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I posted a similar post on my own blog yesterday(https://sharitt.com/2020/04/28/practicality-vs-purity.html https://sharitt.com/2020/04/28/practicality-vs-purit

I posted a similar post on my own blog yesterday(https://sharitt.com/2020/04/28/practicality-vs-purity.html https://sharitt.com/2020/04/28/practicality-vs-purity.html) Oddly one of the few things I actually kept is Google search itself after noticed that I basically add !g to every DDG search, and I've tried to firewall it off as much as I can.

q92z8oeif 6y ago
Having used DDG for several years now as the default on all my devices, i can say that since December the results are completely useless. Not sure what happened. I had never to use "!g" before. Now it is required for 1/3 of my regular searches, and "!ig" for 100% of the image "!i" searches.
- lucb1e 6y ago
  > "!ig" for 100% of the image "!i" searches I replaced 90% of my images searches with Bing Images. I like the UI better and the results are almost as good. Since I use DDG for ~80% of regular searches and Google for the remainder, not giving one party all information seems like it should somewhat level the playing field. Also, I was going to type that a small percentage of my image searches still go to Google for their license selection feature, but I figured I should double check, and whaddayaknow? Bing can do license filtering too. Not sure how good it'll be, but I'll definitely be trying this. Note that instead of typing !something (which I find quite annoying), you can just bind your browser to a keyword. I type "bi test" in my address bar for Bing Images "test" search, instead of having to type a bang and some by-ddg-defined shortcut and giving DDG the data (not that I distrust them, but need-to-know...). Wiki searching is also super convenient like this: wi for wikipedia, dwi for deutsch wikipedia, owi for openstreetmap wiki, etc. Right click in the search field and choose 'Add keyword for this search' usually does the trick.
  - q92z8oeif 6y ago
    i naively like the ! shortbuts on DDG because i like to think they use this as data to improve their results.
    - lucb1e 6y ago
      That's an angle I hadn't thought of, that it might contribute to DDG's attack on Google by supplying them more data, particularly the queries one goes to Google for. Good point.

q92z8oeif 6y ago

Having used DDG for several years now as the default on all my devices, i can say that since December the results are completely useless. Not sure what happened. I had never to use "!g" before. Now it is required for 1/3 of my regular searches, and "!ig" for 100% of the image "!i" searches.

lucb1e 6y ago
> "!ig" for 100% of the image "!i" searches I replaced 90% of my images searches with Bing Images. I like the UI better and the results are almost as good. Since I use DDG for ~80% of regular searches and Google for the remainder, not giving one party all information seems like it should somewhat level the playing field. Also, I was going to type that a small percentage of my image searches still go to Google for their license selection feature, but I figured I should double check, and whaddayaknow? Bing can do license filtering too. Not sure how good it'll be, but I'll definitely be trying this. Note that instead of typing !something (which I find quite annoying), you can just bind your browser to a keyword. I type "bi test" in my address bar for Bing Images "test" search, instead of having to type a bang and some by-ddg-defined shortcut and giving DDG the data (not that I distrust them, but need-to-know...). Wiki searching is also super convenient like this: wi for wikipedia, dwi for deutsch wikipedia, owi for openstreetmap wiki, etc. Right click in the search field and choose 'Add keyword for this search' usually does the trick.
- q92z8oeif 6y ago
  i naively like the ! shortbuts on DDG because i like to think they use this as data to improve their results.
  - lucb1e 6y ago
    That's an angle I hadn't thought of, that it might contribute to DDG's attack on Google by supplying them more data, particularly the queries one goes to Google for. Good point.