Google's dominance is almost entirely due to the fact that its by far the best at search. I use ddg, but I use google search via !g about 25-50% of the time after a failed attempts. And 9 times out of 10 Google gives me exactly what I'm looking for.
For instance:
"the actor that plays the news guy in spiderman"
ddg:
Tom Holland (side bar)
Spider-Man Homecoming (imdb)
Tom Holland (wiki)
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (imdb)
google:
Jonathan Kimble Simmons (splash, link to wiki)
J. Jonah Jameson (wiki)
J. K. Simmons (wiki)
The google result is exactly what I want. And the results were made in incognito mode so Google wasn't able to cheat with privileged information about me as a user.
At the end of the day, most people care about the product. I'm only willing to sacrifice so much to satisfy the ideal that there should be less concentration. Make a better search engine but trying to pull at the heart-strings of users about how Google is an empire and too powerful just won't work and it undermines your product and mission.
When DDG doesn't yield the results I'm looking for, I will frequently try Google, but more and more I find that if DuckDuckGo can't find the results that I want, then neither can Google. What Google can do however, is annoy me with results that it knows to be wrong, because it is excluded the most specific part of my query. Google will remove the bit that absolutely had to be in the query, to get more hits on the majority of the remaining words.
In the end, I think most people could use either Google, Bing or DuckDuckGo and be happy with the results. It's just that we're stuck on "Google is the best search engine", and while that may be true in some technical sense, many of the other search engines are just as good for most of us.
For the "most of us" point, keep in mind that Google has a superior international infrastructure. At least in Finland, DuckDuckGo's loading time for search results is about 2 seconds compared to Google's <0.5s. This makes using ddg surprisingly annoying.
I’ve found the opposite. For the last year, I have to resort to Google more and more often. DDG was on par with Google when I started using it a couple years ago, but it has managed to get worse and worse over time. Note that I’m specifically claiming DDG’s performance has degraded; not just that it has remained the same while Google’s has improved.
> And the results were made in incognito mode so Google wasn't able to cheat with privileged information about me as a user.
that's not what Incognito mode does. It prevents your search from being included in the browsing history and doesn't send cookies from active sessions, but that's about it. Google still knows this is you being unauthenticated. You don't need to be logged into google to be reliably targeted with ads that fit your profile.
This comment and everything downstream from it are a distraction from their point: Run their query from your machine or from Tor and you'll see the same results in Google and lack of results in DDG.
Another example is a query for "elm dict". DDG has little idea what you're looking for while Google links you directly to the docs of Elm's Dict data-structure.
Why do you think Google Search still knows who you are when you search in Incognito mode? (Or, in Firefox, if you open a private browsing window.) How would it know?
There are advertising companies that use fingerprinting for ad targeting, but Google doesn't.
(Disclosure: I work at Google on ads, speaking only for myself)
Anyhow, based on what I've seen, when you go into incognito mode it definitely doesn't use your profile when you go to Google services. Search results, suggestions, etc... are different. In fact, one of the use cases for incognito is using a different Google profile on a someone else's or a public computer. Keeping contextual search results from the 'main' profile logged into the browser would be counterproductive...
It is really good when you search for vague terms, but it seems to come at the cost of ruining precision technical search.
Google also censors some results in controversial categories, where Bing/Yahoo return what I am looking for. I don't trust a search engine that censors entire categories of results.
What kind of technical queries are you running?
I just searched for "HLCD0438 datasheet" on Google and DDG.
I think it is a great example of very precise, and very techinical query.
DDG's first page was only fake sites and wrong answers.
Google gave me the right answer right away (in the positions 2 and 3)
"free energy device" also produces really crappy results compared to what it was.
It only seems like things argued not to exist may or must be scrubbed from seach results. Astrology wasn't scrubed nor was any religion. Everything has its history too!
"... so Google wasn't able to cheat with privileged information about me as a user."
The way they "cheated" was to look at the tens, hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands of previous queries that matched yours in substance.
If the competing websites for "web search" had the same volume of submitted queries that are substantially similar to yours, then they too would be able to give you "exactly" what you are looking for "9 times out of 10".
If all people submitting queries on the web are somehow convinced to visit only one website and submit a majority, (hypothetically let's say 93%) of their queries there, then it should be no surprise when that website "magically" starts becoming more "predictive" than other websites in returning "exactly" what searchers are looking for and becomes "by far the best at search".[1]
The question raised by the blog post is whether enabling such "magic" is worth the trade-off of also creating a "panopticon" in that single website. Giving this level of visitation and query traffic to a single website makes any competing website (working off less than 7% of people's queries) seem irrelevant, maybe even pathetic.
Without the enormous traffic, I would surmise the glory of the "empire" (to use the author's chosen term), and its appeal to "followers" (e.g., those who marvel at its "magic"), might dissipate rather quickly.
1. Especially the part of "search" that involves dealing with repeated, similar queries for popular information.
Knowing what the most common questions are doesn't help you find the corresponding answers. At best you can find the result that users click on most frequently, but if all of the results in the result page suck then that's not going to help.
