Okay, sure. I agree that this is an unfair advantage. But like, I’ve been using DuckDuckGo for a while and the best thing about it is the ability to easily search other search engines. Their own actual search engine isn’t exactly great.
Mostly using it makes me realize how much time Google saves me by already having my location and search history. I still don’t trust them and it isn’t what it was a few years ago, but it’s the actual quality of their search that’s keeping them on top.
Also like, why does clicking a thumbnail in video search not take me to the video? Dumb.
that’s DuckDuckGo and “Names Database” CEO*, folks. PLEASE do not look to this man as a beacon for anything privacy-related, even when he says something true.
I’ve been using freeadblocker browser after stumbling on it (with DDG as a search engine). Does it have anything to do with Google/chrome? I’m confused, because I’ve been using it for so long and it blocks all ads so I guess I don’t know why no one is using it unless it’s some Google stepchild I don’t know about and I’m still googled without knowing it.
Hmmm, that isn’t open source, I don’t know if one can trust it. Why does a browser need in-app purchases? Try Mull or Cromite.
Edit: from the description, it uses Brave Search (to answer you question), so it doesn’t send to Google your queries. But I’d be careful with an app with a bunch of SEO keywords in its description.
I use DDG as my primary search engine, but I find myself repeating searches with Google so often, I wrote a userscript to add a “Search with Google” link to the top of the DDG search results.
I’ve seen a lot of chat recently about Google search quality tanking and it’s made me realise that I haven’t re-searched a DDG query in Google for a really, really long time. when I first started using DDG as my main a few years back, I would repeat searches in Google probably 25% of the time? but I honestly can’t remember the last time I had to now. Been at least 6 months!
unfortunately, I do that often. Even when using meta search engine which sources to google, Google UX and results are simply better but sometime feeling is just not rationale
regarding duckduckgo, it is simply too long to type and people rarely configure their browser, especially on mobile.
so yeah, in a sense, Weinberg is right. At the very least, a choice should be provided on first run but you can’t force people to be curious.
I agree. At least in my experience Google does a better job when it comes to search engine. I use DDG as well but when it comes to searching specific things Google beats it unfortunately.
Sure, but I think there’s still benefit to what the other person did. Search DDG by default, and then if you don’t see good results, it’s one extra click for the google search… vs mousing, clicking, 2 keystrokes…
Nice to -for once- see someone else who recognizes that capitalism in itself isn’t a problem as long as it is very well regulated and doesn’t immediately go “Communism is the answer!”
I always look at people who jump to “Communism is the answer” just have issues with properly articulating what they feel and just jump to a reactionary catch all comment.
I myself don’t like a lot of flaws with the core tenants of capitalism, so I often find myself saying reactionary shit like “capitalism bad” sometimes too.
I think this goes for a lot of discussion on economic models. There’s a lot of nuisance to it, and I think so many folks range somewhere between knowing nothing and knowing enough to be dangerous, but lack the energy, time, patience, or skill to really get it across online.
Often we see people posting about stuff so frequently because of a frustration with the current system, so unless it’s like a bad faith argument I mostly just tune it out, or go “hell yeah” in my little monkey brain depending on if it’s something I agree with slightly.
It’s not reactionary to say that capitalism is bad. Capitalism is literally terrible. Not commerce, capitalism. Buying and selling things isn’t wrong, but extracting and consolidating surplus labor from the working class is.
No, you’re right. I’m saying it’s reactionary to write only “Capitalism is bad”, and nothing else. Mostly because in terms of a discussion it makes it hard to keep talking about why capitalism is bad with such a broad statement. This is just the opinion of one dude on the internet who thinks of comments in a very specific way, and I get that others agree probably fine with broad comments of that style.
What worries me about it is that since for various reasons a lot of people just don’t have it in them to spare any thought on the question of how the economy works, they buy into rhetoric about economics being a fake conspiracy where supply and demand isn’t real and actually all economic problems are trivial and only require putting the bad guys in their place. The frustration is justified but stuff like rent control just doesn’t work and you can see why it doesn’t work if you’re willing to honestly think about it.
