10 ms·

> You may realize they also track you on YouTube, Gmail, Chrome, Android, Gmaps, and all the other services they run. Yes, you can live Google-free. I’ve been d

by vntok 8y ago

> You may realize they also track you on YouTube, Gmail, Chrome, Android, Gmaps, and all the other services they run. Yes, you can live Google-free. I’ve been doing it for many years. You can, however all these alternatives are measurably worse in terms of features and ease-of-use, so much so that switching to them is both painful at first and frustrating on a daily basis. Consider the sheer number of people who in every DDG thread keep on saying "well yes DDG results are worse than Google's, but you can use Google from DDG so it's okay". Well it's not okay for most people. Also, bangs seem like a great idea at first, until you realise that Google simply does not need them to return relevant results! Then they suddenly seem way less differenciating and more like an acknowledgement of the inferiority of DDG compared to Google. And as a user, I'd much rather type "duckduckgo" and get the official site at first then the wikipedia entry (with a complimentary knowledge box on the side) than have to decide first where I want to look and then type "!w duckduckgo". Even in this very thread, we can read stuff like > "I've been using DuckDuckGo for years now. It's not perfect but if you think carefully about your query it will work fine. > For me the killer feature is DDG's bang commands (https://duckduckgo.com/bang https://duckduckgo.com/bang) prepend "!w" for wikipedia, "!imdb" for movie trivia stuff, etc." Well, Google will achieve the same or better results without this need to mentally switch context. This is a feature, and a key differentiator.

