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DuckDuckGo vs Google

fourweekmba.com

351–360 of 558 posts

Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can only speak for my own decision-making process, but I like to pay for my email so that I have greater confidence that the provider will still be in business 10 years from now, and more confidence that my data is my own. Really like Fastmail.

How does paying ensure the data is your own?

You're the customer, not their product.

Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#352
post #337

What's with this person's writing style? I've never seen so many literary tics in one place. "In short", 14 usages. Almost every sentence starts with a prepositional phrase like "In fact...", "Yet...", "However..." Confusing sentence structure like "How would have the net looked like?" It's so irritating to read.

I think such style has legitimate uses; yet, it can also be used to give text an appearance of coherence where there is little or none. (Otherwise, it's just noise, like in the preceding sentence.)

Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a fan of moving away from Google where possible as well, but Fastmail would cost me $500/year with 10 accounts. My G Suite account is one of the original, so I can have up to 200 accounts for free. Granted, it's only 15GB of storage, but even after about 10 years, I only have about 1GB in my inbox, so I'm ok with the lower amount of space.

Wow, what do you do with 10 accounts? Isn't checking all of them a hassle? I have multiple domains and aliases, and Fastmail is much better at those than Google Apps ever was (I also have the free plan but you can never change your initial domain), so I'm much happier.

Several accounts are for separating services - AWS has it's own account, for example, so does Dropbox. I use a different email address for forums and such.

A few for friends and family as well. --Friends I can tell to pay for themselves if I need to, but family, not so much.

Edit: As for checking them, most don't get many emails, and every good email app can handle multiple accounts easily, so I get notifications on my phone.

Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And don't forget to use the bangs that can allow you to check other engines results fast if you need. For people afraid of getting off google, you can always search something like '!g my-search', it works the same for youtube(!yt), google image(!gi), or even hackernews(!hn) And of course the best bang is the 'I am feeling lucky' one (!), i.e.: 'hackernews !'

It's better to use the '!s' bang. Is like using '!g' but with more privacy because uses startpage.com

I didn't realize google allowed this kind of thing.

Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And don't forget to use the bangs that can allow you to check other engines results fast if you need. For people afraid of getting off google, you can always search something like '!g my-search', it works the same for youtube(!yt), google image(!gi), or even hackernews(!hn) And of course the best bang is the 'I am feeling lucky' one (!), i.e.: 'hackernews !'

I'm tired of people mentioning !g. If you want to use google, just use google. Stop using duck duck go just to search google, and then say "but duck duck go is better" lo. no it isn't. clearly.

When I tried it years ago, I would search DDG first, then use !g if I didn't get what I wanted. I ended up using that a lot, so I switched back to Google.

Sounds like they have changed a lot since then, so I'll probably give it another shot.

Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#356
post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a fan of moving away from Google where possible as well, but Fastmail would cost me $500/year with 10 accounts. My G Suite account is one of the original, so I can have up to 200 accounts for free. Granted, it's only 15GB of storage, but even after about 10 years, I only have about 1GB in my inbox, so I'm ok with the lower amount of space.

Fastmail give you free aliases.

The problem with aliases is still that they route to one account, and if it's compromised, there's no separation.

Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#357

The comments on this article mostly talk about the privacy benefits DDG brings. Yet, we've known since the Orange Book (TCSEC) that system integrity is a prerequisite for confidentiality/privacy. As in, the DDG servers and network need some strong security to ensure they're doing what the staff and users think they're doing esp with all the press it gets. Example attacks: 1. Root the search servers. Gradually leak ou…

I imagine most people using DDG over Google for privacy reasons are concerned first with what Google does with the data it collects on them and only secondarily with the potential for other actors to get access to that data.

Entirely true. I bring it up since the article mentioned the Snowden leaks and data ending up in government's hands. The leaks, esp Core Secrets, also said they had a way to get the FBI to "compel" the backdooring. Others said TAO's hackers often made up for what passive collection couldn't do. If they're in the threat model, the DDG isn't likely the solution in and of itself unless their security has the same threat model.

Good for other threat models that majority of users are actually worried about, though. I did say that in original comment.

Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#358

I see DuckDuckGo as an improved search bar more than as a search engine, though it's admirably fast at the latter. DDG's bangs are effectively a CLI interface to web searches. !g does google, !yt does YouTube, !w does Wikipedia, !wa does Wolfram Alpha, !scholar does Google Scholar... Huge timesaver.

It's interesting, since browsers have had custom keyword searches for ages, and I've known that and just never taken the time to set them up.

Having DDG with its bangs I use them all the time, and if there's some specific new site that I want to search there's (so far) always been a fairly guessable bang already set up for it.

I find it exceedingly convenient.

Re: DuckDuckGo vs Google

#360
post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a fan of moving away from Google where possible as well, but Fastmail would cost me $500/year with 10 accounts. My G Suite account is one of the original, so I can have up to 200 accounts for free. Granted, it's only 15GB of storage, but even after about 10 years, I only have about 1GB in my inbox, so I'm ok with the lower amount of space.

Fastmail give you free aliases.

FastMail aliases are great. I've used some for sites I'm more likely to want to cut off access to me, for instance. Whereas address+site@gmail.com gives you sortability, a true alias gives you the easy ability to just shut a site out of access to you.

Another issue I had was that my main email address was already in Google and Microsoft's systems for a couple reasons, and it wouldn't let me set it properly when changing my email address everywhere. So I have google@ and microsoft@ aliases just to work around their account management quirks.

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