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Comment by stfwn | Hacker News Reader

DuckDuckGo. I went back and forth between DDG and Google a number of times before I managed to stick with DDG. I rarely go to Google at this point, only in cases where the search is extremely specific and it really needs Google’s omnipresent eye. DDG’s results have gotten a lot better in the last year or so and the !bangs are super handy.

Meanwhile Google is experimenting tirelessly with AI that ‘corrects’ my searches, pushes mentally draining and content starved hype sites to the top and redirects me to buggy AMP versions of sites that were fine previously.

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I use DuckDuckGo because of infinite scrolling and the ability to navigate your search results with the up/down arrows. It's not privacy, but usability. It's insane that these features aren't built into every search engine.

Also I agree that Google is outsmarting itself in terms of guessing what users want. It used to be you could learn how to coax Google into giving good results, but its queries feel way less expressive these days because they're trying to be smart.

I'm better at learning the behavior of a stupid search engine than a smart search engine is at learning my behavior (for now at least).

I still use Google Scholar a lot though.

> Meanwhile Google is experimenting tirelessly with AI that ‘corrects’ my searches, pushes mentally draining and content starved hype sites to the top and redirects me to buggy AMP versions of sites that were fine previously.

I have been back and forth between Google, DuckDuckGo and Bing for this precise reason. I don't want my search engine to outsmart me, or to think that I am interested in the most recent result instead of the most relevant, or... a bunch of other similar stuff where Google is the worst offender. Recently I have used DDG more because I have the feeling it just does what I tell it to do, not what it thinks I'm trying to get at.

I agree with your assessment of the failings of google, but I wonder if this kind of growing pains are a requisite of moving to AI for search? Some issues are caused by profit motive, but it seems like AI search has a higher ceiling of excellence than older methods. In a few years, they may pass up the competition in a way that others can't easily replicate.

I was using DDG on iPhone to escape Googel AMP pages, but now both !g and !ge take me to www.google.com instead of encrypted.google.com.

Hopefully someone from DDG will see this because I have no clue where to send feedback.

encrypted.google.com is being deprecated by Google.

https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/7631341?p=encryp...

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