bluGill 8y ago
When is the last time you used DDG? I switch about a year ago. I've used the !g trick 3 times when I didn't find what I wanted, and in all cases google didn't find what I was looking for either. I can't speak for you, but I find DDG is good enough to replace google for search. Is google better - maybe, but not enough to overcome their downsides.
StavrosK 8y ago
I've been using DDG for years now, and the results are exactly as good as Google. I've never had a case where going to Google returned better results for me. Maybe it's because I tend to search for programming/hardware questions, but that's my experience. Also, I don't use bangs, I use the browser's built-in searches. So, for example, "i <movie name>" will take me to IMDB (actually Rotten Tomatoes nowadays) by searching for "site:imdb.com ! <movie name>" on DDG.
- detaro 8y ago
  I still have to fall back to Google every now and then or tweak the request more. Random example I encountered today: "Mastodon API". DDG does not find the api documentation on the first two screens, on Google spot 1 is the old location of the docs that has a link to the new, spot 2 is the new location of the docs. "Mastodon API documentation" and DDG understands it too.
  - wruza 8y ago
    I’ll second that. DDG is good for regular searches, but can stumble upon rare particular queries and/or what one calls ‘deep googling’. Otoh, it is good that I can hide everything except few queries from google, so it wastes its money on irrelevant ads that I block anyway.
    - utopcell 8y ago
      ..and by DDG, you mean Bing.
      - wruza 8y ago
        Yahoo, actually, if you insist that DDG is not a fair search engine on its own. Both shown very similar results on my areas of interest.
        utopcell 8y ago
        DDG was built on Yahoo! BOSS, which was backed by Yahoo search engine results until Yahoo switched to Bing (almost 10 years ago.) So, if we are insisting on being accurate, SSG's main backend is Bing.
        wruza 8y ago
        Didn't know that. So, is it safe to use ddg in a sense of not gifting your data to ms/ggl/etc tech pigs? Or is it just Bing with a new skin?
mbostleman 8y ago
I tried to be Google free for a couple of months by dropping Chrome and Google's search for Firefox and DDG. It was a painful experience. Without going in to detail (though I easily could), the stability, performance, and quality just was not there at all. In the end, the final straw was a critical business app that I use that had one too many problems with Firefox. I ended up having to bail. I still look forward to the day that I can ditch Google, but it isn't going to be today unfortunately.
- ldiracdelta 8y ago
  I prefer to fail-over to google. If DDG doesn't work, then I use google by typing !g in the search bar. Using DDG and increasing their audience should hopefully make them better in the long run.
- ithilglin909 8y ago
  For a long time, I felt that Firefox was just less nice to work with than Chrome and couldn't quite make the switch. However, Firefox developer addition feels pretty "Chrome-like" and I've yet to experience any noticeable performance or stability issues.
- cannonedhamster 8y ago
  I'm really curious about the business app you had problems with. I've yet to experience any issues with Firefox and apps since moving back to FF shortly before they moved to Quantum. I do know there are many apps that take advantage of non-standard features supported by Chrome, which could be the case here. I was finally able to completely ditch Google, though because of going back to college to finish up my degree, I'm stuck with MS for a bit longer, though I've been fairly pleased with W10, I'm a sucker for the Ubuntu subsystem.
merpnderp 8y ago
I'm not sure this is a key differentiator. I don't know how many times I've searched for a tv show, movie, song, etc and wanted the wikipedia page, and Google has only shown my IMDB and a ton of other corporate marketing sites, with wikipedia nowhere to be found on the first few pages.
- vntok 8y ago
  Without a knowledge graph infobox?
- majewsky 8y ago
  When you want the Wikipedia page, can't you search on Wikipedia directly? At least in Firefox, I have Wikipedia added as a search keyword.
dangom 8y ago
> so much so that switching to them is both painful at first and frustrating on a daily basis Speaking as someone who made a switch about 2 years ago, I could not agree more. For desktop purposes it's OK because I don't mind refining my search query, but for mobile it's a serious pain. As an example, sometimes you just want to look up something quickly, like restaurant reviews, or an article you were talking about to a friend. Trying to "re-find" things you've searched or seen before, or trying to find specific places in your neighbourhood, that is where the need for privacy takes its largest toll on convenience. Why isn't there a way to combine privacy with keeping your data?
- alleyshack 8y ago
  > Why isn't there a way to combine privacy with keeping your data? Because we haven't figured out how to monetize it yet. Or perhaps more accurately, we haven't convinced the average consumer that it's worth paying for. In theory, we could build services which do combine privacy with convenience, but consumers would have to be willing to pay for those services - and pay enough to make them viable. But too many people are too accustomed to "free" services, paid for with their data/loss of privacy (an intangible loss which many people either don't care about or believe it's too late to recover), to like the idea of handing over cold hard cash instead (a tangible loss which could directly impact the ability of people on limited budgets to access these services).
vnorilo 8y ago
Like many others in this thread, I've got ddg as the default search engine and sometimes fall back to google (maybe once a week.) I think google is "smarter", specifically sometimes about the context of the query. However, I usually don't prefer that: it's sometimes very difficult to find something on google which resembles, but is not, something popular that people often search for. In that situation, my brain can play ddg's results more easily. Perhaps it's relevant that said brain was wired for web search in a simpler time, on altavista.
bad_user 8y ago
I take issue with the idea that alternatives are measurably worse: - Gmail -> FastMail: faster, more standards compliant, fewer limits (e.g. user aliases, connections, domains, etc), sub-domain aliasing, push email on iOS, app passwords with certain permissions (e.g. just SMTP, for usage on your server), mobile web interface that doesn't suck - Chrome -> Firefox: better UI for power users, better extensions, better privacy (e.g. Facebook multi-account container), even after the WebExtensions API - Android -> iOS: OK, this isn't for everybody, still you have AOSP distributions out there and to their credit Android is very customization still - Gmaps -> OpenStreeMaps: in Easter/Central Europe where I live the maps in Gmaps are really poor and got me lost several times, OSM is miles ahead, for POIs too - YouTube -> Vimeo: not for users, but for content creators Vimeo is superior because it lets you sell your movies and embed private videos on your own website; for users too I prefer seeing conference presentations on Vimeo because the mobile app lets me download them for offline viewing; YouTube indeed is unmatched in content, but I don't feel it's very relevant > bangs seem like a great idea at first, until you realise that Google simply does not need them to return relevant results That's just wrong. I've been using Google since aprox 2002 and no, their results are pretty shitty at times and are only getting worse. I was using "custom search engines" with _keywords_ (supported in both Firefox and Chrome) even when I was using Google. Also DuckDuckGo is pretty good at serving direct answers to various question types too. I'm not a fan of DDG bangs though, because the browser is perfectly capable of handling custom search engines powered by keywords. That's not why I use DDG.
- mmirate 8y ago
  > in Easter/Central Europe where I live the maps in Gmaps are really poor and got me lost several times, OSM is miles ahead, for POIs too OSM is nigh-bubkes without some other data from a service like Waze; else the "fastest" route won't take into account traffic congestion.
  - Mediterraneo10 8y ago
    Traffic congestion is only relevant for people driving a car. More people use maps for routing than just drivers. I too live in Eastern/Central Europe like the OP, and when I am looking for a place on my phone, I am typically on foot, on my bike, or I am searching for suitable public transportation between me and my destination.
thanatropism 8y ago
That's fine if you're only going to look at Wikipedia. I use Google Scholar a lot, and !scholar is mighty useful.
- chalst 8y ago
  !gsc is shorter :)
mempko 8y ago
Once you use DDG for a while, you will soon realize just how bad google's filter bubble was. I sometimes do '!g' just to see what Google returns and it's just bad. It's mostly packed with ads, it's just so bad.
cknoxrun 8y ago
If I know I want to go a Wikipedia article, I can avoid an extra click. I use DDG as a research tool, and being able to bang jump to pubmed, UniProt, DrugBank, etc really speeds up my workflow.
fuckthebangs1 8y ago
bangs are a dumb way to solve a problem, because you're basically telling the user they must use terminal or command line synthax to interact with a search engine. once you start !banging, you are not far from -dashing and that is --not -a "good user experience".
jwalton 8y ago
> measurably worse in terms of features I suppose that depends on whether you think of privacy as a feature or not.
abdullahkhalids 8y ago
I think the real question is which Google year has DDG reached feature/quality with? Eg. is DDG as good as Google circa 2010? As soon as you pose this question, whatever the answer, you will realize that your life was pretty fine with google in 20xx. You didn't feel pain or frustration then, why are you feeling that now?

