Google Displays Partial Results – DuckDuckGo

Google’s Personalized Search Is Never a Welcoming Factor for All of Its Users

What is DuckDuckGo?

                    A billboard by DuckDuckGo in San Francisco

DuckDuckgo is a one-man-army start-up internet search engine owned by Gabriel Weinberg, based in Paoli, Pennsylvania. The search engine considers the privacy of their users as their primary goal and brings that to reality by never tracking their information. As a result every user of DuckDuckGo sees the same results page throughout the world. That’s what we expect when we Google for any piece of information. But it never happens as long as Google is your default search engine, says DuckDuckGo!

DuckDuckGo’s experiment on Google

Gabriel Weinberg says “there are no more ‘regular results’ on Google.” DuckDuckGo conducted an experiment in September involving 131 volunteer users in the U.S. and also from many other countries round the world.

The results prove to be shocking since they vary a lot ever when the user is signed out of Google. In such case how the word “personalization” by Google applies? Everyone expects to get regular results when signed out. The experiment proceeded as follows –

The users who were all signed out of Google were given three chosen politically themed terms: “abortion,” “gun control,” and “Obama”. And all were all instructed to send the screenshots of their search activity to DuckDuckGo.

For the search term – “abortion,” some users received information on Obama’s public stance on abortion, while others did not. Yet others received information on pro-life activist Gianna Jessen and others didn’t. Yes it’s all the “FILTER BUBBLE” playing its part. The video below explains how you are trapped into this Bubble and how it deliberately makes you miss valuable information”

When Google was approached for a comment on these experimental results, as usual they never uttered a word back.

Gabriel states –
                                      “We strive for two things in this context that I think are relevant, even in the face of more polarizing sources: 1) increased diversity in the result set and 2) showing the same results at the same time by default.”

DuckDuckGo’s integration with Zanran (a search engine that provides tabular, spreadsheet and statistical data) recently is notable.

Threat to Google

Google should be receiving a huge pile of complaints from its users regarding privacy violations and all these circumstances render a feasible climate for its peers to take charge of its “search king” position. DuckDuckGo’s well wishers expect it to be of the same form as Google was, a while before advertisements carved out a huge part of its results page.

TNW: The infamous hacker group Anonymous recently released its own operating system, dubbed Anonymous-OS and they have chosen DuckDuckGo as their default search engine over Google or Bing, owing to –

                                   “DuckDuckGo is one of the safest search engines where exists! For Anonymous-OS Live 0.1 is default search engine.”

That should be real tough news for Google and Bing.

The Verdict

DuckDuckGo badly needs goodwill among people who have Googling as a habit. What they say from their part is a gravity pull towards their business. But a simple experiment engaging 100+ people is never going to make the difference. They should prove their insights or ideas on how they outsmart Google, as a search box to the public, possibly at a larger scale. Google’s stand on personalized search is to uplift the user experience depending on his interest and perspective. But not all people wish for it. When I type into Google for the key phrase “best baby foods of India”, I strictly need results that every other Indian see in their window screen. Only because of the reason I am interested in herbal beauty products, I never expect my computer to choose natural baby foods leaving behind the best other ones in market. Google has to consider this serious or users might switch to better options which are not personalized.