12 ms·

I suggest stop using google search altogether. https://duckduckgo.com/ https://duckduckgo.com/ is an excellent search engine and its trivial to make a google se

I suggest stop using google search altogether. https://duckduckgo.com/ https://duckduckgo.com/ is an excellent search engine and its trivial to make a google search via `!g` prefix when you are not finding what you are looking for.

65827 9y ago
I moved off of gmail a few months ago, pretty happy about that but man duckduckgo fucking suuuucks. Really wish there was a nonprofit (with a strong privacy policy) wikipedia like .org solution that provided good results.
- Twirrim 9y ago
  What problems are you running in to? I've been using duckduckgo at work for just over a year now (took a change of job as an ideal time to try a complete switch in search engine too), and it has been excellent. I've been getting almost as good results as I do from google on even from some fairly vague terms, and comparable to Google when I give it explicit text to search for. Unlike Google it also seems to pay a lot more attention to searching for what I'm asking for, instead of trying to play guessing games.
  - floatboth 9y ago
    DDG does kinda suck at finding specific programming things sometimes. The results are just not as good for the more obscure and rare stuff.
    - takeda 9y ago
      This is because Google also tries to build a profile for you and serves different results based on that, while DDG will return the same thing for the same keywords to different people. For searches in specific domains it is better to use bangs. For example prefixing with !py shows results from python manual. Here's more about it: https://duckduckgo.com/bang https://duckduckgo.com/bang
    - dingo_bat 9y ago
      I've found this to be true for Bing too. For general search, it matches Google in accuracy. But in the case when I want to find a specific compilation error, only Google gives me useful results. But I still use Bing, and switch to Google only for such stuff.
- quadrangle 9y ago
  I always search for things on duckduckgo and basically always find good enough results. I can only guess that everyone who thinks the results are bad has been using Google so much that they get really user-specific results that they like, despite the bubble.
- amelius 9y ago
  What mail service are you using now?
  - corobo 9y ago
    Not OP but I recently switched to Fastmail myself. It's web interface is a bit bland but you can use IMAP/SMTP and your device's built in client if that's an issue Liking it so far, really liking being able to attach my domains natively to my inbox
  - gkya 9y ago
    Not OP, but I switched to my domain provider's email service. I use IMAP on my phone and POP3 on my computer, so when I'm away I can sneak-peek via the phone, but when I'm at my computer I pop the messages and classify locally, which removes them from the server. The cheapest mail service out there is about $5/mo, but this way all I pay is the annual renewal about $10.
- confounded 9y ago
  https://startpage.com https://startpage.com (there are others) is a good way to get google results without directly feeding the beast.
- mastazi 9y ago
  Oh yeah it sucks. The main problem for me is the broken autocomplete. E.g. you want to search "Sydney Thai Restaurants"; you start typing "Sydney Thai res" and you click the first suggestion because duckduckgo is auto-completing the word "restaurants"... except now your search is "London Thai Restaurant". https://imgur.com/a/V9I4o https://imgur.com/a/V9I4o
- contras1970 9y ago
  the thing is, if you expect DevOps- and testing-related results to a cucumber chef query[0], the search provider really needs to keep a file on you. otherwise you're going to get pages and pages of salad, end of story. this was the nature of the loss of relevancy i saw in DDG results when i started using it several years ago. instead of complaining about it, i took it as a wakeup call to the severity of my google bubble problem. [0] https://hn.algolia.com/?query=cucumber%20chef%20salad&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?query=cucumber%20chef%20salad&sort=b...
- dandelion_lover 9y ago
  Take a look at http://yacy.net http://yacy.net. Though the 'good results' part is missing yet, due to (I believe) too few nodes. Upd: and https://github.com/asciimoo/searx https://github.com/asciimoo/searx
TheAceOfHearts 9y ago
