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I documented (a subset of) my experience in [1]. I don't think any of the Google victories there can be considered to be because of personalization.

[1]: https://www.arnavion.dev/blog/2020-12-05-ddg-vs-google/

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Thank you for documenting it so thoroughly. My experience totally agrees with this. DDG often returns a lot of irrelevant results and they are not irrelevant because they're not personalised to me, but because they do not include terms in my query - even when those terms are in quotes! I simply cannot tell DDG: "unless that exact string is in the page I don't want to see this result"! (To be fair, I cannot tell Google that, either, but it still returns better results.)

Today's example: I searched for

> linux nic bonding "bond-mode"

The second result is https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterp... which does not include the string "bond-mode" (nor "bond mode").

Very informative write-up.

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