I now use duckduckgo as default search engine and my experience is mixed.
The problem with google is that sometime you search for something new and then you see the bubble very clearly, which applies non only to search but also to youtube (maybe even more).
The problem with duckduckgo is that you are searching for something specific or something you saw months ago and don't remember well then google's index and tracking can be useful.
At this point I don't treat search engines as some sort of dichotomy (Google or DDG or Edge, etc). Rather, I try to use them as a nice blend : Google for when I'm throwing darts at the dartboard and have no idea what I'm looking for, DDG for when I know exactly what I'm looking for (to the point where I can type in the url), so on and so forth.
There's absolutely nothing wrong with using multiple search platforms. Obviously Google is great for when you don't really quite know what you're looking for, but if I want to read Deadspin, typing "deadspin.com" into Google will be the exact same experience on DDG.
Seeing as how most people visit the same websites over and over again, it doesn't make since to just have 1 single search engine (e.g., a Google).
Startpage is basic'ly Google results, but the filter bubble is "all Startpage users". Also brings back some of the search operators that Google disabled.
Qwant is a European search engine that brags about privacy, but the results are hit-and-miss for me so far...haven't used it much.
I remember when Google blew us away with Page Rank (goodbye Alta Vista!), but in the last few years Google has gotten so good on providing entry-level information that it's useless for finding specifics, so I expect the next Big Thing in search to come along, though I have no idea how far out it is.
The other annoyance is the lack of Wikipedia results. For a general topic, I like to have a few pages to chooses from about the topic in addition to Wikipedia. Rarely are Wikipedia results in my organic listing unless I specifically add wiki or Wikipedia.
By the way, this[0] is how to search your query.
[0]: https://www.google.com/search?q=ways+to+make+%22nan%22+-%22n...
Fair enough, so click on the Search Instead and it says "Did you mean: ways to make naan" and then shows a bunch of links about breadmaking anyways.
Disclaimer: didn't test it, but I often use this trick to force G to use some word, and to use it exactly as written.
Also, the DDG devs are certainly lurking on this thread, and can fix the class of queries in question.
> In fact, 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 a variety of partners, including Oath (formerly Yahoo) and Bing.
What this means is that they use 400 sources for things like Instant Answers and other widgets but Yahoo and Bing for all their organic search results.
In the name of optimizing for 'engagement', my youtube recs are full of politically polarized clickbait. They're not merely reinforcing my existing beliefs, they're actively trying to push me into a bubble.
At least facebook has the excuse of actual people pushing this stuff.
My other favorite example is Netflix and WWII docs/movies. Watch just one and forever onward they will be half your recommendations.
In your vegetarian example, what if 51% of people were vegetarian in an area, and the general population was making decisions off these "localized" search results. We would likely expect that this would influence the minority to the tastes of the majority.
This might be fine for something like vegetarianism, but what about other topics? Should your search results be more racist because you live around a lot of racists? This is best case.
I have tangentially worked with groups that specifically utilize this to provide public opinion sway and consumer capture for their clients.
Also, search engines can play with inconsistent ranking of results to see how click-throughs might be affected. For example, if moving a link from first to third in the result list has no effect (people continue clicking on the same link even though it's now third instead of first), then it's a pretty strong signal that the link should continue to be ranked first in future results. This experimentation of search results is even more important the more uncommon a search is because there is less confidence in the current ranking until there is more activity to base the ranking on.
Just as stores shift around product placement (front of the store, back of the store, etc), a search engine is free to shift around search results. Keep in mind that product producers might pay for better in-store product placement too, just as customers pay search engines for ad placement in search results.
It is "useful" for me to be on the phone with someone in Cleveland and describe how to find something on the Web, expecting that they can follow a similar set of steps at a similar time and get a similar result.
A (sort-of-)deterministic Web can be good and useful. It is a very strong statement of preference and exercise of power to declare that "useful" results must be meaningfully different based on the characteristics of the individual searching.
