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DuckDuckGo: Escape your search engine filter bubble

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Re: DuckDuckGo: Escape your search engine filter bubble

#81

Post by Uchikoma »

qjz wrote: post #73
yanw wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's bullshit because search is filtering and the filtering done by search is being exaggerated by those who peddle this bullshit.

I expect my search to be faithful to the terms I enter. If the results aren't satisfactory, I'll narrow the search with additional terms. Withholding information based on some guess at my political leanings is dishonest. I'd be appalled if a librarian did it; why should I expect less from a search engine?

What does faithful mean? You want German or Chinese results? You want global or local results (in your language of choice). There is always personalization in search.

Re: DuckDuckGo: Escape your search engine filter bubble

#82

Post by StavrosK »

klous wrote: post #43
retube wrote: post #11

Yeah this is an important issue. Google apparently ranks results (for you personally) based on some 57 inputs, even when not logged into Google services. In short results suffer from a self-reinforcing feedback loop, forever constraining what you see. I wonder how easy it is to get "clean" or "default" results from Google? And I know it's been discussed many times , but just how easy would it be to maintain real anon…

You can get "clean" or "default" results from google by using http://www.scroogle.org/

How? I've seen other people link to it, it's just a page with text salad. What is there to use?

I don't understand that site.

Re: DuckDuckGo: Escape your search engine filter bubble

#84

Post by elb0w »

I noticed this a long time ago. Suddenly I could ask general programming questions and it popped up results in the language I use primarily as the top results (Without me specifying it).

While some may think that this is hiding, do we not often create algorithms to asses and aide? It seems like disabling this would be against the advancement of a learning system.

I for one think its a great feature and have no desire to disable it.

Re: DuckDuckGo: Escape your search engine filter bubble

#86

Post by mquander »

The purpose of search engines is filtering content to give you what you want, which might be information, or it might be discussion, or polemics, or gossip. If you want to learn about some topic that has some element of subjectivity, familiarize yourself with the different points of view and read the writing of whoever you are interested in. There are lots of tools on the Internet to facilitate this -- Wikipedia, for example, is built around an ideal of giving people an objective survey of different things. If you type "climate change" or "Barack Obama" into Google and form an opinion based on the top results then fuck you.

Re: DuckDuckGo: Escape your search engine filter bubble

#87

Post by ugh »

yanw wrote: post #19
retube wrote: post #11

Yeah this is an important issue. Google apparently ranks results (for you personally) based on some 57 inputs, even when not logged into Google services. In short results suffer from a self-reinforcing feedback loop, forever constraining what you see. I wonder how easy it is to get "clean" or "default" results from Google? And I know it's been discussed many times , but just how easy would it be to maintain real anon…

No it's a non-issue, and by the way Google probably uses much more that 57 'inputs' (signals) to determine relevance. Personalization is just a different term for relevant results and this is just FUD, the source of which is people who don't understand the technical aspects.

Personalization can, however, fail. I have a German IP address which causes Google to show me predominantly German search results. That’s not what I want at all most of the time.

There are ways to sort of get around that but they are cumbersome and they don’t always work right.

Google is pretty good at figuring out what to show you depending on the language of the search terms you are using. When there are German words in my search query Google will show me predominantly German results. That’s to be expected, that’s what I want. The problem is that Google seems to use my location (IP address, maybe also the language of the interface and whether I’m using google.de or google.com) and override that behavior so that even if I’m using english words in my query it will nevertheless show me predominantly German results.

Re: DuckDuckGo: Escape your search engine filter bubble

#89

Post by mkr-hn »

speckledjim wrote: post #75
mkr-hn wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The February DDG newsletter reported growth in January from 2.5m searches to 5m. I don't think DDG needs FUD to grow.

http://duckduckgo.com/traffic.html Searches per day in Feb average = 197,687 Searches per day in May average = 205,759 FUD certainly won't grow DDG out of the extreme niche it's in.

That agrees with what I said. Unless you don't think that much growth in searches over such a short period is significant.

It's even more significant when you look at where it was a year ago. 1.2 million in April 2010, 5.9 million in April 2011, 6.3 last month, and already 3.8 a little over halfway through this month. This is significant when you consider the lack of marketing and that DDG is run by one person.

Re: DuckDuckGo: Escape your search engine filter bubble

#90

Post by ordinary »

StavrosK wrote: post #82
klous wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can get "clean" or "default" results from google by using http://www.scroogle.org/

How? I've seen other people link to it, it's just a page with text salad. What is there to use? I don't understand that site.

Yeah, Scroogle's front page is really bad. Here's a link to where you can put in the actual search terms: https://ssl.scroogle.org/
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