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When you type "elm list" into Google and it understands that you mean the language instead of the tree, it's because they have an extensive profile on you. Of c

When you type "elm list" into Google and it understands that you mean the language instead of the tree, it's because they have an extensive profile on you. Of course DuckDuckGo won't do that since that's their unique selling point. I can see this being a legitimate gripe of an end user that just compares search engines, but I was under the impression that this crowd understands the proposition of DDG and doesn't complain when it's working as designed.

hombre_fatal 6y ago
I hear this presumption a lot from people trying to defend DDG, but you can trivially disprove this by googling it anonymously from a random IP address. Try it with "elm list". Frankly, when I compare my logged-in, static-IP Google results to anonymous queries, I can see that the degree of "personalization" that people claim is vastly overstated; not much seems to change. It just seems like wishful thinking when the obvious reality is that Google is just more advanced in its ability to semanticize input. DDG "rust cargo" gives me images and results for cargo ships.
- boomka 6y ago
  I followed your advice, turned on VPN, went private browsing and searched for "elm list". On DDG the first result was elm-lang homepage but the second was a tutorial on lists in Elm. Down the page I also saw a wikipedia entry for a list of elm trees. Seems ok overall to me. Then I tried the same thing with Google and first I was stopped by captcha and had to spend a minute clicking hydrants and traffic lights. Then I got a whole page of results about various programming discussions on lists in Elm, but nothing in the entire page about the trees. That does not seem right, I think regular person would be much more likely to search for a tree, not for an obscure programming language. Verdict: I found DDG results better as in more relevant for general population while still surfacing the programming ones. Also no hydrants on DDG.
  - joshuamorton 6y ago
    Would someone searching for the trees search "elm list" or "list of elms"?

hombre_fatal 6y ago

I hear this presumption a lot from people trying to defend DDG, but you can trivially disprove this by googling it anonymously from a random IP address. Try it with "elm list". Frankly, when I compare my logged-in, static-IP Google results to anonymous queries, I can see that the degree of "personalization" that people claim is vastly overstated; not much seems to change. It just seems like wishful thinking when the obvious reality is that Google is just more advanced in its ability to semanticize input. DDG "rust cargo" gives me images and results for cargo ships.

boomka 6y ago
I followed your advice, turned on VPN, went private browsing and searched for "elm list". On DDG the first result was elm-lang homepage but the second was a tutorial on lists in Elm. Down the page I also saw a wikipedia entry for a list of elm trees. Seems ok overall to me. Then I tried the same thing with Google and first I was stopped by captcha and had to spend a minute clicking hydrants and traffic lights. Then I got a whole page of results about various programming discussions on lists in Elm, but nothing in the entire page about the trees. That does not seem right, I think regular person would be much more likely to search for a tree, not for an obscure programming language. Verdict: I found DDG results better as in more relevant for general population while still surfacing the programming ones. Also no hydrants on DDG.
- joshuamorton 6y ago
  Would someone searching for the trees search "elm list" or "list of elms"?