Google’s search results are absolute garbage lately. It pushes the most advert-heavy spam sites first.
DuckDuckGo has more reliably been giving me the technical documentation I was looking for in the past year.
I can’t find shit anymore, always spam sites angry at my ad blocker or YouTube videos, which are angry at my ad blocker.
The first half of the first page is all ads now on Google. It’s utter shit - the things it’s a lot better at than DDG is NLP, being able to understand questions, and anything news related. If you know exactly what you’re searching for though, using the old style of search words works great on DDG
What does NLP stand for?
Most likely Natural Language Processing - being able to understand what you’re searching for
Search engines are about to be replaced by AI anyway.
If you want good results, use something like perplexity.ai.
It is slow, so it isn’t my main engine. But those results are amazing. You can be very specific in what you are searching and keep refining your search since it remembers your previous results, it tells you why the result is relevant and it also gives summaries of the website so you can know what it says before you click on it.
It truly is artificial intelligent searching.
I used to be able to search for a tracking number by Google and it would link to the correct delivery tracking service. About 1-2 months ago Google stopped doing this and just gives no results. Why would they stop linking you to FedEx or UPS? Who knows, but my wild ass guess is since Google was not able to link “related” sponsored links along with it they just removed the functionality. They are just actively making their service shittier anytime something minor doesn’t dish out a shitty ad along with it.
I’ve gone on to using Kagi and DDG. Rarely do I miss Google search.
I do this all the time for work. It still works for me when I put a FDX trk # in
Not sure what I am doing wrong, work is when I discovered problem. This is what happens when I try to search in android. Doesn’t work on my work pc or on mine. Maybe it is a Firefox thing?
EDIT: YUP. Tried it with chrome and DuckDuckGo browser and ups tracking search works fine. Wonder what’s going on with Firefox preventing it. Don’t think it’s an extension because doesn’t work in Firefox focus either and my work pc doesn’t have any addons.
User agent. Google wants you to use Chrome. You can spoof the user agent in Firefox to get the same results.
Kagi looks neat but they’d have to have absolutely amazing results if they want me to pay for them, which I doubt they have… And sorry, but paying $10/month for a fucking search engine (where the actual cost per user is negligible and profit scales with number of users extremely nicely) is just insane.
I guess Google would make at most about $1/month off of ads from me… if I didn’t block them. I’d be willing to pay that, maybe up to $3 for a really good service. But this is just insane, and continues the trend of “oh you like a service that’s not complete crap? I guess you should pay an order of magnitude (or several) more than what’s necessary to provide that service, because fuck you, what can you do?”
If I had to pay for every service like that I’d probably spend $500/month just for that and then they’d still figure out that hey, we can still put ads in and make a little bit more cuz why not, what are they gonna do?
You are not wrong, but Kagi is basically still a baby. They started maybe like last summer or so? And already decreased their prices twice (well, relative prices.) I think if we give them some time there will be a good priced tier for everyone.
P.S. Search engine is not the only thing they have.
Their lowest plan is $5/mo for 300 searches.
Google search is less than useful nowadays. Google assistant seems to be Google’s inbred idiot cousin. DDG doesn’t seem to be any better. Most of my searches give the same clickbait results that google does.
Honestly, outside of Google Maps, is there any legitimate value to any google product? Is there a single search engine that is brave enough to give 0 results and also literally parses what you’re asking instead of valuating against what the advertisers want you to see?
I dream daily of Google imploding, and every single investor at that useless company going immediately bankrupt and destitute for the disgusting, addled, brain-malware they push.
I love searching for something on Google and have the entirety of the above the fold be sponsored results
My favorite is when I ask how to do something in Google Slides and Google gives me answers on how to do it in Google Docs. So helpful. Not at all frustrating.
or how every answer is a youtube video like just put it all on a page i can skim and read
That’s largely a problem of “modern internet culture” than anything. Resources locked behind proprietary crap like Discord “servers” is a big issue, too.
Ublock Origin
When I built my PC last year I decided to just let Edge and Bing go for a bit instead of immediately downloading another browser or changing the search engine. I can count on one hand the number of times I needed to enter in Google.com to get a different or better result. And almost every one of those was because I wanted a google maps results and not whatever weird maps MS has.
If I recall correctly, DuckDuckGo uses Bing’s search database (not search itself, just the database).
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It might be a myth, but it would probably be the best search engine.
