8 ms·

I've been switched to DDG for about 4 months now. I am loving the Ads I get in youtube now that google doesn't know what I am interested in they have noting to

I've been switched to DDG for about 4 months now. I am loving the Ads I get in youtube now that google doesn't know what I am interested in they have noting to do with anything I care about. It's wonderful. DDG still has a way to go for really technical queries. I just can't get the same results about this error or that in Java. Until then I'm 100% DDG for personal and 100% google for work.

Airyleech 6y ago
I use ublock origin, I don't get ads on youtube.
- rosywoozlechan 6y ago
  I pay for YouTube's premium service and I don't get ads either.
  - quadrangle 6y ago
    https://mimiandeunice.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/ME_486_PokeBlocker.png https://mimiandeunice.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/ME_486_...
  - mrweasel 6y ago
    I do the same. I am a little annoyed that I can’t pay for ad-free Youtube without also buying YouTube Music, which I didn’t need. Content costs money, and if I don’t want ads, I need to pay the difference. I where a little surprised to see Linus Tech Tips break down they income and showing that Youtube Premium as significant source of revenue.
    - radium3d 6y ago
      As a music listener I love YouTube music app, it's great being able to listen to almost anything I want in high quality any time.
      - FalconSensei 6y ago
        I tried a couple years ago, but didn't like it that much. Ended up going back to spotify. I remember trying to get the Guardians of the Galaxy awesome mix, and it only had a youtube video with all songs glued together. Also, it was a bit weird experience overall because they matched so many random videos
      - mrweasel 6y ago
        It is great, I just didn’t want it originally, but now that I paying for it I’ve started using it a fair bit.
      - Tijdreiziger 6y ago
        When I tried it, I couldn't deal with it auto-generating a 'related' playlist whenever I played anything. (I pay for YT Premium, so if I could use YT Music then I wouldn't have to pay for Spotify.) How did you deal with that problem?
        radium3d 6y ago
        To get around that go to the artist and start a song from their top playlist or an album and it will just play their songs.
    - azinman2 6y ago
      I think it’s they’re intrinsically baked together as YouTube has had to license music for all those YouTube music videos, which are hugely popular as you could imagine.
    - cpeterso 6y ago
      Yeah. I don't use YouTube Music and don't care about downloading or background playback, so I'm not ready to pay $11.99/month just to hide ads.
  - azinman2 6y ago
    I do too and pay everywhere I can for the services that I use. The world would be a far better place if it didn’t need ad support, and the only alternative that so far works at all is direct payment.
  - dimator 6y ago
    Along these lines, why doesn't google introduce a paid search service without ads? My hunch is that no matter the price point, it would be a huge revenue hit compared to actual advertising payments. My other hunch is that it would make the non ad-free experience greatly cheapened in the eyes of the consumer, in the same way youtube with ads feels different after experiencing youtube premium.
    - HDMI_Cable 6y ago
      They have Google Workspace, which is pretty similar, but more focused on small businesses.
    - lotsofpulp 6y ago
      Because if you allow a paid option, all the people worth advertising to switch to that, and now the advertising portion of the business is worth a lot less. They’re betting they can get more out of advertisers than paying subscribers.
- Aperocky 6y ago
  +1 to this. I haven't seen ads for years until I switched to M1 macs and had to use safari for a while.
  - azinman2 6y ago
    There are content blockers for safari.
- nashashmi 6y ago
  I use it to but I use a manual blocker with my own lists. I can't find a way to block YouTube ads.
- nostromo 6y ago
  Pro tip: on iOS most adblockers will block YouTube ads so long as you use youtube.com in the browser, not the YouTube app. YouTube in the browser has almost all features of the app now, so there's no compelling reason to use the YouTube app.