You say “Rent Control” doesn’t work, but having seen locations with rent control, and living in a place without it I fundamentally disagree with that statement.
In any economic model, housing is a basic need for humans. While rent control isn’t a solution, I don’t think it’s ever intended to be one. It is a stop gap, or a step implemented in a larger plan. It’s basically regulations for combating price fixing.
If you live in a place fraught with renoviction, the act of using a renovation as an excuse to evict people and charge more for the same thing, then the person who has been forced back into the market does not have to become homeless.
To another point, I don’t think rent control would prevent development of new housing either, as landlords aren’t the only folks who buy properties, even though it’s almost financially impossible to buy a house in certain inflated markets these days no matter who you are.
While rent control isn’t a solution, I don’t think it’s ever intended to be one
The rhetoric I see around it paints it as a solution, and there are people who say with full sincerity that supply and demand is capitalist propaganda.
renoviction, the act of using a renovation as an excuse to evict people and charge more for the same thing
This whole dynamic is only surface level. The excuse doesn’t matter; if the whole market can get those prices, it’s because of the number/means of people seeking housing vs the supply. It will happen with or without an excuse to smooth things over. There are plenty of very run-down places in high demand low supply areas that cost huge amounts without any such aesthetic justification.
I don’t think rent control would prevent development of new housing either, as landlords aren’t the only folks who buy properties, even though it’s almost financially impossible to buy a house in certain inflated markets these days no matter who you are.
It demonstrably has prevented and does prevent the development of new housing, among other market distortions, and afaik this is one of the few things economists broadly agree on. To your point, maybe it would be possible that over time, eventually, all rental apartments would be converted into condos etc. as a market response to rent control. But given the demand specifically for rentals (for which there is then artificially reduced incentive to meet), and the difficulty you mention for most people actually buying a home outright, it’s easy to see why in practice there will be an extended, possibly indefinite, period where housing supply will be suppressed by the policy. One reason it could end up indefinite is that homeowners as a voting class have an incentive to protect the value of their properties, and that often means passing regulations that in practice constrain housing supply. When most voters are renters, this is less of a problem.
The way I see it, looking at housing markets as being “inflated”, as if the prices were the result of some trick of greedly landlords, is completely wrong and missing the bigger picture. Real estate is a wealth asset, a store of wealth, and all of those are skyrocketing in dollar terms beyond official measures of inflation, as part of a process of wealth being transferred away from the majority of the population and the value/negotiating power of labor declining. If people only look at their personal situations and false ideas of what prices “should” be and what is subjectively “fair”, they miss this bigger picture and overlook solutions that could actually work.
The key is “very well regulated”, starting with the ban of corporate lobbyists and abolition and criminalization of PAC donations.
COMMERCE in itself isnt bad. Leveraging money and power to extract resources and value without actually creation anything of value-i.e. Capitalism- is very, very bad.
Make a product and sell it? …good. Perform a service for money?..good. Buy wholesale, sell retail?..fine. Steal natural resources, fund political coups for resources, start wars for resourcces, force destruction of oroduct or allow corporations to hoard resources to corner a market?..BAD
I’m sorry but your definition of capitalism is incorrect.
Leveraging money and power to extract resources and value without actually creation anything of value-i.e. Capitalism- is very, very bad.
Yeah, it’s something that capitalism as currently is (mostly in the US) allows, but that isn’t the basis of what capitalism is.
I fully agree with you that capitalism needs very strick limits to not be abusive, but it’s still a hundred times better than communism, something that too many people here propose as the final great solution
Actually I think the problem is capitalists entering into forums and insisting that any regulation of capitalism is communism by default. It’s not a case of one or the other, but there is absolutely no way to reform the system from within its current structure. We would have to first abolish any and all corporate lobbying and criminalize the submission of donor checks to legislators, and then repeal any and all tax breaks and pro corporate laws and regulations passed since 1980.