I started using DDG a few months back and I've been very happy so far. Sometimes results aren't as great, so I just use !g to load Google. But even better, you can search across different websites! For example, !mdn for Mozilla Developer Network, or !yt for YouTube Another thing you can do is use alternative browsers. On mobile I use Firefox Mobile, which has the benefit of allowing extensions, so you can install uBlock Origin! That makes a gigantic different in mobile web performance. On my laptop I've been using Safari as my main browser because it consumes far less memory, and it seems to handle mountains of tabs a lot better than Chrome.
- nerdponx 9y ago
  I actually find DDG results to be better and more relevant a lot of the time nowadays. The only thing Google really has an edge on (for my use) is searching for academic articles, because of Google Scholar.
  - quantum_magpie 9y ago
    Same experience. I switched 4 years ago, and the search results that I'm interested in were as good or better than google. Except scientific articles. I've yet to find a service that comes anywhere close to Google Scholar, which I think is the most successful of their products for my use case.
  - Semaphor 9y ago
    Can't agree. Almost always when DDG has only spam or useless results, !g gives me exactly what I looked for. I like DDG, especially the bangs, but Google still gives me way better results when I need them.
    - nerdponx 9y ago
      Out of curiosity, what are some examples? You can also submit feedback directly in the results, which the DDG team uses to improve their algorithms.
VitJedlicka 9y ago
Support Yacy development.
accountyaccount 9y ago
Tried it for like 3 hours and got angry about how bad it is.
paulcole 9y ago
If a search engine needs a shortcut to use another search engine, how good can it really be?
- rvense 9y ago
  DDG is probably worse than Google, but often it's good enough. The !commands allow you to search more specific sites directly - if I know I want Wikipedia, which I often do, I can just type !w and search it directly. Similar for other things like IMBD, Wolfram Alpha, etc. It's just a convenience. You can also search Google using a command, which is sometimes necessary when you're really crawling the depths of the internet for something old or weird, but nine times out of ten the straight DDG results will get you where you need in my experience.
throwaway-1209 9y ago
DDG is a wrapper on top of Bing. Maybe just skip the middleman and use Bing instead?
- terrestrial 9y ago
  Does Bing have "bangs" such as !gm for Google Maps, !gh for GitHub, !wa for WolframAlpha and so on? With no user tracking? I was a heavy user of address bar search prefixes, but it's amazingly convenient to not have to think about it until the very end of a query (or even add it in the middle).
- quadrangle 9y ago
  Then you'd get bubbled and tracked just like if you use Google, although you'd avoid AMP. DDG uses Bing and other sources, it's not literally just a wrapping of Bing.
- twsted 9y ago
  That's not true.
- floatboth 9y ago
  Not just Bing. They use many sources and I think they do some indexing on their own. IIRC Yandex is one of the sources too.
deleted 9y ago
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deleted 9y ago
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corobo 9y ago
Having been camping in a field for the past week but still needing my internet fix I think I'm going to start giving ddg a real chance (still hate the name though) until Google gives me a setting to disable AMP results I get the idea behind AMP but it's just far too late to the game for Google to be pushing it so heavily. Back on 2G internet I used Opera Mini, I don't use that now because I just don't need it anymore
- IshKebab 9y ago
  Well lucky you for having an impossibly great internet connection. Do you seriously never go anywhere with slightly less-than-perfect coverage? Or travel by train? AMP is so much faster than 90% of websites 90% of the time I can see why Google push it so much.
  - corobo 9y ago
    Impossibly great? I'm not saying everything responds instantly but usually there's either signal or there isn't. AMP pages don't work offline just as much as regular internet
    - IshKebab 9y ago
      Not my experience at all. And even with good signal many heavy news sites take a long time to load. For example this mobile speed test puts theverge.com at 21 seconds to load! That matches my experience. You can't tell me AMP is as slow as that. It's not even close. https://gtmetrix.com/reports/theverge.com/Qli1RH8u https://gtmetrix.com/reports/theverge.com/Qli1RH8u In my experience AMP pages load in 2-3 seconds, even with bad signal.
mrkgnao 9y ago
What made me move back to Google from DDG is the (by construction?) inability of the latter to learn what you're interested in. For things like documentation search, Google quickly starts tailoring results to $LANG.
geordee 9y ago
I guess I'll try DuckDuckGo for a while (annoyed by AMP).

