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Comment by therealmarv | Hacker News Reader

It's somehow funny to see that Bing search results are so successful when packaged with privacy in mind into DuckDuckGo. I don't like bing search results, especially for Europe. They are just bad for many local things. The only other search engine beside Google which is interesting and surprising for me is maybe Yandex. It's also not as good as Google in (most of) Europe but it's interesting to see that many things are not censored away in comparison to Bing and Google (political correctness, copyright, nsfw etc. etc.). I'm happy there is an alternative with different culture and jurisdiction.

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> It's somehow funny to see that Bing search results are so successful when packaged with privacy in mind into DuckDuckGo.

I'm kind of ambivalent about the privacy of DDG vs Bing (maybe I shouldn't be, but since I use DDG anyway, I haven't done the research) - I simply prefer the UI of DDG over Bing.

> I don't like bing search results, especially for Europe. They are just bad for many local things.

I wish Google was less aggressively local. I pretty regularly search for things on Google where I'm looking for the global/most well-known instance, and Google directs me to weird local results that I've never heard of and don't care about.

I live in Thailand and always get the Thai links first. Hate it because can't read Thai.

Shouldn't that change when you switch your region to "all regions" at the top of any results page?

That's my assumption at least, since my country isn't available as a region.

I'm in a similar situation, so I wrote a small extension that adds a new Google Search provider to the browser with US locale.

https://github.com/dessant/search-google-us

You could also search by visiting Google using this URL: https://www.google.com?gl=us&hl=en&gws_rd=cr

Oh that is another issue on Google. The local bubble is sometimes too much in Google and hard to escape. The problem is most people don't realize that!

I moved between countries in the recent years and also changed language in the OS from German to English (seems that is one switch of many) and suddenly many search results changed.

> but it's interesting to see that many things are not censored away in comparison to Bing and Google (political correctness, copyright, nsfw etc. etc.).

I am not aware that there is a censorship of things that are deemed 'politically incorrect' by either bing or google, and Yandex does comply with European copyright law and other EU legislation like the right-to-be-forgotten.

There are differences in search results for sure. Political correctness is also a very broad field. Depending on topic it is sometimes biased and even filtered (e.g. nsfw content) by Google/Bing or search results in Google are too much SEO hacked in comparison to Yandex on first pages. I've never analysed in deep and don't have numbers but for some searches it is worth to check also Yandex.

But to be fair Google is often better... it depends on the topic you search for.

It became increasingly hard to find EPUBs with DDG or Google.

Is it really? Looking for Calibre libraries is basically considered meme-level effort in places like /r/opendirectories ...

Just because it's in /r/opendirectories doesn't mean it's in google or on the first pages.

What I meant is, the sub is full of cut-and-paste suggestions on how to make google searches for that sort of thing, because it really is trivial. This stuff is in google. Maybe it's de-emphasized by algos, but it's definitely there.

I can recommend to just use a NZB search engine for it (during Black Friday deals you can get a for life account for 10-30 EUR). Combined with a Usenet block server (also available cheap during sales), this should not cost you much data or money. And you can use it for Sonarr/Radarr as well, if you want to burn some more data.

Speaking of searching, does Qwant support dorks (no pun intended)?

As an illusory example only, and definitely not as an endorsement, and chosen only because it is the extremes of acceptable speach that are most likely to be censured; consider these search results for "Daily Stormer"

https://www.google.com/search?q=daily+stormer&oq=daily+storm...

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=daily+stormer

DDG provides the link to the site as their first result; Google provides links to information about the site.

Again, I am not endorsing the site; it is simply an obvious example of search result differentiation between DDG and Google.

A stark difference. Is Google on the record about what their view is on this sort of thing?

I suppose the two scenarios that leap to mind are (1) Google is social engineering or (2) they have good reason to believe that nobody searching for the Daily Stormer actually wants to see the website. It'd be interesting to know if there is a 3rd.

I wonder if the rank is based on which options are clicked the most... I wouldn't put it past google to keep track of which link is clicked the most for each search and use that to 'improve the links'

It could be a massive conspiracy to keep people from seeing some third rate website.

You notice that the results aren't direct links, but redirects through Google first? That seems to support your first alternative.

They don't need to reroute through a url to do tracking, they could do that in JS. The rerouting probably is used for tracking but it also serves the purpose of flushing your search terms out of the referer header.

Maybe they have an AI that ingests thinkpieces and twitter feeds lambasting them for insufficient censorship, and based on the strength of sentiment and number of retweets apply additional censorship to the specific examples listed, with the cost function being something like f(likelihood_of_negative_public_opinion) + g(impact_on_search_quality).

If I were to do this I'd allow penalized results to resurface from time to time, and leave it up if nobody tweets too hard.

Google knows that when I type 'rails' into their search box I mean Ruby on Rails and gives me relevant results, instead of railroad tracks or hand rails.

