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> 5. Review web services I use and switch if necessary > Suddenly this appears: a catch-all "change everything I do on the internet". Stop using Facebook, Skype

by iuguy 13y ago

> 5. Review web services I use and switch if necessary > Suddenly this appears: a catch-all "change everything I do on the internet". Stop using Facebook, Skype, Gmail, etc. Probably not going to happen. I'll come back to this in a second. You say that, but having switched to DuckDuckGo[1] for the past few weeks I'm slowly but surely losing my reliance on Google for personal stuff. Sure, it's not as good as Google in terms of finding relevant results or having the rest of the ecosystem, but it's no worse than using the web a few years ago, which to me is good enough (and I make some pretty esoteric searches). I'm looking further into moving away from the traditional Internet to something a bit more self-hosted and it looks possible.

sneak 13y ago
> You say that, but having switched to DuckDuckGo[1] for the past few weeks I'm slowly but surely losing my reliance on Google for personal stuff. Everyone you converse with via email still uses Gmail. Game over.
harlanlewis 13y ago
> [DuckDuckGo] not as good as Google in terms of finding relevant results or having the rest of the ecosystem, but it's no worse than using the web a few years ago About a year or so ago I was using DuckDuckGo for every search, but after a couple months switched back after falling into the habit of following almost every DDG search with another one on Google to make sure I was getting the real results. Frustratingly, where DDG failed most was on the generic stuff where I expected to find results on the bigger sites. Esoteric searches are harder to judge, as neither engine reliably presented what I'd consider high-confidence results on first query.
yk 13y ago
The trick about using DDG is their !bang [1] notation, which you can use to pipe searches directly into the search of another site. ( At least for many large sites.) Especially, if you prefix your search with !g you will get the Google result page for that search. This is of course a privacy vs usability trade off, but Google still sees only a few searches. With this, I actually think that DDG beats Google as search engine, since quite often I want to just search Wikipedia (!w) or Stackexchange (!se) and in this cases DDG takes me directly to these sites. [1]https://duckduckgo.com/bang.html https://duckduckgo.com/bang.html

by iuguy 13y ago

sneak 13y ago

> You say that, but having switched to DuckDuckGo[1] for the past few weeks I'm slowly but surely losing my reliance on Google for personal stuff. Everyone you converse with via email still uses Gmail. Game over.

harlanlewis 13y ago

> [DuckDuckGo] not as good as Google in terms of finding relevant results or having the rest of the ecosystem, but it's no worse than using the web a few years ago About a year or so ago I was using DuckDuckGo for every search, but after a couple months switched back after falling into the habit of following almost every DDG search with another one on Google to make sure I was getting the real results. Frustratingly, where DDG failed most was on the generic stuff where I expected to find results on the bigger sites. Esoteric searches are harder to judge, as neither engine reliably presented what I'd consider high-confidence results on first query.

yk 13y ago

The trick about using DDG is their !bang [1] notation, which you can use to pipe searches directly into the search of another site. ( At least for many large sites.) Especially, if you prefix your search with !g you will get the Google result page for that search. This is of course a privacy vs usability trade off, but Google still sees only a few searches. With this, I actually think that DDG beats Google as search engine, since quite often I want to just search Wikipedia (!w) or Stackexchange (!se) and in this cases DDG takes me directly to these sites. [1]https://duckduckgo.com/bang.html https://duckduckgo.com/bang.html