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DuckDuckGo is finally good enough to use as a daily driver. About 2 years ago I tried it and I constantly found myself using !g to get decent results. Now I o

DuckDuckGo is finally good enough to use as a daily driver. About 2 years ago I tried it and I constantly found myself using !g to get decent results. Now I only need to use !g some of the time for programming or technical searches. It works great for everything else. I just wanted to add this because I was anti-DuckDuckGo for awhile until I recently retried it.

speg 6y ago
Yep. I switched to DDG last year and haven’t looked back. Between Safari/Firefox, DDG, Fastmail, and Apple Photos I think I’ve moved myself almost entirely off of Google. Recently set up a Pi-hole to shield me from the rest. What else am I missing? Oh, YouTube! Drat. I’m a sucker for hobby videos on there. I’ve seen a couple of alternative front ends but nothing that has really stuck so far.
- theferalrobot 6y ago
  How are you liking Apple photos, considering the switch myself
  - speg 6y ago
    I'm happy with it. I'm not sure why I resisted turning on iCloud Photos. It makes cross device management a non-issue. Now I just need to find the time to cull my 20k something photos... The major sticking point remaining is a shared library. I have my photos. My wife has hers. How do we manage photos of our children without duplicating?
mauvehaus 6y ago
I've been using it pretty much exclusively for a lot longer than 2 years. I think part of the trick to switching is that google has got us trained as to how to search for stuff in a way that gets the results we're looking for. It took maybe a month to feel like I was searching effectively after switching, but I never found ddg's results to be appreciably less relevant at that point. On the upside, since ddg is less popular than google, people have put less effort into getting crap pages higher in the search results, though I'll concede it's gotten worse over the last couple of years. For me, the bangs are the killer app, combined with searching from the browser bar: I don't have to wait for e.g. google maps to load to do a maps search if I search !m pizza in Poughkeepsie.
jm4 6y ago
I've been using it at my daily driver since 2010. At first, I stuck with it because it wasn't Google. I noticed right away that it would turn up different results from what I came to expect at Google. Then I noticed that, although they were different, they were just as effective and getting me the information I needed. For example, it would prominently place websites I may not have heard of and that didn't show up high in the Google results, but when I just went with it anyway I discovered that relevant information that solved my problem was there. I think a lot of people try out DDG, see some sites they don't recognize and then dismiss it as producing bad results because they are not Google results. We basically trained ourselves to use Google as the benchmark for what a search engine should produce - not in general terms of reliability of information but exact results. Then something else doesn't produce those same results and it's crap. Or, for a particular query, the top Google result is the best and the second or third DDG result is the best and that makes it crap. Search has always been a little bit of an art where you have to learn how to do it effectively and how to quickly parse your results. I use Google maybe a handful of times a year and I would rarely find better results over there. It got to the point where I really didn't like their result page at all compared to DDG. It seemed spammy and it was difficult to parse. For a long time, they were fiddling around with things like displaying the full URL or making ads look more like legitimate results. On the other hand, DDG was doing things like zero click info and instant answers. I came to prefer their results much better. I showed up for the privacy and after a little while I stayed because it worked better. I have tried Google a few times recently and they are doing some cool stuff with their results page. I particularly like the "featured snippets" and "people also ask" sections. Featured snippets is similar to DDG's zero click stuff, but it works with more complex queries like "best travel trailers for first time owners". But for years, DDG was doing cool things with the results page while Google was just a list of pages with ads, videos or news featured prominently at the top.

speg 6y ago

Yep. I switched to DDG last year and haven’t looked back. Between Safari/Firefox, DDG, Fastmail, and Apple Photos I think I’ve moved myself almost entirely off of Google. Recently set up a Pi-hole to shield me from the rest. What else am I missing? Oh, YouTube! Drat. I’m a sucker for hobby videos on there. I’ve seen a couple of alternative front ends but nothing that has really stuck so far.

theferalrobot 6y ago
How are you liking Apple photos, considering the switch myself
- speg 6y ago
  I'm happy with it. I'm not sure why I resisted turning on iCloud Photos. It makes cross device management a non-issue. Now I just need to find the time to cull my 20k something photos... The major sticking point remaining is a shared library. I have my photos. My wife has hers. How do we manage photos of our children without duplicating?

mauvehaus 6y ago

I've been using it pretty much exclusively for a lot longer than 2 years. I think part of the trick to switching is that google has got us trained as to how to search for stuff in a way that gets the results we're looking for. It took maybe a month to feel like I was searching effectively after switching, but I never found ddg's results to be appreciably less relevant at that point. On the upside, since ddg is less popular than google, people have put less effort into getting crap pages higher in the search results, though I'll concede it's gotten worse over the last couple of years. For me, the bangs are the killer app, combined with searching from the browser bar: I don't have to wait for e.g. google maps to load to do a maps search if I search !m pizza in Poughkeepsie.

jm4 6y ago

I've been using it at my daily driver since 2010. At first, I stuck with it because it wasn't Google. I noticed right away that it would turn up different results from what I came to expect at Google. Then I noticed that, although they were different, they were just as effective and getting me the information I needed. For example, it would prominently place websites I may not have heard of and that didn't show up high in the Google results, but when I just went with it anyway I discovered that relevant information that solved my problem was there. I think a lot of people try out DDG, see some sites they don't recognize and then dismiss it as producing bad results because they are not Google results. We basically trained ourselves to use Google as the benchmark for what a search engine should produce - not in general terms of reliability of information but exact results. Then something else doesn't produce those same results and it's crap. Or, for a particular query, the top Google result is the best and the second or third DDG result is the best and that makes it crap. Search has always been a little bit of an art where you have to learn how to do it effectively and how to quickly parse your results. I use Google maybe a handful of times a year and I would rarely find better results over there. It got to the point where I really didn't like their result page at all compared to DDG. It seemed spammy and it was difficult to parse. For a long time, they were fiddling around with things like displaying the full URL or making ads look more like legitimate results. On the other hand, DDG was doing things like zero click info and instant answers. I came to prefer their results much better. I showed up for the privacy and after a little while I stayed because it worked better. I have tried Google a few times recently and they are doing some cool stuff with their results page. I particularly like the "featured snippets" and "people also ask" sections. Featured snippets is similar to DDG's zero click stuff, but it works with more complex queries like "best travel trailers for first time owners". But for years, DDG was doing cool things with the results page while Google was just a list of pages with ads, videos or news featured prominently at the top.