11 ms·

Ive forced myself to use Bing since google introduced AMP. Do I like it better than Google? No, I don't. But! I like not having google become my single source o

Ive forced myself to use Bing since google introduced AMP. Do I like it better than Google? No, I don't. But! I like not having google become my single source of content more than I dislike the slight drop in quality as a result of using Bing. I like the sites I go to, to have control over their content and being able to easily link to them. I think it's reprehensible for google to push this so relentlessly and beyond simply stealing links it makes google into the "internet." This (AMP) could easily be a standard, in fact it's mostly just common sense (good lightweight HTML/CSS/JS). Instead of Google forcing its way on users and creators it could just lower the page rank of the offenders. One other thing about AMP that pisses me off as a user and an engineer is it's one more place to maintain meaning one more shitty neglected experience. As a user I hate it when AMP pages are broken and I somehow can't get to the non-AMP version. I don't blame the developers because we have enough on our plate. My anger is solely directed to google for making the damn mess in the first place.

jwilcoxson 9y ago
Checkout Duck Duck Go, still not Google-level results, but it's still pretty good, and not Bing.
- ams6110 9y ago
  It really is as good as google for most things, in my experience. I use it by default and when it can't find what I'm looking for, Google usually doesn't do much better.
  - dwighttk 9y ago
    one of the last areas I've found myself going back to google is when I'm searching for a gif... Duck Duck Go will return them, but it is usually a very small subset of the available gifs out there.
- eps 9y ago
  It is actually Bing, which DDG uses for the bulk of its results.
  - jwilcoxson 9y ago
    Well, I learned something today.
  - PrimHelios 9y ago
    It used Yahoo last I checked.
    - ancientworldnow 9y ago
      And Yahoo uses Bing.
      - PrimHelios 9y ago
        I didn't know that. TIL
    - helthanatos 9y ago
      Yandex?
      - supertramp_sid 9y ago
        http://techreport.com/news/17313/it-official-yahoo-will-use-bing-for-search http://techreport.com/news/17313/it-official-yahoo-will-use-...
        omgtehlion 9y ago
        [2009] nowadays Yandex uses its own index even for “foreign” (non-Russian) sites.
- Semaphor 9y ago
  Can only second ddg. It's not perfect but I usually only have to use "!g" (ddg syntax for search on Google) every two days.
- exergy 9y ago
  Duckduckgo is a lovely idea with abhorrent search results. Like, unusably bad results, at least to the extent that I'm a reasonably tech savvy user. I'm often searching for papers as a grad student, or typing things "close enough" and hoping Google figures it out for me etc. Duckduckgo cannot keep up. I love Bangs, I love the idea, but the search is nigh-useless. That said, I use StartPage, who have a contract I believe with Google. It's Google's search results, minus the tracking. It's as much as I am willing to compromise on something as fundamental as search.
  - eridius 9y ago
    Maybe you're searching for something really niche, but I use DDG and have no problem with its results. If I can't find what I'm looking for, I can always use !g to check google, and most of the time google doesn't have the answer either!
  - eikenberry 9y ago
    You use DDG as your default engine. For most common searches it works fine, particularly nice is that if there is a wikipedia entry it will show it right there. When you have a tougher search and it doesn't work you just slap a '!g' or a '!b' on the end and turn it into a google/bing search.
  - lucb1e 9y ago
