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

[Celejar <celejar@gmail.com>]

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 ;-)
> 
> Could you give an example where DDG fails and Google succeeds?

Here's a sort of example I just ran into. When trying to find
information about Thetis hardware security keys, DDG simply couldn't
find the company's website: searching DDG for "thetis key" turns up (in
the first page of hits) a bunch of Amazon listings, and a bunch of
reviews of, and articles about, security keys that mention Thetis.
Searching for the same thing on Google, OTOH, returns the company's
website (https://thetis.io) as the first hit (along with a convenient
list of pages on the site).

At least, this is what I get here. Who knows what you'll see ...

Celejar