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How to live without Google (2017)

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Re: How to live without Google (2017)

#71

Post by prepend »

DoingIsLearning wrote: post #19
ipidov wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't have personalized, targeted results without being tracked.

Perhaps I am alone in this but but all I want is a really really good crawler that can find the exact subset of results containing all of the keywords I query. Regional/targeted/personalized results often add noise. I appreciate that this is what google needs in order to monetize on ads. And that real verbatim searches are likely more resource hungry. I just wish there was an option to pay some form premium subscript…

I would like a service that just keeps an up to date corpus of the web. Or at least the top few terabytes. Then I can pay the few dollars a month to run a giant map reduce grep on it.

For most of my searches, debugging a few specific strings, I really just need grep. It’s too much for one person to crawl the web. But a good distributed network could.

Re: How to live without Google (2017)

#72

Post by badpun »

phil9987 wrote: post #3

For a couple of month I have set duckduckgo as my standard search engine, but I often do not get satisfactory results. Is this because I am used to the Google results or does duckduckgo indeed not prioritize in a good way?

I switched recently and I find general results satisfactory. Google does have some specialised stuff, such as details about stores/cinemas around me, or championship league results, but I just look them up with a !g bang.

Re: How to live without Google (2017)

#73

Post by SquareWheel »

Const-me wrote: post #67
distant_hat wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK, yea, my filter is set to off. But still, the search I made was regarding completely innocuous programming related stuff, why should adult results come up that quickly? My Google preferences are also set to no filtering and I looked almost 10 pages deep there (just to check), and no adult results showed up.

You asked “reddit search” and there’s substantial amount of porn on reddit. The majority of NSFW results in DDG comes from karmadecay.com, it’s a reverse image search engine. Google doesn’t like that domain, you won’t get images from there even if you’ll search for the domain name. Google will only show result from that domain if you limit search to that domain with “site:karmadecay.com” Have no idea why Google’s doi…

>Have no idea why Google’s doing that.

It's duplicate content. That's punished in the SERPs.

Re: How to live without Google (2017)

#74

Post by spurgu »

phil9987 wrote: post #3

For a couple of month I have set duckduckgo as my standard search engine, but I often do not get satisfactory results. Is this because I am used to the Google results or does duckduckgo indeed not prioritize in a good way?

DDG if fine for some things, but I mainly use Startpage.com as a privacy focused Google alternative.

Re: How to live without Google (2017)

#75

Post by phil9987 »

roenxi wrote: post #46
phil9987 wrote: post #3

For a couple of month I have set duckduckgo as my standard search engine, but I often do not get satisfactory results. Is this because I am used to the Google results or does duckduckgo indeed not prioritize in a good way?

It'd be interesting for the peanut gallery if you went into a bit of detail about what 'satisfactory' and 'unsatisfactory' means to you. I'm sitting here feeling confused because there is no detectable difference between DDG and Google for me. Search patterns must be very particular to the person and obviously I'm not searching for the right stuff :P.

A very concrete example: I am trying to find a solution for a certain error / warning in AndroidStudio. I try finding it using DDG, not succeeding, while on Google I'd find the solution within the 3 first results. Happened to me already several times. So it is satisfactory to me if the search leads to a solution or at least the right path to finding a solution to my query.

Re: How to live without Google (2017)

#76

Post by irrational »

phil9987 wrote: post #3

For a couple of month I have set duckduckgo as my standard search engine, but I often do not get satisfactory results. Is this because I am used to the Google results or does duckduckgo indeed not prioritize in a good way?

I've been using DDG for so many years as my sole means of searching the internet (though I thought when I first started using it, it was proxing Google and not Bing) that I'm not sure if I'm getting satisfactory results back or not. It's not like I'm doing a head to head comparison with Google.

Re: How to live without Google (2017)

#80

Post by propogandist »

chimen wrote: post #35

Still early for a release (work in progress/use at your own risk) but I'm having real fun working on dnsadblock.com. Within days it made me switch from Chrome to Firefox. As soon as I changed my DNS server Chrome tried to contact it's mothership roughly 146,000 times in just 24 hours. Being able to see the actual numbers is something scary.

Have you tried the ungoogled Chromium build? Not sure why anyone would use Chrome.

Separately, if you have android you should install Netguard, the no root firewall, to see how often most apps are phoning home + block them from capturing unnecessary data.

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