Google's advantage is simply billions of dollars and 20 years of R&D into NLP tech.
Just because google has seen my search before, how does that translate to being able to give me good search results? Search is an incredibly hard and nuanced problem. I doubt ddg's main disadvantage is training set of search queries.
Plus, you're underestimating the percentage of queries that google has never seen before. Google processes trillions of searches every year, and still, 15% of those queries have never been seen by Google before. [0]
There’s some truth to that but Google also has a massive knowledge graph. For imdb and freebase like queries they can give very accurate answers as cards. Other humans don’t need to teach every single fact. They just need to teach how to extract and organize facts from a site.
When you see google giving you a one/two word answer as a card, that’s very likely coming from it’s knowledge graph.
What we need is more of this open knowledge graphs. Google and Wolfram Alpha are both closed sources but have deep understanding in niche domains.
To be fair, that example query is more of a personal assistant kind of question. If I want to know who played in that movie, either I know which site has that information (IMDB) and go there directly, or I search for something like "actors spiderman movie <year>".
If you want DDG to understand natural language queries, I think their privacy policy may need to be adjusted so that our queries can actually be used to develop that, and then they need a boatload of funding to catch up with Google's semi-ethical money-generating practices.
Like it or not, NL queries are exactly what most internet users want. Without them, any search engine is doomed to remain a niche product used exclusively by the very privacy-conscious.
You're helping google by tagging its searches, so many people ask for this kind of things that they can prioritise results that gets the most clicks (people rank searches for google everytime they click).
By contrast, the new privacy friendly search engine from the article, with a lot less money and users, can answer a simple question like "news guy actor in spiderman" with
Cliqz:
- And the new actor playing Spider-Man is... this guy (www.foxnews.com)
- J. Jonah Jameson (J.K. Simmons) | Spider-Man Films Wiki (spiderman-films.fandom.com)
Not bad for a small German company uh...
And even if it didn't, when I know it's Jonah Jameson, I can search for the actor that played Jonah Jameson. Search engines are not about having "the answer to life the universe and everything" but helping users refine their searches until they find what they were looking for.
That may have been what search engines were for, but Google changed that. Very few people have the patience any more to try multiple queries to get an answer. When DDG fails, as it inevitably does, I don't spend time refining my query: I repeat the search on Google and get my answer.
This is business. Apple and Google bring something to the table and they meet in the middle. For zero dollars Apple could just let the user choose from a randomised list which is arguable better and more impartial.
This logic is only valid if you assume Apple cares a lot about their users getting the best search results. I don't think this is the case.
Instead, Apple has a thing to sell -- "position of default search engine" -- and it is selling it to highest bidder.
I bet if Bing would offer 10 Billion, they'd make Bing default instead. Hey, if DDG could offer them 10 Billion, I am sure they would set it as default, easily ignoring the fact that many people say they do not like its results.
> Google's dominance is almost entirely due to the fact that its by far the best at search.
Yeah, and due to economies of scale and network effects it will stay that way, unless some people are willing to suffer the minor inconvenience of using a slightly inferior competitor.
Yes, when what you want happens to be the lowest common denominator - in this case, the most recent Spiderman movie. When the next movie in the franchise comes out in a few years and you don't like it so much because the news guy is now played by someone else, you'll be complaining that your preferences have stayed the same but Google no longer handles them as well.
Also, lot of links are hidden in Google by DMCA requests. PR firms use it a lot to hide "bad" information about their clients. Some countries (e.g. Russia, China) bans everything that doesn't fit their propaganda. Google is useless now for many kind of politic-sensitive searches or for investigations.
Google's dominance is almost entirely due to the fact that its by far the best at search.
But is it? I find myself often having to fight it to search for what I entered into the box, rather than what it thinks I really meant. If you know what you want just not where it is, DDG and Bing are both superior.
Not to sound presumptuous but what are you working as that this is a query that’s representative of your search engine use habits? I am using ddg for a few years now, I don’t revert to google (except google scholar) and I don’t feel like my life has gotten worse due to lesser quality search results.
Maybe it’s denial or weirdness on my side... after all I am also a vegan because I don’t want to hurt animals or other people just for a little bit of taste and convenience and most people seem to think that’s stupid on my side.
I tried using DDG and found myself using !G a lot for simple things. Then I switched to Bing about six months ago and have only had to use google a few times.
I know, Bing.. But I have used Windows for about 30 minutes in the last year and that was just to help my mom fix her printer. I don't think I have ever had a Microsoft related account since Hotmail. I know they track me but I don't use MicrosoftDrive or WintowsTube so I can live with it.
Same here, more or less. DDG is 'good enough' in a lot of instances but I think it's more that Google has taught some 'bad' searching habits. When I type a random Google search I'm basically expecting it to read my mind (and essentially it does through all of the tracking and analytics); DDG has none of that so the method of searching has to be more specific.
That said, it does't prevent the situation where searching for certain gifs or images gives you a page full of softcore porn, even with the moderate safe search enabled.
