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Very unpopular opinion, please engage with it on the facts, not their popular perception on HN: After a decade and flipping from Apple services & DDG-only to G
by anoncareer0212 6y ago
Very unpopular opinion, please engage with it on the facts, not their popular perception on HN:
After a decade and flipping from Apple services & DDG-only to Google over time: I'm really annoyed by DDG's histrionics about Google, from the silly domain fight they imagined, to having blinkered arguments about how they just need a free spot in the Android setup wizard and their market share would be 20%, and they should be the one blessed search engine who doesn't have to pay.
- justicezyx 6y agoThey are the underdog anyway. What do you suppose them to do? To somehow magically grab the surveillance capitalism profit with just a search engine? Without that profit, they'll have to play some silly moves. For anyone who has even just superficial understanding of the market mechanism behind google, you'll see that there is no space of another search engine, as long as Google still needs a search engine.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- gkoberger 6y agoHmm, I wouldn't call them histrionics. It's their marketing. David v Goliath. You don't use DDG because it's better than Google. You use it because it's not Google. So of course they remind people of that constantly. And... Google can take it. I do think it's fair to complain that duck.com redirects to google.com if you're DDG. It's also fair for Google to do it anyway! Both sides are playing their part and that's okay. (Google did sell it to DDG, though, so good on them.) I used to work at Mozilla, and it's crazy how easily a large company can crush you by... just existing. Google can funnel people to Google Search from Android, Chrome, Gmail, etc. Google is the defacto default, and DDG has to fight desperately for anyone to care.
- leephillips 6y agoI use DDG because it’s better than Google. Any search engine that actually allows me to use it is better than one that doesn’t: https://lee-phillips.org/byeGoogle/ https://lee-phillips.org/byeGoogle/
- zucked 6y agoI set my default search to DDG and I find myself using G! in my queries a lot more than I want to.
- RedShift1 6y agoWhat does that do?
- krimpenrik 6y agoA google search
- tejtm 6y agowith less bubble/tracking I think. but I only !g a few times a year so not an expert on it
- chinathrow 6y agoWhy would there be less tracking? It's a regular google search, accessed directly from within your browser window.
- gkoberger 6y agoRedirects you to a Google search (try it here: https://duck.com?q=!g%20test https://duck.com?q=!g%20test)
- AnonHP 6y agoIt’s called a “bang command”, [1] and DDG redirects that search to another site. You can set DDG as your default search engine but rely on these commands to search on other sites. Just put the bang command anywhere in your search term or phrase. In this case, “!g” means search on google.com. So you get redirected to Google for that search. You can search on Startpage with !s, Wikipedia with !w, IMDB with !imdb, Amazon with !a, Google Images with !gi and so on. There are thousands of bang commands. [1]: https://duckduckgo.com/bang https://duckduckgo.com/bang
- AlphaSite 6y agoChrome is one of those cases where i think it could be an open and shut case of monopolistic abuse, exploiting their search monopoly to promote chrome at zero cost and then also using chrome to promote google.com.
- josteink 6y ago> exploiting their search monopoly to promote chrome at zero cost And gmail, and YouTube, and gsuite, and google meet, and blogger, and in the past bundled in other installers as a drive-by installation (Flash for instance), and ... the list probably goes on. Clearly monopolistic abuse.
- danielrpa 6y agoI use DDG because it's better than Google in my scenarios. Yes, Google is often better for "hard" searches, but actually DDG tends to give me what I want, not some SEO monstrosity, on my normal searches.
- kenhwang 6y agoEven on my hard searches, Google gives me a bunch of useless SEO and ads. It's like we're past peak search and we're slowly going to stop being able to find things on the internet.
- xref 6y agoEveryone has anecdotes, I’m a DDG user and the results are nearly always worse/more stale than I got before ditching google two years ago (still have to !g a lot) but hey, at least it’s not google all the time. Google having a decade of my search history just makes for really relevant results, even if I don’t like the company’s practices.
- wraptile 6y agoBangs are the killer feature for me and I'm surprised google hasn't stolen it yet. Just kinda illustrates how entrenched Google's search engine is that it keeps removing features rather than adding them and still is number one search engine in the world.
- srtjstjsj 6y agoChrome supports fully customizable bangs (and I assume Firefox does too) so why should Google search bother with them?
- kristopolous 6y agoDDG is attacking the weakness in their strength, a pretty classic technique for a lower tier player to attack the leader. By redefining privacy as "we don't know you" instead of "we keep your stuff secure" their doing a clausewitz style offensive. There's limitations to this technique and that's what they keep hitting. They're not going vertical on their beachhead, so yeah, this is what happens. Eh, whatever, it's not like I work there so best of luck to them.
