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CommenterPerson 7 days ago

Here is the actual search page. I searched for something, looks pretty good. One small blow against enshittification:

https://www.ecosia.org/

jsnell 7 days ago | parent [-]

How do you know those good-looking results were served from the new index, rather than being just rebranded Bing API results?

CommenterPerson 7 days ago | parent [-]

First, the results seem really good. Definitely better than Bing. Remember the old days when g**gle came out and it seemed amazing? A little like that.

Second, I read their blog. Critical thinking and reading helps one recognize BS.

Now the question is typically HN with no answer "proof". One can dive down a HN sub bullet tree with this. It's something like proving you exist. Nothing definitive there!

jsnell 7 days ago | parent [-]

The reason I'm asking this is exactly their blog post, which says says that their goal is to roll this out to 50% of the French queries at the end of the year.

That's a rather limited slice of traffic (50% of French queries, 0% of everything else), and it's not described as the current state but their goal for the end of the year. The obvious implication is that right now even their French rollout is lower than 50%. How much lower, we don't know for certain, but 5 months is a long time. I have to imagine it is far lower than 50% right now. 1%? 10%? Hard to believe it is any higher than that.

So I think my original question was very fair. The answer could for example have been that they indicated on the results page, or maybe they had some kind of a per-user opt-in toggle that you switched. From your reply, I gather that's not the case, and you're just assuming that your results must be from the new index. That seems like a bad assumption to make.