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Comment by daveguy | Hacker News Reader

Unless they are declared an equal access utility. Stranger things have happened in well regulated markets and this is the EU. In the US and EU "search result neutrality" might happen if there was a monopoly (this is an antitrust allegation).

Personally I don't think the antitrust will stick. It is incredibly easy to change your search engine. They may be required to select a default engine on install of chrome. I switched to duckduckgo.com about a year ago. With duckduckgo, your results aren't as ad laden, they don't track you, they don't randomly insist you turn on intrusive tracking to provide services. I would much rather take an extra step for the 1/100 searches ddg doesn't cut it than see ads above the scroll. Setting a blue/green color scheme in the upper right corner, instead of the default monochrome makes a big difference.

tl;dr: there are options.

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Is the 1/100 actually accurate for you? I occasionally test if DuckDuckGo is even nearly competent for my daily usage and it always falls incredibly short.

For example, sometimes I want to revisit a HN article I read days or hour ago, and often it's just faster to type it into Google than it is to search from the history. Typing in "hn google skews" into (incognito mode) Google brings up this thread and the actual news post as the first two, while DDG just brings up pages and pages of irrelevant stuff.

It is pretty close. Maybe I just use ddg as more of a bookmarks to major sites. I used to think it was worse, but when I changed the color scheme I realized the results weren't that worse, just the way they are presented.

Edit: I did the same search and for the default results Google showed the news (not hackernews specifically) and ddg didn't. But under the news tab in ddg you get similar results.

you want: !hn google skews

Slightly off-topic, but useful as an anecdotal example: This kind of thing is why people prefer Google.

We had search engines with magic symbols prior to Google. People don't like learning magic search language; finding the right shibboleth of qualifiers, excluders, and "near-word" matches feels a lot like doing the search engine's job for it. Most people seem to prefer Google's approach of making a guess at what you want based on past search history.

This doesn't mean DDG can't succeed. But in addition to their selling point of not remembering your search history and having a mechanically-tunable query, they may want to consider offering a search-history "smart" search at some point in the future.

I agree that magic symbols make for worse experiences in general. However, this isn't a matter of using the in-site or not. The same thing gives the same results in a different tab for duckduckgo. DDG just needs to change their regular web results to include the top result or two of the other tabs. Especially when they are highly scored compared to the plain web results.

with ddg set as default, i just type

    !hn google skews results

into my address bar and i get the story

What does the exclamation point do?

I think it forces the search to hacker news

On google you'd type this for the same behavior:

  site:news.ycombinator.com google skews

Except you don't need to, you can just type "hn" because google knows hn means you want the hacker news website results

Duck duck go could provide the same behavior if they displayed the top search result of "!<first word> search" when I type "<first word> search" if it realizes <first word> is one of these popular keywords or a synonym

It doesn't search HN, rather it redirects you to the search at hn.algolia.com. The same works for many other sites. So for example "foo doesn't work !so" redirects to Stack Overflow search for "foo doesn't work" and "Foo !wfi" redirects to Finnish Wikipedia search for "Foo".

Even if the antitrust does stick, I wonder what the practical results would be. If it requires Google to use a different policy for google.uk, google.fr, &c about how they rank their data, that's something they could do. If it requires them to make changes to google.com, then we have a bit of a problem; google.com is the US search 'face', and European law shouldn't restrict what the company can do internationally. Yet customers in Europe can get to google.com just as easily as google.uk, so would there be any real practical benefit to restricting Google's practices here?

Google already shows different results for all their sites, including google.com depending on your location – both because they want to provide more targeted results and due to legal reasons. Here in Germany I can't see a few results deemed harmful to the youth (which is done more or less voluntarily by Google under a negotiated agreement) or news articles removed under the 'right to be forgotten'. The TLD used is not a good indicator of jurisdiction and regulators would never accept such a solution.

The same search on the same site returns different results as soon as I run my traffic through a US network.

It's not about how easy it is to change, it is about the relative market shares of the various offerings.

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