In my experience, this was true maybe a year ago or before. But nowadays ddg is quite good at providing what I was looking for. If it can't, google isn't much better either, but makes it look like it is, making me spend more time sifting through the information all over the place. The "People also ask" is a huge distraction, why is that immediately after the first result? It can be maybe at 5+ place, but not at the top.
I looked into the Cliqz browser a few years a ago. Back then they claimed to be a privacy respecting alternative to Chrome. What I found back then is that they sent every keystroke I type in the URL bar to their own servers. They outright lied about that in their terms.
For me their mission is pretty clear: Google ate Burda's ad cookies and now they are trying to get their hands into the cookie jar again. Given that today we have widespread TLS adoption the war about the endpoint has begun. Cliqz, alias Burda Media, is just another combatant - the one who controls the browser controls the ads.
They have an autosuggest feature in the browser which shows search results as you type. Goes without saying that this requires a request per keystroke. If each request contained a unique user id, that would be concerning, but that is not the case. that the search query itself goes to their servers is just common sense, but those requests are anonymized. (Disclaimer: I'm a former employee)
Oh, the requests contained much more than the keystrokes and I looked into the anonymization claims as well. I'd have to dig out my Wireshark traces to tell you exactly what was transmitted, but I'm pretty sure it was enough to id the user. And by the way Cliqz never claimed that the anonymization happens at the endpoint, from what I remember they were very proud of their proprietary anonymization technology in the backend.
And just one more thing: In Google Chrome at least I can turn off auto-suggest. This was not possible in the version of the Cliqz browser I tested.
> I looked into the Cliqz browser a few years a ago. Back then they claimed to be a privacy respecting alternative to Chrome. What I found back then is that they sent every keystroke I type in the URL bar to their own servers. They outright lied about that in their terms.
That's called typeahead search, and that's how it has always worked since the invention asynchronous HTTP requests.
If you know of someone that sends a trie down to the client containing every possible completion a priori, I'd like know about it.
" they sent every keystroke I type in the URL bar to their own servers"
Well, that's how you implement an autocomplete feature in the 1st place. If they'd sent every keystroke you typed outside their URL bar, now that's something to be aware off. So, did they?
Sorry you feel that way. In the Cliqz browser you search as you type. To search and serve results we need to know the query. We will have an article on exactly this product in a week or so.
We will also be sharing more details on the process on data collection in the blog posts scheduled in the next 3 days. Of course, you don't need to trust what we say, all the code used for collecting data is open-source for transparency and auditing: https://github.com/cliqz-oss/browser-core
Lastly, privacy policies are legally binding documents, and we take the law very seriously. We are located in Germany, where privacy laws are as tough as they get (e.g. GDPR was loosely just a re-wording of the existing data protection directive in Germany).
It is impressive what they built. The results are quite good! The UI shows innovative elements like trackers used on the page.
I see two problems with their approach:
1. The product is not built with the 'grandma test' mindset.
More sliders and widgets is not what your grandma wants in a search engine. This is why building a search engine is hard. You have to guess with very little information what the user wants and get it in front of them at first try, without the user having to tweak anything.
2. Google must not fall because it is a monopoly. If it was to fall it should be because someone built a better product.
Similar to how ICE cars had "monopoly" over transportation and the time for change has thankfully come. Not because monopolies are bad, but because electric cars are so freaking awesome.
Google perfected what the 'best search engine' is to 99% of population. This comes at an expense of really annoying 1% of users but it is the price they are willing to pay. To de-throne Google you really need to cater to broad population with a product that will be better both at capturing intent and delivering and presenting relevant results. This may or not come with a different business model.
Even if you break up Google or Alphabet, the search division would probably remain a single company. It won't solve anything.
So You get Google Search Inc. Adsense Inc. AdWords Inc, Gmail Inc, I imagine.
This would be just restructuring, Googlers are too smart to get hold back by this and they probably already have an emergency plan if it remotely comes as a possibility.
I don't think that if Google vanished tomorrow, a new crop of superior search engines would suddenly pop out of the ether to replace it.
Is Google somehow suppressing the creation of a good search engine? No, on the contrary it has created the best web search engine we've ever seen. I would personally be sad if you took it away from me, and I suspect that 99% or more of its users would be in the same boat (don't judge the zeitgeist by web forum echo chambers). You break up monopolies when they are harming users, not in order to cause harm to users.
You are wrong. When a product makes the world a worse place—say fridges that deplete the ozone layer—the right thing to do is to ban the product.
In the case of petroleum fueled cars, they are significantly contributing to a massive climate emergency and should be banned regardless of the existence of a superior product. In the case of the Google search engine... Well in the case of the Google company, it should be forced to split up because it is a massive monopoly that hinders competitors from entering any of their dominated markets, and they use their domination of one market to increase their dominance of another.
And this is should be done regardless of the existence of superior products. Goggle as a single company is making the world a worse place, and the right thing to do in that scenario is to split it up.