Also: the stock market and hedge fund architecture is an absolute sham and should be criminalized. Virtually none of it is about entrepreneur startup money; all if it is about creating value out of thin air with nothing to support it. It collapses and destroys our economy on a regular, nearly predictable basis and results in greater wealth disparagement as the whales grab up all the collapsed wealth
Capitalism in itself is very much the problem. There is no positive aspect to the extraction of surplus value (“profit”), hoarding the vast majority of it into the hands of the wealthiest “private” property owners.
Marxists are opposed to free markets, at least as a long term goal (in achieving a stateless, moneyless, classless society - i.e. communism). But some leftist ideologies aren’t necessarily opposed to free markets (though are still of course anti-capitalist). This includes democratic socialism and market anarchism.
DDG does have better results than Google. I’ve not used the latter for years and was surprised by the bad quality of results when I used it once accidentally last week.
It depends and that’s why both your answers aren’t quite the full truth.
If you are a deep resident of the Google ecosystem (maps, Mail, android etc.) Google’s results are second to none. That’s because Google knows exactly what you care about and what is relevant to you. They know where you work, where you are, what you talk about etc etc.
With all that knowledge google can optimise both ads and answers to you almost perfectly.
If you’re not a deep resident, ddg is better - their results have to work harder, so to speak, because they don’t have your every waking thought to hand as a relevancy scale.
So, yeah, if you give Google everything they make money off it and keep you dependent on them.
I’ve just tried to search for ‘tank man’ and also ‘tiananmen square’ with DuckDuckGo’s image search, and both of them returned the picture we all know, that dictator Winnie the Poop doesn’t wanna see…
But you didn’t say you expect them to show you the foto. You said you wanted them to issue a statement or something. So the issue was not lack of functionality but not taking a stance. Now that I pointed out how silly it is you’re changing it to “it’s a poor service”. Nice…
I installed a custom launcher that’s close to the stock one on my Pixel 3 specifically to make it possible to remove the Google Search widget. Now I have a Firefox widget that points to DDG.
If any are interested, the launcher is Lawn Chair, and it can be installed via F-droid.
I e been debating switching the graphene for weeks weeks now. But I just know I’m gonna end up installing Google play services on it and completely defeat the whole point of the OS. I’m probably gonna buy the pixel 8 when it comes out so once I have that I’ll put graphene on my current phone and see how I like it.
I’ve just switched to it literally yesterday, and while you will probably not avoid Play Services, being able to install it into a different profile that’s only limited to the few apps that need it is nice.
Also, just the fact that on Graphene Play Services do not have the special privileges as on any android phone, and are subjected to the same limitations as any other app (which are even stricter on Graphene) helps a lot. It also means that even if you end up just running the play services at all times, they can’t do as much as they can on other android phones, and the data they can access without your explicit permission is really limited. So, even that helps by a lot.
This is actually great to hear. I’ll probably still ending up holding off until I have a spare phone to test with just because wiping my phone and redoing everything just isn’t something I’m up for right now though. Thank you very much for the info.
I don’t believe the creator is actually a bigot. There’s been too many false bigotry accusations going around and now it’s a “boy who cried wolf” type situation
I don’t believe the creator is actually a bigot. There’s been too many false bigotry accusations going around and now it’s a “boy who cried wolf” type situation
Why do you seem so invested in the fact that well-known bigots might not actually be bigots?
Because there’s too may false bigotry accusations going around for me to believe any of them anymore. I’ve already said that multiple times. Why do people keep asking me that same question?
Think about it. Google wants people to use chrome and to stop using adblockers. Brave is a chromium-based browser that has adblocking, tracker blocking and fingerprint randomization all on by default, but made better when those things are set to aggressive.
People who become aware of brave start using brave and stop using chrome.
google is constantly manipulating results for certain search queries to push an agenda. They do the same shit on youtube by selectively enforcing the rules, elevating garbage channels and demoting good channels.
So why wouldn’t google come up with some bullshit about the creator of brave being a bigot to get people to stop using it? Lots of people are smeared in worse ways for doing even less.
What does being a bigot have anything to do with developing a search engine or a browser? Mozilla has also gone woke, dwelling into politics instead of developing a browser.
