I’m with the others here in saying the search terms were clearly chosen to prompt local results, which are then not considered “organic” (even though they are generated based on popularity and other metrics, with the only unusual constraint being geolocation associated with the site/business/whatever).
It even seems to me that even the categorization of results is organic here: The results are being shown with the “local”, “carousel”, “store” and similar add-on sections based primarily what people tend to do in response to that term.
Yeah, but the entire difference between different search engines and why Google became #1 was by having a meaningful ranking and algorithmic search so that it knew what you meant when you typed in car mechanic. This is basically an evolution of that concept, and for many of these terms, especially the ones in the article, it seems somewhat clumsy to assume that you weren’t looking for local results. Did you want the history of car mechanics? Car mechanic magazine? Italian food awards? All of those have better methods of searching and this isn’t an arcane concept.
The vast majority of people expect that when they search for italian food of course they meant italian food in my area jeez google aren’t you magic?
Adblock for Chrome has a similar feature…“Click to block ad” or “Block an ad on this page”. With just a few trial and error iterations I can block out all of the unwanted content on any of the pages I frequent. My google results don’t show adwords nor do I see the sponsored results. Yes, there’s a lot more whitespace on the page, but it’s at least not distracting me with crap I don’t want.
BB, I love you (and I’d be willing to pay more than the equivalent of the ad revenue you’d make off my pageviews), but once you started autoplaying video, I was done with the entire sidebar and dickbar.
I believe DuckDuckGo largely exists due to its anonymous search features, rather than being an inherently better search engine. If you’re anonymous, you “don’t exist” as a searcher, so the search engine would not know where you are, how to market to you, what you’ve done in the past, and so on. Since it’s not interested in those add-ons, the results are naturally less local and less geared towards the user. Is that useful? Maybe to some people, but Google isn’t plowing ahead with its local-oriented search capabilities amid massive opposition – most people are quite pleased that they’re more easily finding local results. I mean, we have stuff like SquareMarket (which seems like it would be popular among a number of BoingBoing readers) which explores even more of the local internet.
If anything, I think the localizing of the internet is great. The international elements are still there, but what about something right outside my door? Now there’s meetups and apps that are based on “within 100ft of me,” and their popularity shows that people are willing to give up some privacy in order to achieve something interesting and useful to them.
If you’re so concerned about your IP address giving away your general location, you should be using a TOR browser anyway, rather than specialized anonymous-oriented websites.
Finally, I had to try this. I’m pretty rural, and wouldn’t expect to get anything useful without full location hints. I got one column of search results:
ad, “how to become an auto-mechanic”
Wikipedia
YellowPages.ca listing (useless)
Business Directory for my town, includes mechanics
local mechanic
Yelp, for a nearby city, (useless)
auto mechanic program for a nearby technical college
It kind of goes downhill from there, but for such a non-specific search, I’m actually pleasantly surprised that two out of the top 7 were directly related to getting my car fixed. Wikipedia and the college are arguably useful as well. YellowPages and Yelp are effectively advertisements and not making my life better, but not Google advertising.
If people in these parts thought the web was useful, I would expect to have more directly useful results as well.
In a way, this is missing the point. If DDG becomes popular enough, I predict that it will start dropping ‘organic’ search results in favor of ad-driven ones, just like Google. The system that encourages Google to shill out its search results in exchange for money is the problem here, not Google itself.
