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Comment by hyperbovine | Hacker News Reader

Well, Google is the best search engine, and Apple wants the best user experience. This has the feel of getting paid $15b to do something you were going to do anyways.

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Is it the best search engine anymore? Seems like the web is an seo hellhole when I’m looking for real information.

It's the best algorithm I would say, but the site itself has quite horrid design these days.

I've encouraged numerous non-technical friends and family members to switch to DuckDuckGo and they've all gone back to Google within a week.

Although my default is DDG and I am technical, but I still find myself heading back to Google in case DDG disappoints. and that happens frequently (although definitely not always)

That's my experience as well. I'm on DDG for a few months now, and I often resort to using Google when DDG doesn't give me the results I want.

I had the same problem with DDG. I use Bing now. It may not be as ideal as DDG, but it's not Google and I seldom have difficulty finding what I'm searching for.

How much of that is down to them missing the familiar look of the Google results page?

I wish we could do a blind study where users were asked to use a white-labeled search page where the results are served by Google or Bing (or others), but not disclosed. They would be asked to use that engine exclusively for 3 months, and rank their satisfaction with it.

I imagine the results would be similar, but people would still feel a pull towards Google because it's been around for 20 years.

Microsoft did something like this almost a decade ago.

https://techcrunch.com/2012/09/06/bing-it-on-microsoft-claim...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Bing#Bing_It_On

It was marginal, in favor of Bing, though I don't think they did extended experiments with individuals.

I dont understand how people make these claims. For web search, Google is obviously better but for other classes of queries like question answering of structured knowledge or video search, it’s way better.

Ask DuckDuckGo for “Shang chi cast” and compare that with Google.

Or look at how it now returns search results that contain deep links into VIDEOs at the exact time index that is relevant.

(I think this may be done with VideoBERT and if you search for that it will return deep links into a videobert presentation!)

In any case Apple would have along long way to go to match what Google is doing. Search is no longer just TFIDF and 20 blue links.

I really think DDG should at least search for results of "my" country by default. Otherwise it's just too annoying for the regular user. Aside from that, I like DDG more than Google.

The other day I was watching somebody search "Mass Effect Legendary Edition Ultrawide Support" while logged in to Google. They repeatedly got nothing but results for Heroes of the Storm, a completely different game which they had been playing a few days earlier. It was the creepiest thing. HotS is not a very popular game. I guarantee that most people searching "$VIDEO_GAME Ultrawide Support" are not looking for HotS info.

Anyway, on Bing and DDG both the first page of results were what I would have expected. Just like they would have been on Google ten years ago.

That query works well for me on Google.

I don't doubt it. I believe it was a results personalization issue. A history of queries related to one game caused it to include that game in all game-related queries. Maybe exacerbated by the heroes:legendary relationship? Who knows. I don't even recognize the Google algorithm year to year anymore. I don't expect to be able to reproduce anything.

Yes.

I use DDG as my default. The bang syntax is great for quick pivots and for wikipedia-like information. However, digging deep into a topic or doing certain technical searches brings up SEO hell/malicious PDFs worse than Google ever does.

Yes it is. I have tried 6 others and all of them give much much worse results in lots of cases. It won’t matter if you search something popular, but otherwise you notice the difference.

If Apple popped up a list on install of search engines to pick from, 99% of people would pick Google anyway. Google is mostly afraid they will buy a startup and have their own or make the same deal with M$. At $15B of pure bottom line, it is an easy choice for Apple. We can only stop this with taxes on digital advertising. The tracking companies have become too good at fingerprinting. Even if everything was completely random and anonymized from the iPhone side, the carriers/ISPs can fingerprint you so much easier and they'll never stop (probably not even with regulation).

Makes me wonder why they have to pay 15b in the first place. If it’s indeed a no-brainer for apple, the deal could be made with far less money?

I'd imagine with $15B Apple could bootstrap its own search engine.

There are getting 15B to NOT boostrap their search engine. If they bootstrap their own engine, they loose 15B on top of having to pay to build this own engine.

Exactly. Plenty of risks involved - they could just fail like Microsoft did, or if they pull it off it could seriously upset the balance in the ecosystem. Better reach a mutually beneficial agreement with everyone's "favorite" search company instead. Coopetition lol

Not worth it. It's not cheap maintaining a search engine. Apple could throw resources at it but what is the benefit? This is different than the Maps issue where Google refuse to provide new features for iPhone Maps. Apple used OpenStreetMaps (OSM) and created their own. By using OSM, it gave that project more visibility and others an alternative solution to Google Maps. A few years later Google suddenly makes it "not so free" for businesses displaying a map, they better put up a credit card.

Google search is completely gamed, as are Bing and others that rely on the same list of ranking factors. Besides the visual difference between Bing/Google results page, I doubt iPhone users would be able to tell who was serving the results.

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