to highest bidder. I bet if Bing would offer 10 Billion, they'd make Bing default instead. Hey, if DDG could offer them 10 Billion, I am sure they would set it as default, easily ignoring the fact that many people say they do not like its results.
- 7y ago

anigbrowl 7y ago

The google result is exactly what I want. Yes, when what you want happens to be the lowest common denominator - in this case, the most recent Spiderman movie. When the next movie in the franchise comes out in a few years and you don't like it so much because the news guy is now played by someone else, you'll be complaining that your preferences have stayed the same but Google no longer handles them as well.

joshuamorton 7y ago
This implies that the results won't change.

mrweasel 7y ago

When DDG doesn't yield the results I'm looking for, I will frequently try Google, but more and more I find that if DuckDuckGo can't find the results that I want, then neither can Google. What Google can do however, is annoy me with results that it knows to be wrong, because it is excluded the most specific part of my query. Google will remove the bit that absolutely had to be in the query, to get more hits on the majority of the remaining words. In the end, I think most people could use either Google, Bing or DuckDuckGo and be happy with the results. It's just that we're stuck on "Google is the best search engine", and while that may be true in some technical sense, many of the other search engines are just as good for most of us.

weberc2 7y ago
I’ve found the opposite. For the last year, I have to resort to Google more and more often. DDG was on par with Google when I started using it a couple years ago, but it has managed to get worse and worse over time. Note that I’m specifically claiming DDG’s performance has degraded; not just that it has remained the same while Google’s has improved.
- smartasspolice 7y ago
  try startpage
Laakeri 7y ago
For the "most of us" point, keep in mind that Google has a superior international infrastructure. At least in Finland, DuckDuckGo's loading time for search results is about 2 seconds compared to Google's <0.5s. This makes using ddg surprisingly annoying.
- yabadabadoes 7y ago
  Google? No, Yandex.. obviously not blocked in Russia, also not blocked in China. I don't really notice any infrastructure problems for ddg in Europe though, so Finland may be atypical?
- 7y ago

ummonk 7y ago

I don’t think it played a role here but note that incognito mode doesn’t mask your IP so the results will still be somewhat personalized.

ljm 7y ago

Same here, more or less. DDG is 'good enough' in a lot of instances but I think it's more that Google has taught some 'bad' searching habits. When I type a random Google search I'm basically expecting it to read my mind (and essentially it does through all of the tracking and analytics); DDG has none of that so the method of searching has to be more specific. That said, it does't prevent the situation where searching for certain gifs or images gives you a page full of softcore porn, even with the moderate safe search enabled.

mikorym 7y ago

I used to do that, but it's not necessary anymore. You can almost always, by phrasing more carefully, get exactly what you need with DDG. I also think that it's better to learn to search properly than finding the best search engine.

ace_of_spades 7y ago

Not to sound presumptuous but what are you working as that this is a query that’s representative of your search engine use habits? I am using ddg for a few years now, I don’t revert to google (except google scholar) and I don’t feel like my life has gotten worse due to lesser quality search results. Maybe it’s denial or weirdness on my side... after all I am also a vegan because I don’t want to hurt animals or other people just for a little bit of taste and convenience and most people seem to think that’s stupid on my side.

maremp 7y ago

In my experience, this was true maybe a year ago or before. But nowadays ddg is quite good at providing what I was looking for. If it can't, google isn't much better either, but makes it look like it is, making me spend more time sifting through the information all over the place. The "People also ask" is a huge distraction, why is that immediately after the first result? It can be maybe at 5+ place, but not at the top.