Bing is too good, they’re trying to capture market share and likely operating it at a loss. But if people leave Google, it’s most likely because they dont want tracked. And Microsoft is probably at best just as bad as Google.
A go between that anonimizes the results would be exactly what people want.
Bing is too good,
You mean that they just don’t frontload ads on results?
Their own CEO admits they are required to allow Microsoft tracking in their “privacy” browser due to the contract for search. They use Bing for search, it’s not a myth.
For non-search tracker blocking (eg in our browser), we block most third-party trackers. Unfortunately our Microsoft search syndication agreement prevents us from doing more to Microsoft-owned properties. However, we have been continually pushing and expect to be doing more soon.
— Gabriel Weinberg (@yegg) May 23, 2022
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They still have the disclaimer on the app in the pay store. It was added after they were called out.
The fact that they hid it in the first place is disqualifying for a privacy focused product.
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Yeah, I agree with that. I would never use their browser or other products but their search fits the “at least it’s not google/MS”.
I even think what the CEO is saying is correct here, Google is doing it’s best kill competition.
afaik they use multiple, including bing and their own indexer (duckduckbot afaik)
Of course, we have more traditional links and images in our search results too, which we largely source from Bing.
https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/sources/
So I wasn’t totally right in that it doesn’t all come from Bing, but it largely does.
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They literally state this themselves, it’s not a myth.
I miss the 2000s/2010s Google. Now I need to endlessly scroll down the page in an attempt to find something barely useful.
Weird, I stopped using DDG because it was useless for troubleshooting IT stuff.
Depends on what you’re doing. I look up Linux admin stuff. DDG points to the Arch Linux wiki which is solid, even for non-Arch Linux stuff. Google points to random sponsored blog tutorials that are sometimes outdated or the author doesn’t have a full understanding of what their copy-paste terminal commands do.
Recently I used google to look up a Kotlin coding thing. It pointed to every source except the official Kotlin documentation.
Good thing about DDG is you can just add a simple bang to search another site right from the results
DuckDuckGo has been giving me poor results lately - especially when I look for news, everything is a redirect to Bing now - so I instead use Brave Search. It’s kind of disappointing since DDG had always worked great for me
But Weinberg testified that getting users to switch from Google was complicated, requiring as many as 30 to 50 steps to change defaults on all their devices, whereas the process could be shortened to just one click on each device.
Full disclosure, been using Duck Duck Go for a while but…
30 to 50 steps? On a Samsung it’s one click from the address bar to select a search engine and then another to select Duck, Google, yahoo, or bing.
The way it’s worded they’re adding steps for like 10 devices together.
And for it to be a single click, all the options would have to display every time you click the address bar, which would make it look like a 90s web browser.
I’m all about Duck, but that reeks of bullshit because they know most politicians don’t know as much about the internet as a 9 year old does.
Step 1. Pickup the phone Step 2. Look at the screen Step 3. Power the phone on Step 4….
- Profit?
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How come that one shitty device has a range of steps rather than a single number of steps?
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That does seem like an exaggeration, but there is truth in the power of defaults for the mainstream audience.
Pixel phones it’s harder:
Change fucking launcher… The google bar is always there, cannot be removed and it’s always google.
This fucks me up to no end. I love this phone but that fucking search bar made me switch the launcher. I also love the Pixel launcher (if it wasn’t for that search bar), so I run the alpha release of Lawnchair. Problem is, there is no proper release bc there is not enough manpower to develop it.
You’re talking abut the search bar at the top of the first home screen right? It’s always google but it can be removed.
That should be fixed for sure, it’s annoying. Personally I use firefox anyway so I change it to the firefox search widget which uses your firefox default.
You can’t remove it on a pixel without changing launcher or root. It’s at the bottom. It’s not a widget
Yep. I wasted hours on that. Worst thing is that it is combined with the app and setting search.
iPhone.
Settings > Safari > Search Engine
I can change the browser search just as easily on a pixel. Just the default device search is always Google.
Do people even use that? I’ve literally never. Even if I want to search something, I’d rather just use my browser where I have tabs. Relatedly, why don’t more apps have tabs? Like apps for Reddit or Lemmy. Literally none that I ever tried have tabs. I know they don’t perform that great, but not even an option?
Same with iOS
Pixel owner here. Changed to Nova launcher on day one. No search bar on my home screen and DDG is my default search engine.