Its the easiest thing in the world. I degoogled everything in my life in like 2-3 days after work. People aren’t switching because the bulk of the world’s populace likes the centralization and using the popular option. They just want to use what everyone else is.
I think if you were to ask “most people” about which search engine they prefer, they wouldn’t really understand the question. I remember in highschool a teacher asked someone what operating system they have at home, and she replied “I think it’s Microsoft Office”.
Tech people tend to severely overestimate non-tech peoples’ understanding of tech.
I am lucky my husband likes to learn about this sort of stuff. When we started dating he barely knew the difference between Mac and Windows. Now he uses Linux. Granted, I have to install it, but he keeps on top of maintenance.
Migrating email alone is a huge pain. To be truly independent you need your own domain in case whatever provider you choose goes to shit. Any decent one will cost money. Now, most people don’t even know what a domain is, let alone where and how to buy it and use it for email. They also have to pay that mail provider, configure everything and migrate their old emails and forward their old mail. Oh and now they also have different logins everywhere, and because they probably don’t have a password manager either they need to get one or just have different logins for different things.
That’s … a gargantuan task. for an average person - even if you provide them with a rough outline of what they’d need to do they probably wouldn’t be able to do so without help.
Also, as a side note, what do you use for watching videos? What phone do you have? What maps do you use? It’s not so easy to “de-google” completely.
Migrating emails isnt that hard if u dont set yourself a deadline. Some services like proton offer migration and forwarding from google and you can just slowly update them as you use it. I myself got tutanota and anonaddy and going through my bitwarden entries updating different alias for everything for the past couple days. Still gonna keep the gmail accounts around for emergency but will slowly disassociate from it.
Takes a while but you can just stick with updating them when you do use it if you dont have the time or feeling lazy. For an average person who doesnt value privacy, they have no reason to move out of google anyway so gmail will always be the popular one unfortunately.
This is how I did it. Set up a Protonmail account with my own domain, and set all my Gmail emails to forward there. I set up a special folder for all forwarded mail, to remind myslef that I should change my email on that service, and every time I logged somwhere or received an email from an important service I use, I made sure to change my address there.
It has already been several years, but I think I’ve managed to replace it everywhere within a few months. I haven’t seen a forwarded email in months, so I think I’m finally done.
I made a list of the Google services I needed to replace, replaced a couple of them, but ultimately that list had dozens of items on it and I’m too tired already to complete it
It is not easy. This comment must be satire?
For example have you tried navigating in a car with a navigation app besides Maps? I don’t have an iPhone and the ones I’ve tried so far suck. I mean, I think Waze isn’t even all that good and Google owns even them now.
I tried Mapquest recently for the first time in 18 years. It was astonishing just how terrible their app and directions were.
I would gladly pay a few dollars a month for an alternative to Google Maps or Waze, but it’s like no company even wants to try and compete with Google and Apple maps.
While I don’t believe you can degoogle that quickly, because some of their services take quite some time to properly switch, such as email, in the end it’s not too hard, but just takes time and some work.
Changing email is easy, if you don’t mind it being a slow process. Just forward your google email, and start slowly replacing any service you notice in the following months/years to your new address.
Google Drive is harder to replace, I went for just running a NAS with Nextcloud, which takes care of most of Google Drive/Docs/Calendar stuff. If self-hosting isn’t your cup of tea, Proton is slowly setting up usable google alternatives - they have Drive and Calendar IIRC.
Now for phone, that’s the hardest task. You wouldn’t help yourself by getting an IPhone. While it would de-google you, there’s basically no point in switching google for apple. Getting android to be usable for stuff like banking, MFA and other bullshit you need your phone for while being degoogled is hard, due to the bullshit Google Services. The only solution I found is to either just go with dumb phone with an obscure OS, or just get a Google Pixel and run GrapheneOS.
Maps are another issue, but thankfully we have a local mapy.cz , which is a pretty OK alternative to Google maps for our country, and I guess they even work worldwide. I don’t drive a car, so I don’t really need it that often.