That's such a vague standard - every single big company has people claiming they make the world a worse place, are we going to break up nestle, every oil company, every agribusiness and pharmaceutical and car company along with google? That could make the world a much worse place
Yes. Google has a superior product riding on top of a corrupting business model that cannot help but mis align Google's interests with those of the users they are claiming to serve. Google should unbundle the current business model from the technology and also offer clean, unbiased, private search service that is paid by the user on a subscription basis. I would jump on the chance to pay say $10 a month for Google quality search if I knew my search was private and the results were not influenced by outside parties.
I've noticed things on the spectrum of articles <-> blogspam crowding out the top results in many queries, and that it's substantially more difficult to find forum content discussing related topics to the query. It's a shame, as I think there is often more interesting content on such forums.
Google does seem to have their 'recency bias' setting set to 11. If any of your search terms have been in the news in the last 2 weeks, those articles are all you are going to get.
it’s useful for google to demote wikipedia in favor of showing more diverse results. wikipedia is very very very easy for you to just search directly before turning to google
This seems like a pretty blatant advertisement for their company's "Cliqz Browser".
You should at least acknowledge your bias by being transparent enough to show you have a vested interest. It's really disingenuous otherwise, and makes it hard to take what you have to say at face value.
Yes, according to the post, the "primary benefit" of using Cliqz is so that you can get access to their search engine, which is exclusive to their browser.
There needs to be a new search engine focused on the niche of people who hate the current ad spam/SEO results that Google currently returns. A query like "best headphones" returns results like "The Best Headphones for 2019 | PCMag.com".
They've clearly optimized for the mass user base, since the average person is probably fine with a result like that. But I'm willing to bet no one on HN would ever click a link like that, just because of how "spammy" it feels.
When I search for something like "best headphones", my ideal results would be forum/discussion posts (eg. like "Ask HN") where I can read what other programmers/hackers are using, their experience with it, etc. And that's the problem with trying to make a one-size-fits-all search engine - it isn't possible to make everyone happy.
I've actually been working on a product to solve this exact problem. The best comparison would be the old "discussions" filter that Google used to have until they removed it. I'd love to show more people and get feedback. If this is something you'd be interested in trying, drop your email here ( https://degoogle.typeform.com/to/QzVy7c ) and I'll send you the beta
I totally agree with the sentiment. However I'm afraid the day "Ask HN" comes as first results in Google, is the day HN will be flooded with spammers recommending their products (like in amazon reviews).
I feel the force of small sites like HN is precisely to be in the shadow and too small to interest spammers.
I don't even mind "best widget" searches coming up with blogspam and the odd forum post.
What bothers me is searching for a specific product and having Google promote a competing product to the top search result (or as a "featured" listing that looks like a normal search result).
I made some typical searches I do in my job. They returned reasonable results. Impossible to know if they are better or worse than Google. I need some days of usage. I'll do my best to keep using it this week.
Maybe autodecting the language would help. It gave me a German page without any obvious way to change to English.
I went to the settings, changed the language and discovered that it wants to know my country. I left Germany because it looks like profiling and I don't want to help them at it.
Then I disabled every feature (news, weather, etc). I'm interested into a search engine, not into a portal from the 90s.
However I'm afraid that Cookies Autodelete and other privacy extensions will delete those settings and I'll have to do it again. I'll probably hide them with uBlock Origin. For the language a URL ending with something like ?lang=en would be great for bookmarks.
And finally, do we need more independent search engines? Yes, definitely.
Many thanks for the feedback. We'll add the language autodetection for the interface and results this week. There is no profiling taking place. The country is just to select what index you would like results from - we'll try to make the UI better.
This is still beta, so please keep on using it and we'd love to hear more feedback [beta@cliqz.com].
I second the need to do some form of detection for language. My browser tells webpages I want results in english (Accept-language header), and this can be safely used to detect what is most appropriate initially.
If not that, then at least IP, considering I’m sitting in the US.
beta@cliqz.com bounces mail. It seems it's a closed list and accepts mail only from addresses already included in the list.
You should create a contact form for the search engines. Everything reachable from the Contacts link at the bottom of the page is about other products.
We don't need more search engines like google, we need a new kind of engines that will supersede google/bing/etc and break the following axioms:
* search engine is a cloud service, which is not controlled by user of that engine
* search gives final results in milliseconds (why? because google cannot spend many seconds/minutes for you, that's why)
* search creates information bubble (that user cannot control) because it tires to satisfy user's expectations
Most likely this new 'google-killer' will be:
* open source, because user should trust the code
* self-hosted (easily deployed in a click), not a cloud SaaS. Our search preferences have ultimate value, no one should have an access to it
* more useful than google because of accumulated data about you that are processed by computational knowledge engine (something like WolframAlpha)
* background reasoning - this engine can work continuously and utilize your own computational resources on notebook/PC and bring you brand new search insights that google never will be able to deliver (because they cannot dedicate a lot of computational resources for each google user).
Sounds good, isn't it?.. Maybe this kind of software already exists, could someone point me out?
Disclaimer: I work at Google so I'm 100% biased. All opinions are my own.
Edit: formatting
>search engine is a cloud service, which is not controlled by user of that engine
So is hacker news.
>search gives final results in milliseconds (why? because google cannot spend many seconds/minutes for you, that's why)
Do you want latency to be larger??
