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Comment by Skalman | Hacker News Reader

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.

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