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> I'm never going to use DDG ever again. The removals were a rarity. It's not as if you can't add a `!g` bang query to redirect to Google if you can't find som

by vmoore 4y ago

> I'm never going to use DDG ever again. The removals were a rarity. It's not as if you can't add a `!g` bang query to redirect to Google if you can't find something. And DDG is rampant with all sorts of stuff that shouldn't be there, so I don't think they're hellbent on censorship.

behnamoh 4y ago
!g leads to Google, who also blocks yt-dl and other similar tools. Edit: I was wrong.
- oefrha 4y ago
  Uh, what? youtube-dl.org is the first result for youtube-dl on Google, followed by GitHub repo, ytdl-org.github.io, Wikipedia, etc. TPB is the first result too. IIRC at one point searching for TPB only returned proxy sites, but that doesn’t appear to be the case now.
- bqmjjx0kac 4y ago
  Any source on that? I just searched both "youtube-dl" and "pirate bay" and got reasonable-looking results.
  - ttybird2 4y ago
    You don't get "reasonable-looking" results for "pirate bay" on google.
    - ghostly_s 4y ago
      My first result is https://thepiratebay.org https://thepiratebay.org and the rest of the page is proxies.
      - ttybird2 4y ago
        Weird, I only get shady proxies and the wikipedia page.
spiderice 4y ago
> if you can't find something You don’t always know what you don’t know. If I don’t know about YouTube-dl and I search “download YouTube command line”, how am I going to know that ddg is hiding the best result from me? This definitely isn’t a small annoyance kind of problem, in my eyes. It’s a deal breaker. I’ll never use ddg again. If they’re going to censor like Google does, then I’m going to use Google because it generally has better results. Ddg needs to offer something beyond what Google offers to make up for their bad results, and they aren’t doing that.
- lamontcg 4y ago
  > Ddg needs to offer something beyond what Google offers If you're searching on google for medical terms it builds a profile on you, and you should be concerned that they could be selling that information to insurers, directly or indirectly.
  - 14 4y ago
    I've been curious about this as a health care worker. The number of times I've looked up a client condition to better help the person I can't count. So is googles profile of me tainted?
    - lamontcg 4y ago
      I would be somewhat worried that information could be abused now or in the future. Since that data is necessarily going to be noisy, insurers probably aren't going to make black and white decisions based on it, but they could score you somewhat worse over it. You could maybe trust them that their algorithms would be able to determine that since you work in health care and are probably in the top 5% of people who search health terms that your individual data is polluted by your job, but I would never trust an insurer's black-box algorithms. They only need to be statistically correct over the population, they can always fuck you over individually and still make a fantastic profit for themselves. Is this really going on? Maybe not, but is it worth it to ignore the risk? Can you just use DDG so it isn't a question?

by vmoore 4y ago

behnamoh 4y ago

!g leads to Google, who also blocks yt-dl and other similar tools. Edit: I was wrong.

oefrha 4y ago
Uh, what? youtube-dl.org is the first result for youtube-dl on Google, followed by GitHub repo, ytdl-org.github.io, Wikipedia, etc. TPB is the first result too. IIRC at one point searching for TPB only returned proxy sites, but that doesn’t appear to be the case now.
bqmjjx0kac 4y ago
Any source on that? I just searched both "youtube-dl" and "pirate bay" and got reasonable-looking results.
- ttybird2 4y ago
  You don't get "reasonable-looking" results for "pirate bay" on google.
  - ghostly_s 4y ago
    My first result is https://thepiratebay.org https://thepiratebay.org and the rest of the page is proxies.
    - ttybird2 4y ago
      Weird, I only get shady proxies and the wikipedia page.

spiderice 4y ago

> if you can't find something You don’t always know what you don’t know. If I don’t know about YouTube-dl and I search “download YouTube command line”, how am I going to know that ddg is hiding the best result from me? This definitely isn’t a small annoyance kind of problem, in my eyes. It’s a deal breaker. I’ll never use ddg again. If they’re going to censor like Google does, then I’m going to use Google because it generally has better results. Ddg needs to offer something beyond what Google offers to make up for their bad results, and they aren’t doing that.

lamontcg 4y ago
> Ddg needs to offer something beyond what Google offers If you're searching on google for medical terms it builds a profile on you, and you should be concerned that they could be selling that information to insurers, directly or indirectly.
- 14 4y ago
  I've been curious about this as a health care worker. The number of times I've looked up a client condition to better help the person I can't count. So is googles profile of me tainted?
  - lamontcg 4y ago
    I would be somewhat worried that information could be abused now or in the future. Since that data is necessarily going to be noisy, insurers probably aren't going to make black and white decisions based on it, but they could score you somewhat worse over it. You could maybe trust them that their algorithms would be able to determine that since you work in health care and are probably in the top 5% of people who search health terms that your individual data is polluted by your job, but I would never trust an insurer's black-box algorithms. They only need to be statistically correct over the population, they can always fuck you over individually and still make a fantastic profit for themselves. Is this really going on? Maybe not, but is it worth it to ignore the risk? Can you just use DDG so it isn't a question?