In our recent exploration of search engines, we decided to compare Google and DuckDuckGo by testing how they handle lexical ambiguity, precision, and recall. Here’s what we found:
Handling Lexical Ambiguity
We started with a search for “Washington”, which can be ambiguous as it could refer to the U.S. state, Washington D.C., or even George Washington.
- Google: Right off the bat, Google provided a range of results. The top links included information about Washington state, Washington D.C., and the Washington Commanders football team. Additionally, Google presented a knowledge panel that gave a clear breakdown of these different meanings, and it provided a “People also ask” section with related clarifications.
- DuckDuckGo: The first result was a Wikipedia disambiguation page for Washington, followed by individual links to Washington state and Washington D.C. However, DuckDuckGo did not attempt to offer a more refined answer to clarify the different contexts of “Washington.”
Winner: Google
Google outperformed DuckDuckGo in handling lexical ambiguity by presenting a well-organized and informative set of results, complete with clustering and context clarification.
Precision in Non-Ambiguous Searches
Next, we tested a more straightforward search, “Hawkes Learning statistics tutorials”, to see how well each engine could pinpoint relevant content.
- Google: The top results were directly from Hawkes Learning’s official site, YouTube tutorials, and other academic sources specifically related to Hawkes Learning. It provided a clean, relevant set of results that directly answered our query.
- DuckDuckGo: While DuckDuckGo also brought up Hawkes Learning’s site, some of the results were a bit less relevant, showing broader math tutoring resources that were only loosely connected to the query.
Winner: Google
Google delivered better precision in this case, as nearly all of the top 20 results were highly relevant to the specific search. DuckDuckGo, while still relevant, included more extraneous links.
Assessing Recall
Recall refers to the total number of relevant results a search engine retrieves, but this metric is tricky to measure directly. Since both search engines don’t show all results at once, it’s impossible to see the entire dataset. Additionally, recall is influenced by factors such as personalization—Google’s results are tailored based on browsing history, while DuckDuckGo emphasizes privacy and doesn’t track users.
Because of these limitations, it’s difficult to determine which search engine has better recall without access to their full index or deeper internal data.
Conclusion
- Google clearly excels in handling lexical ambiguity and delivering precise, relevant results.
- DuckDuckGo, while offering privacy-focused results, may not provide the same level of precision as Google.
- Recall is challenging to measure accurately, so we cannot definitively state which search engine excels in this area.
Ultimately, if you need highly relevant results with a focus on clarity, Google is the better choice. However, for those prioritizing privacy without tracking, DuckDuckGo remains a solid alternative.