• Carighan Maconar@lemmy.world
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    6 months ago

    I’ve switched to Ecosia and while it’s not perfect, I now find what I look for, which became impossible with Google somewhere about 2014-2016, I think?

    Ecosia’s results are pulled from Bing, and as the very paper linked here shows, Bing’s results are significantly worse than Google’s, even accounting for Google’s deteriorating result quality. Notice in particular the percentage of spam.

        • rottingleaf
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          6 months ago

          The paper - I have not, the article - yes.

          I’ve looked through the paper diagonally now, and since it’s a scanned PDF, I’ll get back to it to read it patiently.

          I still see that they chose one criterion which is maybe less relevant for things I look for, which are usually not very popular. There’s probably a curve somewhere which is better for Bing, apparently, than for Google in that point.

          Because it’s my personal experience that I find things much faster with Ecosia than with Google.