Plan Your Route Privately: DuckDuckGo Now Has Driving and Walking Directions

Post by lucb1e » Mon, Oct 12, 2020, 12:49 AM UTC

nbadg wrote: post #88

politelemon wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the one thing that's kept me off DDG - the superior choice of OSM exists. And as you've pointed out, their choice of maps now forces the user into Apple's hands as the choice of navigation, a company which I do not trust, and I certainly don't see it as the least evil. Even placing my mistrust aside, it's once again a US-centric move; as garbage as Apple Maps is, it's even worse outside the US. The only reason f…

Speaking from experience, trying to deploy a production-grade OSM instance is an enormous amount of work. Several businesses have been built purely around that (Maptiler and Mapbox, to name two off the top of my head). I agree that, particularly outside the US, OSM may seem theoretically to be a better choice, but I'm more inclined to assume that DDG simply decided the development resources needed for OSM were too gr…

Post by Seb-C » Mon, Oct 12, 2020, 2:00 AM UTC

nelaboras wrote: post #81

laurent92 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google is trying to find the saturation point where people start leaving... My annoyance is that every second trip is... back home. So with their gigawatt AI, I suppose it could have learnt. So I guess it tries to do its best to avoid me going home: typing « Home » suggests « Home Depot? home improvement? Homie restaurant? Homicide drop point? » I’m joking with the last one but Google seems to be pushing too hard to…

If you have saved your address home is always the first option, no need to type anything

Post by aero-glide » Mon, Oct 12, 2020, 3:41 AM UTC

movedx wrote: post #86

rwmj wrote: post #23

After getting thoroughly sick of the full page "pop up" that Google Search and Youtube both now display on just about every visit, I switched to DDG for search and youtube-dl for YT and it's actually been great. DDG results are fine, and the !bang (!g, !w etc) makes it really easy to jump to other search engines / places if I really need it. Google have lost me as a regular customer for good.

> youtube-dl for YT and it's actually been great I was interested in doing this too. One issue I found, however, was getting a list of my subscriptions without having to go to the website and fetch the channel IDs or video IDs for youtube-dl to then use. I also noted that youtube-dl can download from your subscriptions list directly, which is cool. I was going to put that on a cronjob and just let it milk my subscrip…

Post by newen » Mon, Oct 12, 2020, 4:44 AM UTC

oarsinsync wrote: post #38

qrbLPHiKpiux wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you’re using something that’s “free...,” you’re the product being sold. A lot of people still don’t realize this, or just don’t care.

This statement is a lot less valuable now that your data is sold even when you’re paying for a product (eg a “smart” TV)

Post by kruczek » Mon, Oct 12, 2020, 6:55 AM UTC

karussell wrote: post #60

kqr wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For bicycle, in my case. Sorry, should have specified. Bicycle infrastructure is awful where I live so I need to spend a lot of cognitive effort just not being killed by the road. In that mental state I can't follow very complicated directions, so I prefer bigger roads!

Bike routes are currently heavily optimized already and sometimes I'm also a bit surprised about the good route quality ;) but actually this is only possible with the fantastic OpenStreetmap data. Still the most improvements are probably possible via data improvements in many areas. Still we will try to improve routes via "less turns" and more precise elevation data etc. For bike routing we only need to keep the bala…