What Happens When You Pay People Not to Use Google Search? (yahoo.com) 47
"A group of researchers says it has identified a hidden reason we use Google for nearly all web searches," reports the Washington Post. "We've never given other options a real shot."
Their research experiment suggests that Google is overwhelmingly popular partly because we believe it's the best, whether that's true or not. It's like a preference for your favorite soda. And their research suggested that our mass devotion to googling can be altered with habit-changing techniques, including by bribing people to try search alternatives to see what they are like...
[A] group of academics — from Stanford University, the University of Pennsylvania and MIT — designed a novel experiment to try to figure out what might shake up Google's popularity. They recruited nearly 2,500 participants and remotely monitored their web searches on computers for months. The core of the experiment was paying some participants — most received $10 — to use Bing rather than Google for two weeks. After that period, the money stopped, and the participants had to pick either Bing or Google. The vast majority in the group of people who were paid to use Bing for 14 days chose to go back to Google once the payments stopped, suggesting a strong preference for Google even after trying an alternative. But a healthy number in that group — about 22 percent — chose Bing and were still using it many weeks later.
"I realized Bing was not as bad as I thought it was...." one study participant said — which an assistant professor in business economics and public policy at the University of Pennsylvania says is a nice summation of the study's findings.
"The researchers did not test other search engines," the article notes. But it also points out that more importantly: the research caught the attention of some government officials: Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser (D), who is leading the group of states that sued Google alongside the Justice Department, said the research helped inspire a demand by the states to fix Google's search monopoly. They asked a judge to require Google to bankroll a consumer information campaign about web search alternatives, including "short-term incentive payments."
On the basis of that, the article suggests "you could soon be paid to try Microsoft Bing or another alternative."
And in the meantime, the reporter writes, "I encourage you to join me in a two-week (unpaid) experiment mirroring the research: Change your standard search engine to something other than Google and see whether you like it. (And drop me a line to let me know how it went.) I'm going with DuckDuckGo, a privacy-focused web search engine that uses Bing's technology."
[A] group of academics — from Stanford University, the University of Pennsylvania and MIT — designed a novel experiment to try to figure out what might shake up Google's popularity. They recruited nearly 2,500 participants and remotely monitored their web searches on computers for months. The core of the experiment was paying some participants — most received $10 — to use Bing rather than Google for two weeks. After that period, the money stopped, and the participants had to pick either Bing or Google. The vast majority in the group of people who were paid to use Bing for 14 days chose to go back to Google once the payments stopped, suggesting a strong preference for Google even after trying an alternative. But a healthy number in that group — about 22 percent — chose Bing and were still using it many weeks later.
"I realized Bing was not as bad as I thought it was...." one study participant said — which an assistant professor in business economics and public policy at the University of Pennsylvania says is a nice summation of the study's findings.
"The researchers did not test other search engines," the article notes. But it also points out that more importantly: the research caught the attention of some government officials: Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser (D), who is leading the group of states that sued Google alongside the Justice Department, said the research helped inspire a demand by the states to fix Google's search monopoly. They asked a judge to require Google to bankroll a consumer information campaign about web search alternatives, including "short-term incentive payments."
On the basis of that, the article suggests "you could soon be paid to try Microsoft Bing or another alternative."
And in the meantime, the reporter writes, "I encourage you to join me in a two-week (unpaid) experiment mirroring the research: Change your standard search engine to something other than Google and see whether you like it. (And drop me a line to let me know how it went.) I'm going with DuckDuckGo, a privacy-focused web search engine that uses Bing's technology."
I bailed out on Google years ago (Score:5, Interesting)
Part of the probable benefit is a form of "security though obscurity" since I doubt many people go to the effort to game DDG/Bing's search rankings.
Re:I bailed out on Google years ago (Score:5, Interesting)
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(Oh, and probably drive in front of a blue screen, it's less dangerous)
(an old PC in the backseat _may_ work too)
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I typically use Duck Duck Go, but sometimes the search results from it just don't get me the result I need and as soon as I do a Google search, there it is at the top of the search results.
Seconded. It's a fairly frequent occurrence for me. In one extreme instance within the last two weeks I was searching for some very recent news item - I forget now what it was. DDG had ZERO results, and Google had a bunch. That said, I've found a few occasions where DDG gave better results on the same search terms.
DDG also requires putting EVERY search term in double quotes in order to reliably provide usable results, whereas Google doesn't.