- conradfr 6y ago
  There is on mobile and there's so much nowadays that I had to stop clicking video links on my phone.
  - hojjat12000 6y ago
    You can use Youtube Vanced (Youtube Advance without the Ad) on your phone. I can not recommend it enough. It also supports "Sponsor blocker". It's the best app for youtube addicts.
    - conradfr 6y ago
      I was fine with a small amount of ads but yeah I guess I'll have to try it now. The irony is that I was a Google Play Music subscriber until its death but in my country you still had the Youtube ads.
  - acatsdream 6y ago
    You can have ublock origin on firefox mobile.
- accented 6y ago
  I use unlock origin, I didnt eve know there were ads on YouTube.
tiborsaas 6y ago
> they have noting to do with anything I care about Why is this good? For me personally, both FB and Google figured out that I'm into home renovation and all they keep recommending me is relevant stuff. So I consider it free research done for me :) Contractors, webshops, pretty images are all over my feed. I even press accept cookies for webshops I want to see more of their competition :)
- Taylor_OD 6y ago
  Eh. I don't really want to be sold to even if the thing I'm being sold might be interesting to me. I don't need more stuff and I really don't need my brain thinking I need more stuff. To each their own.
- flukus 6y ago
  > Why is this good? Saving money instead of being manipulated to buy something I otherwise wouldn't is good for me and the environment.
simias 6y ago
I use DDG as well but I went further and told Firefox to use a dedicated container for google domains. I also did it because they made Youtube really annoying to use when you're not logged in, so I made a burner account but it's only active inside this container and they can't track me around the web (at least, not with that).
- f1refly 6y ago
  You might enjoy invidious. It's a frontend for youtube that cuts 99% of the bloat and show videos directly in your html5 player. It even supports subscriptions without a google account!
  - pixxel 6y ago
    Is it still running ok. Didn’t the main instance shutdown or something? Sorry, I forget the specifics.
    - aarchi 6y ago
      I haven't had success with using Invidious. I'd love to ditch the YT frontend and tracking though. I have extensions that remove suggested videos on the sidebar, homepage, and during the video; as well as ads, comments, and product recommendations. I use YT in a Firefox container without an account that is separate from my other Google container.
    - Nextgrid 6y ago
      You can run your own instance; that’s what I do. Public instances tend to be overloaded or their external IP becomes temporarily banned by YouTube (since its traffic is obviously more than what a typical home would use).
    - f1refly 6y ago
      The instance of the original dev has shut down because he seized developement, but the project ist still doing fine. There's multiple public instances, but those are often unable to handle all user requests and get rate limited by google every now and then. I'm currently using invidious.tube, it has a good "real" uptime in my opinion (the site is up the whole time but might have issues like described above). I'm considering just self hosting should things get worse.
DamnYuppie 6y ago
I use DDG as well. I use FF as my primary personal browser, I have installed uBlock Origin and Enhancer for YouTube, https://www.mrfdev.com/enhancer-for-youtube https://www.mrfdev.com/enhancer-for-youtube, and I now never get any ads on YouTube.
mcescalante 6y ago
I have the same experience - my two major issues with DDG are the results for technical searches, and I wish that it showed more basic info for businesses like phone number/address/hours without me having to click around a bunch.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
sneeuwpopsneeuw 6y ago