>open source, because user should trust the code
That would make it easier for SEOs to game the system.
Or perhaps it would put everyone on a level playing field. I'm not sure.
>self-hosted (easily deployed in a click), not a cloud SaaS.
Do you mean users should keep their own index of the whole web by themselves?
>more useful than google because of accumulated data about you that are processed by computational knowledge engine
First I think you greatly overestimate how useful information about you can be.
Second if that worked then it would make they problem you mentioned before (information bubble) worse...
Instant results are good for sure, however very often few more seconds - in addition to instant results! - is not a problem if late, more carefully processed results can save minutes of my time - for now I spend it for opening the links and scanning the content with my eyes.
The same is about not very often but important searches that may be described as 'research about something', in this case I'm ready to make complex, well detailed query and wait even hours - then back and get well organized and intelligent results.
> Do you mean users should keep their own index of the whole web by themselves?
oh no! Users should keep only their personal data - in wide meaning, this includes all history of searches, search results, refinements, anything that ML currently uses to bring personal search experience. In addition to that, relatively small index of important content may be saved. For internet search this 'personal search' will use API of anything that can be used manually for now - google, bing, consume direct API of Twitter/FB/Medium/WolframAlpha and hundreds of connectors to other cloud services. It is important to say, that this 'delegated search calls' may be anonymized.
It will be important that search results are not limited only by what google decided to be 'top results for this user'. At this moment I can do all this manually - open N tabs, query many services, compare results, open most 'relevant' (from my human point of view, not google) links and scan them for most interesting information. I believe that all this can be automated.
> First I think you greatly overestimate how useful information about you can be. Second if that worked then it would make they problem you mentioned before (information bubble) worse...
As for now, all this just thoughts. I'm a programmer with almost 20YOE; I have understanding about how google works in general, how lucene works, how WolframAlpha works, modern approaches to NLP and search-driven queries processing, and I think - without a MVP that works, this is more belief, of course - that value of this 'personal computation engine' combined with modern ML approaches might be ultimate. Challenge, but nothing impossible!
I'm more than happy with DuckDuckGo. I would love more specialized search engines. Back in the day I've used several search engines depending the task i needed to perform, from Altavista to Yahoo to Google.
Beat me to it! Very happy here as well. I also love the bang short cuts. I am actually at the point where google is clearly inferior.
I will grant that Google has a more intelligent indexing and ranking of Stack Overflow. However, DDG is making major progress there, and I rarely need to add !g
Pro tip: with the bang shortcuts, you can add them anywhere in your query, it does not need to be in the beginning of your query string.
I use DDG but I still have to resort to Google for 5% of searches because it dosen't deliver the results as well. I desperately want to pay for something that has the quality of Google but the privacy of DDG.
I try to use DDG as my default but it's so awful at knowledge-graph questions. I find myself using !g for knowledge queries before even attempting it.
An example would be something like "Rick and Morty episodes." I know google will give me a list with recent/upcoming episode names and air dates for pretty much any show. DDG will link me wikipedia and fan wikis. I make a "<show> episodes" query anytime I want to know when the next episode of something is released.
DDG's knowledge graph (and/or query parsing) is just so limited I skip it anytime I think google will be able to produce the answer directly. Similarly, there are things I'm confident asking a voice assistant, and there are things I won't even bother trying. If it's something I'd ask an assistant, I'm skipping DDG.
We're trying to get a version that works with javascript disabled (for TOR), but are trying to avoid having to maintain two separate clients. We'll try to push it out soon. Many thanks for the feedback on our beta.
Readit News
For instance:
"the actor that plays the news guy in spiderman"
ddg:
Tom Holland (side bar)
Spider-Man Homecoming (imdb)
Tom Holland (wiki)
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (imdb)
google:
Jonathan Kimble Simmons (splash, link to wiki)
J. Jonah Jameson (wiki)
J. K. Simmons (wiki)
The google result is exactly what I want. And the results were made in incognito mode so Google wasn't able to cheat with privileged information about me as a user.
At the end of the day, most people care about the product. I'm only willing to sacrifice so much to satisfy the ideal that there should be less concentration. Make a better search engine but trying to pull at the heart-strings of users about how Google is an empire and too powerful just won't work and it undermines your product and mission.
In the end, I think most people could use either Google, Bing or DuckDuckGo and be happy with the results. It's just that we're stuck on "Google is the best search engine", and while that may be true in some technical sense, many of the other search engines are just as good for most of us.
that's not what Incognito mode does. It prevents your search from being included in the browsing history and doesn't send cookies from active sessions, but that's about it. Google still knows this is you being unauthenticated. You don't need to be logged into google to be reliably targeted with ads that fit your profile.
Another example is a query for "elm dict". DDG has little idea what you're looking for while Google links you directly to the docs of Elm's Dict data-structure.
There are advertising companies that use fingerprinting for ad targeting, but Google doesn't.
(Disclosure: I work at Google on ads, speaking only for myself)
Anyhow, based on what I've seen, when you go into incognito mode it definitely doesn't use your profile when you go to Google services. Search results, suggestions, etc... are different. In fact, one of the use cases for incognito is using a different Google profile on a someone else's or a public computer. Keeping contextual search results from the 'main' profile logged into the browser would be counterproductive...