That said, I almost always use DDG first, because it seems to honou
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Re:I bailed out on Google years ago (Score:4, Informative)
Same here. Google search has been crap for quite a while now. But DuckDuckGo is not only Bing, it uses a number of sources.
Occasionally, when DDG does not find something, I still try Google search, but very rarely works any better for me. In fact, it seems to work worse quite frequently in the last year or so.
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I switched to DuckDuckGo (Bing) years ago and haven't looked back.
I tried DDG off and on for a few years as I was trying to ween myself off of Google, but found it to be next to useless. It would return useful results about 30% of the time.
I tried Brave as well, and got similar results until recently. It has gotten to the point where its AI answers almost always hit the mark for my tech-related questions, and has become my default engine. I fallback to Google on the rare occasions I need a second opinion.
Google still has useful results somewhere on the first few pages, bu
I Do It For Free (Score:3, Funny)
You mean I can get paid to not use it? Where's my check?
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I use the card catalog at the library... I'm old school.
Moved on and never looked back (Score:3, Interesting)
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People are so funny around here. Startpage. LOL
You're still using Google and BIng search results.
I am amazed that it took a study to conclude this (Score:4, Insightful)
Why u no dogpile? (Score:2)
"I realized Bing was not as bad as I thought it was...." one study participant said — which an assistant professor in business economics and public policy at the University of Pennsylvania says is a nice summation of the study's findings.
And from the title I thought they were going to get people to use Dogpile.com or Kagi.com or Mojeek.com. Picking Bing hardly seems like much of a challenge. And from a government's point of view, wrestling with massive tech companies like Microsoft is no easier than it is with Google.
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Google has the network effect on its side: the more & faster you index, the more users you'll get, meaning more ad revue to fund more indexing.
A startup would need a patented wonder-tool beat that.
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There's best in class and there's good enough. We should all already know that Bing is good enough.
What's more interesting, in my opinion, is that a metasearch engine can theoretically outperform a single search engine. And for governments, a small metasearch engine offers a lot of flexibility with curating (or censoring) search engine results without diving fully into investing in building a search engine big enough to be good enough for regular use.
Startpage (Score:4, Informative)
I switched to startpage.com a few years ago and have not missed Google's advertisement search engine at all. When I absolutely have to use Google I always use the udm=14 option that I set up in FireFox as a custom search. I see there is now a FireFox addon that does this as well: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-... [mozilla.org]
DuckDuckGo (Score:4, Interesting)
I've been using DuckDuckGo [duckduckgo.com]for what seems like ages (a couple of years?). I find it returns useful results about 80% of the time, however when I am using more than 3 words in the query, it tends to pick up on the more frequently used ones and ignore the ones I'm using to narrow the search.
Google also covers more of the internet. One example from today is a search for "You can safely disable CFG80211_CRDA_SUPPORT". No results from DuckDuckGo, but several Gentoo Linux related ones from Google.
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this.
I only reluctantly gave up atavist for the weaker search but broader index of google.
But I've tried, off and on for several years, to use non-google search engines.
I think that that 80% is about right on usable results from bing/ddg -- but it's unusual day that I don't need to go to google at least once. For some searches, I don't even bother and go straight there.
what finally got me to change my default away from google was the effort of typing "-video:" (which also excludes ai) on every search.
in re
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what finally got me to change my default away from google was the effort of typing "-video:"
Thanks! I didn't know that was a thing. I exclude domains quite frequently but didn't know I could do it with video as well. And axing AI is a bonus.
I don't use Google that much anymore, but when I do those video results and AI crap that come first can be really annoying.
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... when I am using more than 3 words in the query, it tends to pick up on the more frequently used ones and ignore the ones I'm using to narrow the search.
I've taken to putting every search term between double quotes, and it works wonders when it comes to bypassing the "here's the most recent / most popular stuff that roughly meets your criteria" results.
It's a PITA and I get tired of it - that's when I use Google. But I try hard to make DDG work because I don't want to give Google any more traffic than I have to. And I find I can make DDG give me what I need most of the time.
Sometimes the "all-double-quotes" trick narrows the scope too much and I have to fuc
Microsoft's been paying people to use Bing (Score:2)
Microsoft's had a program that paid people to use Bing for many years. Just do 50 searches a day and you get some tokens good for Microsoft merchandise!
