The enshittification of online search? Privacy and quality of Google, Bing and Apple in coding advice
Konrad Kollnig

TL;DR
This study compares the search quality and privacy of Google, Bing, and Apple Search for coding advice, revealing Bing's superior performance in privacy and coding quality metrics in October 2023.
Contribution
It provides a large-scale, quantitative comparison of search quality and privacy across three major search engines, including the underexplored Apple Search.
Findings
Bing has higher privacy scores than Google and Apple.
Bing provides higher quality coding advice based on Stack Overflow rankings.
Search privacy and quality vary significantly among the three search engines.
Abstract
Even though currently being challenged by ChatGPT and other large-language models (LLMs), Google Search remains one of the primary means for many individuals to find information on the internet. Interestingly, the way that we retrieve information on the web has hardly changed ever since Google was established in 1998, raising concerns as to Google's dominance in search and lack of competition. If the market for search was sufficiently competitive, then we should probably see a steady increase in search quality over time as well as alternative approaches to the Google's approach to search. However, hardly any research has so far looked at search quality, which is a key facet of a competitive market, especially not over time. In this report, we conducted a relatively large-scale quantitative comparison of search quality of 1,467 search queries relating to coding advice in October 2023.…
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Taxonomy
TopicsInformation Retrieval and Search Behavior · Expert finding and Q&A systems · Ethics and Social Impacts of AI