I use Firefox and DDG on my Pixel but I do keep a small Google option for those (usually location based} particular searches
Other launchers are better anyway. But it does become another big step for those that never leave defaults.
My Samsung phone automatically reverts my favourite browser to the Samsung browser all the time without asking.
Interesting, I’m using an s20fe for around 3 years now, and haven’t had it happen once, was using an a50 before that, and don’t remember it happening there either
I have an S20 regular and it does it constantly. It’s annoying.
Huh, must be a region thing
Yeah my last few phones were Samsungs, same with my parents and friends and none of us have ever had that issue. In the US
wE hAd aN uPdaTe bUG tHAt ACCIDENTLY cAuSeD sOmE tHInGs tO rEseT
Yeah, what the fuck is that number? Are we just straight up lying in court now?
I decided to see how long it would take me to find out how to change it with no help. Took about 30 seconds. In mobile Chrome, it’s basically the first setting on the settings page. So the steps are (1) open chrome, (2) hamburger menu, (3) settings, (4) search engine. Even if I have to count turning my phone on and opening Chrome if it wasn’t on my home page, it still wouldn’t even add up to 10 steps.
I checked Firefox and it has one extra step. There’s still a search option literally at the top of the settings, just it goes to a page with multiple search related options (default search engine is still at the top). The fact that it worded it as “default” also made me immediately realize you can tap the Google icon in the address bar to choose another option, which must be what you used. 2 steps in that case.
How many clicks does it take to change the search on the home screen?
I didn’t know anyone uses those…
But aren’t they widgets? I don’t even know if you can change it, you might have to use a different widget
Is that part of the problem?
I have a Pixel. The Pixel Launcher that comes stock on the phone has a Google search thing that is not removable except via switching to another launcher. It looks like a widget, but you can’t remove it. It exists on every “panel” of the screen, below the app shortcuts.
I do use it quite a bit when making searches, but only because it’s there already and can’t be removed. If I could remove it, I would.
It’s supremely useful if you want to use Google search. If you don’t on the other hand… 🥲
I have a phone with stock android 13, which would be the same experience as a Pixel or other stock android phone.
Here’s the process for me:
- Tap chrome
- Tap vertical … menu
- Tap settings
- Tap search engine (it’s the top option under basic settings and visible without scrolling)
- Tap DuckDuckGo (or bing or whatever)
Definitely not 30-50 steps on a phone setup by Google. Only real complaint is it can’t be changed from the search field itself.
Nope. The pixel phones have a Google widget on the homescreen that cannot be removed.
I have a pixel and it would be those steps +
Open Google play, find a launcher, find a new search provider. Set new launcher as default, insert new search provider widget. Probably missed a few steps.
Yeah, that was my experience as well as a Pixel user. That said, it didn’t take too long to just finally switch to Firefox, Nova launcher, and Duck Duck Go. Mostly painless, and I’m over 40 👴
I’ve done all but the launcher. The gestures became super choppy with another launcher (nova).
I have put a FF search bar above the Google one and I just ignore it.
I personally use kiss launcher, bit of a different paradigm to regular ones but i like it
I’ve been using Niagara on my pixel 7. It takes a bit to get used to, but is so much cleaner. Add that with a browser other than chrome, and duckduckgo. Works pretty well.
For each browser on your phone* for the default on your phone*
I have 3 browsers on my phone for various stuff. If each is 5 steps, that’s 20 steps just to change them on my phone alone. People have multiple phones, multiple tablets, multiple computers…….
If I hold down the home button on my phone, it launches the stupid Google Voice Search thing. Try as I might, I can’t find any way to remap that function.
Daily reminder that unregulated capitalism hurts all of us.
Daily reminder that capitalism hurts all of us.
Capitalism isn’t about free markets, it’s about private property and profit extraction.
Laziness or not giving a damn is a choice
Its the easiest thing in the world. I degoogled everything in my life in like 2-3 days after work. People aren’t switching because the bulk of the world’s populace likes the centralization and using the popular option. They just want to use what everyone else is.
I think if you were to ask “most people” about which search engine they prefer, they wouldn’t really understand the question. I remember in highschool a teacher asked someone what operating system they have at home, and she replied “I think it’s Microsoft Office”.
Tech people tend to severely overestimate non-tech peoples’ understanding of tech.
Counterpoint: tech literacy is irresponsibly low for a modern developed world that now requires it for everyday operation.
Both of these things can be true at the same time.
