If you're a journalist, writer, researcher, business owner, or just interested in getting the facts and broadening your mind, you need to start exploring your search engine options and not just default to Google every time.
If there's one piece of advice I would offer to any
journalist, researcher, or anyone in fact, it's this: Don't stick to the same
old, same old. These days we shouldn't be spoonfed information that an
algorithm expects we want or that the masses are searching for – it's a sure
way to stunt our growth as a species.
Where do you go when you need to research something?
For many years, I, like the majority of people living in
North America and the world, would head straight to Google. It was easy to
navigate and it seemed to provide access to information I needed.
There's a reason why people say, “Google it.”
But not anymore.
Over the years, I have found researching a topic has become
a lot harder on Google. You type in what you are looking for and you have to
trawl through pages and pages before you find relevant information, and not the
paid for or “presumptive” information that the search engine likes to feed you.
I have to say, for me, Google started to make my job A LOT
harder.
I would be trying to find multiple angles on a subject to
get a balanced view, but I seemed to be fed by a very one-sided argument.
I really don't need information to back up my beliefs – not
in my business, and definitely not in life.
Don't get me wrong, Google has its merits (there's a reason
why it has more than 86% of the search market share). As a business, you will
want to appear at the top of the search results, and for me, it has become more
like the good old Yellow Pages, where I can find out about people, businesses,
products and services. It's also where I go to find out what the general public
is reading as far as information goes.
But, in order to do my job, to dig deep, I need more than
that, and that's when DuckDuckGo became my new bff.
Type into Google why DuckDuckGo 's popularity has exploded,
and of course the first thing that comes up is about why DuckDuckGo's growth
has dropped.
That's not surprising really, being a competitor to Google.
But, the reality is that while it only holds around 2.44% of
the global search engine market share in North America, it has an estimated 80
million people using the search engine and grew by an estimated 46% in 2021.
Of course, this is a guess (based on searches per month),
because the search engine doesn't track it's users and so it's impossible to
really know.
WHY I LIKE IT & HOW IT HAS CHANGED
It seemed like only a few years ago now that I discovered
the search engine DuckDuckGo.
At first I was intrigued. I liked that it didn't track or
share my searches, not for privacy reasons, because personally that doesn't
really bother me, but it meant that every time I conducted a new search, it
wouldn't try and predict what I was searching, or give me information based off
an algorithm that predicted what it thought I wanted.
Back when I started using it, it seemed a little limited
with a fairly small database (it was launched in 2008), and so for a few years
I completely forgot about it.
But one day I realized it was impossible for me to find a
study on Google that I knew was out there, that I had read previously, and
needed access to . . . but no matter what I typed into the Google search
engine, I could not find it.
Lightbulb moment.
Let's try DuckDuckGo. Sure enough, the study came up
straight away.
This happened a few times, and slowly, over the past few
years I realized Google wasn't giving me what I needed to do my job properly.
You see, as a writer/content creator/editor, your search
engine is the first place you will go to begin your research. From there, you
head direct to the sources, before it's back to the search engine to continue
with your research before reaching out to the experts or the people on the
ground again. (If you're doing your job, of course).
The hours I wasted on Google trying to research people or
topics that I knew existed, but just wouldn't show. Too. Many. Hours.
And that's when I made DuckDuckGo my “go to” search engine.
What I started to notice was that DuckDuckGo had a ton more
information on there than a few years prior. Its database had exploded. I also
found that if I wanted both sides of a story and everything in between, sure
enough I could find it on DuckDuckGo.
There was limited information bias, as far as I could see.
It was the difference between asking a politician a question
and getting some stock answer that really made no sense, and asking a scientist
specialized in a certain field a question and getting the exact information you
were after.
WHY YOU NEED MULTIPLE SEARCH ENGINES
Of course, DuckDuckGo is just one of a few search engines I
use (Bing, Baidu and Yahoo! are others).
And then, depending on whether I want to dig even further
with a worldwide view or a specific region view, I will use, for example,
startpage.com, or even yandex.
What I have found since expanding my search engine profile,
so to speak, is not only do I get access to information I need, but I get a
really great overview of opinions as well as a deeper sense of what is going on
from various angles.
It's almost like someone suddenly discovering alternative
media after only ever reading/watching mainstream media – your eyes are opened
to a different world.
If you want to see what I mean, pick a topic that you
support, it doesn't matter what it is. Then type that topic into the various
search engines and see what comes up.
I think you'll be surprised.
You can even simplify the process and submit your query or
the topic to metacrawler.com, which searches multiple different search engines.
It truly helps broaden the mind and to see things from a
perspective you may not have thought of.
In the end, every search engine has it's own way of doing
things, and not one is perfect. Many will even default to return to the largest
number of results for a query. But combine them, and they will at least give
you a good springboard.
If there's one piece of advice I would offer to any
journalist, researcher, or anyone in fact, it's this: Don't stick to the same
old, same old. These days we shouldn't be spoonfed information that an
algorithm expects we want or that the masses are searching for – it's a sure
way to stunt our growth as a species.
(Btw, I have zero affiliation with DuckDuckGo)