[bakhlawa]

I've always wondered if ddg's stated mission to respect privacy, etc. is in fact causing it to show worse results than Google...i.e., because Google tracks clicks, knows who from what region clicks on a link more often and ostensibly moves those results further up, don't they have better "signals" about what results to prioritize? It strikes me that ddg is handicapped in this regard as it ignores these signals that its competitors openly use.

Note: I frequent both ddg and google (more the latter as it's the default in my browser) but I've always wondered if ddg's results would be even better if the "ignored signals" were, well, not ignored.

[pilooch]

User clicls are used to fit ranking functions. These functions typically depend on a number of signals that make their optimization otherwise intractable.

Dedicated machine learning algorithms take into account the click-bias due to the results initial position.