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I was sort of in your boat, but is google really working out for you? It sure isn’t working out for me. I still use it out of familiarity and because DDG isn’t
by moksly 5y ago
I was sort of in your boat, but is google really working out for you? It sure isn’t working out for me. I still use it out of familiarity and because DDG isn’t working either, but almost all the time that I want to find something that isn’t on Wikipedia or related to me buying something, I end up needing to do multiple search typically ending up doing something like site:these-are-all-the-bees-in-the-world.com because I was trying to identify the huge bee my cat almost ate, not trying to buy honey, or bee coloured dresses, or plush bees or bee branded diapers or whatever else.
Some of it isn’t Google’s fault or course, all the hobby stuff that happens in the blood bowl community group on Facebook never ends up in a search engine, but some of it is certainly Google’s fault. I’m just not sure how much privacy helps though, sure DDG might not try to sell me diapers because their advertisers might not know I have a two year old, but it still tries to sell me honey.
- zaat 5y agoGoogle isn't really working for me either. I mean, it isn't the effective tool it used to be in the distant past. Having saying that, yes, Google does work for me more than any of the alternatives and most of the times I can find even the most arcane and niche stuff I'm looking for, after investing few hours. Investing this level of efforts in DDG have never been fruitful and I have given up long ago trying anything but the most trivial stuff.
- Retric 5y agoYou just said you where using g! constantly. As someone that never had that issue I can only assume you simply never learned how to use DDG. For example, it’s not using your location behind the scenes so “restaurants near me” doesn’t work. But swap to say “restaurants near ZIPCODE” and it’s fine. I bring this up because oddly enough I had the opposite problem yesterday. When using a friends phone I just couldn’t find what I was looking for until I swapped from Google to DDG. From 15 useless queries to first try third result.
- zaat 5y agoNo, I have no issue or interest with finding restaurants near me. I'm talking about researching stuff, finding solutions to technical issues, old manuals, stuff that is a little bit more challenging than the basics. I used g! constantly because most of the times the results for non trivial stuff are worthless
- Retric 5y agoYet, I and many others can find solutions to technical issues easily on DDG. Hell that’s what I was trying to find on Google and failed. If it’s a frequent issue for you perhaps you could provide some examples? I only ask because I hear people agreeing with you and yet I have never seen an actual example.
- zaat 5y agoOne recent example - for some reason I had to find a bunch of RPM packages for i386 arch from RHEL/CentOS 5 era. I'm not talking about the easy stuff that I could find on old mirrors or rpmfind, though even those would rarely show up on ddg, but the more obscure ones, which I could never find without google.