A lot of these improvements are based on personalization. A common problem for me would be searching for Django related stuff - Duck Duck Go would return a lot of things based on the film, while Google knew that I was interested in the web framework.

I don't really care about personalization if it comes at the cost of my privacy.

Duck gives me the first link to django project, second to the movie wiki article, then another 4 links to django framework stuff.

DDG gives me : movie, framework, movie (2 links), some song on youtube

But the difference is covered literally by just adding 'python' to your query.

The art of crafting query strings seems to have fallen by the wayside. Almost any query I do involves giving topics or categories first, followed by more qualifiers to nail it down more, usually followed by double-quoting the terms that the search engine seemingly ignores in the query string.

All the code to find like terms and phrases and whatnot is great and not privacy threatening, but I wish the search giants would stop trying to guess my motivations and just present me with the most relevant results based on what I asked for, and not what it thinks I was probably asking for.

Or by adding g!

The point is that the personalization is somewhat useful, and relying on others input to improve search isn't necessarily going to improve things for a particular user.

`django` vs `django python` in search. Specificity makes a big difference in DDG results.

…which is precisely the point the parent comment is making. Google doesn’t need you to be specific because it already knows how to do that for you, using the information they have on you.

Oh weird. My experience isn't like that. In fact, sometimes Google's guessing game turns up the oddest results where DDG works a little more straight-forward. (but I digress)

I do part-time work on a Django app, doing major work only once a year. It's creepy as, but I do find the Google results that are tagged "you've been to this page X times" shamefully useful.

Oddly enough, DDG rather frequently presents me my own postings in otherwise unqualified SERPs 9notmentioning my username/alias or sites).

I'm a fairly prolific. poster and use DDG search heavily. Be the SERP you want to see in the world?

I'd recommend just switching to StartPage. Instead of proxying a Bing/Yahoo search result as DDG does, it uses Google under the hood, which has been giving me much better results even without the personalization.

Game theory suggests that the designers of said services wouldn’t have any incentive to give you that control.

The negative feedback here and elsewhere provides exactly that incentive, which is why less than 24 hours after your comment, they've announced that they are ending the practice entirely.

An interesting effect of that would be that algorithms and result would get tuned more and more towards other users, those who give away their data.

The same as to why drugs or so many other things are tuned towards men (large body of research and easy to grab for tests) vs women (less historical interest, tricky to research, especially anything that can affect the reproductive functions)

I think it's flawed for a different reason: you have no idea if the 'off' switch is actually turning off what you think it is in these proprietary systems (e.g. Apple's 'wifi off' fiasco).

If you do not want Apple/Google/Amazon/whatever listening to you, do not use their services/products.