Re: Google vs. DDG (was: Social-media antipathy)
On Tue, 16 Mar 2021 15:02:19 +0100
<tomas@tuxteam.de> wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 16, 2021 at 09:46:53AM -0400, Celejar wrote:
>
> [...]
>
> > You've been making some very interesting points here about the key
> > being context, but I'm not sure I totally buy it. DDG simply doesn't
> > work well for me in certain areas of interest to me. Perhaps I'm simply
> > not sufficiently skilled at disambiguation (my "DDG fu" needs
> > improvement?), but I'm simply much less productive with DDG than with
> > Google. And I do usually access Google without being logged in, with
> > most cookies blocked, NoScript, etc., so in general it has much less
> > (not zero, of course) "context" with regard to me than it does in
> > general.
>
> Hm. Good point. Of course, Google has a lot more resources than DDG.
> My hypothesis is that the advantage from that is rather marginal and
> that they get most of their advantage from search context. Of course,
> I may be wrong (as nearly always ;-)
It's certainly hard to know how the search engine black boxes really
work inside, but it's also possible that all the money / engineers that
Google has to throw at the problem of search actually add value to its
solutions ;)
> Could you give an example where DDG fails and Google succeeds?
I'll keep an eye out. My primary issue was with certain foreign language
content - and not one of the top thirty on this list:
https://www.vistawide.com/languages/top_30_languages.htm
I just checked my browser settings, and I discovered that somehow my
privacy settings have slipped and gotten much laxer. I've just
corrected that, though, so we'll see how things go going forward.
Celejar
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