Ultimate Comparison with Google, Bing, Yahoo, and Duckduckgo
Google censorship has been a rising issue over the past years. Accusations about Google censoring news are surfacing more and more. Let’s compare Google search results with Bing, Yahoo and DuckDuckGo to find out if we can see instances of Google manipulating search results.
To evaluate Google’s search results, I compared them with Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo and Startpage. To get as anonymous results as possible, I used separate Firefox profiles for Google, DuckDuckGo and Bing. I turned off telemetry and Google safe browsing feature, and I set Firefox to never remember browser history. This should get rid of most of Google trackers planted on the device, which could interfere with the results. To pull Yahoo results, I used Vivaldi with similar settings and for Startpage I used Tor Browser. Startpage lists Google results but more privately and without Google’s trackers, and I only use it to double check whether I really get non-personalised Google results.
I was not logged in to any account and I didn’t have any other browser open at the time of recording these search experiments. For each search engine, we are going to compare results from the first two pages only, as this is where the vast majority of clicks happen. For each search on Google, I connected from a different IP address in the United States and I restarted Firefox to wipe all browser data. This was done using NordVPN servers, to make sure Google can’t track my real location and personalise my results that way. I also used different US-based IP addresses for Bing, Yahoo and DuckDuckGo, and I restarted the browser for each search on them as well.