Amidst reports the National Security Agency is harvesting your data from major tech firms, I wonder if the DuckDuckGo search engine will catch on. Unlike Google and Bing, which hand over your information to government snoops, DuckDuckGo doesn't track you or save your search queries.
Google and Microsoft supposedly save the data to serve up search results that are more suited to you. So, in other words, they are profiling you as well as saving your search history.
One problem with that whole idea is you cannot do collaborative searches. Say you're on the phone with your mom and you both are looking for a recipe. Your conversation might go like this:
Mom: There it is. Six items down, the perfect cheese pie!
You: It's a link to a Sandra Lee video. How can that be the perfect cheese pie?
Mom: No, it's right there. One, two, three, four, five, six. Bingo!
You: Sandra Lee.
Mom: I don't even see Sandra Lee. Did you search with the words "perfect cheese pie"?
You: Yes.
On it goes until you both realize that one of you is logged into Google and the results are "personalized." The fact that one of you did not get the desired result tells you that customized search results don't work.
Google is making a huge fuss right now about turning over user data to the government. It wants more leeway in regards to what it can tell its customers. Here is an idea: stop tracking people in the first place. Just stop.
Well, Google cannot do that because of advertising optimization. It needs to figure out what you might want to buy.
Personally, I think this is the biggest scam in the history of advertising. I've been seeing these ads for over a decade and they've never recommended anything I'd be interested in buying. That said, I have clicked on a Google ad which just so happens to be the link to a site I was looking for. This in itself makes me wonder how it all works in the first place.
If I am looking for the Widget Company using Google, it should show up in the regular search list. Once in a while I'll search for the Widget Company and it will show up in the sponsored search but not on the regular search results. Or maybe it is just buried somewhere. How does that work? People should start paying attention to this phenomenon and recording it.
Knowing my profile, there is no reason that the right search result should be in the sponsored searches and not at the top of the regular search. Still, it happens.
This makes me wonder what is really going on with Google's search algorithm. All it seems to do is notice that I've searched for a bearskin rug and for the next month deliver sponsored ads from rug vendors. I'm not impressed.
I think I'll move to the less aggravating DuckDuckGo and prevent the government snoops from tapping into my search history. Will the results be as good? Seems so.
