Cooper Quintin: > The default engine was Google for a while until Mike Perry and I changed > it. We chose StartPage over DDG because while both being privacy aware, > start page had more relevant search results. However these days I > personally find that DDG's results are often more relevant than start > page.
I find StartPage/Google immensely superior to Duckduckgo/Bing when searching the "long tail" of technical material (which I do frequently). This has always been the case, and has not changed these days, or ever. One example: Try querying both engines for "deterministic builds" and compare what you find on the front page of each. By result 10, DuckDuckGo starts rambling about free will, philosophy, and life planning. Startpage on the other hand, actually already includes this very thread in the first page results. I am curious which types of queries people perceive DuckDuckGo/Bing to be better at. Is it only better if you're searching for hoodies, movies, video games, and other mainstream things? > They also have a page that does not require cookies or JS at > https://duckduckgo.com/html/ I am not aware of any JS or cookie requirement via StartPage either, and Startpage allows you to generate your own URL with the safesearch features disabled (so you do not need cookies). You can then create a keyword search for this URL. I am not sure if we want to make that our default search option, but I might be convinced to merge a third omnibox dropdown for it. -- Mike Perry
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