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Comment by manish_gill | Hacker News Reader

>Today it just picks whatever it believes is what you are searching for and wont budge. This is especially annoying when you are just starting out on a search of a topic you know nothing about and need a random factor to get going.

Preciously the reason why I've started using DuckDuckGo as my primary search engine. In my experience, it almost always provides unbiased results.

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Could you give a specific example of a search that you've done on Google that gives you bad results? And that would give you better "unbiased" results on DuckDuckGo? I would like to try and do a side-by-side comparison. Also, what do you mean by "unbiased"? What is the "bias" that Google has? I am trying to find real, concrete examples of all of the complaints in this thead, and I can't really find any.

I'm not the original poster, but it's really annoying to me that Google has changed its default behavior so it returns results that don't necessarily contain all my search terms, often higher on the page than results that do contain all my terms. While this may be helpful to the clueless, I'd love a "yes, I really know what I'm doing" user pref that lets me switch back to the old behavior.

Does this include so-called verbatim search? http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/2011/11/search-using-your-t...

I don't use it but I'm curious to know if the problems you're encountering also happen with this new feature.

Verbatim is nice, but it'd be extra nice if one could set it as default.

I didn't know about verbatim, thanks! As icebraining noted, though, this doesn't fully solve the problem. It still adds an extra step.

search nfc championship game in google. In my results MG Seigler's g+ account is ranked #5. Above the nfl, nytimes, espn, etc. It is a G+ post where he says "going to the nfc championship game with Sarah Lacy" - Keep in mind, I am not friends with him nor is he in my circles, etc. So instead of getting an article from a sports news outlet about the post I get a MG Seigler status update.

http://duckduckgo.com/?q=nfc+championship+game http://www.bing.com/search?q=nfc+championship+game&go=&#...

Weird; I don't get any g+ accounts on the front page, either normally or in an incognito window.

I'm not surprised. It is weird though. He is not in my circles and never has been. Even if he was I don't care to know he is going to the game. :)

fred_nada described it way better than I could in this post earlier in the thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3511595

"Bias" has the obvious meaning here. When searching for a topic on which I am not very well informed, I expect to see informative, authoritative results(which Google /does/ provides), but I don't want references to what my "friends" think on the topic. This becomes worse because in many cases, these "personalised" results are higher than the ones which should be more relevant.

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