7 ms·

Maybe stop using google and other search engines that prioritize AMP in the results. I’ve been using DDG for a long time now and don’t miss google at all.

epistasis 7y ago
This is what I do and I love it. In order to avoid the AMP experience I had to stop using google web search, and it turned out that I can't tell the difference in results anyway. Stop using Google, everyone! It's not necessary and you'll be tracked far less. Plus you're helping to save what is left of the web from one of the most odious attacks on it ever.
- m-p-3 7y ago
  https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/amp2html/ https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/amp2html/ is a nice little addon when I have to do a search on Google.
- thephyber 7y ago
  > you'll be tracked far less Citation needed. Last I checked, most news sites still throw dozens of ad networks and tracking beacons on their pages. If they use Google Analytics, Google Fonts, Google Maps, or other Google web APIs, Google still tracks (or has the capability to) many of your movements across the web. I'm not against making incremental changes to my own life, but there's no clear value in doing this yet.
  - ldh 7y ago
    You don't search the web using news sites.
  - danShumway 7y ago
    Decentraleyes and Ublock Origin will block the vast majority of tracking beacons you encounter from FANG sites. I'm not personally as worried about being tracked by Google APIs, but UMatrix will still block the majority of them -- even Youtube embeds and many Google fonts. That means you get to choose which sites are allowed to load those APIs, which is a huge improvement over just giving Google access to everything. Honestly, while fingerprinting is still a huge concern, blocking the majority of Google's tracking on 3rd-party sites is pretty easy, since Google tracking is served from consistent domains. The remaining pain points are stuff like reCaptcha and AMP, which are obviously a big problem, but are not used universally enough to erase the privacy gains you'll get by switching off of Gmail and Google search. If you're already running a (good) adblocker, you will genuinely be tracked less if you switch off of Google. There are ways to mess that up and erase those gains (cough running stock Android with default settings cough), but it's very feasible for most tech-literate people to reduce Google tracking right now.
  - alasdair_ 7y ago
    At the moment I use DDG for search, Firefox, privacy badger extension and a good vpn as well as keeping a separate browser for facebook or google sites. I switched from android to ios because I preferred Apple’s stance on privacy. There is lots more that could be done but small, incremental changes do add up over time.
a_wild_dandan 7y ago
Yup, switched to DDG for search, Firefox Quantum: Developer Edition for browsing and web dev (bonus points for allowing extensions, e.g. uBlock Origin, in their mobile Android app), and ProtonMail for email.
- zamber 7y ago
  Extensions for Firefox on Android are a godsend feature. Pretty much the sole reason I use Android instead of iOS. That + ease of doing backups and migrations on an unlocked device.
- karma20 7y ago
  > Firefox Quantum: Developer Edition for browsing and web dev (bonus points for allowing extensions, e.g. uBlock Origin, in their mobile Android app) Similar setup here, but recently switched back to iOS. It's a shame that extension support is impractical because of WebKit.
OJFord 7y ago
Doesn't stop people sending me AMP links though.
- protomyth 7y ago
  I dearly wish iMessage was scriptable do I could write something to strip incoming links.
dvdbloc 7y ago
So I think this works for the 1% of people that are informed about the issue and the struggle but how do you convince that 99% of the population that frankly probably doesn’t even care? Andecdotal but I know personally that when I used DDG a couple of times I was getting slightly less relevant results than I was using Google and if this happened to anyone in the general population, they’d just keep using Google.
- pvorb 7y ago
  DDG has to show you less relevant results because they don't know much about you. The problem is that seeing less relevant search results is only considered a good thing by very privacy-sensitive people. One approach could be to advertise DDG as a search engine that works against filter bubbles and everybody sees the same results for the same query (not sure if this is actually the case).
  - Wowfunhappy 7y ago
    I don’t buy this at all. I get much better results from Google compared to DDG even when I’m using Tor. Google just has a really good results, it’s not that they’re customized for me.
    - pvorb 7y ago
      Yes, Google also has a better index and more experience in building a search engine. I'm just arguing why DDG cannot be as good as Google, when you expect personalized results. E.g. when you are a programmer and get results for Swift the programming language rather than the pop star.
  - Silhouette 7y ago