I have been using DDG for roughly 2 years now and I always search for things technical or non-technical there first. If it does not give any result or when I know it's very technical I simply add !g to the end (but you can add it anywhere) and it automatically searches the same thing in Google. Some examples of things I personally thing DDG could improve / is different then Google: - DDG gives the feeling they prefer wikipedia over stack overflow. Stack overflow ranks often second. - GLSL shaders. DDG does not index websites such as shadertoy. Example search for "Gold Noise Uniform Random" - indexing Youtube and other videos. It takes up to 2 days before new youtube videos show up if you search for a video. Example a mcdonalds burned down in my city a few weeks ago so I searched for videos and photos. It did not find any videos only photos and articles. Google found a few videos including once on a dutch news website. - Visual search and reverse image lookup is not that great. Only in Bing you can search for a video based on a image DDG and Google both can not do that. So both could improve that. - DDG sometimes gives the feeling not enough people have searched for something, This feeling is more a feeling then a real thing. This is mostly because Google finds a lot of spelling / typo's in your search query and DDG appears to only repairs it until it contains valid words. Example search for "A apple a day keps the", Google corrects AN and KEEPS but DuckDuckGo only corrects KEEPS. - Old websites are not indexed that well. Example if you are developing a gameboy advance game it takes a while before you find Tonc (one of the best resources regarding GBA development). With google this experience is terrible as well but it takes less time to find some good things.
- breiti 6y ago
  > I have been using DDG for roughly 2 years now and I always search for things technical or non-technical there first. If it does not give any result or when I know it's very technical I simply add !g to the end I am the same, but i default to !sp (startpage.com) first. They claim: > You can’t beat Google when it comes to online search. So we’re paying them to use their brilliant search results in order to remove all trackers and logs. [...]
  - DyslexicAtheist 6y ago
    you do know that startpage.com "is now owned by an ad company" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21371577 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21371577
mdaniel 6y ago
Out of curiosity, do you use the "Send Feedback" in the bottom-right(!) corner of the results page to let them know? I have almost zero belief it does anything, but without even attempting to provide feedback I don't think it's reasonable to expect any change
- AdamSC1 6y ago
  As the person who just read through feedback today, I can assure you that each piece of feedback sent is received, read and logged by real humans who care and more importantly deeply appreciate the fact that users take time to send feedback :)
  - mdaniel 6y ago
    Foremost, thank you for your service! I really, really want DDG to be successful and I'm glad to know the feedback doesn't /dev/null. If I might be so bold as to suggest that hiding the "Send Feedback" in the bottom right is a very opaque location for what is arguably a vital interaction DDG has with its users. While I have an insider: I see a lot of mentions in the threads about folks who use "!g" or "!sp" -- are those counted as votes of suboptimal DDG results? I could see it going either way: it's a bad metric for those users who just default to doing it, but it's a good metric for searches that end in the frustration of a series of bad DDG results
  - wombatmobile 6y ago
    Could you consider making a list of common feedback items that already have resolutions? I imagine it would make a popular HN submission in addition to a useful FAQ.
barbacoa 6y ago
The key to technical questions in ddg is to be very verbose. From tracking you Google knows you're a programer who works in Java, ddg doesn't do that by design. When I search "transformer" in ddg I get the movie franchise, when I do it in Google I get the ones you see hanging on utility poles. Google knows I look at power electronics. When I search "voltage transformer" in ddg I get the same quality results as google.
Shorel 6y ago
I don't understand what's the issue with the technical queries. Are they ambiguous? Are they paraphrasing the error description? Because for me, most of the time, I just paste the error message into DDG, and the relevant Stack Overflow answer, not question page, the actual answer, is in DDG search results for me to use and fix my problem. This is actually one of my favourites DDG features, along with currency conversion.

