DuckDuckGo: Escape your search engine filter bubble

Post by sambe » Tue, Jun 21, 2011, 7:47 PM UTC

delackner wrote: post #188

Matt_Cutts wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good question; one person is annoyed by this endlessly a few offices down from me. It's hard to make sure that things are handled consistently sometimes, but if you use google.com/ncr or the "Google.com in English" link at the bottom of the home page, that should help. The "Language tools" link to the right of the search box should also let you set a cookie with your language preference.

I appreciate that you went and asked someone for the clarification that this issue is about the preference being set in a cookie and not in user settings, but this doesn't solve the problem for many of us. For YEARS, on a weekly and sometimes daily basis, always logged-in, always with preferences set to english, it is infuriating to routinely end up receiving results that conflict with your explicit language settings…

Post by Sephr » Wed, Jun 22, 2011, 4:58 AM UTC

Matt_Cutts wrote: post #202

Sephr wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think in the past we saw a lot of people with their Accept-Language header set wrong, which is why we haven't used it. But we've been having a good discussion internally about the "my language won't stick" issues raised on this thread.

Post by util » Wed, Jun 22, 2011, 4:03 PM UTC

mkr-hn wrote: post #13

I've been using DDG exclusively for a little while. Half the time the results are identical to Google. The other half is usually a collection of links from sites I would have searched on to research the topic.

Post by SergeyHack » Thu, Jun 23, 2011, 6:24 PM UTC

newman314 wrote: post #164

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…

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"

Post by projectsjh » Sun, Jul 03, 2011, 11:19 AM UTC

widget wrote: post #173

malaka wrote: post #167

"But aren't you a part of the relevance equation? The ideal results for a search like [bitcoin crash] should be different for a Japanese-speaking searcher in Tokyo vs. a German-speaking searcher in Munich vs. a bitcoin expert vs. a programmer trying to diagnose why compiling bitcoin is crashing vs. my Mom who has never heard of bitcoin before, right?" Maybe, but that is not the point. Besides, you are mixing localiza…

Of course Google can't read minds, that does not mean they should ignore information that they have when deciding which results to show or what order to show them in. Sufficient data to provide a better filter for a given user is not the same as mind reading. You are absolutely right that more criteria should be used if a user is interested in better results, but I fail to see why a deterministic base case is superio…