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Comment by phatbyte | Hacker News Reader

I live fine without FB, Twitter etc..

But I can't find any good replacement for Google services unfortunately.

Tried Duck Duck Go for a full month, but the returned results weren't as accurate as Google, I missed some of functionalities the search automatically gives to you. I could switch to bing, although I don't know if that would make a huge difference, privacy wise.

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I use DDG as my default search engine. Whenever I feel like a search would be a better fit for google I use the !sp flag. The !bang system makes DDG a really nice default search engine IMHO. I'm quite happy with the results that DDG produces. I think it became way better than it was a couple of years ago, when I last tried.

When was the last time you used DDG? It used to be worse but it's roughly on par now.

Not the OP, but I try it every year or so and always give up after a few weeks. I've been using DDG again for about a week or so, and the results are still about as bad as I remember. It's fine for really common searches such as finding a company's website that I don't remember the domain name for or getting quick info about popular places or things, but anything even slightly obscure (like "how do I do x with y?") is almost always useless. I very quickly get into the habit of adding "!g" to the majority of my searches.

That said, I'm going to try to keep using DDG this time. Although most of my "important" searches are still going to Google, at least they're not seeing absolutely everything I search for.

I've been researching the Swiss based options personally. Kolab (open source, hosted and enterprise options) and Proton Mail both look like solid options if you don't mind paying a little.

> Swiss based options

Like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto_AG#Compromised_machines?

Try startpage and searx.me. They're more of a direct Google proxy.

I had the same issue with DDG but tried again recently and so far so good. I've gotten used to using the bangs for wikipedia and imdb now. Maybe give it another shot.

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