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Google also censors some results in controversial categories, where Bing/Yahoo return what I am looking for. I don't trust a search engine that censors entire categories of results.
I am not an adwords user but anecdotes in another HN thread seems to affirm that Google is due to be disrupted: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21667484
DDG's first page was only fake sites and wrong answers.
Google gave me the right answer right away (in the positions 2 and 3)
(for those who don't know legacy electronics: I was looking for the box with labeled pins, like on first page of https://www.turus.com.tr/class/INNOVAEditor/assets/PDF/MM584... )
"free energy" use to produce countless results that now require extra keywords.
Under "free energy suppression" you find professionally crafted hatemongering. The actual list of claimants is huge, non of it is here. https://peswiki.com/directory:suppression#Wiki_2796702
"free energy device" also produces really crappy results compared to what it was.
It only seems like things argued not to exist may or must be scrubbed from seach results. Astrology wasn't scrubed nor was any religion. Everything has its history too!
The way they "cheated" was to look at the tens, hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands of previous queries that matched yours in substance.
If the competing websites for "web search" had the same volume of submitted queries that are substantially similar to yours, then they too would be able to give you "exactly" what you are looking for "9 times out of 10".
If all people submitting queries on the web are somehow convinced to visit only one website and submit a majority, (hypothetically let's say 93%) of their queries there, then it should be no surprise when that website "magically" starts becoming more "predictive" than other websites in returning "exactly" what searchers are looking for and becomes "by far the best at search".[1]
The question raised by the blog post is whether enabling such "magic" is worth the trade-off of also creating a "panopticon" in that single website. Giving this level of visitation and query traffic to a single website makes any competing website (working off less than 7% of people's queries) seem irrelevant, maybe even pathetic.
Without the enormous traffic, I would surmise the glory of the "empire" (to use the author's chosen term), and its appeal to "followers" (e.g., those who marvel at its "magic"), might dissipate rather quickly.
1. Especially the part of "search" that involves dealing with repeated, similar queries for popular information.
Google's advantage is simply billions of dollars and 20 years of R&D into NLP tech.
Plus, you're underestimating the percentage of queries that google has never seen before. Google processes trillions of searches every year, and still, 15% of those queries have never been seen by Google before. [0]
[0] https://searchengineland.com/google-reaffirms-15-searches-ne...
When you see google giving you a one/two word answer as a card, that’s very likely coming from it’s knowledge graph.
What we need is more of this open knowledge graphs. Google and Wolfram Alpha are both closed sources but have deep understanding in niche domains.
If you want DDG to understand natural language queries, I think their privacy policy may need to be adjusted so that our queries can actually be used to develop that, and then they need a boatload of funding to catch up with Google's semi-ethical money-generating practices.
!bangs are the main reason why it's always going to be difficult for me to switch from DDG to anything else.
By contrast, the new privacy friendly search engine from the article, with a lot less money and users, can answer a simple question like "news guy actor in spiderman" with
Cliqz:
- And the new actor playing Spider-Man is... this guy (www.foxnews.com)
- J. Jonah Jameson (J.K. Simmons) | Spider-Man Films Wiki (spiderman-films.fandom.com)
Not bad for a small German company uh...
And even if it didn't, when I know it's Jonah Jameson, I can search for the actor that played Jonah Jameson. Search engines are not about having "the answer to life the universe and everything" but helping users refine their searches until they find what they were looking for.
"Google's dominance is almost entirely due to the fact that its by far the best at search."
is, and I'm sorry to say, a make-believe
Google's quality is better than anyone else, that is a fact. Let's go to the point. [[I work on Cliqz, and in search]]
Do you know how much Google pays apple to be the default search engine?
According to you, nothing, because people will go to Google because it's the best.
Well, it turns out that last year was more than 9 Billion (with a B). Quite a lot of money poorly spend, someone should really get fired :-)
Instead, Apple has a thing to sell -- "position of default search engine" -- and it is selling it to highest bidder.
I bet if Bing would offer 10 Billion, they'd make Bing default instead. Hey, if DDG could offer them 10 Billion, I am sure they would set it as default, easily ignoring the fact that many people say they do not like its results.
Yeah, and due to economies of scale and network effects it will stay that way, unless some people are willing to suffer the minor inconvenience of using a slightly inferior competitor.
Yes, when what you want happens to be the lowest common denominator - in this case, the most recent Spiderman movie. When the next movie in the franchise comes out in a few years and you don't like it so much because the news guy is now played by someone else, you'll be complaining that your preferences have stayed the same but Google no longer handles them as well.
But is it? I find myself often having to fight it to search for what I entered into the box, rather than what it thinks I really meant. If you know what you want just not where it is, DDG and Bing are both superior.
Maybe it’s denial or weirdness on my side... after all I am also a vegan because I don’t want to hurt animals or other people just for a little bit of taste and convenience and most people seem to think that’s stupid on my side.