For whom is that exercise of power most beneficial? I would argue that a rapidly shifting, slippery, personally-dependent presentation of the world's information is extremely useful as a tool of control, but gives only occasional and relatively marginal benefit to individual searchers.
The 2016 US election is a big case in point. Personalizing information delivery, when coupled with asymmetric processing power and data availability, lets you have situations where an atomized polity winds up seeing what suits each individual, but with a radically degraded ability to form collective truths or consensus.
The definition of "useful" is an exercise of power.
I feel more and more these ideas of optimizing for 95% of the use cases give good result on paper but shitty lives for the 5% left.
I understand the good intentions behind that calculation, because making life easier for a huge majority of people should be a good thing.
But for instance boosting local results is one of the way you’ll make people often searching for foreign information miserable. Searching for remote places will most of time be met by random local businesses first. Web based international content will be outranked by local content, and your local newspaper bitching about heat waves when it’s just summer will outrank by far rock bands and manga titles.
Sometimes that’s the wanted behaviors, but for instance currently Google already works with strong preference for localised search, and that’s one of the things that pushed me to DDG.
In a way if Google wasn’t so massively successful I’d root for them to better serve mainstream searches. But in the position they are now I think it’s harder to say they should just care about the vast majority of people. Even 1% of their userbase is an incredibly huge number.
But what I would also like is a way to search without using my context, as sometimes I want results that aren't related to my location etc.
The article runs through the analysis you propose, and (within the limitations of the study) show that Google does apply very similar filter bubbling logged out in incognito mode vs logged in.
In fact in “anonymous” mode, the results are much more similar to the same person’s “logged in” mode than to other randomly chosen people’s logged in or logged out results.
Should there not be an opt-out option though?
I don't mean this in a snippy way, but truly. If it's that bothersome, why not try something else? It seems that most people instead think that they have the privilege to change the product to their desires.
Because the "something else" lacks other features. Are you suggesting that users shouldn't have "the privilege" to suggest new features or discuss already existing features?
For the sake of education and not being evil (or "doing the right thing"), it would be nice to be able to view results from other typical profiles' points of view.
And I've been using DDG for a bit now and have found it perfectly useable.
That's great that you use DDG and find it useful! If Google was a true monopoly, as the current media blitz would have you believe, then you would not have been able to so easily switch to DDG (or Bing, or...).
I can't say with confidence how far along Google is toward the threshold of "Monopoly" and have yet to hear an analysis that I would consider definitive in any way.
This is shady, at best. It probably contributes to the US’ current political instability (different propaganda / news in red states), and is also probably an unauthorized use of personal information in places like Europe that have laws about such things.
The only reason for the biased localized results is due to corporate pressure from media and news industries.
Also, you are conflating localized and unbiased results with spam and scam. Nobody is saying google shouldn't remove scams and spam. People are just saying they want unbiased results.
That's contrary to everything I know about Google's history, including the origins of Backrub and PageRank. Please provide citations in your comment.
> Please don't impute astroturfing or shillage. That degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about it, email us and we'll look at the data.
We use Google because the results are useful, not because they are "unbiased". Ranking implies some sort of "bias" and is what makes search results generally useful. We don't want a search engine that does nothing clever and just spits back unranked results. Otherwise, we would be inundated with results containing credit card scams, porn, Bitcoin scams, Viagra ads, etc, when we search for... pretty much anything.
In privacy (incognito and not logged in) mode, all of the above still applies. What would NOT apply is something like: You are a vegetarian and suddenly all of your restaurant searches rank vegetarian restaurants higher in results while in privacy mode. Unless, of course, for some reason people in your general location happen to mostly eat vegetarian.
In any case, if people don't like it, stop using Google and go use some other search engine; there is absolutely nothing holding you back. More times than not, I think people will switch back to Google because they find the results more useful, even in privacy mode.