    The results for localized stuff, e.g. a local store, are horrible. The results for complicated questions where the query is either not very specific or the page might not have all words, are also really bad. But if you have a good idea of what you're looking for, which is most of the time for me, it works very well. At least it's honest about not having results whereas Google presents 5 billion, all of which are missing one of the three keywords (which it notes in a small, light grey text, which you only notice after the first three results were completely unrelated and you were wondering what went wrong). For example, "new double c++" is the query I did most recently and in the top 3 there are 2 results that answer my question. Making something up at random like "torrent clients" gives me as top hit the Wikipedia article "comparison of bittorrent clients", which is better than expected. I can't seem to think of a vague query right now. "audio books" gives me sites with audio books; "psychology books" gives me articles of 'the best 50 psychology books' and such; and looking in my query history, "draw unicode" seems vague but the top hit (shapecatcher.com) is the one I was looking for. Something localized then: "drankwinkel echt" (where Echt is a place and drankwinkel a liquor store) indeed gives terrible results. The store name, surprisingly, works though: "gal & gal echt" gives similar results to google.nl.
- vamsipk 9y ago
  And specifically why not Bing?
  - jwilcoxson 9y ago
    Bing just feels gross to me, just like Google. But as someone pointed out, I guess DDG uses Bing for some of its results, so I don't have much of an argument here.
- monochromatic 9y ago
  I tried Duck Duck Go exactly because of the AMP issue. Its search results are bad enough that I couldn't keep using it even though I wanted to. I'm on Bing for now.
  - inopinatus 9y ago
    I get identical results from DDG and Bing, and that isn't surprising because DDG's search backend is Bing.
    - Retric 9y ago
      I really don't ex: "ice cream calories" share several but not all sites and use a different order for those they share, which just suggests similar algorithms. PS: DDG redirected image searches to bing, but not generic searches. Which honestly seems reasonable as doing image search well is incredibly hard, with minimal payoffs.
      - inopinatus 9y ago
        Nope, for that search I once again got the same results in the same order. It sounds like Bing is personalizing your results either by location or by adtech tracking, which is kinda antithetical to the point of DDG.
- agumonkey 9y ago
  After 2 attempts it's now my default search "portal". As other said, generic results are low grade. But the bangs and the "control" are worth this loss. I can search really fast on dedicated websites !yt !gi !gmaps !wbm (waybackmachine) and I don't have to worry about what's going on most of the time.
- piyush_soni 9y ago
  For past few years, I go to try DuckDuckGo every once in a while (especially when someone suggests that again on HN), but it disappoints me every time with the quality of search results. Also, if it is using Bing on inside, I'm not then sure why the results are still different than that(even at the places where there's no scope for personalization). For example type this line exactly in both bing and ddg: difference between std list and std set The first result DDG shows is of a difference between set and a vector - not only that, it also highlights that result in a Google Card inspired fashion (which is worse because Google does that only when they have a certain amount of confidence in the answer), while the first result Bing shows is an actual difference between list and a set. So either Bing is cheating DDG, or DDG is doing something stupid on top of its results. (Also, if you cover the above string in quotes, Bing still shows 'some' search results, while DDG doesn't). May be after using the '!' ninja techniques it'll be same as Google, but then I have also come to love the fact that I can type in 'my next flight' or 'Show me emails from ....' or 'remind me to ... ' and other personalized things on Google so may be my priorities are different here.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - wand3r 9y ago
    Sounds like your priorities are different; and that's fine. DDG doesn't parse your emails so it doesn't have your location, flight info nor a lot of user data to build personalized results. I like it a lot, it's gotten much better but it requires adaptation when coming from Google.. or just !g
hellcow 9y ago
I've become a pretty big fan of StartPage. Same Google search but without all the tracking.
polishTar 9y ago
Just as a FYI, Bing is a really large supporter of the AMP project. “We started experimenting with AMP in our Bing App last May and have noticed that AMP pages load, on average, approximately 80% faster than non-AMP pages” says Marcelo De Barros, Group Engineering Manager in charge of the AMP integration at Bing. https://blogs.bing.com/search/September-2016/bing-app-joins-the-amp-open-source-effort https://blogs.bing.com/search/September-2016/bing-app-joins-...
