[JumpCrisscross]

> most queries aren't in the long tail

But that's where differentiation occurs. Every search engine will get short tail results correct. We go back to Google because it also performs with the weird queries.

I agree that algorithmic superiority will probably perpetuate Google's dominance. But making its index public is (a) legally precedented, (b) conceptually simple and (c) a small step in the right direction.

[toxik]

Gotta say my experience is very varying with long-tail type queries, I usually try DuckDuckGo and if that fails I search Google. They find very different things, DDG tends to be less filtered in terms of spam sites and fake news, but it also finds results of dubious copyright nature, for example.

[JumpCrisscross]

I've had the same experience with DDG, which I use as my primary search engine. If I'm looking for a specific e.g. scientific paper or a recent news article, it doesn't have it. I run the search through Google. That's purely an indexing problem.

On the other hand, if I have a health-related search, I run it through Google. DDG has the proper content. It's just that it priorities the blog spam. That's an algorithm problem.

Relieving the former, as the author's proposal would do, makes DDG more competitive. As a second-order effect, it would also let DDG priorities resources towards the second problem, making them more competitive still.

[JD557]

From my experience, for long-tail queries, DDG also a lot more NSFW results than Google.

Bing does have the reputation of being better for NSFW searches than Google, so I guess that it's normal to have more NSFW false positives as well.