I don't know if that's still around. I dropped it years ago.
Not a unique phenomenon. (Score:5, Informative)
A group of researchers says it has identified a hidden reason we use Product X for Task Y. We've never given other options a real shot.
Humans prefer to take the path of least resistance which is why we use things that are "good enough". This is why the "defaults" are so important.
However, spend enough time using a particular product and you become familiar with details of whatever that thing is, creating new dependencies said details, and thus we subconsciously modify what is now considered "good enough".
If you doubt this then do you honestly think Microsoft WIndows operating system has maintained its dominance because it has the best design or features? Vendor lock-in plays a large role but non-serious computer users have little issue moving to using a Chromebook because "it's the same thing but different". The same is true about office productivity software. There is a good reason that Microsoft offers its software/services free of charge to schools and that reason is to make students familiar with it so they will pay for it later.
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Linux is a server OS for power users with two years or more of experience on Linux,
Is that why it's on every Android and chrome device, because it's a server OS? Hmm...
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Linux is a server OS for power users with two years or more of experience on Linux, or a kiosk/web OS for people who buy a new computer when their video card glitches and they don't know what to do.
Is that why it's on every Android and chrome device, because it's a server OS? Hmm...
Android and ChromeOS represent the the "kiosk/web OS" category of Iamthecheese's Linux distribution dichotomy. Android window policy is meant for small screens or 10-foot TV interfaces, not the sort of experience where one uses multiple windows to perform a task. ChromeOS doesn't run anything other than the included web browser unless you install GNU in a virtual machine.
Smart People (Score:1)
Smart people, like Professors, use Bing.
They say they could use Google, which is the best,
and they're used to Google. But if paid to try Bing,
they stick with Bing, saying, "It's not as bad as I thought". I mean, it's still bad, but I am going to
stick with it!
Nobody mentioned surveillance, so it does not sound
like they prefer being spied on by Microsoft.
I wonder if they are just too embarrassed to admit
that they don't know how to click in the search box
to switch it back to Google?
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Nobody mentioned surveillance, so it does not sound like they prefer being spied on by Microsoft.
DDG != Bing. First, DDG gets some of its search results elsewhere. Second, DDG's raison d'etre is privacy. Using it doesn't rat you out to Microsoft, even though using Bing directly does.
Obviously? (Score:1)
No one wanted to continue to use an inferior product if they weren't being paid to do it?
This study could have been enlightening, but it seems like they came to the wrong conclusions.
Wrong question (Score:3)
I pay ChatGPT so that I never have to use Google search, no ads, it actually reads the search results and combines it to an answer that I actually asked, something Google hasn't been able for YEARS.
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Simplicty (Score:1)
Just change your default search (Score:2)
Change your default search to duckduckgo. If it's not enough, click into the search bar and add a !g to the front and hit enter and you do the same search in google. Or a !b for bing, or even !w to go straight to Wikipedia.
Using Guggle? (Score:2)
Using Google Search is like using a coupon book to look up a word.
When it works, it's not because it was designed to do so, it's sheer accident.
For a while, if it was a tech issue, I searched Reddit. Now Reddit has enshittified too.
There isn't anything that works as well as google from 15 years ago did. I can ask any babbling baby and get just about the same results from search engines. I'd hoped (against hope) that someone here would have solved the issue, but most I've already tried and it didn't suit me
Wait. (Score:2)
I'd switch it an instant (Score:2)
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https://kagi.com/ [kagi.com] ...for good and for ill, it's a subscription service, so while users (like me) pay directly, there's no ads or anything like that. It's pretty solid at not-ignoring keywords, and the results are typically as good as Google, again in both directions (obscure error codes that don't give useful results in Kagi tend to yield equally-bad results in Google, for example).
Not a shill or anything, just an extremely satisfied customer.
Paid to use ... (Score:2)
Sounds like one of *those* headlines (Score:2)
Use whatever you wnat (Score:2)
When setting up a new browser I usually switch to duck duck go but it's really easy to switch.
This is much ado about nothing, people are going to use whatever they like and right now that's AI search like Perplexity.
Bing not as bad? (Score:2)
I realized Bing was not as bad as I thought it was...." one study participant said
Not as bad? Kind of a low bar.
I've tried Bing many times. And I've tried other search engines based on Bing APIs, such as Duck Duck Go. I always go back to Google, because I get better results.