Fuck you spez
tips fedora
I am lucky my husband likes to learn about this sort of stuff. When we started dating he barely knew the difference between Mac and Windows. Now he uses Linux. Granted, I have to install it, but he keeps on top of maintenance.
Seriously, most people don’t even know you can go into browser settings, let alone change your default browser there.
While I don’t believe you can degoogle that quickly, because some of their services take quite some time to properly switch, such as email, in the end it’s not too hard, but just takes time and some work.
Changing email is easy, if you don’t mind it being a slow process. Just forward your google email, and start slowly replacing any service you notice in the following months/years to your new address.
Google Drive is harder to replace, I went for just running a NAS with Nextcloud, which takes care of most of Google Drive/Docs/Calendar stuff. If self-hosting isn’t your cup of tea, Proton is slowly setting up usable google alternatives - they have Drive and Calendar IIRC.
Now for phone, that’s the hardest task. You wouldn’t help yourself by getting an IPhone. While it would de-google you, there’s basically no point in switching google for apple. Getting android to be usable for stuff like banking, MFA and other bullshit you need your phone for while being degoogled is hard, due to the bullshit Google Services. The only solution I found is to either just go with dumb phone with an obscure OS, or just get a Google Pixel and run GrapheneOS.
Maps are another issue, but thankfully we have a local https://mapy.cz/ , which is a pretty OK alternative to Google maps for our country, and I guess they even work worldwide. I don’t drive a car, so I don’t really need it that often.
The only remaining Google service I use is GCloud VPS, because I have some websites running there on the free instances that I’m too lazy to move. But I’m slowly migrating it to Amazon. Not that it would help much, anyway. And also Youtube, but I’m trying to go through the alternative front-ends as much as possible.
And for browser, I’m using https://mullvad.net/en/browser. Fuck chromium.
Migrating email alone is a huge pain. To be truly independent you need your own domain in case whatever provider you choose goes to shit. Any decent one will cost money. Now, most people don’t even know what a domain is, let alone where and how to buy it and use it for email. They also have to pay that mail provider, configure everything and migrate their old emails and forward their old mail. Oh and now they also have different logins everywhere, and because they probably don’t have a password manager either they need to get one or just have different logins for different things.
That’s … a gargantuan task. for an average person - even if you provide them with a rough outline of what they’d need to do they probably wouldn’t be able to do so without help.
Also, as a side note, what do you use for watching videos? What phone do you have? What maps do you use? It’s not so easy to “de-google” completely.
Migrating emails isnt that hard if u dont set yourself a deadline. Some services like proton offer migration and forwarding from google and you can just slowly update them as you use it. I myself got tutanota and anonaddy and going through my bitwarden entries updating different alias for everything for the past couple days. Still gonna keep the gmail accounts around for emergency but will slowly disassociate from it.
Takes a while but you can just stick with updating them when you do use it if you dont have the time or feeling lazy. For an average person who doesnt value privacy, they have no reason to move out of google anyway so gmail will always be the popular one unfortunately.
This is how I did it. Set up a Protonmail account with my own domain, and set all my Gmail emails to forward there. I set up a special folder for all forwarded mail, to remind myslef that I should change my email on that service, and every time I logged somwhere or received an email from an important service I use, I made sure to change my address there.
It has already been several years, but I think I’ve managed to replace it everywhere within a few months. I haven’t seen a forwarded email in months, so I think I’m finally done.
He’s probably right, but from what I see, the reality is that like 95% of people simply don’t care, and the rest will find an alternative.
Thing is, Google is also (still) just better.
I use DDG as my primary search engine, but I find myself repeating searches with Google so often, I wrote a userscript to add a “Search with Google” link to the top of the DDG search results.
I’ve seen a lot of chat recently about Google search quality tanking and it’s made me realise that I haven’t re-searched a DDG query in Google for a really, really long time. when I first started using DDG as my main a few years back, I would repeat searches in Google probably 25% of the time? but I honestly can’t remember the last time I had to now. Been at least 6 months!
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Sure, but I think there’s still benefit to what the other person did. Search DDG by default, and then if you don’t see good results, it’s one extra click for the google search… vs mousing, clicking, 2 keystrokes…
I agree. At least in my experience Google does a better job when it comes to search engine. I use DDG as well but when it comes to searching specific things Google beats it unfortunately.
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DuckDuckGo CEO apparently is just another CEO. I’ve been an early adopter that’s been using their search engine long before there were apps or a browser.
