3 ms·

> Earlier this week, I searched for “Pride,” expecting to find out more about Pride Weekend in San Francisco. DuckDuckGo seemed to have no understanding of that

by weland 13y ago

> Earlier this week, I searched for “Pride,” expecting to find out more about Pride Weekend in San Francisco. DuckDuckGo seemed to have no understanding of that context, whereas Google’s first results were exactly what I was looking for. In the meantime, everyone studying philosophy or psychology in the San Francisco area is probably bashing their head against the wall, because they want to find starting points about the moral implications of pride or its psychological cues. The Google bubble is a good thing in about, what, 1% of the cases. Don't fall in love with it. > It must be no more than 200-300 ms, but it really makes a difference. At the risk of being impolite, this has to be the most retarded claim I have ever heard from someone who is doing programming, ever since I heard a colleague of mine revolutionizing virtual memory by thinking how the MMU could instantiate another MMU to avoid stack overflows. You can literally compensate for the time you need to make 100 queries by getting to your office 30 seconds earlier.

relix 13y ago
The article is titled "I used ... and switched back" not, "why you shouldn't use DDG". It's by definition subjective, and if this person found better results 99% of the time, then that's a good reason to switch back. Those students studying philosophy might like DDG better, and that's perfectly fine. 200-300ms is a difference that you can feel. This is not about losing that time, this is about waiting for your results a little bit longer which adds friction and annoyance. If you can't understand that then I hope you're not in charge of any user-facing interfaces. It's the reason sites use CDN's and cache pregenerated pages, it's the reason why DNS systems have edges distributed all over the world, it's the reason why Github improved reaction time from 1 sec down to 300ms in their latest update, etc...
- narozik 13y ago
  It is usually more about perceived speed and feels than actual speed. And giving the user a quicker feel is a user experience improvement. But feeling quick to display results is worthless if you have to make 5 queries to find your results, if you actually find it, and in my experience google rarely offers what I'm looking for in the first few searches. It was not that way until they removed some and modified others search operators from their engine.
tytso 13y ago
Using context is quite different from people not seeing alternate points of view. If someone is interested in LGBT issues, it's more likely that the "Pride Weekend" is what they might be interested in, especially if the search originated in San Francisco. If someone is mostly interested in philosophy or psychology, that, and they see articles which they are mostly interested, the fact that "Pride Weekend" might be a bit lower down in the ten natural search results doesn't mean that some abstract "alternate point of view" has been excluded from their world view. I suspect people use the term "Google Bubble" mostly as an abstract FUD, as opposed to anything that they can definitively point to. This kind of context-aware searching is something they can "point with alarm" about, but it's actually a good thing, not a bad thing.
danmaz74 13y ago
> The Google bubble is a good thing in about, what, 1% of the cases. Don't fall in love with it. You may not like it, but if Google is creating that bubble you can be sure that they have the numbers to prove that users generally like it this say.

by weland 13y ago

relix 13y ago

The article is titled "I used ... and switched back" not, "why you shouldn't use DDG". It's by definition subjective, and if this person found better results 99% of the time, then that's a good reason to switch back. Those students studying philosophy might like DDG better, and that's perfectly fine. 200-300ms is a difference that you can feel. This is not about losing that time, this is about waiting for your results a little bit longer which adds friction and annoyance. If you can't understand that then I hope you're not in charge of any user-facing interfaces. It's the reason sites use CDN's and cache pregenerated pages, it's the reason why DNS systems have edges distributed all over the world, it's the reason why Github improved reaction time from 1 sec down to 300ms in their latest update, etc...

narozik 13y ago
It is usually more about perceived speed and feels than actual speed. And giving the user a quicker feel is a user experience improvement. But feeling quick to display results is worthless if you have to make 5 queries to find your results, if you actually find it, and in my experience google rarely offers what I'm looking for in the first few searches. It was not that way until they removed some and modified others search operators from their engine.

tytso 13y ago

Using context is quite different from people not seeing alternate points of view. If someone is interested in LGBT issues, it's more likely that the "Pride Weekend" is what they might be interested in, especially if the search originated in San Francisco. If someone is mostly interested in philosophy or psychology, that, and they see articles which they are mostly interested, the fact that "Pride Weekend" might be a bit lower down in the ten natural search results doesn't mean that some abstract "alternate point of view" has been excluded from their world view. I suspect people use the term "Google Bubble" mostly as an abstract FUD, as opposed to anything that they can definitively point to. This kind of context-aware searching is something they can "point with alarm" about, but it's actually a good thing, not a bad thing.

danmaz74 13y ago

> The Google bubble is a good thing in about, what, 1% of the cases. Don't fall in love with it. You may not like it, but if Google is creating that bubble you can be sure that they have the numbers to prove that users generally like it this say.