Hacker News Reader

Comment by GoodIntentions | Hacker News Reader

I don't think it was _terrible_.

It just doesn't give as accurate results as Google in some searches, I assume due to the rafts of information collected about users - a trade off I will make happily.

View on HN

It's not even that they're less accurate, I think for a lot of searches we expect certain results.

If the search engine isn't giving me results I expect isn't that the same if not worse than it being inaccurate? If I type cucumber in google, it knows since I'm always search technical information I probably mean Cucumber BDD and it gives it to me as the second result right after the wikipedia article about the gourd, that's what I expect. DDG, however, having no clue who I am, gives me 8 results about the gourd before finally, below the fold mind you, giving me Cucumber BDD.

It's definitely uncomfortable, I don't know if it's better or worse but for me I couldn't adjust and found myself going through !g until I just switched back.

That's like searching for CakePHP by typing "cake", or for information on french braids by typing "french".

I don't expect my search engine to be staffed by psychics, or people who have gone through my emails and bookshelves. That's the problem, really.

But having a search engine staffed by psychics is almost undeniably more useful.

Certainly more creepy, and not a tradeoff many people would be willing to make, but incredibly useful.

Ah but Google does return me CakePHP if I search cake (and CoffeeScript for some reason, coffee and cake go together I guess I dunno). I don't agree with your example about french braids, at some point you are getting a little too generic.

You're fooling yourself. Google and Startpage return Cucumber BDD as a second result whether you're logged in or not. And in foreign countries such as France, it's even the first result.

Compare to Bing: in France, "cucumber" returns a porn(!) site as the first result (note: I don't visit porn sites or use bing).

DuckDuckGo and Bing simply aren't good enough, but it has nothing to do with whether they respect your privacy.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com