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Comment by jinushaun | Hacker News Reader

But the problem is that Google works so well because it tracks me! Search is local and contextual.

Literally the only "local" searches I do are on Google Maps, after I have navigated to the place I'm interested in. I have absolutely no use for a search engine that tries to cram local results down my throat. If I want local, I'll ask for local. Explicit is better than implicit.

import this

I know I'm probably an odd user out, but I find myself annoyed more often than not that Google tries to make every query I have return local results. I agree with Skalman that I can add a location if I want to search locally.

I feel about the same. I recently switched back over to DDG (and Firefox). I'm happier with their privacy conscience philosophy (even if turns out moot because of it's location) and will give it my search queries going forward. Ducking it works for me. A Googleopoly display of local results and products is not always beneficial for me. I agree that adding location in the query is easy enough.

Not my searches. If I need something location sensitive, I have no problem adding the location in the query.

While I have myself made the decision to start using DDG and abandon Google for these very privacy issues, I will voice another devil's advocate argument that there's another big plus to personalization (and data tracking): If I search "go" or some equally generic keyword which has one technical meaning besides a host of other ones, Google will actually be pretty smart about giving me results that I'm after, thus saving me lots of time.

Searching for these sorts of things is the one thing I still use Google for. Even when I'm not logged in, Google still does a better job with somewhat ambiguous queries. That being said, it does a better job for me. When I search for "go" I'm looking for the programming language, not the game(s). Someone else might feel differently.

As an aside, whenever a new search engine comes out, or there is an update to an existing one (Bing, mostly), the test I always use is to search for "python" with no other search terms. If the results are dominated by articles about the animal (as was the case with Cuil a few years back) then the search engine and its weighting choices probably isn't a good fit for me, personally.

Right, that's the point.

Google will increasingly give you better results the more you use it because of data-tracking and search personalization.

But I'm talking about using Google anonymously, incognito. Sure, they might guess who I am from my IP address or font list or something weirder, so who knows. But assuming they don't know who I am, or at least act like they don't know who I am, Google still works better for certain types of query. I think this has to do with the way the software itself is tuned, or perhaps what their other customers search for.

I've always hated the personalization Google does, because I don't want local results.

Every search engine suffers from a particular paradox which I will describe, but Google suffers from it twofold by virtue its contextualized searches. The paradox is simply this: it fundamentally cannot, for instance, offer a meaningful search on something like "cheap car insurance." It can only tell you who the best advertisers are. If the cheapest company has little to no advertising budget, you'll never find them on Google. Your best bet will be to find them through a secondary insurance search engine which, by virtue of its massive advertising budget, does show up on Google.

I don't know if DuckDuckGo solves this problem. It probably doesn't because the problem is driven by keyword searches and only exacerbated rather than created by advertising-centric filtering. I'm not even sure it can be solved. It's something I'd like to see tackled, though.

Don't worry, you can use DDG and still be tracked by Goolge! With content of some sort loaded from Google's servers on around 80% of all sites, this mostly happens without you doing anything. But if you're really concerned, just use Chrome and/or set your name servers to 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4.

Hmm, interesting point about the Google DNS servers. I'm not too familiar with DNS servers; anyone can give more details on how they could be used to track people? Does a DNS request contain enough information to allow for the kind of thing?

DNS is a service that resolves a domain name to a specific IP address that handles requests for that domain, and is transparently invoked when visiting websites and other services.

See Google's FAQ: https://developers.google.com/speed/public-dns/faq#privacy

That's a very well written FAQ.

Makes me feel much better about using their DNS.

Just piecing together known data here but...

My IP address requests a particular site form DNS, in theory that request could be recorded. Even if Google doesn't know that I'm at that IP (which they could have gotten from some other site I'm logged into (say Amazon)) they know that my particular ip address has requested certain sites. They can then serve ads to that IP based on context

it is safe to assume that Google record IP information (among other things) from Google Adsense and Google Analytics... which you probably visit at least one site that use one or the other at least once a day..

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Name_server

For "local", it seems quite feasible to add optional location personalization.

For context, I find DDG's top-of-the-results-page "did you mean this foo or that foo" fairly reasonable most of the time.

Agreed -- I love the fact that it just works. However their social experiment with integrating Google+ and search has always been a lousy experience for me.

personalized searches is the second thing that I hate most about Google search ... the first being not being able to use the "+" and "-" operators... thanks to Google+ (it happened at the same time)

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