I work for Google, but nowhere near search. I'm just curious whether that's a difference in search bubbles, as I haven't noticed this problem.
To be fair, it’s most pronounced when I’m looking for something I found in the past and then try searching for it in the present. Using custom date ranges help a bit but it’s still biased toward big entertainment and “brands”.
So what it looks like to is that it doesn’t use historical rankings to show results but present rankings.
So let’s say I was looking for something sports related that in 2005 was on a regional site, today that site is relatively obscure so even if you limit date range it would down rank the legacy site even if back then it would have been at the top.
I was very happy when someone announced a project to make a thing that indexes your own search history. I believe that it had a Mozilla affiliation. But it never made it to the point I could use it (it might have worked, but I never found it?), which is a bummer.
How would you upload the content to said elasticsearch instance?
So I keep having to flip it on and off.
I use DDG as main engine and it works for 95% of my search queries, you just have to be a little more exact with what you type. So if I know what I'm looking for, DDG usually gives me the better results. And if it's a general thing, the result are usually the same between Google & DDG (i.e. Who was the 42nd president or whatever). When I specially search for something that is marketed/an ad, then Google yields better results. For example "that shop around the corner". But for that you can just use DDG's bangs: "g! shop around the corner" will redirect you to Google Search with that query.
What's interesting is that a major complaint about Google, besides their data harvesting, has been about how their ranking algorithm operates and how it's abused. Maybe the problem is actually much harder to solve than people here make it out to be...
Of course it is, especially when have your own monetization interests to protect and consider.
https://github.com/benbusby/whoogle-search
My own free, private search engine with Google results.
The one downside for me is that iOS Safari doesn't support custom search providers, so I can't use it on my phone unless I switch to an alternate browser. That said, once iOS 14 lands I can set Firefox as my default browser and use it that way.
> for DDG, but I haven't been able to make it work.
My experience has unfortunately been the same; I often need to click through pages of DDG results to find the results I want, while Google tends to show it within the first 3-5 results. I tried using it for several months as my main search engine (last time I tried was 2019), and I basically just ended up typing `!g` in muscle memory when working.
For now, I'm using StartPage [1] which works quite well:
> You can’t beat Google when it comes to online search.
> So we’re paying them to use their brilliant search
> results in order to remove all trackers and logs. The
> result: The world’s best and most private search engine.
1. Long tail results. When DDG has few results, they completely ignore some of my terms to show me more, but useless results, even when I "force" terms. This is by far my number 1 complaint about them and I can’t fathom why they would do this.
2. Long tail results 2. While in 1) DDG has the proper results but just doesn’t show them, sometimes the result is not available to them. This is pretty rare though.
3. Google products. DDG sucks at giving me documentation (both API and help pages) for them.
I really have no problem with some abundance of affiliate spam, if anything, google is worse at that.