65827 9y ago

I moved off of gmail a few months ago, pretty happy about that but man duckduckgo fucking suuuucks. Really wish there was a nonprofit (with a strong privacy policy) wikipedia like .org solution that provided good results.

Twirrim 9y ago
What problems are you running in to? I've been using duckduckgo at work for just over a year now (took a change of job as an ideal time to try a complete switch in search engine too), and it has been excellent. I've been getting almost as good results as I do from google on even from some fairly vague terms, and comparable to Google when I give it explicit text to search for. Unlike Google it also seems to pay a lot more attention to searching for what I'm asking for, instead of trying to play guessing games.
- floatboth 9y ago
  DDG does kinda suck at finding specific programming things sometimes. The results are just not as good for the more obscure and rare stuff.
  - takeda 9y ago
    This is because Google also tries to build a profile for you and serves different results based on that, while DDG will return the same thing for the same keywords to different people. For searches in specific domains it is better to use bangs. For example prefixing with !py shows results from python manual. Here's more about it: https://duckduckgo.com/bang https://duckduckgo.com/bang
  - dingo_bat 9y ago
    I've found this to be true for Bing too. For general search, it matches Google in accuracy. But in the case when I want to find a specific compilation error, only Google gives me useful results. But I still use Bing, and switch to Google only for such stuff.
quadrangle 9y ago
I always search for things on duckduckgo and basically always find good enough results. I can only guess that everyone who thinks the results are bad has been using Google so much that they get really user-specific results that they like, despite the bubble.
amelius 9y ago
What mail service are you using now?
- corobo 9y ago
  Not OP but I recently switched to Fastmail myself. It's web interface is a bit bland but you can use IMAP/SMTP and your device's built in client if that's an issue Liking it so far, really liking being able to attach my domains natively to my inbox
- gkya 9y ago
  Not OP, but I switched to my domain provider's email service. I use IMAP on my phone and POP3 on my computer, so when I'm away I can sneak-peek via the phone, but when I'm at my computer I pop the messages and classify locally, which removes them from the server. The cheapest mail service out there is about $5/mo, but this way all I pay is the annual renewal about $10.
confounded 9y ago
https://startpage.com https://startpage.com (there are others) is a good way to get google results without directly feeding the beast.
mastazi 9y ago
Oh yeah it sucks. The main problem for me is the broken autocomplete. E.g. you want to search "Sydney Thai Restaurants"; you start typing "Sydney Thai res" and you click the first suggestion because duckduckgo is auto-completing the word "restaurants"... except now your search is "London Thai Restaurant". https://imgur.com/a/V9I4o https://imgur.com/a/V9I4o
contras1970 9y ago
the thing is, if you expect DevOps- and testing-related results to a cucumber chef query[0], the search provider really needs to keep a file on you. otherwise you're going to get pages and pages of salad, end of story. this was the nature of the loss of relevancy i saw in DDG results when i started using it several years ago. instead of complaining about it, i took it as a wakeup call to the severity of my google bubble problem. [0] https://hn.algolia.com/?query=cucumber%20chef%20salad&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?query=cucumber%20chef%20salad&sort=b...
dandelion_lover 9y ago
Take a look at http://yacy.net http://yacy.net. Though the 'good results' part is missing yet, due to (I believe) too few nodes. Upd: and https://github.com/asciimoo/searx https://github.com/asciimoo/searx

TheAceOfHearts 9y ago

I started using DDG a few months back and I've been very happy so far. Sometimes results aren't as great, so I just use !g to load Google. But even better, you can search across different websites! For example, !mdn for Mozilla Developer Network, or !yt for YouTube Another thing you can do is use alternative browsers. On mobile I use Firefox Mobile, which has the benefit of allowing extensions, so you can install uBlock Origin! That makes a gigantic different in mobile web performance. On my laptop I've been using Safari as my main browser because it consumes far less memory, and it seems to handle mountains of tabs a lot better than Chrome.

