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



On Sun, Mar 14, 2021 at 11:58:32AM +0200, Andrei POPESCU wrote:
> On Du, 14 mar 21, 10:03:44, tomas@tuxteam.de wrote:
> > 
> > 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.
> 
> In my case the company laptop connects to the internet via a VPN to the 
> head office in a different country, so it tends to show me results from 
> that country instead, whereas I prefer global results in most cases.
> 
> For searches from my private device I often want results from yet 
> another country.
>  
> > 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.
> 
> With DDG I can easily specify whether I want "local" results and for 
> which country.

Ruoghly yes, but what I was aiming at is slightly more subtle.

To take some egregious example, let's assume you are looking for "base".

If you're thinking molecular biology, what you are looking for [1]
might be very different from what you are looking for as a maths
person [2]. Here[3]'s an overview of how the whole array might look
like.

My point is that Google takes this "burden" off you. A search engine
which doesn't track you can't -- *but* you can compensate for that
by gaining some awareness wrt the context you have to provide to
refine your searches.

My experience (I changed from Google to DDG some years ago) is that
this happens in a feedback loop.

Cheers

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nucleobase
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_(group_theory)
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base

 - t

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