I followed your advice, turned on VPN, went private browsing and searched for "elm list".
On DDG the first result was elm-lang homepage but the second was a tutorial on lists in Elm. Down the page I also saw a wikipedia entry for a list of elm trees. Seems ok overall to me.
Then I tried the same thing with Google and first I was stopped by captcha and had to spend a minute clicking hydrants and traffic lights. Then I got a whole page of results about various programming discussions on lists in Elm, but nothing in the entire page about the trees. That does not seem right, I think regular person would be much more likely to search for a tree, not for an obscure programming language.
Verdict: I found DDG results better as in more relevant for general population while still surfacing the programming ones. Also no hydrants on DDG.
Re:DuckDuckGo is growing fast
by joshuamorton on Thursday September 17, 2020 @03:07PM
(#24508649)
Would someone searching for the trees search "elm list" or "list of elms"?
Frankly, when I compare my logged-in, static-IP Google results to anonymous queries, I can see that the degree of "personalization" that people claim is vastly overstated; not much seems to change.
It just seems like wishful thinking when the obvious reality is that Google is just more advanced in its ability to semanticize input.
DDG "rust cargo" gives me images and results for cargo ships.