Airyleech 6y ago

I use ublock origin, I don't get ads on youtube.

rosywoozlechan 6y ago
I pay for YouTube's premium service and I don't get ads either.
- quadrangle 6y ago
  https://mimiandeunice.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/ME_486_PokeBlocker.png https://mimiandeunice.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/ME_486_...
- mrweasel 6y ago
  I do the same. I am a little annoyed that I can’t pay for ad-free Youtube without also buying YouTube Music, which I didn’t need. Content costs money, and if I don’t want ads, I need to pay the difference. I where a little surprised to see Linus Tech Tips break down they income and showing that Youtube Premium as significant source of revenue.
  - radium3d 6y ago
    As a music listener I love YouTube music app, it's great being able to listen to almost anything I want in high quality any time.
    - FalconSensei 6y ago
      I tried a couple years ago, but didn't like it that much. Ended up going back to spotify. I remember trying to get the Guardians of the Galaxy awesome mix, and it only had a youtube video with all songs glued together. Also, it was a bit weird experience overall because they matched so many random videos
    - mrweasel 6y ago
      It is great, I just didn’t want it originally, but now that I paying for it I’ve started using it a fair bit.
    - Tijdreiziger 6y ago
      When I tried it, I couldn't deal with it auto-generating a 'related' playlist whenever I played anything. (I pay for YT Premium, so if I could use YT Music then I wouldn't have to pay for Spotify.) How did you deal with that problem?
      - radium3d 6y ago
        To get around that go to the artist and start a song from their top playlist or an album and it will just play their songs.
  - azinman2 6y ago
    I think it’s they’re intrinsically baked together as YouTube has had to license music for all those YouTube music videos, which are hugely popular as you could imagine.
  - cpeterso 6y ago
    Yeah. I don't use YouTube Music and don't care about downloading or background playback, so I'm not ready to pay $11.99/month just to hide ads.
- azinman2 6y ago
  I do too and pay everywhere I can for the services that I use. The world would be a far better place if it didn’t need ad support, and the only alternative that so far works at all is direct payment.
- dimator 6y ago
  Along these lines, why doesn't google introduce a paid search service without ads? My hunch is that no matter the price point, it would be a huge revenue hit compared to actual advertising payments. My other hunch is that it would make the non ad-free experience greatly cheapened in the eyes of the consumer, in the same way youtube with ads feels different after experiencing youtube premium.
  - HDMI_Cable 6y ago
    They have Google Workspace, which is pretty similar, but more focused on small businesses.
  - lotsofpulp 6y ago
    Because if you allow a paid option, all the people worth advertising to switch to that, and now the advertising portion of the business is worth a lot less. They’re betting they can get more out of advertisers than paying subscribers.
Aperocky 6y ago
+1 to this. I haven't seen ads for years until I switched to M1 macs and had to use safari for a while.
- azinman2 6y ago
  There are content blockers for safari.
nashashmi 6y ago
I use it to but I use a manual blocker with my own lists. I can't find a way to block YouTube ads.
nostromo 6y ago
Pro tip: on iOS most adblockers will block YouTube ads so long as you use youtube.com in the browser, not the YouTube app. YouTube in the browser has almost all features of the app now, so there's no compelling reason to use the YouTube app.
conradfr 6y ago
There is on mobile and there's so much nowadays that I had to stop clicking video links on my phone.
- hojjat12000 6y ago
  You can use Youtube Vanced (Youtube Advance without the Ad) on your phone. I can not recommend it enough. It also supports "Sponsor blocker". It's the best app for youtube addicts.
  - conradfr 6y ago
    I was fine with a small amount of ads but yeah I guess I'll have to try it now. The irony is that I was a Google Play Music subscriber until its death but in my country you still had the Youtube ads.
- acatsdream 6y ago
  You can have ublock origin on firefox mobile.
accented 6y ago
I use unlock origin, I didnt eve know there were ads on YouTube.

tiborsaas 6y ago

> they have noting to do with anything I care about Why is this good? For me personally, both FB and Google figured out that I'm into home renovation and all they keep recommending me is relevant stuff. So I consider it free research done for me :) Contractors, webshops, pretty images are all over my feed. I even press accept cookies for webshops I want to see more of their competition :)

Taylor_OD 6y ago
Eh. I don't really want to be sold to even if the thing I'm being sold might be interesting to me. I don't need more stuff and I really don't need my brain thinking I need more stuff. To each their own.
flukus 6y ago
> Why is this good? Saving money instead of being manipulated to buy something I otherwise wouldn't is good for me and the environment.

simias 6y ago

I use DDG as well but I went further and told Firefox to use a dedicated container for google domains. I also did it because they made Youtube really annoying to use when you're not logged in, so I made a burner account but it's only active inside this container and they can't track me around the web (at least, not with that).

f1refly 6y ago
You might enjoy invidious. It's a frontend for youtube that cuts 99% of the bloat and show videos directly in your html5 player. It even supports subscriptions without a google account!
- pixxel 6y ago
  Is it still running ok. Didn’t the main instance shutdown or something? Sorry, I forget the specifics.
  - aarchi 6y ago
    I haven't had success with using Invidious. I'd love to ditch the YT frontend and tracking though. I have extensions that remove suggested videos on the sidebar, homepage, and during the video; as well as ads, comments, and product recommendations. I use YT in a Firefox container without an account that is separate from my other Google container.
  - Nextgrid 6y ago
    You can run your own instance; that’s what I do. Public instances tend to be overloaded or their external IP becomes temporarily banned by YouTube (since its traffic is obviously more than what a typical home would use).
  - f1refly 6y ago
    The instance of the original dev has shut down because he seized developement, but the project ist still doing fine. There's multiple public instances, but those are often unable to handle all user requests and get rate limited by google every now and then. I'm currently using invidious.tube, it has a good "real" uptime in my opinion (the site is up the whole time but might have issues like described above). I'm considering just self hosting should things get worse.

