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Switching to DuckDuckGo and Firefox

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Re: Switching to DuckDuckGo and Firefox

#131
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On DDG you can add !g to the start or end of a query and it will do the search on Google.

That's one of the best, and yet one of the worst feature of DuckDuckGo. When I tried using it a while ago, I ended up always searching for "!g ", since I knew I would always get equal or better results. I'm glad it's this easy to search on Google from DuckDuckGo, but it also makes the switch harder. Or, at least, it did for me.

Yeah I had the same problem. If I'm going to be in DDG but most of my searches are on Google, what's the point of me using DDG?

Re: Switching to DuckDuckGo and Firefox

#132

Why does anyone trust DuckDuckGo more than Google? I am really confused

Because at the very least it doesn't use tracking cookies, which we know Google does. Whether it tracks based on IP and/or browser fingerprint is impossible to tell - there we have to take their word for it.

Re: Switching to DuckDuckGo and Firefox

#133

Another particular nagging problem with Firefox is that "full screen doesn't even hide the tabs or address bar (just the OS X bar, assuming you're using OS X). It would be nice if you can add a way to change Firefox's settings so that, in full screen, the only thing visible is the web page.

On my Linux fullscreen (F11) shows nothing but web content.

Re: Switching to DuckDuckGo and Firefox

#134
post #114

I was surprised to see praise for Chrome's omnibar here. The meddlesome assumption that everything I type into the URL bar is or should be a Google search drives me crazy when I use Chrome. By comparison, Firefox's URL bar does an incredible job of matching fragments of URLs to my history and bookmarks. My personal project has the word "taskforce" in the domain and title. In Firefox, I can type "task" and it's at the…

Different strokes, etc? The Chrome omnibar is my favorite navigational tool I've ever used and I wish it was in every program (maybe that's possible already, I don't know actually). It's the main reason I haven't switched to Firefox.

Re: Switching to DuckDuckGo and Firefox

#135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I was using Firefox I used this extension to unify the address/search bars. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/omnibar/

I don't use Omnibar, because by typing words into the address bar directly, Firefox does do a search. Also Firefox's address bar is much better at searching your history, saving you from doing Google searches. For example you can type the words in the titles of articles you've read and Firefox's AwesomeBar does a good job at suggesting past entries. This is awesome when you no longer remember the domain or url, but y…

> Google has no interest in developing something like the AwesomeBar

As far as I can tell, chrome's address-bar behavior is trying to do something like the FF "awesome bar", i.e., combine searches of past urls and titles of pages you've visited, plus google search results, etc., into a single DWIM-like result.

Chrome's results aren't as good as FF's (I typically have to type more to get what what I'm looking for, and the ordering is often not ideal), but it does appear to have similar goals. Chrome used to be much worse at this, but seems to have improved somewhat over time.

As to why exactly FF's results are better, my guess is that it weights the results differently, emphasizing pages you've visited often even if the match is in the middle somewhere, whereas chrome seems to give prefix matches more weight....

[I normally use FF, but use chrome occasionally too...]

Re: Switching to DuckDuckGo and Firefox

#138
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also, perhaps I'm missing something, but as far as I > can tell Chrome is at least partially open source, no? > http://www.chromium.org/developers/how-tos/get-the-code > > Why aren't people forking it to create a more privacy > friendly version? People citing privacy as a reason to move away from Chrome are doing so on moral rather than technical grounds. Chromium itself doesn't have anything harmful in it, so ther…

Well you hope it is. All sorts can happen between source and binary.

> All sorts can happen between source and binary.

True. But also true of firefox. But you can install chromium and firefox from source and be sure that apart from your compiler nobody planted anything in your browser.

Re: Switching to DuckDuckGo and Firefox

#139

Is there anyway to specify a time range on queries on DuckDuckGo? Such as "last year", "any time", "last week" etc. Works on StartPage but would be nice to have it on DDG too.

check out http://help.dukgo.com/customer/portal/articles/215622

Thanks
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