What’s stopping people from using DDG isn’t switching to DDG, it’s getting absolutely dogshit results 90% of time. As an advanced user I know I can prefix my search with “!g phrase” to use Google instead of DDG. The sad fact is that despite the ad-ridden result page and tracking, Google is still lightyears ahead in providing relevant, and especially timely results for a user that is both tech-savvy and critical.
They need to improve their product, users will follow a good adfree search engine, that’s a given. Only a fraction of users will put up with degraded results in order to search without tracking.
I sincerely hope they will get their tech up to par. And that their browser on mobile reaches feature parity soon. (as a Z Fold user, DDG browser doesn’t have tabs. Brave, Vivaldi and Firefox does).
The new kid on the block needs humility and good tech, not shittalk. Fuck that CEO,. he’s undermining something very promising and important.
I often don’t find what I want in DDG; and I then try !g to look for it with Google… and Google doesn’t find it either.
In my experience it is very rare for Google to help me with a search that DDG failed with. As for the converse, I wouldn’t know - because I never search Google first. Why wouldn’t I? They’re evil.
That said, I will point out that I don’t use a google account, and I block most google-related cookies. I know that some people find Google gives better results due to its personalised results; and obviously I’m not ‘benefiting’ from that. So it is believable that you get better results from Google than I do, due to it knowing more about you, and thus guessing what you might want to see.
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I used DDG as my main for about half a year recently (and also a few times in the past). I always eventually end up back with Google. Don’t get me wrong the results aren’t that much better; but they’re definitely marginally better, at least for me. The personalization helps, too.
This time I had a brief detour using Neeva for a while and I was really happy with it; was kinda like a better DDG; but that got defunct so I ended up with Google again in the end and I just don’t see a way out.
I always see people saying Google provides better results, but to me it’s awful. I don’t even use DDGO anymore, but Google only shows ads and SEO optimized results that look AI generated. Is this common or am I just an isolated case?
I only ever hear people say the opposite. The comment you’re replying to is I think the first time I’ve seen someone say google is better than ddg in the wild. I keep feeling like I’m going crazy when people say ddg is better than google. Google is the only search engine capable of actually finding the results I’m looking for. Half the time it feels like it’s reading my mind.
I genuinely don’t know what people are searching for that yields better results on ddg than google. Every time I’ve gotten someone to give me an example, the thing they supposedly couldn’t find was the first result.
I gotta say I’m pretty good finding stuff, but i swear Google makes it more complicated for me. In DDGO I only need to change words, in Google I need to filter out half the results to get something human.
But that was when I used to use DDGO, I now self-host SearXNG and only use DDGO for simple searches and when using my phone.
I guess Google needs constant use to give something better(?, which would be another reason for me not to use it hehe
It aren’t the search terms, it is the fact that Google presents ads above the results. And that a lot of websites are purposely designed to get on top of Google results, while only having nonsensical info you don’t seek.
Lol, yeah right? I feel the same way most of the time. On top of that, I’m in Google’s beta AI thing so usually I just get a summary of whatever the hell I’m searching for right at the top and I don’t even have to look at any of the actual results what I’m looking for data.
My experience has been similar to yours. It’s disheartening.
Google results are garbage compared to 10 years ago, but they’re still miles ahead of ddg.
DDG isn’t the only alternative to Google. I use Kagi and love it. The results IME are definitely better than Google’s.
I just signed up for kagi and so far i like what i see. I am still in my 100 search trial though.
I agree that DDG’s results suck, but so do Google’s.
They really are both just awful. I’ve yet to find a search engine as good as Google was 10-15 years ago.
I wonder how much of that is Google being worse and you making more complex searches because you’re older
You got me there, but only you didn’t at all and I just feel sorry for you. Great baseless conjecture though.
I wasn’t trying to “get” anyone. It’s genuine curiosity. Christ, dude. Send your toxic-ass Reddit attitude back to that shitty platform it belongs.
It was an absolutely unnecessary comment and in no way a relevant quesiton. Odds are I’m better versed in technology than you. Don’t act like you were reasonable and you’re the one being attacked now. You’re one of those people who thinks they have the right to say whatever crappy thing they want and then look all confused when you illicit whatever response you absolutely deserved. Then accuse the other person of exactly what you started. I’m not facilitating this childish banter any further. Have whatever day you deserve.