by vntok 8y ago

bluGill 8y ago

When is the last time you used DDG? I switch about a year ago. I've used the !g trick 3 times when I didn't find what I wanted, and in all cases google didn't find what I was looking for either. I can't speak for you, but I find DDG is good enough to replace google for search. Is google better - maybe, but not enough to overcome their downsides.

StavrosK 8y ago

I've been using DDG for years now, and the results are exactly as good as Google. I've never had a case where going to Google returned better results for me. Maybe it's because I tend to search for programming/hardware questions, but that's my experience. Also, I don't use bangs, I use the browser's built-in searches. So, for example, "i <movie name>" will take me to IMDB (actually Rotten Tomatoes nowadays) by searching for "site:imdb.com ! <movie name>" on DDG.

detaro 8y ago
I still have to fall back to Google every now and then or tweak the request more. Random example I encountered today: "Mastodon API". DDG does not find the api documentation on the first two screens, on Google spot 1 is the old location of the docs that has a link to the new, spot 2 is the new location of the docs. "Mastodon API documentation" and DDG understands it too.
- wruza 8y ago
  I’ll second that. DDG is good for regular searches, but can stumble upon rare particular queries and/or what one calls ‘deep googling’. Otoh, it is good that I can hide everything except few queries from google, so it wastes its money on irrelevant ads that I block anyway.
  - utopcell 8y ago
    ..and by DDG, you mean Bing.
    - wruza 8y ago
      Yahoo, actually, if you insist that DDG is not a fair search engine on its own. Both shown very similar results on my areas of interest.
      - utopcell 8y ago
        DDG was built on Yahoo! BOSS, which was backed by Yahoo search engine results until Yahoo switched to Bing (almost 10 years ago.) So, if we are insisting on being accurate, SSG's main backend is Bing.
        wruza 8y ago
        Didn't know that. So, is it safe to use ddg in a sense of not gifting your data to ms/ggl/etc tech pigs? Or is it just Bing with a new skin?

mbostleman 8y ago

I tried to be Google free for a couple of months by dropping Chrome and Google's search for Firefox and DDG. It was a painful experience. Without going in to detail (though I easily could), the stability, performance, and quality just was not there at all. In the end, the final straw was a critical business app that I use that had one too many problems with Firefox. I ended up having to bail. I still look forward to the day that I can ditch Google, but it isn't going to be today unfortunately.

ldiracdelta 8y ago
I prefer to fail-over to google. If DDG doesn't work, then I use google by typing !g in the search bar. Using DDG and increasing their audience should hopefully make them better in the long run.
ithilglin909 8y ago
For a long time, I felt that Firefox was just less nice to work with than Chrome and couldn't quite make the switch. However, Firefox developer addition feels pretty "Chrome-like" and I've yet to experience any noticeable performance or stability issues.
cannonedhamster 8y ago
I'm really curious about the business app you had problems with. I've yet to experience any issues with Firefox and apps since moving back to FF shortly before they moved to Quantum. I do know there are many apps that take advantage of non-standard features supported by Chrome, which could be the case here. I was finally able to completely ditch Google, though because of going back to college to finish up my degree, I'm stuck with MS for a bit longer, though I've been fairly pleased with W10, I'm a sucker for the Ubuntu subsystem.

merpnderp 8y ago

I'm not sure this is a key differentiator. I don't know how many times I've searched for a tv show, movie, song, etc and wanted the wikipedia page, and Google has only shown my IMDB and a ton of other corporate marketing sites, with wikipedia nowhere to be found on the first few pages.

vntok 8y ago
Without a knowledge graph infobox?
majewsky 8y ago
When you want the Wikipedia page, can't you search on Wikipedia directly? At least in Firefox, I have Wikipedia added as a search keyword.

