Measuring the “Filter Bubble”: How Google is influencing what you click

I now use duckduckgo as default search engine and my experience is mixed.

The problem with google is that sometime you search for something new and then you see the bubble very clearly, which applies non only to search but also to youtube (maybe even more).

The problem with duckduckgo is that you are searching for something specific or something you saw months ago and don't remember well then google's index and tracking can be useful.

>Normally I only use Google, but I've also experienced this. In contrast with a few years ago, more recently Google gave me such bullshit that I was like, "Just give me the pages that have these keywords, this is so obvious" and I went to duckduckgo.com. There, with literally the exact same query, every one of the top links was relevant and had my search terms. On Google none of the first page of links had what I searched for. This certainly supports "they show me what they want me to see", rather than what I asked for.

>On the flip side, I still find Google useful and I must say that I often am happy to read what they decide to give me: even if it's not what I searched for.

On the whole I guess I support Google's changes, they serve me well. But one thing, though, is that the old algorithms which are deprecated are probably literally less than 5 minutes from a production deploy - so I wonder what Google would have to lose by keeping the old, well-working algorithms in some kind of classic deprecated search. Everyone on it is still eyeballs for their ads, so if it really doesn't take any extra resources to keep the classic view up somewhere (besides a few minutes for someone to deploy it), then why not expose it as long as it works well. (Obviously the classic algorithms might stop working if spam against those algorithms becomes insurmountable, I realize it's a bit of a cat and mouse game between SEO and Google's algorithms. On the other hand since hardly anyone would use the classic interface, spammers might stop doing SEO against it and ignore it entirely.) So if those algorithms are really a few clicks away, perhaps it would be a good thing for them to deploy just for the people are are about to go to duckduckgo or bing because Google just isn't giving them what they're searching for.

Thoughts?

And I've been using DDG for a bit now and have found it perfectly useable.

On the other hand, authors could find better names for their libraries ...

Further, there are different solutions, where the user has full control over the context of their search. For instance by maintaining a fully user-controlled list of keywords that is remembered by a cookie (which can be deleted as well).