- ghughes 9y ago
  It turns out that if you strip most of the JS bloat from a webpage and serve it from a fast CDN, the page loads way faster. Shocking stuff.
  - ejcx 9y ago
    It's not shocking but AMP enforces it. People talk a lot of trash about AMP, but until there's another solution that allows me to go to a news website and actually read it, I'm an AMP supporter.
    - ploxiln 9y ago
      Such a solution has existed for at least a decade: ad blocker :)
      - dzhiurgis 9y ago
        + reading mode in Safari helps a ton. But still you are loading ton of unnecessary content. Ad blocking on iOS still sucks (no custom filters).
        giobox 9y ago
        Custom filters are absolutely possible, it just depends which adblocker you choose to enable. IIRC the block list has to be compiled to a static JSON file for Safari to consume, but most of the decent adblock apps on iOS provide a companion configuration application that lets you insert custom entries then recompile the block list. If anything I prefer this way of working - Apple alone are responsible for maintaining a high performance adblocker in Safari, the wider app ecosystem just provides the block lists, rather than rely on app developers to write performant browser plugins.
quakeguy 9y ago
Use ddg.com.
- quakeguy 9y ago
  no. dont use it, hands were faster than brain. the adress is ddg.gg. sorry.
trengrj 9y ago
I've switched to Bing on my mobile as well. My contract with a search engine is that they should provide links to other sites in a relatively painless way. In exchange for this the search engine can track me while I am on the site. AMP breaks this relationship by refusing to let me leave the site and extends tracking to other sites. The speed difference is negligible to me and not worth this violation of privacy.
cacarr 9y ago
FWIW, you do get a link on the AMP page to the canonical URL now.
65827 9y ago
I am kind of shocked to see this be the top comment on this story, I remember getting shit on thoroughly everywhere for daring to point out how awful this was back when it first came out, seems like people are FINALLY willing to be a bit more skeptical of Google's actual intentions given their shady and abusive track record.
shados 9y ago
The internet is going to be all AMP and PWA soon, so everything is served from google or on the app store. Enjoy! /barf.
- carpenumidium 9y ago
  I think you've misunderstood what PWAs are? PWAs are fundementally websites which are built on a bunch of guidelines with performance and accessibility prioritized.
  - shados 9y ago
    And if you follow those guidelines and with the right meta data, they get treated specially by certain 3rd party, like google/android letting you update them in the app store. Just like AMP are fundamentally websites built on a bunch of guidelines with performance and accessibility prioritized which, once you sprinkle them with enough metadata, get treated specialty by third party like google. Yeah, I don't think I misunderstood. AMP's guidelines are just more strict before the 3rd parties start treating you specially. And in both cases, the original website/app is just fine, until it starts getting treated specially.
    - carpenumidium 9y ago
      > like google/android letting you update them in the app store. Update what? What do you mean by "app store"?
      - shados 9y ago
        sorry, terrible choice of words on my part (more like the world's worse freudian slip, as I was thinking "like apps in the app store). I meant that they're going to show up like any other app in the app list, settings to be tweaked/modified/deleted and so on.
snakeanus 9y ago
Why not DDG? I switched to it recently and I am enjoying the !bang searches.
cyphunk 9y ago
DuckDuckGo.com instead, for so many reasons. First, privacy aware. Their index is fine. They don't hide their tale and run, hiding behind captcha's and turning their users into slaves, when it comes to confronting bots: https://twitter.com/cyphunk/status/849615910545620992 https://twitter.com/cyphunk/status/849615910545620992 (vid comparison of using google via tor vs using duckduckgo)