I know, Bing.. But I have used Windows for about 30 minutes in the last year and that was just to help my mom fix her printer. I don't think I have ever had a Microsoft related account since Hotmail. I know they track me but I don't use MicrosoftDrive or WintowsTube so I can live with it.
That said, it does't prevent the situation where searching for certain gifs or images gives you a page full of softcore porn, even with the moderate safe search enabled.
You can almost always, by phrasing more carefully, get exactly what you need with DDG.
I also think that it's better to learn to search properly than finding the best search engine.
Dead Comment
For me their mission is pretty clear: Google ate Burda's ad cookies and now they are trying to get their hands into the cookie jar again. Given that today we have widespread TLS adoption the war about the endpoint has begun. Cliqz, alias Burda Media, is just another combatant - the one who controls the browser controls the ads.
Previous thread with more info:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18626790
And just one more thing: In Google Chrome at least I can turn off auto-suggest. This was not possible in the version of the Cliqz browser I tested.
This "feature" should be off by default on any software that claims to be a privacy respecting alternative to Chrome.
That's called typeahead search, and that's how it has always worked since the invention asynchronous HTTP requests.
If you know of someone that sends a trie down to the client containing every possible completion a priori, I'd like know about it.
Well, that's how you implement an autocomplete feature in the 1st place. If they'd sent every keystroke you typed outside their URL bar, now that's something to be aware off. So, did they?
We will also be sharing more details on the process on data collection in the blog posts scheduled in the next 3 days. Of course, you don't need to trust what we say, all the code used for collecting data is open-source for transparency and auditing: https://github.com/cliqz-oss/browser-core
Lastly, privacy policies are legally binding documents, and we take the law very seriously. We are located in Germany, where privacy laws are as tough as they get (e.g. GDPR was loosely just a re-wording of the existing data protection directive in Germany).
I see two problems with their approach:
1. The product is not built with the 'grandma test' mindset.
More sliders and widgets is not what your grandma wants in a search engine. This is why building a search engine is hard. You have to guess with very little information what the user wants and get it in front of them at first try, without the user having to tweak anything.
2. Google must not fall because it is a monopoly. If it was to fall it should be because someone built a better product.
Similar to how ICE cars had "monopoly" over transportation and the time for change has thankfully come. Not because monopolies are bad, but because electric cars are so freaking awesome.
Google perfected what the 'best search engine' is to 99% of population. This comes at an expense of really annoying 1% of users but it is the price they are willing to pay. To de-throne Google you really need to cater to broad population with a product that will be better both at capturing intent and delivering and presenting relevant results. This may or not come with a different business model.
One of the reasons for breaking up monopolies is that they make it harder for newcomers to build something better.
So You get Google Search Inc. Adsense Inc. AdWords Inc, Gmail Inc, I imagine.
This would be just restructuring, Googlers are too smart to get hold back by this and they probably already have an emergency plan if it remotely comes as a possibility.
Is Google somehow suppressing the creation of a good search engine? No, on the contrary it has created the best web search engine we've ever seen. I would personally be sad if you took it away from me, and I suspect that 99% or more of its users would be in the same boat (don't judge the zeitgeist by web forum echo chambers). You break up monopolies when they are harming users, not in order to cause harm to users.
In the case of petroleum fueled cars, they are significantly contributing to a massive climate emergency and should be banned regardless of the existence of a superior product. In the case of the Google search engine... Well in the case of the Google company, it should be forced to split up because it is a massive monopoly that hinders competitors from entering any of their dominated markets, and they use their domination of one market to increase their dominance of another.
And this is should be done regardless of the existence of superior products. Goggle as a single company is making the world a worse place, and the right thing to do in that scenario is to split it up.
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> One could rightfully counter that Google has a good product. They even offer it for free.
But Google Ads are not free. If Search is the product, then advertisers are the customers, not users.
When a Wikipedia/encyclopedia article is what I'm looking for, why is Google showing articles?
Wikipedia used to be the top result.
I've noticed things on the spectrum of articles <-> blogspam crowding out the top results in many queries, and that it's substantially more difficult to find forum content discussing related topics to the query. It's a shame, as I think there is often more interesting content on such forums.
You should at least acknowledge your bias by being transparent enough to show you have a vested interest. It's really disingenuous otherwise, and makes it hard to take what you have to say at face value.
They've clearly optimized for the mass user base, since the average person is probably fine with a result like that. But I'm willing to bet no one on HN would ever click a link like that, just because of how "spammy" it feels.
When I search for something like "best headphones", my ideal results would be forum/discussion posts (eg. like "Ask HN") where I can read what other programmers/hackers are using, their experience with it, etc. And that's the problem with trying to make a one-size-fits-all search engine - it isn't possible to make everyone happy.
I've actually been working on a product to solve this exact problem. The best comparison would be the old "discussions" filter that Google used to have until they removed it. I'd love to show more people and get feedback. If this is something you'd be interested in trying, drop your email here ( https://degoogle.typeform.com/to/QzVy7c ) and I'll send you the beta
I feel the force of small sites like HN is precisely to be in the shadow and too small to interest spammers.