Man you really think I’m being wildly more hostile than I am. It was genuine curiousity. It was in no way unnecessary, it wasn’t attacking you in any way, it was prompting a conversation. If you think every response to you that’s only tangentially related to what you said is off topic, then I fear for anyone who even attempts to have any sort of conversation with you at all. That’s how conversations work.
Fifteen years ago my searches were limited to Minecraft and basic programming questions. Now they’re more like searching for specific research papers and other significantly more complex topics and I get much less useful results.
Fuck, dude, get your head out of your goddamn ass. Learn how to talk to people. Fuck.
I’ve switched to DDG almost a year ago, and I never had issues with my search results. Quite the contrary, every time I tried using !g because I simply wasn’t finding an answer, the Google was ad-ridden bullshit full of promoted pages without relevance to what I was looking for.
I guess I’m just used to DDG quality of results, but I never felt like it’s as bad as you say.
I am with you. I don’t know what this guy’s about about the search results of Google. A couple comments above people were complaining about the terrible results googles ad driven engine spews out. Also saying he’s so tech savvy and needs the Google “quality”, somehow not knowing !g just completely circumvents the benefits of DDG
That depends very heavily on what your searching for.
If you’re a programmer or similar, like the poster you’re replying to appears to be, then you absolutely will find DDG crap compared to Google.
I use DDG as my primary search engine, but if I have a tech question, I usually skip it and go straight to Google.
I work part-time as a game developer, and part time as a pentester, so I do search for technical questions quite a lot.
Hmm, now I wonder whether I’m just used to it. I haven’t used any other search engine in more than a year. I’ll have to compare the results more, but as far as I remember every time I couldn’t find what I needed on DDG and resorted to !g, the Google results were even worse.
I work in IT and use the search engine around 100 times a day in order to find specific answers to specific edge cases. DDG results are just too generic most of the time.
But once they get better, oh yeah.
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Until recently I would have agreed 100%.
But Google’s search has turned to dogshit since it’s started trying to be smarter than it is, and DDG is now giving me results on par with old Google - that is, a list of exactly what I was searching for on the first try.
I made the switch a week ago. For two days at work, I always used Google, DDG and ecosia(uses bing) at the same time to compare the results. They are the same most of the time for the first 10 to 20 results. There’s sometimes a blogpost that one engine shows that the other doesn’t, but that post never made a difference.
When DDG does not get me helpful results, I can still ask Google to help out.
ecosia(uses bing)
Ecosia is a fucking scam. They claim that “every search plants a tree”, except the monetary contribution towards their “tree-planting” stuff comes from clicking ads – therefore if you are a knowledgeable user who purposefully skips over ads (or just use an ad-blocker) then Ecosia makes exactly $0 off of your traffic.
Yeah, I e had worsening search results from DDG over the past 6+ months. I’ve set it to my default browser, but I often have to switch because the results are not specific enough compared to Google.
And now Googles AI results are a huge time saver.
I installed a custom launcher that’s close to the stock one on my Pixel 3 specifically to make it possible to remove the Google Search widget. Now I have a Firefox widget that points to DDG.
If any are interested, the launcher is Lawn Chair, and it can be installed via F-droid.
That launcher is abandoned
It’s true (and it feels a bit dusty), but it’s still meeting my needs. I hope it’ll get picked up again or perhaps another project will replace it.
It is updated on the github
Last update was from more than one year ago, last I checked. Has it been updated since?
Still more recent than 4 years ago
Well, it’s only maintained through dependency updates
F-droid relesae is 4 years old, you can get August 2022 releases on github
For more convenience, the newest version is also available via the IzzyOnDroid repo, you can enable it with one tap in Drod-ify.
If you have a Pixel, why not go all in with https://grapheneos.org/?
I e been debating switching the graphene for weeks weeks now. But I just know I’m gonna end up installing Google play services on it and completely defeat the whole point of the OS. I’m probably gonna buy the pixel 8 when it comes out so once I have that I’ll put graphene on my current phone and see how I like it.
Play Services is sandboxed on Graphene and is treated as a regular app, so you can actually disable most of its features, including network access.
I’ve just switched to it literally yesterday, and while you will probably not avoid Play Services, being able to install it into a different profile that’s only limited to the few apps that need it is nice.
Also, just the fact that on Graphene Play Services do not have the special privileges as on any android phone, and are subjected to the same limitations as any other app (which are even stricter on Graphene) helps a lot. It also means that even if you end up just running the play services at all times, they can’t do as much as they can on other android phones, and the data they can access without your explicit permission is really limited. So, even that helps by a lot.
