Sunday, November 27, 2011

Why DuckDuckGo has it wrong!

Until Recently I have never heard of DuckDuckGo.com. It's a search engine that doesn't track you, or put you in a bubble. Sounds good right? Well, they got it wrong! They have an illustrated website called http://dontbubble.us on the website, they explain that other search engines will give you results based on other sites you have visited, putting you in a bubble, and not showing or showing results outside the "bubble" lower in ranking on the search results.
So I did a little test of my own. Now I am a big Star Trek fan, that's no secret. and I used the 3 big search engines, and DuckDuckGo.com, here are the pictures of my results when I searched, "Who is the better Captain?"






In the 1st picture you see the results of duckduckgo and google. In the 2nd Bing.com and Yahoo.com. I didn't say anything about which "Captain" I was looking for, it was a pretty generic question so just about anything could have come up in the search. Well with out tracking or putting me in a bubble, I get things like "Captain America or Batman" or "Dhoni or Dada", from DuckDuckGo, Bing and Yahoo. But Google putting me in a "Bubble" gave me results that are more suited to my interests. Namely "Captains from Star Trek" and then four or five results down the page I got the results that were like the other engines. In otherwords, google put what it thinks I might be looking for near the top of the results, based on websites, or other searches I have done, but it didn't exclude the results I wasn't looking for.
Where in duckduckgo I had to search the results for what I was looking for. I want to be put in the "bubble" I want results that are much more to my interests then non-relative results.

OK, so what are the results if I change the question "Who is the better captain Kirk or Picard?"






This time the results for all four virtually identical, and on Yahoo and Bing they appear to be identical. What does this prove? Well in my mind I can't just use a generic search on duckduckgo, I have to be pretty specific about what I am looking for. While on Google I can be a lot less specific about what I am searching for, and the results will be sorted in an order that makes since and still will show results that may or may not have anything to do with what I am really looking for.

Google has it right!

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