    Unfortunately DDG of late has been very poor for me, and I'm not convinced it has anything to do with tracking. For example, if I'm searching for a store to buy something and the first term in the search query is my country, returning me no results at all on the first page that are stores in that country (when several such stores exist) is literally useless, and clearly DDG could have done better.
ElCapitanMarkla 7y ago
I’ve been really impressed with DDG. When I initially made the switch about a year ago and found local (New Zealand) searches were a bit crap. Then i discovered the bangs feature. If the search is crap throw a “!g” in but I’ve been doing that a lot less lately.
- travisgriggs 7y ago
  This. I’ve had the same experience. I’ve wondered what the cause of using !g less is. Is it because I’m giving google less and less of a diet so it’s ability to cater to me is eroding? Or perhaps DDG is just truly getting better? Or is there a subtle feedback loop between man and search engine where we learn how to search better and better given a certain tools behavior? Would love to hear what others suspected.
  - kleiba 7y ago
    Not this. When using DDG a couple of years back, I noticed that after a while, throwing in a !g became my default so I figured I might as well switch back to Google. Don't get me wrong, I'd love to love DDG but for my searches, I would simply have to revert to Google too often.
    - whereistimbo 7y ago
      I think by using DDG you will feed data to DDG thus improving DDG. A huge advantage that Google has over DDG is huge enormous userbase that constantly feed data to Google thus making it better compared to other search engine. CMIIW.
    - ElCapitanMarkla 7y ago
      I'd give it another go, at the start I was tempted to switch back a couple of times but now I very rarely do.
  - zamber 7y ago
    Anecdata: people are spoiled with google. Context-aware search queries are rampant in younger folks. Older G users also rely on it but to a lesser extent. Having a couple weeks of appending !g when a search query does not match eventually hits the spot where "hey, they actually don't know what I'm thinking now".
mattkevan 7y ago
Agreed. Use DDG and Apple News almost exclusively for web content and not encountered an AMP page in a long time. Google is a data-led org, where metrics are king. If AMP’s metrics go the wrong way it’ll be dropped.
xref 7y ago
I switched from Chrome+Goog to Firefox+DDG...but had to dump DDG a week later. The results just aren’t anywhere near on par with google. The results have no dates so I’m constantly served results to outdated tech info (5 year old posts about Cassandra, no thanks DDG), and they only present 1 link to an article vs the more info-dense google format with 1 primary link to say, StackOverflow, and 4 more possible hits smaller just below it presented as “more from this site.” Basically I get more done faster with google search, however much I hate the goog panopticon. I’ve also switched to Apple News and Maps so I’m very much trying to dump goog, but search is where they still really excel. I do wish I’d come back to Firefox sooner though, absolutely love it post quantum.
- half-kh-hacker 7y ago
  I've taken to using DDG and when I find that the results are unsatisfactory, I stick a '!g' at the start or the end of my query, and it redirects to the google results page.
  - xref 7y ago
    Like I mentioned though, with no dates every page is unsatisfactory. I’m not gonna waste time clicking each link to look at the date before I devote time to reading it
    - unforeseen9991 7y ago
      I JUST ran into this. It's not good for tech searches for this very reason. I was trying to look up an issue with an application, and every link I clicked on was from 7 years ago. I switched to google and instantly grabbed some ones from 2019
    - m-p-3 7y ago
      This is the kind of feedback DDG should take seriously.
    - your-nanny 7y ago
      then use DDG's time filter.
lucb1e 7y ago
This comment and a lot of its children are about DDG vs. Google. But that's not this point. That some techies avoid Google, won't kill AMP. That does not mean I am against it, I use DDG as default engine and fall back to Google only if I tried different queries and scrolled down and still can't find it, and I recommend DDG to everyone. But this question is about killing AMP, which this won't significantly help towards unless we can get non-AMP search engine market share a lot higher than it currently is.
Rebelgecko 7y ago
I moved over to DDG this week because I got added to some sort of Google A/B testing that was really annoying with no opt out (when logged into my Gmail account search results no longer showed the URL, which was bad for so many reasons). There's specific types of searches that Google is better at, but DDG is close enough that I don't mind making it my default

epistasis 7y ago

This is what I do and I love it. In order to avoid the AMP experience I had to stop using google web search, and it turned out that I can't tell the difference in results anyway. Stop using Google, everyone! It's not necessary and you'll be tracked far less. Plus you're helping to save what is left of the web from one of the most odious attacks on it ever.

