Re: Google vs. DDG
On Wed, 28 Apr 2021 17:07:42 +0100
mick crane <mick.crane@gmail.com> wrote:
> On 2021-04-28 16:05, Celejar wrote:
> > 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
>
> I think Google tailors results according to what they know about you.
> Even if you reset the router to a new IP and clear all the cookies they
> still seem to know. I've wondered if the browser has an identifying
> number.
I can't speak for all browsers, of course, but I'm pretty sure Firefox
has no (public) unique ID:
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1123927
Celejar
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