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Reading your comments, I am experiencing some cognitive dissonance. On one hand, you write very convincingly, and seem to have access to data showing that you a

Reading your comments, I am experiencing some cognitive dissonance. On one hand, you write very convincingly, and seem to have access to data showing that you are right. On the other hand, my personal experience just tells me that you are wrong. Like the other commenters, I distinctly remember just how much better Google's search was back in the days. And I must be one of those cited 10%-30% of users that try to switch search engines, as in recent years I have tried twice to switch to DuckDuckGo for privacy reasons. Both times I had to return to Google because DuckDuckGo's results were just too bad (for me). Perhaps you are right, and it is just an illusion that Google search results are better. But intuition and Occam's razor tells me that most likely it's just still the best general search engine. One example supporting that theory is the fact that users have discovered that other search engines, first Bing, and now Yandex, are better suited for specific types of content, and are indeed using those search engines when searching for that type of content. This goes counter to your claim that users don't switch search engines even when there is a difference in search result quality.

cbsmith 5y ago
If it helps, I was just as surprised by the results at the time. ;-) DuckDuckGo is working at a significant disadvantage as compared to Google. For starters, they have significantly smaller market share. This is no longer like the days of yore when the market was much more fragmented. Google's market share is roughly 18x larger than DDG's. That means they get far less behavioural data to inform their ranking algorithm. That also dramatically impacts the amount of revenue they can feed in to the engine (and the impact isn't linear, as I mentioned elsewhere). Then add on that their privacy efforts mean they are deliberately blinding themselves to much of the data that can be used to tune a search engine. It'd be amazing if their result quality was better. Again, it wasn't an illusion that Google's search results were better, particularly whenever people switched (which mostly happened long before Google gained a dominant market share). I would argue that even with comparable technology, today Google has an overwhelming advantage over competitors. I'd be surprised if it weren't absolutely the best at least amongst any of the alternatives that most people would even consider. That's just not how they got most of their market share. The illusion is that technical advantages were the primary driver of Google's success in the search engine market, and that Google has consistently been the best search engine in the market. The former is just clearly not true (the AOL deal alone helped them way more than any subsequent technical innovations), and the latter flies against the evidence that at the very least during height of the search engine wars, result relevance was very competitive.

cbsmith 5y ago

If it helps, I was just as surprised by the results at the time. ;-) DuckDuckGo is working at a significant disadvantage as compared to Google. For starters, they have significantly smaller market share. This is no longer like the days of yore when the market was much more fragmented. Google's market share is roughly 18x larger than DDG's. That means they get far less behavioural data to inform their ranking algorithm. That also dramatically impacts the amount of revenue they can feed in to the engine (and the impact isn't linear, as I mentioned elsewhere). Then add on that their privacy efforts mean they are deliberately blinding themselves to much of the data that can be used to tune a search engine. It'd be amazing if their result quality was better. Again, it wasn't an illusion that Google's search results were better, particularly whenever people switched (which mostly happened long before Google gained a dominant market share). I would argue that even with comparable technology, today Google has an overwhelming advantage over competitors. I'd be surprised if it weren't absolutely the best at least amongst any of the alternatives that most people would even consider. That's just not how they got most of their market share. The illusion is that technical advantages were the primary driver of Google's success in the search engine market, and that Google has consistently been the best search engine in the market. The former is just clearly not true (the AOL deal alone helped them way more than any subsequent technical innovations), and the latter flies against the evidence that at the very least during height of the search engine wars, result relevance was very competitive.