m-p-3 7y ago
https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/amp2html/ https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/amp2html/ is a nice little addon when I have to do a search on Google.
thephyber 7y ago
> you'll be tracked far less Citation needed. Last I checked, most news sites still throw dozens of ad networks and tracking beacons on their pages. If they use Google Analytics, Google Fonts, Google Maps, or other Google web APIs, Google still tracks (or has the capability to) many of your movements across the web. I'm not against making incremental changes to my own life, but there's no clear value in doing this yet.
- ldh 7y ago
  You don't search the web using news sites.
- danShumway 7y ago
  Decentraleyes and Ublock Origin will block the vast majority of tracking beacons you encounter from FANG sites. I'm not personally as worried about being tracked by Google APIs, but UMatrix will still block the majority of them -- even Youtube embeds and many Google fonts. That means you get to choose which sites are allowed to load those APIs, which is a huge improvement over just giving Google access to everything. Honestly, while fingerprinting is still a huge concern, blocking the majority of Google's tracking on 3rd-party sites is pretty easy, since Google tracking is served from consistent domains. The remaining pain points are stuff like reCaptcha and AMP, which are obviously a big problem, but are not used universally enough to erase the privacy gains you'll get by switching off of Gmail and Google search. If you're already running a (good) adblocker, you will genuinely be tracked less if you switch off of Google. There are ways to mess that up and erase those gains (cough running stock Android with default settings cough), but it's very feasible for most tech-literate people to reduce Google tracking right now.
- alasdair_ 7y ago
  At the moment I use DDG for search, Firefox, privacy badger extension and a good vpn as well as keeping a separate browser for facebook or google sites. I switched from android to ios because I preferred Apple’s stance on privacy. There is lots more that could be done but small, incremental changes do add up over time.

a_wild_dandan 7y ago

Yup, switched to DDG for search, Firefox Quantum: Developer Edition for browsing and web dev (bonus points for allowing extensions, e.g. uBlock Origin, in their mobile Android app), and ProtonMail for email.

zamber 7y ago
Extensions for Firefox on Android are a godsend feature. Pretty much the sole reason I use Android instead of iOS. That + ease of doing backups and migrations on an unlocked device.
karma20 7y ago
> Firefox Quantum: Developer Edition for browsing and web dev (bonus points for allowing extensions, e.g. uBlock Origin, in their mobile Android app) Similar setup here, but recently switched back to iOS. It's a shame that extension support is impractical because of WebKit.

OJFord 7y ago

Doesn't stop people sending me AMP links though.

protomyth 7y ago
I dearly wish iMessage was scriptable do I could write something to strip incoming links.

dvdbloc 7y ago

So I think this works for the 1% of people that are informed about the issue and the struggle but how do you convince that 99% of the population that frankly probably doesn’t even care? Andecdotal but I know personally that when I used DDG a couple of times I was getting slightly less relevant results than I was using Google and if this happened to anyone in the general population, they’d just keep using Google.

pvorb 7y ago
DDG has to show you less relevant results because they don't know much about you. The problem is that seeing less relevant search results is only considered a good thing by very privacy-sensitive people. One approach could be to advertise DDG as a search engine that works against filter bubbles and everybody sees the same results for the same query (not sure if this is actually the case).
- Wowfunhappy 7y ago
  I don’t buy this at all. I get much better results from Google compared to DDG even when I’m using Tor. Google just has a really good results, it’s not that they’re customized for me.
  - pvorb 7y ago
    Yes, Google also has a better index and more experience in building a search engine. I'm just arguing why DDG cannot be as good as Google, when you expect personalized results. E.g. when you are a programmer and get results for Swift the programming language rather than the pop star.
- Silhouette 7y ago
  Unfortunately DDG of late has been very poor for me, and I'm not convinced it has anything to do with tracking. For example, if I'm searching for a store to buy something and the first term in the search query is my country, returning me no results at all on the first page that are stores in that country (when several such stores exist) is literally useless, and clearly DDG could have done better.