This is actually great to hear. I’ll probably still ending up holding off until I have a spare phone to test with just because wiping my phone and redoing everything just isn’t something I’m up for right now though. Thank you very much for the info.
I like the ‘ground up’ approach they mention that doesn’t rely on insecure ‘adversaries’. I’ll check it out soon.
DDG rules
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The U.S. Department of Justice argues that Google has smothered competition by paying companies such as Apple and Verizon to lock in its search engine as the default choice — the first one users see — on many laptops and smartphones.
Even when it holds the default spot on smartphones and other devices, Google argues, users can switch to rival search engines with a couple of clicks.
DuckDuckGo still sells ads, but bases them on what people are asking its search engine in the moment, a technique known as “contextual advertising.” That focus on privacy helped the company attract more users after the Edward Snowden saga raised awareness about the pervasiveness of online surveillance.
It gained even more customers after Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica scandal opened a window into how personal information extracted from digital services can be passed around to other data brokers.
But Lehman said machine learning has improved rapidly in recent years, to the point that computers can evaluate text on their own without needing to analyze data from user clicks.
During the exchange, U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta drew a laugh by asking how internet searches would answer one of pop culture’s most pressing questions this week: whether superstar singer Taylor Swift is dating NFL tight end Travis Kelce.
The original article contains 637 words, the summary contains 212 words. Saved 67%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Good bot
Im just here to watch the slimeballs duke it out.
Bing says what?
Ker-ching! 🤑
Maybe if they made DDG give better results, I wouldn’t use Google quite as much
DDG does have better results than Google. I’ve not used the latter for years and was surprised by the bad quality of results when I used it once accidentally last week.
It depends and that’s why both your answers aren’t quite the full truth.
If you are a deep resident of the Google ecosystem (maps, Mail, android etc.) Google’s results are second to none. That’s because Google knows exactly what you care about and what is relevant to you. They know where you work, where you are, what you talk about etc etc.
With all that knowledge google can optimise both ads and answers to you almost perfectly.
If you’re not a deep resident, ddg is better - their results have to work harder, so to speak, because they don’t have your every waking thought to hand as a relevancy scale.
So, yeah, if you give Google everything they make money off it and keep you dependent on them.
Sounds like a dealer, right?
Exactly my thoughts as well. You need enable your country, though.
No, I mean that DDG doesn’t provide summaries or skip to the section of video Tha answers your questions. Google has some great features
I am a regular DDG user but it depends what I’m searching for. I also use Qwant
Yeah brave has a bit of an upper hand on that front but I switched to ddg recently because of news on brave’s ceo being a not nice guy.
I could switch but I don’t see any need to. The lockin from apple apps and google play apps is far stronger.
DuckDuckGo just sounds so stupid. I refuse to use it
I assume you’re not using, and have never used, Google (a silly sounding, misspelled math term that sounds like a sound a baby would make), Bing (sillier yet), Yahoo (it sounds almost as ridiculous as “Google” and their early advertising only made it worse), Yandex (what is it, a cleaning product or a search engine?), Baidu (sounds like a name from a children’s show), Seznam (sounds like a sauce), Brave (literally the same name as a children’s movie), Searx (someone tried to be cool by replacing “ch” with “x”… c’mon), or Qwant (bless you!). I’m curious, though… which search engine do you use?
Found the one remaining webcrawler user.
Removed by mod
The cleaning product sure lifts a lot of things out of the cracks 🏴☠️
Removed by mod
Baidu means “100 times” in Chinese and originates from a classic Chinese love poem…
It’s worth the weird name if you care about maintaining privacy rights.
Oh no theyre lost the business of those distracted by tinfoil. Whatever will they do?
I personally use DuckDuckGo, but if you’re just after avoiding handing your searches over to Google there are other more “palatably-named” alternatives like Startpage, OneSearch, Ecosia etc.
Okay, sure. I agree that this is an unfair advantage. But like, I’ve been using DuckDuckGo for a while and the best thing about it is the ability to easily search other search engines. Their own actual search engine isn’t exactly great.
Mostly using it makes me realize how much time Google saves me by already having my location and search history. I still don’t trust them and it isn’t what it was a few years ago, but it’s the actual quality of their search that’s keeping them on top.
Also like, why does clicking a thumbnail in video search not take me to the video? Dumb.
