Googles oversteps haven't seemed to make much of a dent in their usership. Perhaps your absence will shake things up over there :) It's been nearly 3 years since mk decreed that Google Plus would be their undoing. Perhaps he was right and we are in the midst of their deckine...
Well, they haven't quite lost that big following yet, but I see more and more dissatisfaction with them on the Internet and more competing services. Their new innovations aren't buying them much popularity either — people hated Plus, and there's widespread distaste for Google Glass. I think they've lost touch and it's the beginning of their decline. I was a fan of Google+ initially, but the way they forced it on everyone didn't make them any fans. I had no idea mk called it all that time ago! I've got to give him credit for some amazing foresight there.
While we're on the topic of shouting out mk, how is the switch to DuckDuckGo working for you?
I'm disappointed to say that I switched back to the Goog just last week. DDG has become markedly better. However, it seems that for some searches they are off on a different axis. For my purposes, the two are almost equivalent, but I found myself going back to Google often enough that I eventually made the switch back. I really want DDG be my default, so I am going to try again, but I'll wait a few more months. Next round, I should keep track of which searches sent me from DDG back to Google and send them along to them. It would be interesting to know what component of my affinity towards Google searches is due to their personalization of results. I don't suspect that it is significant, as I haven't noticed much difference when I am not logged in. I wonder if DDG could provide a client-side plugin that had a similar effect, working on the results that they piped to my browser, without sending anything along to them.
I think Google search is still better even without the personalized results. I'm no longer signed in when I search and I have all those tracking blockers installed, so I'm not sure what Google can ascertain about me from an IP address alone. The search is still pretty great, even with the minimal amount of data Google can squeeze out of me. Search is the one product I'm really hoping a competitor can trump Google at. No-one has quite done it yet, but one day…
I dunno, mk. Part of my fear of Google is that it knows everything about me, but it's helpful so I'm still sorta okay with it. That's probably a bad mindset to have, but man, Google Now has saved my ass in terms of transportation help, soccer scores, and the best places to eat in my vicinity so many times. Still didn't make the first time it guessed where I work any less creepy, though. The same might be said of personalization results as well, haha.It would be interesting to know what component of my affinity towards Google searches is due to their personalization of results. I don't suspect that it is significant...
The google search engine is not that good. They artificially boost their result page by listing the same webpage in various version.
You seems to have 100% more result in Google, most of them are the same shit. But yeah in a sense it is better: it's tailor made for YOU. They have enough data to know what you may want to search. It's a "bad" good feature, you'll never have to discover real new thing. Tailor-made is a fuel for laziness.
No one on earth cares how many results they get on google. They care about the first five or ten, and google consistently gives the right first five or ten. Who actually uses google to discover "new things"? I do use google scholar for that occasionally.
for me, google is about getting to what i want quickly. it works for me because 99.9% of the time, what i want is the top result. the reality is that discovery and creativity aren't going to be found by a machine, that's what places like this (and more importantly, the real world) are for. just my two cents...