Re: Google vs. DDG
On Wed, 28 Apr 2021 11:45:59 -0400
Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> wrote:
> > 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).
>
> FWIW, I'm pretty sure that such anectodal evidence is of no importance
> because you can also come up with examples where the situation
> is reversed.
Can you? I'm interested in examples of such cases.
> This is simply because the subset of the internet that is indexed by the
> two search engines is not simply in a subset relation. So the question
> is not whether such things happen, but how often they happen for your
> use-case one way compared to how it happens for your use-case the
> other way.
>
> And of course this question is only relevant as one of the properties
> distinguishing the two search engines. Obviously, the purpose of DDG is
> not to give better search results.
>
> BTW, as far as I know, DDB doesn't do its own indexing but it relies
> internally on Bing, so in the above is explained by the difference
Incorrect (or at least outdated):
DuckDuckGo gets its results from over four hundred sources. These
include hundreds of vertical sources delivering niche Instant Answers,
DuckDuckBot (our crawler) and crowd-sourced sites (like Wikipedia,
stored in our answer indexes). We also of course have more traditional
links in the search results, which we also source from multiple
partners, though most commonly from Bing (and none from Google).
https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/sources/
> between Bing and Google. Technically they could probably just as
> well rely on Google (or on both).
FWIW, Bing doesn't find the Thetis homepage either, so that supports
your point.
Celejar
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