DuckDuckGo: Escape your search engine filter bubble • Hacker News Board

Re: DuckDuckGo: Escape your search engine filter bubble

#191

Post by chc » Tue, Jun 21, 2011, 6:56 AM UTC

dhimes wrote: post #122

SoftwareMaven wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you went to a librarian and said "show me Egypt", she would have nowhere to start. A conversation would then ensue about what you are interested in. Keep going to the library, keep having those conversations, and eventually, the librarian will take you straight to the books you want when you ask for Norway. If you want something different, you'll have to explicitly ask. What Google is doing is no different. It jus…

What Google is doing is no different only if you can, in your ensuing "conversations," correct a misinterpretation that may have happened somewhere along the way. If your ability to do that is hampered because the only way to do it is by clicking on something, you don't see the thing to click on which will do this, then the filtering is not helping (and actually works against Google's and my mutual interests).

That's a good point, but I think it kind of misses the forest for the trees. It's true that personalization might sometimes lead Google to mistakenly show you less relevant results, but it seems pretty certain that the opposite would also be true — a generic page will sometimes show less relevant results than a personalized one. One search result is going to be shown ahead of another either way. If showing a less relevant result ahead of a more relevant one is considered "hampering," I don't see any reason this "hampering" is unique to personalized search.

Re: DuckDuckGo: Escape your search engine filter bubble

#192

Post by loup-vaillant » Tue, Jun 21, 2011, 7:40 AM UTC

VMG wrote: post #184

loup-vaillant wrote: post #26

Confirmation bias is bad enough already, it's really a shame that powerful companies like Google reinforces it just for the sake of giving you more pleasing search results. (Pleasing and Good overlap, but they're not equal.) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias http://lesswrong.com/lw/iw/positive_bias_look_into_the_dark/ Edit: I didn't intend to bash Google specifically. But they are faced with a choice in…

Look, if it wasn't for this, my 100 "latex"-related searches today wouldn't have led me to a typesetting language.

Then you would have caught the habit of typing disambiguating words, such as "Knut", or "typesetting", or "language".

Re: DuckDuckGo: Escape your search engine filter bubble

#193

Post by iamelgringo » Tue, Jun 21, 2011, 7:44 AM UTC

ryanisinallofus wrote: post #152

I spent a few hours using Duck Duck Go before commenting. It's been my Chrome default search for 4 hours. • The results are less relevant. Bubble or no, it was harder to find things I look for all the time. For example I had to constantly add the word Seattle to my search terms. • It felt like an old search engine. The results, the display, the choice of Mapquest maps all made me feel like I was using Yahoo or even e…

Blekko has been my default search engine for the last months, and I really really like it.

Re: DuckDuckGo: Escape your search engine filter bubble

#194

Post by wildlogic » Tue, Jun 21, 2011, 8:37 AM UTC

Matt_Cutts wrote: post #103

If I had to tackle the notion of over-personalization in ~5 minutes, I'd say: - If someone prefers to search Google without personalization, add "&pws=0" (the "pws" stands for "personalized web search") to the end of the Google search url to turn it off, or use the incognito version of Chrome. Personalization tends to be a nice relevance improvement overall, but it doesn't trigger that much--when it launched, the imp…

Just wanted to say thanks to Matt_Cutts for addressing many relevant issues/questions here on HN. Your responses are appreciated and not always taken for granted.

Re: DuckDuckGo: Escape your search engine filter bubble

#195

Post by computermacgyve » Tue, Jun 21, 2011, 8:53 AM UTC

Matt_Cutts wrote: post #180

newman314 wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I regularly see this without clearing cookies, so yes, I would consider this a bug. There seems to be no discernible pattern as to why it works in one session, suspend laptop, go somewhere else and it stops working. Or it'll work twice in a row and when I return location a (both in the same foreign country), it stops working.

Interesting. HN isn't ideal for debugging, but if you wanted to send cookies or IP addresses (e.g. via Twitter), I could see if someone could look into it.

