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Re: Google vs. DDG (was: Social-media antipathy)



On Sat, Mar 13, 2021 at 11:47:27PM +0100, deloptes wrote:
> Andrei POPESCU wrote:
> 
> > Interestingly, for my searches recently I've seldom got really better
> > hits on Google.
> 
> I'm trying DuckDuckGo for 2 weeks now - it's not bad, but Google is (still)
> the best

This is nonsense. "The best" without any context is just meaningless.

Let me put an example: a friend of mine is doing biological research
(mRNA and that kind of stuff).

She relies totally on Google to keep the research papers she's reading
in order. Whenever she needs a paper, Google is the entry point. One
or two words, and presto, the paper she needs is whithin the first
three hits.

Once she was working at home and tried the same. No luck. Cooking recipes,
whatever you want, no bio research papers.

I think by now every avid reader will have an idea of what's going on.
The whole fuzzball of metadata you share with Google (your IP address,
your browser version, the whole compost heap of cookies, browser metrics
prior search history with Google and affiliates -- all of that kaboodle
is part of your search query, without you knowing it.

If you /want/ to get back part of that control, you have to understand
that. When you search with DDG, you have to ask yourself: "since they
don't know, how can I narrow the search context?".

After a while, this becomes second nature, and DDG results start being
more or less as good as Google's.

I know because I tried.

Cheers
 - t

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