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I'm testing on Firefox and the Tor browser right now, JS disabled. I also disabled cookies in Firefox. Searches for "Seirdy", "Neovim", "gccgo", and others retu

by Seirdy 5y ago

I'm testing on Firefox and the Tor browser right now, JS disabled. I also disabled cookies in Firefox. Searches for "Seirdy", "Neovim", "gccgo", and others return results identical to Google, Startpage, and Searx instances with only Google enabled. No other independent engine of all the 25 other English independently-indexing engines I compared in the article has had this happen; identical pages on all the other engines are nearly impossible to find for advanced/uncommon queries. 90% of queries being identical to Google but different from the 25 other independent engines is one hell of a coincidence. Archived example: Brave results for "gccgo": https://web.archive.org/web/20210622172743/https://search.brave.com/search?q=gccgo https://web.archive.org/web/20210622172743/https://search.br... Google results for "gccgo" (proxied through Startpage): https://web.archive.org/web/20210622172939/https://startpage.com/do/metasearch.pl?query=gccgo https://web.archive.org/web/20210622172939/https://startpage... If this is a bug, it's very serious and needs to be publicly disclosed. Edit: more examples: Brave results for "oppenheimer": https://web.archive.org/web/20210622173647/https://search.brave.com/search?q=oppenheimer https://web.archive.org/web/20210622173647/https://search.br... Google results for "Oppenheimer" (proxied through Startpage): https://web.archive.org/web/20210622173658/https://startpage.com/do/metasearch.pl?query=oppenheimer https://web.archive.org/web/20210622173658/https://startpage...

iudqnolq 5y ago
As a counterexample, I searched for something very obscure (only three pages on startpage) expecting to see them pulling in results from startpage to cover the long tail. I was surprised to see different results, suggesting their index is much larger than I assumed. The query was "retail snap incentive program" Edit: All your queries are for relatively popular terms. I wouldn't be surprised if there's just a clearly right top set of pages.
- mkl 5y ago
  > I wouldn't be surprised if there's just a clearly right top set of pages. I would be astounded! Why would DDG, Bing, etc. not use it? Different search indices and engines should practically always have differences in results, as ranking results is very fuzzy and dependent on the available data.

by Seirdy 5y ago

iudqnolq 5y ago

As a counterexample, I searched for something very obscure (only three pages on startpage) expecting to see them pulling in results from startpage to cover the long tail. I was surprised to see different results, suggesting their index is much larger than I assumed. The query was "retail snap incentive program" Edit: All your queries are for relatively popular terms. I wouldn't be surprised if there's just a clearly right top set of pages.

mkl 5y ago
> I wouldn't be surprised if there's just a clearly right top set of pages. I would be astounded! Why would DDG, Bing, etc. not use it? Different search indices and engines should practically always have differences in results, as ranking results is very fuzzy and dependent on the available data.