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Use DuckDuckGo to improve your privacy online (2018)

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Re: Use DuckDuckGo to improve your privacy online (2018)

#101

Post by iagovar »

jdgoesmarching wrote: post #57
mrweasel wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every now and then I search for something and don't get the results I'd expect. So I turn to Google, but for the past year or so I noticed that Google can't find what I expect for those search terms either. The difference seems to be that Google starts guessing and excluding keywords, without understanding that those keywords where important. For me personally, Google is a less pleasant experience these days. The Duc…

THANK YOU. I feel crazy when I tell people this but I 100% agree. Google seems to look at your search as a general guide now rather than actual parameters. I also have to surround each word in quotes or they get excluded on the SECOND OR THIRD RESULT. I'm very upset because this hinders my daily work and research. I'm starting to rely on Bing which is definitely worse than old Google but may be better than current Go…

That annoys me too, I tried with lite.qwant.com but their exact match operator annoys me, as I have a spanish keyboard.

Results are decent but I just hate that.

Re: Use DuckDuckGo to improve your privacy online (2018)

#102

Post by jgamman »

runjake wrote: post #70
ignoramous wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try https://startpage.com They pay Google to proxy their generic non personalized results.

Some people are going to ask "How does Startpage make its money?" and fortunately they've put that info in their Privacy Policy: Our search result pages may include a small number of clearly labeled "sponsored links", which generate revenue and cover our operational costs. Those links are retrieved from platforms such as Google Adwords. In order to enable the prevention of click fraud, some non-identifying system inf…

this always seemed like the right kind of trade-off - the sponsored links are generated from the search terms, not the 'personalised' search_terms+surveilled_data blob. if this is _all_ that Google the search engine did, I probably wouldn't have switched.

Re: Use DuckDuckGo to improve your privacy online (2018)

#103

Post by jialutu »

I've stopped using Google and moved to DDG not because of privacy, but because the results on Google just seem the same everytime even when I use different wording, making it feel like Google has been becoming a "recommendation engine" rather than a "search engine".

Re: Use DuckDuckGo to improve your privacy online (2018)

#104

Post by class4behavior »

Y_Y wrote: post #100
jdgoesmarching wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

THANK YOU. I feel crazy when I tell people this but I 100% agree. Google seems to look at your search as a general guide now rather than actual parameters. I also have to surround each word in quotes or they get excluded on the SECOND OR THIRD RESULT. I'm very upset because this hinders my daily work and research. I'm starting to rely on Bing which is definitely worse than old Google but may be better than current Go…

Is there any possible way the old google could be resurrected? By google themselves or just someone cloning the tech? My google-fu keeps getting worse, on pages I know I've found handily in the past. I'd almost pay for a good search, cash or personal data or whatever.

Google offers the verbatim mode (search for exact words of phrases) which you can activate in tools or by adding the tbs=li:1 parameter to the URL.

Re: Use DuckDuckGo to improve your privacy online (2018)

#105

Post by kasbah »

DavideNL wrote: post #99
jjordan wrote: post #19

Switched to DDG for my defaults over a year ago now. Still occasionally have to append a !g to my search, and Google Maps is still unmatched, but for run of the mill searches it's been working out. Google lost my trust, so if I can avoid using a service of theirs with a viable alternative, I do so. Go, OpenStreetMap!!

> Google lost my trust you might want to try occasionally using !sp instead of !g -> same results, no google.

Just !s will do actually.

Re: Use DuckDuckGo to improve your privacy online (2018)

#107

Post by x220 »

tombert wrote: post #79

I love DDG (and have been using it as my primary search engine for about six months) but I feel like the hacker community (including me) forgets that DDG is a for-profit corporation, and that at some level posting these kinds of links is more or less the same as just giving them free advertising.

So the implication here is that if Google bad, Google company, DuckDuckGo company, then DuckDuckDuckGo bad too?

Re: Use DuckDuckGo to improve your privacy online (2018)

#108

Post by DecayingOrganic »

jialutu wrote: post #103

I've stopped using Google and moved to DDG not because of privacy, but because the results on Google just seem the same everytime even when I use different wording, making it feel like Google has been becoming a "recommendation engine" rather than a "search engine".

If you feel like Google is excluding certain keywords you very much like to include, you can wrap the word/sentence in double quotes, this tells Google to show results that certainly include these keywords.

For example, searching: "word x" "sentence a" would prompt Google to show only pages that include both the word and the sentence in the same page.

Re: Use DuckDuckGo to improve your privacy online (2018)

#109

Post by vinbreau »

pixelbreaker wrote: post #12

I first tried DDG in its early years and it just didn't yield the results I needed, I tried it again a couple of years ago and have stuck with it ever since as it has must better results these days.

I use it, but it fails in several areas. It has no filter to limit searches to a year, their options stop after 1 month. Their image search results also lack the depth of Google's. These are features I actually use heavily. So even though I have my browser defaulted to DDG, I find myself having to go to Google several times a day. I really hope they improve this.
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