nerdponx 9y ago
I actually find DDG results to be better and more relevant a lot of the time nowadays. The only thing Google really has an edge on (for my use) is searching for academic articles, because of Google Scholar.
- quantum_magpie 9y ago
  Same experience. I switched 4 years ago, and the search results that I'm interested in were as good or better than google. Except scientific articles. I've yet to find a service that comes anywhere close to Google Scholar, which I think is the most successful of their products for my use case.
- Semaphor 9y ago
  Can't agree. Almost always when DDG has only spam or useless results, !g gives me exactly what I looked for. I like DDG, especially the bangs, but Google still gives me way better results when I need them.
  - nerdponx 9y ago
    Out of curiosity, what are some examples? You can also submit feedback directly in the results, which the DDG team uses to improve their algorithms.

VitJedlicka 9y ago

Support Yacy development.

accountyaccount 9y ago

Tried it for like 3 hours and got angry about how bad it is.

paulcole 9y ago

If a search engine needs a shortcut to use another search engine, how good can it really be?

rvense 9y ago
DDG is probably worse than Google, but often it's good enough. The !commands allow you to search more specific sites directly - if I know I want Wikipedia, which I often do, I can just type !w and search it directly. Similar for other things like IMBD, Wolfram Alpha, etc. It's just a convenience. You can also search Google using a command, which is sometimes necessary when you're really crawling the depths of the internet for something old or weird, but nine times out of ten the straight DDG results will get you where you need in my experience.

throwaway-1209 9y ago

DDG is a wrapper on top of Bing. Maybe just skip the middleman and use Bing instead?

terrestrial 9y ago
Does Bing have "bangs" such as !gm for Google Maps, !gh for GitHub, !wa for WolframAlpha and so on? With no user tracking? I was a heavy user of address bar search prefixes, but it's amazingly convenient to not have to think about it until the very end of a query (or even add it in the middle).
quadrangle 9y ago
Then you'd get bubbled and tracked just like if you use Google, although you'd avoid AMP. DDG uses Bing and other sources, it's not literally just a wrapping of Bing.
twsted 9y ago
That's not true.
floatboth 9y ago
Not just Bing. They use many sources and I think they do some indexing on their own. IIRC Yandex is one of the sources too.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

corobo 9y ago

Having been camping in a field for the past week but still needing my internet fix I think I'm going to start giving ddg a real chance (still hate the name though) until Google gives me a setting to disable AMP results I get the idea behind AMP but it's just far too late to the game for Google to be pushing it so heavily. Back on 2G internet I used Opera Mini, I don't use that now because I just don't need it anymore

IshKebab 9y ago
Well lucky you for having an impossibly great internet connection. Do you seriously never go anywhere with slightly less-than-perfect coverage? Or travel by train? AMP is so much faster than 90% of websites 90% of the time I can see why Google push it so much.
- corobo 9y ago
  Impossibly great? I'm not saying everything responds instantly but usually there's either signal or there isn't. AMP pages don't work offline just as much as regular internet
  - IshKebab 9y ago
    Not my experience at all. And even with good signal many heavy news sites take a long time to load. For example this mobile speed test puts theverge.com at 21 seconds to load! That matches my experience. You can't tell me AMP is as slow as that. It's not even close. https://gtmetrix.com/reports/theverge.com/Qli1RH8u https://gtmetrix.com/reports/theverge.com/Qli1RH8u In my experience AMP pages load in 2-3 seconds, even with bad signal.

mrkgnao 9y ago

What made me move back to Google from DDG is the (by construction?) inability of the latter to learn what you're interested in. For things like documentation search, Google quickly starts tailoring results to $LANG.

geordee 9y ago

I guess I'll try DuckDuckGo for a while (annoyed by AMP).