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Comment by eterm | Hacker News Reader

I have a colleague who uses DDG but they frequently have to use !g to find relevant stack-overflow answers. It's not clear whether DDG is simply ranking them lower than they ought to be or if it's just google's personalisation algorithm understanding which SO answers are relevant to our job / stack.

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You can always open an incognito window to see if it's personalization affecting Googles results.

Surprisingly, I find the only substantial signal personalization uses is on your current location, and on results you have clicked before.

Search for 'pizza' for example, and the results will be all companies that are in your country, even if you search on Google.com.

Is there a way to verify that a search result set is “unpersonalized?” I wouldn’t put it past Google to be able to track you even into an incognito window.

Even the most paranoid don't think it's profitable for Google to track you through Tor, even if they've found some exploitable weakness. Try your search via Tor. Browser fingerprinting will get them little distinguishing information beyond what they get knowing you're coming from a Tor exit node.

DDG has a specific SO bang, so going via google is a clue that your colleague may be poor at basic searching and not understand the tools which they use.

That's rude and that's not it, it's the fact that google knows which SO questions are relevant.

If valid criticism is rude, we're all doomed here on HN. The parents point is valid. If you don't like it, that's fine, but rude it was not. Google doesn't know anything more than DDG, so you're just plain old wrong on that argument.

> your colleague may be poor at basic searching and not understand the tools which they use

I don't know about you, but this is pretty rude.

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