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How to live without Google (2017)

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Re: How to live without Google (2017)

#82
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nice idea, I even tried it myself. What happens though is you start putting "!g" before every search, since DDG is unreliable and searching twice adds friction.

for me its about 30% of the searches, not every search. Its fine for very regular stuff, the kind where a Wikipedia page exists but not that great for deep searches.

Before you search, you don't know if it will be in the 30% or the 70%. It is quicker to always add "!g" than it is to search twice 30% of the time.

Re: How to live without Google (2017)

#83
post #7
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?

duckduckgo is definitely not an alternative for google. you can't even compare.

I've been using DuckDuckGo for about 2 years now. Absolutely no issues.

There's a viable alternative for every service Google offers. Fuck Google.

Re: How to live without Google (2017)

#84

Not using Google is just the tip of the iceberg! There’s so much information you leave out there just by browsing the internet ( https://everysiteknows.ferrucc.io ) or clicking on things. I also don’t see any alternatives to Google Analytics, Google Adsense, Google Fonts and Google DNS. All these services are something most users don’t opt-in for and are the kind of side businesses that feed the data that makes googl…

Google DNS? Easy. Cloudflare DNS.

1.1.1.1 1.0.0.1

Re: How to live without Google (2017)

#86
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?

If you want to move away from Google 100% and expect DDG to fill the gap, it will be a disappointing experience.

What I have been doing successfully for three-ish years now is to use DDG as my default, which handles about 50% of my searches, while the other 50% are !bangs to sites I know I want to end up on.

A lot of the time that allows me to circumvent Google for a few extra searches, and sometimes it's just !g to show Google results, mostly when it's searches I want localized, or the topic is just too specific. For the latter I am trying to use !s more often.

Much like knowing what terms to look up, knowing when DDG results are good enough and when to use !g, !s or when to jump straight to the website you want to go to, is something that gets easier and starts to feel natural eventually.

I'm not 100% de-google-fied, but I'm 95% there in regards to searches, with none of the discomforts people keep bringing up.

Re: How to live without Google (2017)

#87
I think it’s funny that people try to cut FAANG out of their lives and still use Linux, which is primarily contributed to by FAANG and other corporations like Intel and IBM.

Also DuckDuckGo is so slow. I mean how are they supposed to compete with Google’s edge network? Then they have innacurate results, the first result is usually a deceiving looking ad, and you have to take them at their word that they aren’t also selling your data.

Re: How to live without Google (2017)

#88
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm no, I know how to handle my own mail. My concern is that gmail is a good backup solution that always works, including when I'm in the middle of nowhere with no time or inclination to fix my custom domain. What I'm most concerned with is the email address as identity. It's the key to all my online accounts via the reset password form. Jumping from provider to provider with my own custom domain works the same, but…

> the key to all my online accounts Most services support primary email/login change

> Most services support primary email/login change

They do, but would you like to do that every couple years if, say fastmail or any other service goes out of bussiness? Do you even remember all of them, so you can change the email in time if your provider gives you advance warning that they're shutting down? Long term, it's complicated.

Re: How to live without Google (2017)

#89
About Google Drive, the article says: "This also means your files are never stored on a single server in the cloud"

The assumption that all the files in Google Drive is in a single server is false.

You can sync Google Drive on one or more computers and have local backup copies too. That is also not mentioned.

Re: How to live without Google (2017)

#90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Search “karmadecay” on google images. You’ll get zero results from karmadecay.com. Not on the first page, not on the 10-th page, it’s just not there.

Normally, the domain is very strong keyword. Search for “facebook” and the first image will be from facebook.com, search for “duckduckgo” and you’ll see a screenshot image hosted on duckduckgo.com on the 7-th place (not the first I expected but still high enough).

I’m not sure how your duplicate content remark explains this behavior. karmadecay has original logo image, why it’s not found?

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