It seems "ad blending" made a final step towards morphing into organic results. It was distinct background first, ads count limited, then it went further and further and now it's just a favicon saying 'Ad' which distinguish sponsored content from the organic.
I've also noticed recently that the first search result page is absolutely filled with nonsense: "People also ask" "Refined by Brand" Map results, Sponsered banner etc. I did a search recently where there were only 3 actual results on the first page, the rest were peripheral items.
It's such a mess. Unfortunately no matter how many times I try to switch to DDG, the results just don't hold up. Particularly for localised results.
The sad reality is, I am having trouble discovering new content online even if I have a fairly specific search query. I am fed a list of the same websites ad nauseam.
I can't find much in regards to in-depth discussions, interesting blogs, or thought-provoking material. The worst part is, for communities that do provide this content, secrecy is a feature not a bug.
However, you have to think of privacy and consumer hostile behavior as a continuum. Even though I don't trust Startpage as a private search engine, I also don't trust Google as a private search engine. The question is, "is Startpage still better than Google?"
I think it is. I think if you're in the position of saying, "I can't use DDG, I get the privacy issues, I get the monopoly issues, but I just don't like their results", then Startpage is still going to be a pretty big step up in privacy over Google search. Startpage is still going to be a good way to fragment your data so one company doesn't know everything about you. It's still going to be a good way of getting around the worst user-hostile UI changes to blend ads into search results.
If you disable Javascript and run a Google search, every single link you click on gets wrapped in a Google URL to record that click -- there is no way around that without some kind of browser extension. If you disable Javascript and run a Startpage search, you get direct links to the website.
So I heavily encourage people in your position to use Startpage if the alternative is continuing to use Google Search directly.
Not following the logic there. How is DuckDuckGo not an (entirely) advertising company? Do they make money off anything else other than ads and injecting affiliate links?
DuckDuckGo and Startpage always made money with advertising. The problem with Startpage's acquisition is the introduction of System1/Privacy One, which is not just focused on advertising, but on advertising based on consumer intent/interested, calculated by large-scale collection of consumer data.[0]
> “In our business,” Blend adds, “if we can gather as much data as possible, give it off to our engineers and data scientists, and then manage the two effectively, the business can quickly scale.”
Again, even though I don't trust System 1/Privacy One as much as I trust DuckDuckGo, I do still trust them more than Google.
[0]: https://csq.com/2018/01/system-1-silicon-beach-sleeping-gian...
So basically what you are saying is "I trust that Weinberg & co are immune to that kind of pressure" or that their primary motives are altruistic in nature and will always stay such.
For me personally that is a hard sell. The elephant in the room is advertising based business models for search engines, and any company adopting it will be tempted to follow the path of Google if such opportunity is presented to it.
No, not at all. I trust that right now Weinberg & co are less likely to be actively caving to that pressure or actively exploiting my information.
Trust is always a moving target, but right now I know that Google logs literally everything I click on associated to an IP address, and uses that for targeted ads. As far as I know, Startpage doesn't currently do that, though I expect them to get more aggressive about data in the future. DuckDuckGo (most likely) also doesn't do that, and I expect it to take them some time and have additional warning signs before they start doing it.
The link wrapping is a good example of something measurable that matters at this moment. You can use Startpage without Javascript and with a few browser-level features toggled and be pretty certain that the actual link you click on will be impossible for them to log. With Google search, today, there's no way to do that.
I switched to DDG a few months ago, and quite frankly I can probably count the number of times I've needed to switch to Google on one hand, and nearly every time it's been related to looking up directions via web search and expecting Google Maps to open up. DDG and Bing are largely good enough already for standard web search. The standard has probably been there for a while, so I would argue that web search is largely down to experience right now - and DDG/Bing have Google beat here.
With that being said, I doubt the average person has even heard of DDG, and probably never uses Bing unless it's set up by default. If there was ever a time to market Bing and DDG as viable Google alternatives to the public, it's now.
I've tried to steer most of my searching away from Google. (Of course, that's easy if you're already using a search keyword to skip the part where you go to the search engine's home page first.)
Google no longer does that! because they switched to dedicated feature for just this very purpose :D https://www.w3schools.com/tags/att_a_ping.asp
"When the user clicks on the hyperlink, the ping attribute will send a short HTTP POST request to the specified URL.
This attribute is useful for monitoring/tracking."
Was introduced into HTML5 drafts as early as 2005, removed by 2010 due to obvious user spying connotations. Chrome and Safari fully support it, uBlock Origin strips it automatically (but wont be able to after manifest v3 goes thru).
So what's going on, is "AND" just treated as another keyword now? Lame.
And on top of that you can't find specific information on actual data if it anyway correlates to businesses that advertise. It's gotten painfully difficult to research markets that I'm casually interested in (e.g. tonight I wanted to compare a few cities by how many hotels they had - this is impossible on google and duck duck go with simple queries).
They really aren't doing a great job of cataloging data and making it useful to anyone but advertisers.
Bing is now easier to use.
Note: I scrolled past the top result and twitter to show you the listed results.
let resultLinks = e ? e.querySelectorAll('.r>a:not([class])') : document.querySelectorAll('div#search .r>a:not([class])');
for (let link of resultLinks)
{
//LC20lb yWc32e iUh30 B6fmyf
link.removeAttribute("ping");
link.querySelector('a>div>cite.iUh30').innerText = link.querySelector('a>.LC20lb').innerText;
let div = document.createElement('span');
div.innerText = link.href;
div.className = 'LC20lb';
link.querySelector('a>.LC20lb').parentNode.insertBefore(div, link.querySelector('a>.LC20lb').nextSibling);
link.querySelector('a>.LC20lb').parentNode.removeChild(link.querySelector('a>.LC20lb'));
}