Could be that Google is paying your ISP for traffic prioritization.
Is this legal ? And how do we know if there is such thing ?
Ask HN: Any obvious reason for duckduckgo vs. Google speed difference on mobile?
11–20 of 21 posts
Re: Ask HN: Any obvious reason for duckduckgo vs. Google speed difference on mobile?
#12Could be that Google is paying your ISP for traffic prioritization.
Is this legal ? And how do we know if there is such thing ?
It's not legal in a lot of countries, and I also doubt it is the case. It's much more likely they are just positioned better all around the globe (with better peering, etc). Arguably this means the same thing in practice, but this is the thing that happens all the time (as opposed to direct deals with network operators).
Re: Ask HN: Any obvious reason for duckduckgo vs. Google speed difference on mobile?
#13Re: Ask HN: Any obvious reason for duckduckgo vs. Google speed difference on mobile?
#14Google serves content from a data center near you, others just from 1-2 central servers. You cannot beat the shorter connection.
That's btw Google's trick, from the very beginning. It was not pagerank or any better algorithms, it was purely massive investments getting into all the data centers worldwide.
Re: Ask HN: Any obvious reason for duckduckgo vs. Google speed difference on mobile?
#15In my case,
DDG: 4-5 seconds.
Google search: 1-2 seconds.
Carrier - Airtel (4G) in India.
Re: Ask HN: Any obvious reason for duckduckgo vs. Google speed difference on mobile?
#16You could try doing a traceroute from your mobile phone to both Google and DDG.
The number of hops and latency you see in traceroute may help you figure out what kind of CDN and global server load balancing that DDG is doing versus what Google is doing, and thus why their respective web pages are the speeds they are.
Re: Ask HN: Any obvious reason for duckduckgo vs. Google speed difference on mobile?
#17You could try doing a traceroute from your mobile phone to both Google and DDG. The number of hops and latency you see in traceroute may help you figure out what kind of CDN and global server load balancing that DDG is doing versus what Google is doing, and thus why their respective web pages are the speeds they are.
If you go to gmetrix.com and generate page speed reports for both Google and DDG, you will see some interesting differences.
Of biggest importance to the OP is that DDG doesn't appear to be using any kind of CDN.
For DDG, their web page is the same size (384 KB), and the score pretty well on most subjects, except they don't defer parsing of Javascript (noted on the first tab of the Page Speed report), and on the second tab of the page speed report, you will note they don't use a CDN and they don't have "Expires" headers.
But for someone on a mobile device in a country that might have slow connectivity to the main web site for DDG, I think the lack of the CDN is probably the biggest factor.
Re: Ask HN: Any obvious reason for duckduckgo vs. Google speed difference on mobile?
#18You could try doing a traceroute from your mobile phone to both Google and DDG. The number of hops and latency you see in traceroute may help you figure out what kind of CDN and global server load balancing that DDG is doing versus what Google is doing, and thus why their respective web pages are the speeds they are.
If you go to gmetrix.com and generate page speed reports for both Google and DDG, you will see some interesting differences. Of biggest importance to the OP is that DDG doesn't appear to be using any kind of CDN. For DDG, their web page is the same size (384 KB), and the score pretty well on most subjects, except they don't defer parsing of Javascript (noted on the first tab of the Page Speed report), and on the seco…
I did try to see if I could generate some quick graphs with pingdom.com or runscope.com to highlight the importance of using a CDN, when sampled from various places around the world.
Sadly, while both pingdom and runscope do allow me to test sites and get HTTPS latency data on a per test basis, they don't make it easy to collect and graph that data -- on a per test basis. Sure, they can both give you uptime reports and tell you average response time across all tests, but I want more detail than that.
Still working on this.
Re: Ask HN: Any obvious reason for duckduckgo vs. Google speed difference on mobile?
#19Google serves content from a data center near you, others just from 1-2 central servers. You cannot beat the shorter connection. That's btw Google's trick, from the very beginning. It was not pagerank or any better algorithms, it was purely massive investments getting into all the data centers worldwide.
[citation needed]
Re: Ask HN: Any obvious reason for duckduckgo vs. Google speed difference on mobile?
#20I would guess more of Google's landing page is cached, and it's a smaller page. I'm getting Google in 0.5-3 secounds, DuckDuckGo in 3-4 secounds, StartPage in 2 secounds. USA 4G 3:30AM On another note, both Google and DuckDuckGo seem to link directly to search results but actually redirect your broswer to capture the link you clicked. StartPage links directly to search results. I've asked DuckDuckGo about this and th…
Isn’t it to mask the search terms that you used? If you go directly to the page the current url including the query would become the referrer
No https cross domain referr