The only remaining Google service I use is GCloud VPS, because I have some websites running there on the free instances that I’m too lazy to move. But I’m slowly migrating it to Amazon. Not that it would help much, anyway. And also Youtube, but I’m trying to go through the alternative front-ends as much as possible.
DuckDuckGo CEO apparently is just another CEO. I’ve been an early adopter that’s been using their search engine long before there were apps or a browser.
What’s stopping people from using DDG isn’t switching to DDG, it’s getting absolutely dogshit results 90% of time. As an advanced user I know I can prefix my search with “!g phrase” to use Google instead of DDG. The sad fact is that despite the ad-ridden result page and tracking, Google is still lightyears ahead in providing relevant, and especially timely results for a user that is both tech-savvy and critical.
They need to improve their product, users will follow a good adfree search engine, that’s a given. Only a fraction of users will put up with degraded results in order to search without tracking.
I sincerely hope they will get their tech up to par. And that their browser on mobile reaches feature parity soon. (as a Z Fold user, DDG browser doesn’t have tabs. Brave, Vivaldi and Firefox does).
The new kid on the block needs humility and good tech, not shittalk. Fuck that CEO,. he’s undermining something very promising and important.
I’ve never had a problem with DDGs search results that simply rephrasing my query didn’t solve. What are you all searching for that Google’s results are “light-years ahead” of DuckDuckGo’s? (Honest question)
Not OP, but I get completely trash results on a ton of technical questions no matter how I phrase it. Not a specific example, but if I’m having an issue with some niche distribution of Linux that requires a specific fix, it’ll instead insist on showing me the massive pile of results for the normal distros instead of the couple of links containing the answer I want.
For as shitty as Google has gotten, it’ll at least give you the one or two better hits before piling on the generic results.
It’s like DDG changes the query to get more results whereas Google will just run the damn search even if they stuff the results with ads and tracking.
The only thing I goto Google for is when I’m looking for local attractions. With Google maps being native everything is just smoother. Also, Google reviews are much more relevant with whatever duckduckgo has integrated (yelp?). Just my 2 cents.
I offset any inconvenience with how Google is not much of a search engine but more of an ad company. Also, I disabled all Googles data scavenging shit and I can’t even load the site without getting hit with a captcha. As someone who saw Google rise from the librarians favorite search engine, when a cable modem was life changing, it’s devastating to see it become everything that’s wrong with the internet.
In my recent experience Google still delivers better results for tech troubleshooting queries. “linux drivers for acer e15 card reader” at least points me to some semi-relevant pages on Google that could lead to a solution or more ideas where to look while ddg throws a lot of generic stuff that is only faintly related.
But Google’s search has turned to dogshit since it’s started trying to be smarter than it is, and DDG is now giving me results on par with old Google - that is, a list of exactly what I was searching for on the first try.
I always see people saying Google provides better results, but to me it’s awful. I don’t even use DDGO anymore, but Google only shows ads and SEO optimized results that look AI generated. Is this common or am I just an isolated case?
I only ever hear people say the opposite. The comment you’re replying to is I think the first time I’ve seen someone say google is better than ddg in the wild. I keep feeling like I’m going crazy when people say ddg is better than google. Google is the only search engine capable of actually finding the results I’m looking for. Half the time it feels like it’s reading my mind.
I genuinely don’t know what people are searching for that yields better results on ddg than google. Every time I’ve gotten someone to give me an example, the thing they supposedly couldn’t find was the first result.
I gotta say I’m pretty good finding stuff, but i swear Google makes it more complicated for me. In DDGO I only need to change words, in Google I need to filter out half the results to get something human.
But that was when I used to use DDGO, I now self-host SearXNG and only use DDGO for simple searches and when using my phone.
I guess Google needs constant use to give something better(?, which would be another reason for me not to use it hehe
Lol, yeah right? I feel the same way most of the time. On top of that, I’m in Google’s beta AI thing so usually I just get a summary of whatever the hell I’m searching for right at the top and I don’t even have to look at any of the actual results what I’m looking for data.
I often don’t find what I want in DDG; and I then try !g to look for it with Google… and Google doesn’t find it either.
