Ask HN: Why do you use DuckDuckGo?

3 points·montrose··3 comments

DuckDuckGo usage seems to have roughly doubled over the past year. If you are one of the people who use it, when did you start, and why? Do you use it for all searches or just some of them? Are there other ways it's better than Google besides not tracking you?

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I decided to live an almost Google-free life. I do not use Gmail or Chrome anymore (Fastmail and Firefox), and I try its search only when the results on DDG are unsatisfactory. Unfortunately, the DDG search is not on par with Google's in my country (Brazil), but it is generally good enough and getting better.

I started using it 1-2 years ago to decrease the amount of data Google has on me. I still return to Google for some things (unit conversions; searches where DDG's results are unhelpful [Google seems to be more effective when you're trying to buy things]; certain time-based searches DDG doesn't support). When you're looking for a particular meaning of something with multiple meanings or information about a food but not recipes, etc. sometimes one engine will be more effective than the other.

DDG is now my default engine on my phone (where I pretty much never return to Google) and at home, but I still use Google at work.

I found it to be inferior to google but I use it for not tracking and not seeing news results for search words.

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