It's not a big leap to think they'd do that globally for extreme results like DS where most people want to know about them and not actually visit the site.

It's a website. Shouldn't your first stop be visiting the site itself to form your own opinion?

Yes but in many countries this can get you into legal trouble.

You still can, obviously.

It's simply more probable that I would prefer a site that contains expert analysis of a topic/subject first.

So at what point will Google look at your search history and decide that you are looking for racism when you search for a racist term?

I don’t think anyone on here will admit if it’s happening to them, but if the answer is never then that means Google is suppressing the “best” search results due to political reasons.

For a less charged example, Google won’t show pornography as the first result for a fetish term, ever. It will always show a clean page with Wikipedia as the first result regardless of safe search.

How do you even get it to show non safe for work results?

> decide that you are looking for racism

Given that there are definitely people that I have personally met that keep complaining "they keep getting racist results" in Google and Youtube, I'm guessing we are already there. As for how they build up this profile, I'm sure the people that actually know aren't allowed to tell us.

I know that website has been heavily censored, so it's possible there is fool play here, but it's also possible that it's simply different algorithms.

If Google weighs links to a certain page, it's not a stretch to imagine that fewer websites would directly link to that particular website, and refer to its name instead. But maybe Bing has some rule that gives priority to the domain name.

this is why https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2017/08/1...

The first thing I see on DDG is the Wikipedia page describing their site. They must be reading this.

Well there's a few things in here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_by_Google

Am a staunch gun-control type, but there certainly has been evidence of google censoring political causes they disagree with. This is not the way forward. It's incredibly hard to have a discussion with someone who clearly has a point about the masses being dictated what they see/think by a Google search. These sort of things do not advance civil discourse and only serve to inflame it in an "us against them" mentality.

When I was in Russia, I was constantly surprised by the quality of Yandex's services. Their map data was far superior to Google Maps and their cab app felt better than Uber.

> Their map data was far superior to Google Maps and their cab app felt better than Uber.

How?

Haven't been to Russia or used Yandex, but I'd guess that the Russian Govt/Agencies give more accurate/up-to-date data to a Russian company instead of Google? This and a local presence to understand local nuances etc.

Google is capable of providing inferior service all on its own, no shady stuff required.

E.g. http://www.framecompare.com/image-compare/screenshotcomparis...

> It's somehow funny to see that Bing search results are so successful when packaged with privacy in mind

My understanding is that Bing only provides the index, not the search result

Do you have an objective (or at least intersubjective) measure for search result quality which could provide some evidence for your claim?

Right now you are grounding on anecdotal evidence which is generally accepted to be a quite weak form of argument.

I am asking out if interest because I am a happy user of ddg and wonder what I am missing out on? Are my needs so different from other users that I don’t have the issue that you are describing at all? Are you sure it’s not just a “this is slightly different so it must be worse” type situation?

Notice that there are entirely no NSFW images on DDG. This is a big hole right where content should be, and basically voids all claims to anti-censorship street cred.

I assume you’ve got Safe Search turned on? There’s three options: on (default), moderate or off.

There was a period some time ago when image searches are always SFW even with safe search off. I guess this is no longer the case (checked just now).

If anything, DDG is a bit too quick to suggest NSFW results if you don't have the NSFW filter on max.

Same for Google in comparison to Yandex. This is a kind of censorship in my opinion and as a full grown up adult it's my decision what I want to see.

I suffer through DDG to avoid Google, but it's not pretty. Especially for terms with ambiguous meaning, DDG just performs way worse than Google.

For example, the tensorflow terminology for reducing dimensionality is "squeeze" and the scipy Gaussian distributing is called "normal".

A DDG query for "python squeeze normal" shows me stuff about the animal. Google correctly infers that I want programming advice.

I also really don't get why when I search for a TensorFlow function name, DDG will show me random pages with code examples instead of the official manual page for that function, which has my exact search query as meta title and as top h1.

Just tried it in DDG the top 3 results for ‘python squeeze normal’ were for something called numpty.squeeze()

A DDG query for "python squeeze normal" shows me (in order):

https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/numpy-squeeze-in-python/

https://docs.scipy.org/doc/numpy-1.15.1/reference/generated/...

https://docs.scipy.org/doc/numpy/reference/generated/numpy.s...

https://docs.scipy.org/doc/numpy-1.13.0/reference/generated/...

https://www.tutorialspoint.com/numpy/numpy_squeeze.htm

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/34990652/why-do-we-need-...

https://www.tensorflow.org/api_docs/python/tf/squeeze

https://pytorch.org/docs/stable/torch.html

https://docs.scipy.org/doc/scipy/reference/generated/scipy.s...

https://www.programcreek.com/python/example/13561/numpy.sque...

Litterally nothing on the first results about the animal.

I have a different problem. When searching for stackoverflow style answers DDG almost always shows years old questions that no longer apply

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