I'm so reluctant to agree with you... I imagine Google threatened legal action in this case

*itch game page

Yes, speaking from experience building ads on Google.

You're tracked with an anonymized id. If they're able to remotely tell any of your past activity or similar searches by others searching for the same term, then they will alter results.

This is especially true for any paid ads that appear since companies can bid to appear higher on competitor terms or names.

I can even say "if someone downloaded x-z specific apps on their phones, then consider them interested in my ad".

Or, another explanation is that more people are interested in things they can buy than in you (and I understand how hard it might be to believe in that), and Google algorithms "know" that

It's not just Google. The Internet has been getting worse over the last years. People don't make sites any more. Blogs have moved to closed and centralized social media platforms. Forums are rarely used, most communities moved to platforms like reddit and Discord.

Most of these platforms make finding content very difficult. You won't find articles posted on Facebook, Twitter threads and Discord discussions in search engines. You have to create an account on their platform, then use their shitty search (or be subscribed to the right people) to see it.

Put another way, spam sites have become more effective at defeating anti-webspam measures.

At the very least, it's no better than the alternatives any more. Whenever I put Duck Duck Go up against Google, I get very similar results, other than all the extra ads on Google.

My mom almost got scammed while buying tickets online because google placed an ad site before the real site in search results. Thankfully she always asks me or my sister before buying stuff online.

Unless you really like spam from quora and pinterest.

Do people deliberately not use archive.org? That's the one I always use but with everyone using these alternatives, I wonder if I should use them too.

Apart from that archive.today seemed down yesterday - I was worried they weren't coming back!

I don't know if Google threatening the DDG employee would change the situation. Wired published it. If their writer came back and said "I was threatened by a megacorp for my excellent work. Please take it down and tell everyone I was wrong" wired, at very least, would not issue that statement.

I'll never understand corporate apologists that live to defend the billion dollar companies ruining the Internet. Google is an ad company, but you can't believe they'd alter search queries to sell ads? How could you possibly trust Google after they've been caught illegally sniffing people's Wi-Fi with their Google Maps vehicles, spying on kids in school with Chromebooks and destroying incriminating documents in a federal court case to hide their actions?

In my experience Google is a bit better than DDG. I tried it out a few years ago and often found myself going back to Google for certain searches. Been using DDG again for a few weeks and having a somewhat similar experience.

1. Google is the standard. I'd argue that more than 50% of the population doesn't know what a browser or a search engine is. They put their question into whatever textbox they find in chrome and Google gives them their answers.

2. There are no better alternatives for the general userbase. Other search engines are better for your privacy and may give better results if you know how to use extended search parameters, but very few people even care about all that. Google is the search engine that will give you the best result if you just type in your question.

Many don't know about DuckDuckGo and even more don't care.

I should say that DuckDuckGo is generally much more strongly censored and controlled than Google. This won't affect people in say, the US. But in many places around the world (like my country of South Korea), using DuckDuckGo is not realistic as a daily driver without using a VPN or making heavy use of the "!g" bang to fall back to Google (which doesn't blanket censor words). Overall it makes it less accessible.

And I know, part of the reason people use DuckDuckGo in the first place is to avoid region-aware results. But that does not change their censorship policies.