Use: http://www.google.com/ncr to disable. NCR=no country redirect. I've set this as my homepage and not had any issues

Re: DuckDuckGo: Escape your search engine filter bubble

#196

Post by guelo » Tue, Jun 21, 2011, 8:57 AM UTC

Matt_Cutts wrote: post #143

jannes wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, I don't believe that over-personalization is an issue. (As I already said in another comment.) But here's why some people probably don't like personalization: It's invisible. There is nothing on the results page that tells you whether your results are personalized or not. Sure, you can look at whether the browser is in incognito mode or you can look for some parameter in the URL, but these things require tha…

"But here's why some people probably don't like personalization: It's invisible. There is nothing on the results page that tells you whether your results are personalized or not." Sorry, this is just not the case: we do provide indication on Google's search results page for personalized results. Here's a couple links that talk about how we surface whether results have been personalized: http://www.google.com/support/…

There's also this http://i.imgur.com/PMD5U.png which I hadn't noticed before. I just clicked through DDG's links and it tied guns and Obama for me, pretty cool.

Re: DuckDuckGo: Escape your search engine filter bubble

#197

Post by bhrgunatha » Tue, Jun 21, 2011, 9:19 AM UTC

Sephr wrote: post #172

newman314 wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here is a slightly different question, how do you get "no country redirect" to stick reliably? I cant begin to describe how annoying it is that I am presented with a different language when travelling to a different country. All I ever want is Google in English but it keeps going back to a localized search regardless of the many times that I choose "google in english"

It's a shame how Google completely disregards your HTTP Accept-Language header. If they didn't, this would be much less of a problem.

This annoys me more than anything - not just google, but for a large and growing number of sites. They completely ignore your browser settings and select language based on IP address. I installed the google international search plugin from mycroft which has solved my problem with google - but still suffer the myriad of other sites that ignore my browser's config.

Re: DuckDuckGo: Escape your search engine filter bubble

#198

Post by epi0Bauqu » Tue, Jun 21, 2011, 12:03 PM UTC

ryanisinallofus wrote: post #152

I spent a few hours using Duck Duck Go before commenting. It's been my Chrome default search for 4 hours. • The results are less relevant. Bubble or no, it was harder to find things I look for all the time. For example I had to constantly add the word Seattle to my search terms. • It felt like an old search engine. The results, the display, the choice of Mapquest maps all made me feel like I was using Yahoo or even e…

Thx -- in my experience it really takes a week to get into it. If you can stick it out I'd love to get your additional feedback after that point.

Point of fact: it isn't MapQuest, it is OpenStreetMap served via OpenMapquest, which uses their resources to forward that project. You can read more about it at http://openstreetmap.com/ (left column) and http://open.mapquestapi.com/ - in any case, maps are relatively new and in process.

Re: DuckDuckGo: Escape your search engine filter bubble

#199

Post by GaryOlson » Tue, Jun 21, 2011, 12:13 PM UTC

Matt_Cutts wrote: post #182

gnosis wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry, but a "View Customizations" link is nowhere near as clear as a simple statement like "These search results have been personalized." right on top of the search results page, where you can't miss it. But the real solution is to use a search engine that does not track you. Even better is to use it in such a way that it can't track you (ie. through a Tor proxy, while taking other reasonable precautions).

In case you missed where I said this below, we did launch a message on the top-right of the search results page. The Search Engine Land article had a snapshot, but here's a direct link to what it looked like: http://www.flickr.com/photos/searchengineland/2717951328/ Over time, we saw that people didn't seem to notice/care about the message and corresponding link much, so it eventually migrated down to the bottom of t…

If the flickr image is the actual size, then no wonder it was not noticed. No matter how much I customize all my interfaces -- and with the increasing pixel count of displays -- interfaces are constantly populated with immutable 8 point fonts. Any font less than 14 points is fine for 1985 and VGA displays; but not anymore.

Re: DuckDuckGo: Escape your search engine filter bubble

#200

Post by mrspeaker » Tue, Jun 21, 2011, 12:16 PM UTC

computermacgyve wrote: post #195

Matt_Cutts wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting. HN isn't ideal for debugging, but if you wanted to send cookies or IP addresses (e.g. via Twitter), I could see if someone could look into it.

Use: http://www.google.com/ncr to disable. NCR=no country redirect. I've set this as my homepage and not had any issues

FANTASTIC TIP! This drives me (and 3 co-workers who will want to buy you a beer) insane - I travel a lot, and use proxies - so google is constantly swapping languages on me.

Though it makes me less worried about them collating all my personal information if they can't figure out I didn't suddenly learn to speak German ;)