Ask Paul: March 24 (Premium)

After a rather interesting flight home from Mexico City, we’re back to face our home sale and another move. But first, it’s almost the weekend…
Anecdotal
goodbar asks:

Hey Paul - Question on search engines.  I know you use google as does most of the world, but I am curious if there's really a noticeable difference between google vs bing vs brave search vs duckduckgo vs ?.  Have there been any studies other than usage numbers that back up google as the most efficient search engine?  I'm fairly certain I could ultimately find what I need on any of them, but not certain on if one will get me to my answer milliseconds, seconds or minutes faster.

I probably told this story already---maybe multiple times---but many years ago now I was visiting with a friend in France and his wife commented on my Windows laptop, noting that she had stopped using Windows because it so buggy. So I asked her how long it had been since she used Windows, and she said several years. To which I replied, basically, then your opinion is out of date, and you have no idea what Windows is like now.

And that’s what most of our experiences are like: if we use something even once and move on to something else, we still have this idea in our head that our opinion of that first time, no matter how out of date, is still correct. And that opinion is part of what validates our use of whatever thing we moved to.

The nice thing about search engines, of course, is that you can easily try one without “leaving” the service you usually use. And my experiences with non-Google search engines, while absolutely anecdotal, always have followed the same path: I try it---Bing, Brave Search, DuckDuckGo, whatever---and I always quickly go back to Google. Why? Any number of reasons from literally not seeing what I wanted or expected, or just basic UI stuff. But the most common thing is I search for something, don’t find what I need, and then try the same search in Google and it works. I’ve never tried another search engine and thought, yeah, maybe. Ever.

Others have, though, and obviously, others successfully use these things. (Conversely, they probably never use Google Search either, where their opinions are likewise out of date.) I don’t know what everyone’s experiences are---and I’ve had some try to convince me, say, that Bing is “better” than Google, or whatever---but this, at least, is something anyone can experiment with easily. I’ll just say that if Bing, or Brave Search, or DuckDuckGo really was “better,” most people would probably just use it, if only because of the non-issues with switching costs. But they’re not. So my guess is that most people who do use these other services are doing so just because they have concerns about Google. Understandable, but I’m not going to bite my nose to spite my face. Google seems that much better to me.

I’m not sure if there’s a way to objectively compare these things. Part of the issue is th...