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Comment by FreeFull | Hacker News Reader

I still regularly make searches in duckduckgo (which gets results from Bing) and then find that I have to switch Google to actually find what I'm looking for. The worst thing about this is that Google's results don't seem to be as good as they used to be, and there isn't really any other search engine that matches it yet that I've seen.

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Hmmm but DDG will never be quite as good as Bing or Google simply because DDG doesn't keep any histories or track any other activity. Really good search engines get quality and relevance from all those things that DDG purports NOT to track. It's partly a machine learning problem that I just am very very skeptical DDG can get around.

Exactly. Personally, only a very small fraction of my searches are 'random', about something I've never browsed about before. However, most of my searches are either very predictable (related to stuff I browse, search every day). Or I'm searching for something I've browsed already just didn't bookmark or can't bother to find because I know google will find it.

I don't think this is true unless you are truly locked into your own tiny little world. All your search history really does is help Google serve up ads for you. If that's an improvement, so be it.

Many programming language related terms, movie titles, cities/postal codes, ... All those things can be judged better when the search engine has prior knowledge about you. You don't have to be "truly locked into your own tiny little world" to have previous search be a valuable predictor of what kind of results you expect.

Google keeps track of what sources you're more frequently clicking on and weights results subtly but noticeably. If you look up things on Wikipedia a lot, Wikipedia pages will be ranked higher. If you're more likely to click over to the BBC than to Fox when you read a news source, the BBC will be higher and Fox will be lower.

This reminds me of a relevant quote from my AI Professor's slides: "An algorithm that forgets it's past is doomed to repeat it"

This. Google's updates recently have made the results worse than ever. I wish there was a solid alternative.

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