What bothers me is searching for a specific product and having Google promote a competing product to the top search result (or as a "featured" listing that looks like a normal search result).
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I made some typical searches I do in my job. They returned reasonable results. Impossible to know if they are better or worse than Google. I need some days of usage. I'll do my best to keep using it this week.
Maybe autodecting the language would help. It gave me a German page without any obvious way to change to English.
I went to the settings, changed the language and discovered that it wants to know my country. I left Germany because it looks like profiling and I don't want to help them at it.
Then I disabled every feature (news, weather, etc). I'm interested into a search engine, not into a portal from the 90s.
However I'm afraid that Cookies Autodelete and other privacy extensions will delete those settings and I'll have to do it again. I'll probably hide them with uBlock Origin. For the language a URL ending with something like ?lang=en would be great for bookmarks.
And finally, do we need more independent search engines? Yes, definitely.
This is still beta, so please keep on using it and we'd love to hear more feedback [beta@cliqz.com].
If not that, then at least IP, considering I’m sitting in the US.
You should create a contact form for the search engines. Everything reachable from the Contacts link at the bottom of the page is about other products.
* search engine is a cloud service, which is not controlled by user of that engine
* search gives final results in milliseconds (why? because google cannot spend many seconds/minutes for you, that's why)
* search creates information bubble (that user cannot control) because it tires to satisfy user's expectations
Most likely this new 'google-killer' will be:
* open source, because user should trust the code
* self-hosted (easily deployed in a click), not a cloud SaaS. Our search preferences have ultimate value, no one should have an access to it
* more useful than google because of accumulated data about you that are processed by computational knowledge engine (something like WolframAlpha)
* background reasoning - this engine can work continuously and utilize your own computational resources on notebook/PC and bring you brand new search insights that google never will be able to deliver (because they cannot dedicate a lot of computational resources for each google user).
Sounds good, isn't it?.. Maybe this kind of software already exists, could someone point me out?
>search engine is a cloud service, which is not controlled by user of that engine
So is hacker news.
>search gives final results in milliseconds (why? because google cannot spend many seconds/minutes for you, that's why)
Do you want latency to be larger??
>open source, because user should trust the code
That would make it easier for SEOs to game the system. Or perhaps it would put everyone on a level playing field. I'm not sure.
>self-hosted (easily deployed in a click), not a cloud SaaS.
Do you mean users should keep their own index of the whole web by themselves?
>more useful than google because of accumulated data about you that are processed by computational knowledge engine
First I think you greatly overestimate how useful information about you can be. Second if that worked then it would make they problem you mentioned before (information bubble) worse...
Instant results are good for sure, however very often few more seconds - in addition to instant results! - is not a problem if late, more carefully processed results can save minutes of my time - for now I spend it for opening the links and scanning the content with my eyes.
The same is about not very often but important searches that may be described as 'research about something', in this case I'm ready to make complex, well detailed query and wait even hours - then back and get well organized and intelligent results.
> Do you mean users should keep their own index of the whole web by themselves?
oh no! Users should keep only their personal data - in wide meaning, this includes all history of searches, search results, refinements, anything that ML currently uses to bring personal search experience. In addition to that, relatively small index of important content may be saved. For internet search this 'personal search' will use API of anything that can be used manually for now - google, bing, consume direct API of Twitter/FB/Medium/WolframAlpha and hundreds of connectors to other cloud services. It is important to say, that this 'delegated search calls' may be anonymized.
It will be important that search results are not limited only by what google decided to be 'top results for this user'. At this moment I can do all this manually - open N tabs, query many services, compare results, open most 'relevant' (from my human point of view, not google) links and scan them for most interesting information. I believe that all this can be automated.
> First I think you greatly overestimate how useful information about you can be. Second if that worked then it would make they problem you mentioned before (information bubble) worse...
As for now, all this just thoughts. I'm a programmer with almost 20YOE; I have understanding about how google works in general, how lucene works, how WolframAlpha works, modern approaches to NLP and search-driven queries processing, and I think - without a MVP that works, this is more belief, of course - that value of this 'personal computation engine' combined with modern ML approaches might be ultimate. Challenge, but nothing impossible!
I will grant that Google has a more intelligent indexing and ranking of Stack Overflow. However, DDG is making major progress there, and I rarely need to add !g
Pro tip: with the bang shortcuts, you can add them anywhere in your query, it does not need to be in the beginning of your query string.
“This result isn’t that great. I’m going to !g just this once”
Then, one week later I’m adding !g to literally every singe search so I switch back to google because what’s the point?
I really do hope to one day get off of google though.
An example would be something like "Rick and Morty episodes." I know google will give me a list with recent/upcoming episode names and air dates for pretty much any show. DDG will link me wikipedia and fan wikis. I make a "<show> episodes" query anytime I want to know when the next episode of something is released.
DDG's knowledge graph (and/or query parsing) is just so limited I skip it anytime I think google will be able to produce the answer directly. Similarly, there are things I'm confident asking a voice assistant, and there are things I won't even bother trying. If it's something I'd ask an assistant, I'm skipping DDG.