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Pro-privacy search engine DuckDuckGo hits 30M daily searches, up 50% in a year

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Re: Pro-privacy search engine DuckDuckGo hits 30M daily searches, up 50% in a year

#111
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The average tech person has been switching away from Google products I would like to see something to back that up. HN is not "the average tech person" and even here I have the feeling there are a few people who decided to die on the anti Google hill but it's nowhere near the foregone conclusion you state. A few problems: Firefox wiped the extensions store clean less than a year ago and the long tail didn't, couldn…

Yep, Docs is going to be a tough nut to crack. I use DDG for search, but Docs [/Sheets, etc] is hard to get away from in business. [Sorta like Office was 20 years ago, I guess]

Nextcloud + Collabora is a pretty nice alternative and good enough to meet my needs.

Re: Pro-privacy search engine DuckDuckGo hits 30M daily searches, up 50% in a year

#112

After everything that has happened in the last few weeks I've completely moved away from Google. 1. I retired my ~15 year old Gmail account and registered with Fastmail 2. I moved away from Chrome to Firefox on both my laptop and phone 3. I stopped using Chrome's password manager on iOS in favor of 1Password and Firefox Lockbox 4. I've mostly stopped using the Google search engine and now using DDG and Bing if I have…

I had the opposite experience. I felt like the results were finally relevant to the search term again, instead of relevant to whatever Google thinks I like to see.

Re: Pro-privacy search engine DuckDuckGo hits 30M daily searches, up 50% in a year

#113

I switched earlier this year. It takes some time to get used to it. I used to !g often. It doesn't feel as intuitive at knowing what you are looking like Google. Addresses and map integration is not that good either and does not come even close to Google. It is a good enough. I have their app on my phone as my search tool, which I miss Google maps more often.

Try using "!s", which sends you to Startpage, a search engine with Google search results but which promises privacy. (I don't know much more about Startpage, and in many discussions about DDG I ask if anyone knows more, but no luck so far.)

My only encounter with Startpage was when it mysteriously showed up on my parents' computer as a self-resetting default and I had to clean it off for them. If Startpage is legit, they need to maintain much better control of their affiliate campaign to prevent the use of malware to drive affiliate revenue.

Re: Pro-privacy search engine DuckDuckGo hits 30M daily searches, up 50% in a year

#114

A search engine that has nothing more to offer than "privacy" isn't really worth my time. Whenever I use DDG I get inferior search results. If privacy is your concern with Google use Startpage. That Bing/Yahoo mashup that DDG want to sell simply doesn't cut it for me (or any of my friends/colleagues).

But I believe you fail to see that this is just like watching somebody throw trash at a neighbor lawn and then go on thinking, well they did not do it in my lawn.

At this point, everybody knows that the data mining operations run by Google and Facebook are detrimental to society as a whole for a lot of reasons, but more importantly because they represent a big brother operation without having elected officials.

What is going on with Android nowadays is beyond comprehension in the privacy aspect. Unless you go really technical, it is incredible the amount of apps that will fetch your contact list, location, phone number, etc. The fact that the apps do not work if you do not consent to some of that stuff brings into question some of these business models.

Re: Pro-privacy search engine DuckDuckGo hits 30M daily searches, up 50% in a year

#115

After everything that has happened in the last few weeks I've completely moved away from Google. 1. I retired my ~15 year old Gmail account and registered with Fastmail 2. I moved away from Chrome to Firefox on both my laptop and phone 3. I stopped using Chrome's password manager on iOS in favor of 1Password and Firefox Lockbox 4. I've mostly stopped using the Google search engine and now using DDG and Bing if I have…

> 1. I retired my ~15 year old Gmail account and registered with Fastmail I'm looking to switch my email. Any thoughts on Fastmail vs ProtonMail? Do you feel secure with Fastmail?

I think it’s mostly a matter of who you trust. For me the deciding factor was mostly that I trust the EU/Swiss authorities to spy responsibly more than the US ones.

If it’s just about privacy from Google reading your email, both work equally well.

Re: Pro-privacy search engine DuckDuckGo hits 30M daily searches, up 50% in a year

#117

After everything that has happened in the last few weeks I've completely moved away from Google. 1. I retired my ~15 year old Gmail account and registered with Fastmail 2. I moved away from Chrome to Firefox on both my laptop and phone 3. I stopped using Chrome's password manager on iOS in favor of 1Password and Firefox Lockbox 4. I've mostly stopped using the Google search engine and now using DDG and Bing if I have…

DDG is arguably worse than Google. Can you estimate what year of google search is DDG equal to in terms of search quality? Eg. Is DDG2018=Google2012?

Re: Pro-privacy search engine DuckDuckGo hits 30M daily searches, up 50% in a year

#118
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can make your own and submit them too. It's all written in gasp PERL. !pw generates password :)

I was curious what type of hash I would get and !pw took me to pricewatch.com. What am I missing here?

It seems you just need to say 'strong password' now.

Edit: their tweet to announce https://mobile.twitter.com/duckduckgo/status/827516489251041...

Re: Pro-privacy search engine DuckDuckGo hits 30M daily searches, up 50% in a year

#119
post #76

After everything that has happened in the last few weeks I've completely moved away from Google. 1. I retired my ~15 year old Gmail account and registered with Fastmail 2. I moved away from Chrome to Firefox on both my laptop and phone 3. I stopped using Chrome's password manager on iOS in favor of 1Password and Firefox Lockbox 4. I've mostly stopped using the Google search engine and now using DDG and Bing if I have…

As a dev I was pretty anxious about the quality of results from DDG but a couple of months into my experiment I’ve only found myself going back to Google for dev-related searches a handful of times (maybe 2 handfuls). So I’m now sold on DDG. Yeh sure there are cool little helpers in Google that DDG doesn’t have (yet) but can’t think of any right now that I miss so they can’t be too important.

!g is very handy.
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