3 ms·

Just so that everyone is on the same page on what is being discussed here: this is a “study” by a competitor who can't implement personalised search and thus is

by capo 14y ago

Just so that everyone is on the same page on what is being discussed here: this is a “study” by a competitor who can't implement personalised search and thus is spreading FUD to spin that as a differentiating advantage. It might be a good marketing strategy as he managed to get coverage by a couple of outlets during the elections frenzy in the US, but this "filter bubble" buzz-phrase is nonsense. Don't fear personalized results they are just another way of sussing relevance, and as mentioned in that post it concerns a tiny number of queries and has minimal effect on the results page.

viraptor 14y ago
> by a competitor who can't implement personalised search I believe the main idea behind using DDG is that it does not personalise, collect data, etc. It's a feature rather than a bug. Your attack on DDG seems to ignore some facts... (see https://duckduckgo.com/about.html https://duckduckgo.com/about.html)
papsosouid 14y ago
I don't fear personalized results, I just don't like them. I switched to DDG because google results have been getting progressively worse and worse for quite some time. Rather than jump through hoops to try to convince google to just search for what I asked instead of what it wants to infer I meant to ask, I just use a search engine that does what I ask it to.
AJ007 14y ago
"We also saw in Google chrome that magic keyword transformations sometimes jumped incognito sessions, meaning that if you started a new incognito mode, got a transformation, then shut it down and started a new incognito mode you could sometimes see the same transformation again (without searching for the same magic keyword again). This weird behavior was not reproducible in Firefox's private browsing mode." If that is FUD, that is some pretty damn creepy FUD.
- magicalist 14y ago
  Yeah, that jumped out at me as well, and actually seems somewhat irresponsible without more data (like a log of actual http traffic). AFAIK (when I last checked), Chrome keeps no data between incognito sessions. If data is being kept, it should be extremely easy to spot and a bug should be filed. "This weird thing happened" isn't really a sufficient response to that theory. If there isn't data being kept and transmitted, it means either the testers left open an incognito tab or something without noticing (easier to do than with private browsing, since private browsing closes all non-private browsing tabs until private browsing is over), or that google is tweaking results based on search history saved server side by ip address (and maybe other id-able browser characteristics), but only if the browser identifies itself as Chrome, not e.g. Firefox. There doesn't seem to be any real advantage there (and you'll likely just end up polluting anything but the coarsest of clustering), but that's just speculation. I'm not able to reproduce the behavior in Chrome (though I'm having trouble reproducing even simple magic keyword behavior in incognito mode in the first place), so more data would be appreciated.

by capo 14y ago

viraptor 14y ago

> by a competitor who can't implement personalised search I believe the main idea behind using DDG is that it does not personalise, collect data, etc. It's a feature rather than a bug. Your attack on DDG seems to ignore some facts... (see https://duckduckgo.com/about.html https://duckduckgo.com/about.html)

papsosouid 14y ago

I don't fear personalized results, I just don't like them. I switched to DDG because google results have been getting progressively worse and worse for quite some time. Rather than jump through hoops to try to convince google to just search for what I asked instead of what it wants to infer I meant to ask, I just use a search engine that does what I ask it to.

AJ007 14y ago

"We also saw in Google chrome that magic keyword transformations sometimes jumped incognito sessions, meaning that if you started a new incognito mode, got a transformation, then shut it down and started a new incognito mode you could sometimes see the same transformation again (without searching for the same magic keyword again). This weird behavior was not reproducible in Firefox's private browsing mode." If that is FUD, that is some pretty damn creepy FUD.

magicalist 14y ago
Yeah, that jumped out at me as well, and actually seems somewhat irresponsible without more data (like a log of actual http traffic). AFAIK (when I last checked), Chrome keeps no data between incognito sessions. If data is being kept, it should be extremely easy to spot and a bug should be filed. "This weird thing happened" isn't really a sufficient response to that theory. If there isn't data being kept and transmitted, it means either the testers left open an incognito tab or something without noticing (easier to do than with private browsing, since private browsing closes all non-private browsing tabs until private browsing is over), or that google is tweaking results based on search history saved server side by ip address (and maybe other id-able browser characteristics), but only if the browser identifies itself as Chrome, not e.g. Firefox. There doesn't seem to be any real advantage there (and you'll likely just end up polluting anything but the coarsest of clustering), but that's just speculation. I'm not able to reproduce the behavior in Chrome (though I'm having trouble reproducing even simple magic keyword behavior in incognito mode in the first place), so more data would be appreciated.