jwilcoxson 9y ago

Checkout Duck Duck Go, still not Google-level results, but it's still pretty good, and not Bing.

ams6110 9y ago
It really is as good as google for most things, in my experience. I use it by default and when it can't find what I'm looking for, Google usually doesn't do much better.
- dwighttk 9y ago
  one of the last areas I've found myself going back to google is when I'm searching for a gif... Duck Duck Go will return them, but it is usually a very small subset of the available gifs out there.
eps 9y ago
It is actually Bing, which DDG uses for the bulk of its results.
- jwilcoxson 9y ago
  Well, I learned something today.
- PrimHelios 9y ago
  It used Yahoo last I checked.
  - ancientworldnow 9y ago
    And Yahoo uses Bing.
    - PrimHelios 9y ago
      I didn't know that. TIL
  - helthanatos 9y ago
    Yandex?
    - supertramp_sid 9y ago
      http://techreport.com/news/17313/it-official-yahoo-will-use-bing-for-search http://techreport.com/news/17313/it-official-yahoo-will-use-...
      - omgtehlion 9y ago
        [2009] nowadays Yandex uses its own index even for “foreign” (non-Russian) sites.
Semaphor 9y ago
Can only second ddg. It's not perfect but I usually only have to use "!g" (ddg syntax for search on Google) every two days.
exergy 9y ago
Duckduckgo is a lovely idea with abhorrent search results. Like, unusably bad results, at least to the extent that I'm a reasonably tech savvy user. I'm often searching for papers as a grad student, or typing things "close enough" and hoping Google figures it out for me etc. Duckduckgo cannot keep up. I love Bangs, I love the idea, but the search is nigh-useless. That said, I use StartPage, who have a contract I believe with Google. It's Google's search results, minus the tracking. It's as much as I am willing to compromise on something as fundamental as search.
- eridius 9y ago
  Maybe you're searching for something really niche, but I use DDG and have no problem with its results. If I can't find what I'm looking for, I can always use !g to check google, and most of the time google doesn't have the answer either!
- eikenberry 9y ago
  You use DDG as your default engine. For most common searches it works fine, particularly nice is that if there is a wikipedia entry it will show it right there. When you have a tougher search and it doesn't work you just slap a '!g' or a '!b' on the end and turn it into a google/bing search.
- lucb1e 9y ago
  The results for localized stuff, e.g. a local store, are horrible. The results for complicated questions where the query is either not very specific or the page might not have all words, are also really bad. But if you have a good idea of what you're looking for, which is most of the time for me, it works very well. At least it's honest about not having results whereas Google presents 5 billion, all of which are missing one of the three keywords (which it notes in a small, light grey text, which you only notice after the first three results were completely unrelated and you were wondering what went wrong). For example, "new double c++" is the query I did most recently and in the top 3 there are 2 results that answer my question. Making something up at random like "torrent clients" gives me as top hit the Wikipedia article "comparison of bittorrent clients", which is better than expected. I can't seem to think of a vague query right now. "audio books" gives me sites with audio books; "psychology books" gives me articles of 'the best 50 psychology books' and such; and looking in my query history, "draw unicode" seems vague but the top hit (shapecatcher.com) is the one I was looking for. Something localized then: "drankwinkel echt" (where Echt is a place and drankwinkel a liquor store) indeed gives terrible results. The store name, surprisingly, works though: "gal & gal echt" gives similar results to google.nl.
vamsipk 9y ago
And specifically why not Bing?
- jwilcoxson 9y ago
  Bing just feels gross to me, just like Google. But as someone pointed out, I guess DDG uses Bing for some of its results, so I don't have much of an argument here.
monochromatic 9y ago
I tried Duck Duck Go exactly because of the AMP issue. Its search results are bad enough that I couldn't keep using it even though I wanted to. I'm on Bing for now.
- inopinatus 9y ago
  I get identical results from DDG and Bing, and that isn't surprising because DDG's search backend is Bing.
  - Retric 9y ago
    I really don't ex: "ice cream calories" share several but not all sites and use a different order for those they share, which just suggests similar algorithms. PS: DDG redirected image searches to bing, but not generic searches. Which honestly seems reasonable as doing image search well is incredibly hard, with minimal payoffs.
    - inopinatus 9y ago
      Nope, for that search I once again got the same results in the same order. It sounds like Bing is personalizing your results either by location or by adtech tracking, which is kinda antithetical to the point of DDG.
agumonkey 9y ago
After 2 attempts it's now my default search "portal". As other said, generic results are low grade. But the bangs and the "control" are worth this loss. I can search really fast on dedicated websites !yt !gi !gmaps !wbm (waybackmachine) and I don't have to worry about what's going on most of the time.
piyush_soni 9y ago
For past few years, I go to try DuckDuckGo every once in a while (especially when someone suggests that again on HN), but it disappoints me every time with the quality of search results. Also, if it is using Bing on inside, I'm not then sure why the results are still different than that(even at the places where there's no scope for personalization). For example type this line exactly in both bing and ddg: difference between std list and std set The first result DDG shows is of a difference between set and a vector - not only that, it also highlights that result in a Google Card inspired fashion (which is worse because Google does that only when they have a certain amount of confidence in the answer), while the first result Bing shows is an actual difference between list and a set. So either Bing is cheating DDG, or DDG is doing something stupid on top of its results. (Also, if you cover the above string in quotes, Bing still shows 'some' search results, while DDG doesn't). May be after using the '!' ninja techniques it'll be same as Google, but then I have also come to love the fact that I can type in 'my next flight' or 'Show me emails from ....' or 'remind me to ... ' and other personalized things on Google so may be my priorities are different here.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- wand3r 9y ago
  Sounds like your priorities are different; and that's fine. DDG doesn't parse your emails so it doesn't have your location, flight info nor a lot of user data to build personalized results. I like it a lot, it's gotten much better but it requires adaptation when coming from Google.. or just !g

hellcow 9y ago

I've become a pretty big fan of StartPage. Same Google search but without all the tracking.