- croes 6y agoPrivacy is "we don't know you".
- waon 6y agoPlease don't redefine privacy as "we know everything about you and we're going to exploit that information for profit but won't give it to anyone else except governments whatever their purpose may be because they only ever use it for a good cause." That's not what it is.
- kristopolous 6y agoMy (and your) personal definition isn't at play here. When companies offer you privacy they usually mean privacy from others, not from the company itself. This is the hard reality of what these companies mean when they use the word privacy.
- robertlagrant 6y agoOkay, but "hard reality" isn't the same as "the newbie is redefining things".
- kristopolous 6y agoHuh? I don't understand your point here. I've been doing business building for 20 years, I hope I'm not that green. This is a business purposing claim and that's it.
- ehsankia 6y agoIt's not so much about what's "fair", it's about what's right. Fabricating some baseless headline about how Google is intentionally hoarding duck.com to overplay the "David v Goliath" story is just lame. I do agree this is their marketing, but twisting the truth and the facts to forcefully drive a narrative should be called out.
- gkoberger 6y agoGoogle happened to own the domain via an acquisition. They own a lot of domains via acquisition. It’s one of the only ones they redirected to Google. People don’t take kindly to gigantic corporations punching down on tiny little companies whose sole existence is to highlight the big corp’s lack of privacy. It’s not a good look.
- jariel 6y agoIt's not a fabrication. Using an 'auction' model is a very easy way for Google to undermine the credibility of the anti-trust legislation. Any upstart that would theoretically 10x better wouldn't ever be able to get any material market share. Imagine if there were only 4 car dealerships allowed in America and everyone had to 'bid' on the distribution. There would be no Tesla.
- ehsankia 6y agoAnd upstart would have much more chance to win an auction than magically get enough market share to get onto the list. This method is actually much better for newcomers than the other.
- jariel 6y agoAn upstart would have 0 chance of winning the auction. It's tantamount to a wireless spectrum option - enormous costs involved.
- kovac 6y agoTrue, most non-technical people I know don't know that a search engine and an Internet browser are two separate things. They only know internet browsing as Chrome+Google search. If they are given Microsoft Edge at work or something, they'll search Google on Bing, go to Google, bookmark it and use it :D I use Qwant primarily and DDG on mobile. But that's a personal choice and it works for me. I think with Chromebooks given away at schools to kids, Google will become synonymous with internet. Heck, I think Chromebooks will be synonymous with computers to them. It's what it is.
- macspoofing 6y agoI was slightly annoyed and impressed that their 'histrionics' managed to finagle a high-value domain, for zero cost, from Google. When you're a fiesty up-and-comer, you do what you can. On the other hand, Google seems to be now playing the old Microsoft game of keeping competitors alive so as to keep the regulators at bay.
- addicted 6y agoYou are right. Why wouldn’t they just die out quietly so we can all continue to be beholden to the one true choice in every area of our online lives. What they are doing is very little different than what Google did when Google was the plucky underdog. But I guess the whole “don’t be evil” branding is having an effect even after google doesn’t even use it anymore.
- wyxuan 6y agoYou imply that google did the same when they were the underdog, but I don't see any clear parallels between their practices.
- superasn 6y ago> What they are doing is very little different than what Google did when Google was the plucky underdog. I don't remember to be the case. Google won because the existing search engines at the time (altavista, excite, etc) paled in comparison to its search results. Same for its other services like Gmail that offered 1gb space when Hotmail offered only 2mb. I can understand the Google hate but they did many things right also to capture the top spots.
- cortesoft 6y agoWhat did google do when they were the underdog?
- markmark 6y agoLaunched a clearly better product that everyone flocked to because it worked so much better than the competition. I'm not sure how that relates to DDG though.
- robertlagrant 6y agoThey ranked based on relevance, not who paid the most. That was new.
- philistine 6y agoHow can you implore to argue on the facts when you’re lying yourself? Their statement couldn’t be more clear. They want to eliminate the pay-for-play to replace it with a system without money exchanging hands. I say you forfeit your right to ask only to speak on facts when you’re that wrong.
- dang 6y agoPlease don't break the site guidelines like this, regardless of how wrong someone else is or you feel they are. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- dkobran 6y agoI appreciate the sentiment about having a fact-based debate but it’s difficult to engage in an argument about the facts when the issue you raised is that you’re annoyed about something. What exactly would we be debating here?
- anoncareer0212 6y agoWe can start at why this is filed under 'Privacy Research' - pure FUD.
- eitland 6y ago> how they just need a free spot in the Android setup wizard and their market share would be 20%, and they should be the one blessed search engine who doesn't have to pay. It worked when Microsoft had to implement browser choice. No reason why the spots should need to be auctioned this time.