ElCapitanMarkla 7y ago

I’ve been really impressed with DDG. When I initially made the switch about a year ago and found local (New Zealand) searches were a bit crap. Then i discovered the bangs feature. If the search is crap throw a “!g” in but I’ve been doing that a lot less lately.

travisgriggs 7y ago
This. I’ve had the same experience. I’ve wondered what the cause of using !g less is. Is it because I’m giving google less and less of a diet so it’s ability to cater to me is eroding? Or perhaps DDG is just truly getting better? Or is there a subtle feedback loop between man and search engine where we learn how to search better and better given a certain tools behavior? Would love to hear what others suspected.
- kleiba 7y ago
  Not this. When using DDG a couple of years back, I noticed that after a while, throwing in a !g became my default so I figured I might as well switch back to Google. Don't get me wrong, I'd love to love DDG but for my searches, I would simply have to revert to Google too often.
  - whereistimbo 7y ago
    I think by using DDG you will feed data to DDG thus improving DDG. A huge advantage that Google has over DDG is huge enormous userbase that constantly feed data to Google thus making it better compared to other search engine. CMIIW.
  - ElCapitanMarkla 7y ago
    I'd give it another go, at the start I was tempted to switch back a couple of times but now I very rarely do.
- zamber 7y ago
  Anecdata: people are spoiled with google. Context-aware search queries are rampant in younger folks. Older G users also rely on it but to a lesser extent. Having a couple weeks of appending !g when a search query does not match eventually hits the spot where "hey, they actually don't know what I'm thinking now".

mattkevan 7y ago

Agreed. Use DDG and Apple News almost exclusively for web content and not encountered an AMP page in a long time. Google is a data-led org, where metrics are king. If AMP’s metrics go the wrong way it’ll be dropped.

xref 7y ago

I switched from Chrome+Goog to Firefox+DDG...but had to dump DDG a week later. The results just aren’t anywhere near on par with google. The results have no dates so I’m constantly served results to outdated tech info (5 year old posts about Cassandra, no thanks DDG), and they only present 1 link to an article vs the more info-dense google format with 1 primary link to say, StackOverflow, and 4 more possible hits smaller just below it presented as “more from this site.” Basically I get more done faster with google search, however much I hate the goog panopticon. I’ve also switched to Apple News and Maps so I’m very much trying to dump goog, but search is where they still really excel. I do wish I’d come back to Firefox sooner though, absolutely love it post quantum.

half-kh-hacker 7y ago
I've taken to using DDG and when I find that the results are unsatisfactory, I stick a '!g' at the start or the end of my query, and it redirects to the google results page.
- xref 7y ago
  Like I mentioned though, with no dates every page is unsatisfactory. I’m not gonna waste time clicking each link to look at the date before I devote time to reading it
  - unforeseen9991 7y ago
    I JUST ran into this. It's not good for tech searches for this very reason. I was trying to look up an issue with an application, and every link I clicked on was from 7 years ago. I switched to google and instantly grabbed some ones from 2019
  - m-p-3 7y ago
    This is the kind of feedback DDG should take seriously.
  - your-nanny 7y ago
    then use DDG's time filter.

lucb1e 7y ago

This comment and a lot of its children are about DDG vs. Google. But that's not this point. That some techies avoid Google, won't kill AMP. That does not mean I am against it, I use DDG as default engine and fall back to Google only if I tried different queries and scrolled down and still can't find it, and I recommend DDG to everyone. But this question is about killing AMP, which this won't significantly help towards unless we can get non-AMP search engine market share a lot higher than it currently is.

Rebelgecko 7y ago

I moved over to DDG this week because I got added to some sort of Google A/B testing that was really annoying with no opt out (when logged into my Gmail account search results no longer showed the URL, which was bad for so many reasons). There's specific types of searches that Google is better at, but DDG is close enough that I don't mind making it my default