dangom 8y ago

> so much so that switching to them is both painful at first and frustrating on a daily basis Speaking as someone who made a switch about 2 years ago, I could not agree more. For desktop purposes it's OK because I don't mind refining my search query, but for mobile it's a serious pain. As an example, sometimes you just want to look up something quickly, like restaurant reviews, or an article you were talking about to a friend. Trying to "re-find" things you've searched or seen before, or trying to find specific places in your neighbourhood, that is where the need for privacy takes its largest toll on convenience. Why isn't there a way to combine privacy with keeping your data?

alleyshack 8y ago
> Why isn't there a way to combine privacy with keeping your data? Because we haven't figured out how to monetize it yet. Or perhaps more accurately, we haven't convinced the average consumer that it's worth paying for. In theory, we could build services which do combine privacy with convenience, but consumers would have to be willing to pay for those services - and pay enough to make them viable. But too many people are too accustomed to "free" services, paid for with their data/loss of privacy (an intangible loss which many people either don't care about or believe it's too late to recover), to like the idea of handing over cold hard cash instead (a tangible loss which could directly impact the ability of people on limited budgets to access these services).

vnorilo 8y ago

Like many others in this thread, I've got ddg as the default search engine and sometimes fall back to google (maybe once a week.) I think google is "smarter", specifically sometimes about the context of the query. However, I usually don't prefer that: it's sometimes very difficult to find something on google which resembles, but is not, something popular that people often search for. In that situation, my brain can play ddg's results more easily. Perhaps it's relevant that said brain was wired for web search in a simpler time, on altavista.

bad_user 8y ago

I take issue with the idea that alternatives are measurably worse: - Gmail -> FastMail: faster, more standards compliant, fewer limits (e.g. user aliases, connections, domains, etc), sub-domain aliasing, push email on iOS, app passwords with certain permissions (e.g. just SMTP, for usage on your server), mobile web interface that doesn't suck - Chrome -> Firefox: better UI for power users, better extensions, better privacy (e.g. Facebook multi-account container), even after the WebExtensions API - Android -> iOS: OK, this isn't for everybody, still you have AOSP distributions out there and to their credit Android is very customization still - Gmaps -> OpenStreeMaps: in Easter/Central Europe where I live the maps in Gmaps are really poor and got me lost several times, OSM is miles ahead, for POIs too - YouTube -> Vimeo: not for users, but for content creators Vimeo is superior because it lets you sell your movies and embed private videos on your own website; for users too I prefer seeing conference presentations on Vimeo because the mobile app lets me download them for offline viewing; YouTube indeed is unmatched in content, but I don't feel it's very relevant > bangs seem like a great idea at first, until you realise that Google simply does not need them to return relevant results That's just wrong. I've been using Google since aprox 2002 and no, their results are pretty shitty at times and are only getting worse. I was using "custom search engines" with _keywords_ (supported in both Firefox and Chrome) even when I was using Google. Also DuckDuckGo is pretty good at serving direct answers to various question types too. I'm not a fan of DDG bangs though, because the browser is perfectly capable of handling custom search engines powered by keywords. That's not why I use DDG.

mmirate 8y ago
> in Easter/Central Europe where I live the maps in Gmaps are really poor and got me lost several times, OSM is miles ahead, for POIs too OSM is nigh-bubkes without some other data from a service like Waze; else the "fastest" route won't take into account traffic congestion.
- Mediterraneo10 8y ago
  Traffic congestion is only relevant for people driving a car. More people use maps for routing than just drivers. I too live in Eastern/Central Europe like the OP, and when I am looking for a place on my phone, I am typically on foot, on my bike, or I am searching for suitable public transportation between me and my destination.

thanatropism 8y ago

That's fine if you're only going to look at Wikipedia. I use Google Scholar a lot, and !scholar is mighty useful.

chalst 8y ago
!gsc is shorter :)

mempko 8y ago

Once you use DDG for a while, you will soon realize just how bad google's filter bubble was. I sometimes do '!g' just to see what Google returns and it's just bad. It's mostly packed with ads, it's just so bad.

cknoxrun 8y ago

If I know I want to go a Wikipedia article, I can avoid an extra click. I use DDG as a research tool, and being able to bang jump to pubmed, UniProt, DrugBank, etc really speeds up my workflow.

fuckthebangs1 8y ago

bangs are a dumb way to solve a problem, because you're basically telling the user they must use terminal or command line synthax to interact with a search engine. once you start !banging, you are not far from -dashing and that is --not -a "good user experience".

jwalton 8y ago

> measurably worse in terms of features I suppose that depends on whether you think of privacy as a feature or not.

abdullahkhalids 8y ago

I think the real question is which Google year has DDG reached feature/quality with? Eg. is DDG as good as Google circa 2010? As soon as you pose this question, whatever the answer, you will realize that your life was pretty fine with google in 20xx. You didn't feel pain or frustration then, why are you feeling that now?