DamnYuppie 6y ago

I use DDG as well. I use FF as my primary personal browser, I have installed uBlock Origin and Enhancer for YouTube, https://www.mrfdev.com/enhancer-for-youtube https://www.mrfdev.com/enhancer-for-youtube, and I now never get any ads on YouTube.

mcescalante 6y ago

I have the same experience - my two major issues with DDG are the results for technical searches, and I wish that it showed more basic info for businesses like phone number/address/hours without me having to click around a bunch.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

sneeuwpopsneeuw 6y ago

I have been using DDG for roughly 2 years now and I always search for things technical or non-technical there first. If it does not give any result or when I know it's very technical I simply add !g to the end (but you can add it anywhere) and it automatically searches the same thing in Google. Some examples of things I personally thing DDG could improve / is different then Google: - DDG gives the feeling they prefer wikipedia over stack overflow. Stack overflow ranks often second. - GLSL shaders. DDG does not index websites such as shadertoy. Example search for "Gold Noise Uniform Random" - indexing Youtube and other videos. It takes up to 2 days before new youtube videos show up if you search for a video. Example a mcdonalds burned down in my city a few weeks ago so I searched for videos and photos. It did not find any videos only photos and articles. Google found a few videos including once on a dutch news website. - Visual search and reverse image lookup is not that great. Only in Bing you can search for a video based on a image DDG and Google both can not do that. So both could improve that. - DDG sometimes gives the feeling not enough people have searched for something, This feeling is more a feeling then a real thing. This is mostly because Google finds a lot of spelling / typo's in your search query and DDG appears to only repairs it until it contains valid words. Example search for "A apple a day keps the", Google corrects AN and KEEPS but DuckDuckGo only corrects KEEPS. - Old websites are not indexed that well. Example if you are developing a gameboy advance game it takes a while before you find Tonc (one of the best resources regarding GBA development). With google this experience is terrible as well but it takes less time to find some good things.

breiti 6y ago
> I have been using DDG for roughly 2 years now and I always search for things technical or non-technical there first. If it does not give any result or when I know it's very technical I simply add !g to the end I am the same, but i default to !sp (startpage.com) first. They claim: > You can’t beat Google when it comes to online search. So we’re paying them to use their brilliant search results in order to remove all trackers and logs. [...]
- DyslexicAtheist 6y ago
  you do know that startpage.com "is now owned by an ad company" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21371577 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21371577

mdaniel 6y ago

Out of curiosity, do you use the "Send Feedback" in the bottom-right(!) corner of the results page to let them know? I have almost zero belief it does anything, but without even attempting to provide feedback I don't think it's reasonable to expect any change

AdamSC1 6y ago
As the person who just read through feedback today, I can assure you that each piece of feedback sent is received, read and logged by real humans who care and more importantly deeply appreciate the fact that users take time to send feedback :)
- mdaniel 6y ago
  Foremost, thank you for your service! I really, really want DDG to be successful and I'm glad to know the feedback doesn't /dev/null. If I might be so bold as to suggest that hiding the "Send Feedback" in the bottom right is a very opaque location for what is arguably a vital interaction DDG has with its users. While I have an insider: I see a lot of mentions in the threads about folks who use "!g" or "!sp" -- are those counted as votes of suboptimal DDG results? I could see it going either way: it's a bad metric for those users who just default to doing it, but it's a good metric for searches that end in the frustration of a series of bad DDG results
- wombatmobile 6y ago
  Could you consider making a list of common feedback items that already have resolutions? I imagine it would make a popular HN submission in addition to a useful FAQ.

barbacoa 6y ago

The key to technical questions in ddg is to be very verbose. From tracking you Google knows you're a programer who works in Java, ddg doesn't do that by design. When I search "transformer" in ddg I get the movie franchise, when I do it in Google I get the ones you see hanging on utility poles. Google knows I look at power electronics. When I search "voltage transformer" in ddg I get the same quality results as google.

Shorel 6y ago

I don't understand what's the issue with the technical queries. Are they ambiguous? Are they paraphrasing the error description? Because for me, most of the time, I just paste the error message into DDG, and the relevant Stack Overflow answer, not question page, the actual answer, is in DDG search results for me to use and fix my problem. This is actually one of my favourites DDG features, along with currency conversion.