That's probably true to some degree, but I found that the most effective thing that Google does to improve search results is to connect multiple searches you submit in relatively quick succession.
Googling a paper or article, skimming it, then searching for something that's in the text makes Google appear like magic. When I enter the first word of my follow-up question, Google will often suggest a complex 10 word query exactly like I would have entered it.
Apparently, many people have the exact same follow-up questions that I have after reading the same text.
That doesn't require a whole lot of tracking. It does require a session cookie, but that's not the sort of tracking I'm opposed to at all.
Another thing that Google does well is searching for local content. I think this is very difficult to replicate for DDG.
But for context free and non-local queries, Google is usually no better than DDG in spite of all the wealth of data they have on me. For some niches DDG is actually better than Google and they don't fill half of their result pages with ads.
Sometimes I wonder whether the entire ad targeting thing is a fraud. Maybe Google doesn't actually track us after all ;-)
Googling a paper or article, skimming it, then searching for something that's in the text makes Google appear like magic. When I enter the first word of my follow-up question, Google will often suggest a complex 10 word query exactly like I would have entered it.
Apparently, many people have the exact same follow-up questions that I have after reading the same text.
That doesn't require a whole lot of tracking. It does require a session cookie, but that's not the sort of tracking I'm opposed to at all.
Another thing that Google does well is searching for local content. I think this is very difficult to replicate for DDG.
But for context free and non-local queries, Google is usually no better than DDG in spite of all the wealth of data they have on me. For some niches DDG is actually better than Google and they don't fill half of their result pages with ads.
Sometimes I wonder whether the entire ad targeting thing is a fraud. Maybe Google doesn't actually track us after all ;-)