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I've tried really hard to not use google for search. But DDG is bad. I have it set as my default search. I find myself either: 1) trying duck duck go and then immediately re-searching in google to actually get relevant answers. 2) skipping the search bar and going immediately to google when I know DDG just isn't going to work. Feels like back in the olden days when you had to try Altavista, Lycos and Yahoo to find wh…
Isn't DDG just a frontend for bing.com?
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In what way does google invade your privacy that has made you worse off?
>In what way does google invade your privacy that has made you worse off? This made me laugh. Let's talk about an example. Imagine the nicest house with all of the features possible. You get to live in the house and enjoy all benefits at not cost whatsoever. Only catch would be that the house would be made of transparent glass and everyone outside gets to see what you are doing at all times. Would you still choose to…
I've tried really hard to not use google for search. But DDG is bad. I have it set as my default search. I find myself either: 1) trying duck duck go and then immediately re-searching in google to actually get relevant answers. 2) skipping the search bar and going immediately to google when I know DDG just isn't going to work. Feels like back in the olden days when you had to try Altavista, Lycos and Yahoo to find wh…
This feature would make me switch to DDG.
(I tried DDG, but got tired from typing "!g")
I've tried really hard to not use google for search. But DDG is bad. I have it set as my default search. I find myself either: 1) trying duck duck go and then immediately re-searching in google to actually get relevant answers. 2) skipping the search bar and going immediately to google when I know DDG just isn't going to work. Feels like back in the olden days when you had to try Altavista, Lycos and Yahoo to find wh…
Yes, imho DDG really needs a button at the bottom of their first search results page that redirects you to the equivalent Google search. This feature would make me switch to DDG. (I tried DDG, but got tired from typing "!g")
that opens google search
I'll consider Google alternatives when there is a better alternative. Until then I use the best technology. Do we really need these same posts every other week?
"Best" is a subjective measure. For a lot of people being tracked all around the internet is a non-starter. I would also argue that a lot of Google products have stagnated and are not the best on offer anymore. Hey and Protonmail for mail, Notion for docs/keep, and Sync for file syncing come to mind, but of course that's just me :)
Can anyone explain to me why exactly startpage.com is not listed? - They also list other meta searchers which have ads. I know some of the rumours about startpage but not mentioning it at all made me wonder what are the criteria for the list or whether I've missed something very bad about starpage (such that it becomes obvious to not list it)...
1/ Google Search, YouTube, Maps: visit https://myactivity.google.com/activitycontrols to turn on auto-deletion or turn off search history, location history or YouTube watch history. This page also allows you to turn off ads personalization. There are many security and privacy controls on https://myaccount.google.com/, turn them on however you see fit.
2/ Chrome: visit chrome://settings/syncSetup to turn off Chromesync, disallow Chrome sign-in, disable automcomplete searches and URLs, etc. You can also change the default search engine to something else, but see point 1/ if you want to use Google Search. Use Incognito mode more often.
3/ Gmail, Photos, Calendar, Drive, Docs: "we don’t use information in apps where you primarily store personal content—such as Gmail, Drive, Calendar and Photos—for advertising purposes, period." [1] In other words, Gmail, YouTube or Search ads are not targeted or personalized using your emails, photos, events, docs, etc.
Disclosure: I'm a Google's security engineer, advocating for and contributing to some of the aforementioned security/privacy controls.
[1] https://blog.google/technology/safety-security/keeping-priva...
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Changing the search provider wouldn't matter. The commercial nature of Google's results has almost nothing to do with Google and almost everything to do with SEO. Search results are far too valuable a piece of real estate for rankings to not be correlated with money. I guarantee you the army of marketers and full time SEO ninjas at Conde Nast will always figure out a way to get their content past your "no corporation…
I'm advocating for a ranking algorithm aligned to the benefit to the users, instead of the marketers. I think you're not appreciating Google's ranking algorithms lending a hand to the popularity of SEO. Their rankings are certainly not objective. As for "far too valuable of a piece of real estate"... I feel like that's an unimaginative view trapped in the commercial state that we're in. Perhaps if Google had beat Wik…
(Google has deliberately slanted their news results towards mainstream sources in an attempt to suppress political messaging that they consider unacceptable, but it's not clear whether this is having an impact on the specific problem of commercial results drowning out other sources.)
> There are other alternatives to Google Chrome like Apple’s Safari and Microsoft’s Edge but many of these have serious privacy issues. Really? I don't anything about Edge, but what serious privacy issues does Safari have? It doesn't send data back to Apple as far as I can tell. I can use ad blockers and tracker blockers with it. Or when they say "some of these" do they mean "one of these two?"
Does Safari sync your data to icloud? If so, it can be secretly subpoenaed.
End-to-End encrypted data section: Safari History and iCloud Tabs (requires iOS 13 or later)
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Isn't DDG just a frontend for bing.com?
DuckDuckGo's results are a compilation of "over 400" sources,[8] including Yahoo! Search BOSS, Wolfram Alpha, Bing, Yandex, its own web crawler (the DuckDuckBot) and others.[3][8][9][10] It also uses data from crowdsourced sites, including Wikipedia, to populate knowledge panel boxes to the right of the results.[10][11] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DuckDuckGo