In my experience it is very rare for Google to help me with a search that DDG failed with. As for the converse, I wouldn’t know - because I never search Google first. Why wouldn’t I? They’re evil.
That said, I will point out that I don’t use a google account, and I block most google-related cookies. I know that some people find Google gives better results due to its personalised results; and obviously I’m not ‘benefiting’ from that. So it is believable that you get better results from Google than I do, due to it knowing more about you, and thus guessing what you might want to see.
In my experience, DDG has less relevant results than Google most of the time, but will occasionally end up being way better than Google if you’re looking for something that goes against corporate interests. It’s a lot easier to find free movie sites and whatnot on DDG.
I used DDG as my main for about half a year recently (and also a few times in the past). I always eventually end up back with Google. Don’t get me wrong the results aren’t that much better; but they’re definitely marginally better, at least for me. The personalization helps, too.
This time I had a brief detour using Neeva for a while and I was really happy with it; was kinda like a better DDG; but that got defunct so I ended up with Google again in the end and I just don’t see a way out.
I’ve found that for me, the results are good 90% of the time but the images suck, if I’m looking for a specific image then google does a sometimes much better job of showing me relevant results, that’s where I start using !g a lot
I made the switch a week ago. For two days at work, I always used Google, DDG and ecosia(uses bing) at the same time to compare the results. They are the same most of the time for the first 10 to 20 results. There’s sometimes a blogpost that one engine shows that the other doesn’t, but that post never made a difference.
When DDG does not get me helpful results, I can still ask Google to help out.
Ecosia is a fucking scam. They claim that “every search plants a tree”, except the monetary contribution towards their “tree-planting” stuff comes from clicking ads – therefore if you are a knowledgeable user who purposefully skips over ads (or just use an ad-blocker) then Ecosia makes exactly $0 off of your traffic.
It was an absolutely unnecessary comment and in no way a relevant quesiton. Odds are I’m better versed in technology than you. Don’t act like you were reasonable and you’re the one being attacked now. You’re one of those people who thinks they have the right to say whatever crappy thing they want and then look all confused when you illicit whatever response you absolutely deserved. Then accuse the other person of exactly what you started. I’m not facilitating this childish banter any further. Have whatever day you deserve.
Man you really think I’m being wildly more hostile than I am. It was genuine curiousity. It was in no way unnecessary, it wasn’t attacking you in any way, it was prompting a conversation. If you think every response to you that’s only tangentially related to what you said is off topic, then I fear for anyone who even attempts to have any sort of conversation with you at all. That’s how conversations work.
Fifteen years ago my searches were limited to Minecraft and basic programming questions. Now they’re more like searching for specific research papers and other significantly more complex topics and I get much less useful results. Are they related? Who knows! It’s an interesting idea, though, which I was hoping to explore with someone who might be interested. But no, you decided to be whatever this is.
Fuck, dude, get your head out of your goddamn ass. Learn how to talk to people. Fuck.
I’ve switched to DDG almost a year ago, and I never had issues with my search results. Quite the contrary, every time I tried using !g because I simply wasn’t finding an answer, the Google was ad-ridden bullshit full of promoted pages without relevance to what I was looking for.
I guess I’m just used to DDG quality of results, but I never felt like it’s as bad as you say.
I am with you. I don’t know what this guy’s about about the search results of Google. A couple comments above people were complaining about the terrible results googles ad driven engine spews out. Also saying he’s so tech savvy and needs the Google “quality”, somehow not knowing !g just completely circumvents the benefits of DDG
I work in IT and use the search engine around 100 times a day in order to find specific answers to specific edge cases. DDG results are just too generic most of the time.
I work part-time as a game developer, and part time as a pentester, so I do search for technical questions quite a lot.
Hmm, now I wonder whether I’m just used to it. I haven’t used any other search engine in more than a year. I’ll have to compare the results more, but as far as I remember every time I couldn’t find what I needed on DDG and resorted to !g, the Google results were even worse.
Yeah, I e had worsening search results from DDG over the past 6+ months. I’ve set it to my default browser, but I often have to switch because the results are not specific enough compared to Google.
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