DuckDuckGo is following Bing’s lead with a new ad telling you why its results are better than Google’s. Unlike Bing’s “Bing It On” campaign, however, DuckDuckGo isn’t pushing a blind taste test of side-by-side search results. They’re simply telling you that you’re getting different results than everybody else because of the “filter bubble,” and that you could be missing out on stuff just because it doesn’t fit the profile of what Google thinks you should be seeing.
There are no “regular results” on Google anymore. from DuckDuckGo on Vimeo.
Google personalizing results is nothing new, as anyone who follows the industry knows, though I’m not sure how common this knowledge is to the average user. I’m not sure how often the average user thinks about this or even cares, to be honest.
Earlier this year, Google updated its privacy policy to consolidate numerous policies from its various products into one that can cover most of them, and enable the company to use data from service to service so that it can better personalize the user experience. This is, in fact, something that is even still causing drama in Europe. The EU is expected to tell Google it can’t do this on Tuesday, though it’s been doing it for months.
Google has not hidden from any of this, however, and maintains that a personalized experience is a better experience, and many would likely agree.
DuckDuckGo makes the point that Google is still personalizing searches even for signed out users, and says it had 131 who weren’t signed into Google perfrom searches for three different political queries (abortion, gun control and Obama), with a “wide variance” in resulting links, as it’s put in a Talking Points Memo article on the study.
In other DuckDuckGo news, the search engine has reportedly added “zero click” info from Zanran to its search results.
