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by vorpalhex 2199 days ago
Not the op but I was using a mixture of DuckDuckGo and Google for searching recent news this past week and got very different results from the two. I don't think this is intentional on Google's part, I suspect it's tied to keyword expansion (given a keyword like "Chaz" expand it into "seattle protests") but the result was that Google consistently returned a small result set of the same few news sites across multiple different searches compared to DDG giving me a much wider swath of results.

I've noticed this is an issue on medical terms too. I wanted to look up the claimed health benefits of spirulina (tldr, it makes you go) and consistently got bogus sites that had successfully gamed Google's SEO practices while academic and government sites were rather buried. DDG seemed to have a better representation of sources.
2 comments
the_omegist 2199 days ago
Well, sure some part of it may not be intentional but i think I've seen mentioned (here?) that Google tweaks its search results so that they conform to some "company principles".

A quick search gave me this :

https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-google-interferes-with-its-...

link
jolmg 2199 days ago
> Google consistently returned a small result set of the same few news sites across multiple different searches compared to DDG giving me a much wider swath of results.

That sounds like it'd be because Google's results are personalized and DDG's aren't.

link