polishTar 9y ago

Just as a FYI, Bing is a really large supporter of the AMP project. “We started experimenting with AMP in our Bing App last May and have noticed that AMP pages load, on average, approximately 80% faster than non-AMP pages” says Marcelo De Barros, Group Engineering Manager in charge of the AMP integration at Bing. https://blogs.bing.com/search/September-2016/bing-app-joins-the-amp-open-source-effort https://blogs.bing.com/search/September-2016/bing-app-joins-...

ghughes 9y ago
It turns out that if you strip most of the JS bloat from a webpage and serve it from a fast CDN, the page loads way faster. Shocking stuff.
- ejcx 9y ago
  It's not shocking but AMP enforces it. People talk a lot of trash about AMP, but until there's another solution that allows me to go to a news website and actually read it, I'm an AMP supporter.
  - ploxiln 9y ago
    Such a solution has existed for at least a decade: ad blocker :)
    - dzhiurgis 9y ago
      + reading mode in Safari helps a ton. But still you are loading ton of unnecessary content. Ad blocking on iOS still sucks (no custom filters).
      - giobox 9y ago
        Custom filters are absolutely possible, it just depends which adblocker you choose to enable. IIRC the block list has to be compiled to a static JSON file for Safari to consume, but most of the decent adblock apps on iOS provide a companion configuration application that lets you insert custom entries then recompile the block list. If anything I prefer this way of working - Apple alone are responsible for maintaining a high performance adblocker in Safari, the wider app ecosystem just provides the block lists, rather than rely on app developers to write performant browser plugins.

quakeguy 9y ago

Use ddg.com.

quakeguy 9y ago
no. dont use it, hands were faster than brain. the adress is ddg.gg. sorry.

trengrj 9y ago

I've switched to Bing on my mobile as well. My contract with a search engine is that they should provide links to other sites in a relatively painless way. In exchange for this the search engine can track me while I am on the site. AMP breaks this relationship by refusing to let me leave the site and extends tracking to other sites. The speed difference is negligible to me and not worth this violation of privacy.

cacarr 9y ago

FWIW, you do get a link on the AMP page to the canonical URL now.

65827 9y ago

I am kind of shocked to see this be the top comment on this story, I remember getting shit on thoroughly everywhere for daring to point out how awful this was back when it first came out, seems like people are FINALLY willing to be a bit more skeptical of Google's actual intentions given their shady and abusive track record.

shados 9y ago

The internet is going to be all AMP and PWA soon, so everything is served from google or on the app store. Enjoy! /barf.

carpenumidium 9y ago
I think you've misunderstood what PWAs are? PWAs are fundementally websites which are built on a bunch of guidelines with performance and accessibility prioritized.
- shados 9y ago
  And if you follow those guidelines and with the right meta data, they get treated specially by certain 3rd party, like google/android letting you update them in the app store. Just like AMP are fundamentally websites built on a bunch of guidelines with performance and accessibility prioritized which, once you sprinkle them with enough metadata, get treated specialty by third party like google. Yeah, I don't think I misunderstood. AMP's guidelines are just more strict before the 3rd parties start treating you specially. And in both cases, the original website/app is just fine, until it starts getting treated specially.
  - carpenumidium 9y ago
    > like google/android letting you update them in the app store. Update what? What do you mean by "app store"?
    - shados 9y ago
      sorry, terrible choice of words on my part (more like the world's worse freudian slip, as I was thinking "like apps in the app store). I meant that they're going to show up like any other app in the app list, settings to be tweaked/modified/deleted and so on.

snakeanus 9y ago

Why not DDG? I switched to it recently and I am enjoying the !bang searches.

cyphunk 9y ago

DuckDuckGo.com instead, for so many reasons. First, privacy aware. Their index is fine. They don't hide their tale and run, hiding behind captcha's and turning their users into slaves, when it comes to confronting bots: https://twitter.com/cyphunk/status/849615910545620992 https://twitter.com/cyphunk/status/849615910545620992 (vid comparison of using google via tor vs using duckduckgo)