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Comment by Hasknewbie | Hacker News Reader

As much as I would like to see more competition in that space, on the topic of search Google is still head and shoulders above the rest as soon as you leave mainstream queries. I regularly try out DDG or Bing to see if they are closer to fitting the bill, but after a few days or weeks it's back to House Google. Maybe it will be simple to drop them at some point in the future. But in 2018? Not so much.

And there's also that one thing, that's kinda hard to avoid because there is no direct equivalent, what's it called, ho yes: Android.

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I've mostly switched to DDG and it works great for most queries but I do still end up resorting to Google if I'm not able to find what I'm looking for. I've gotten my Google search use down to maybe five times a week.

I've started migrating from Gmail to ProtonMail but it's been a slow process. Turns out it's not trivial to drop an email address that I've been using extensively for more than a decade.

You're right that Android is a big one. De-Googled Android is possible but it isn't a great experience. I've been desperate for a "true" Linux phone for years.

>You're right that Android is a big one. De-Googled Android is possible but it isn't a great experience. I've been desperate for a "true" Linux phone for years.

I switched to iPhone about six months ago, after having used Android since it was invented. In both cases you're trusting a large corporation, but Apple's business model is more direct - sell products and services directly to customers while protecting their privacy, vs Google's "the user is the product" approach. Apple seems the lesser of two evils in this regard.

I'm thinking of doing the same, and was wondering about Apple's position on ads, selling metrics, selling tracking data, and all the other craptastic stuff.

People have done GDPR requests for apple and get back basically nothing, because almost nothing is stored.

You can read about the limited analytics data apple provides to app devs as well.

Also moving to ProtonMail, and I'm somewhat slow with ditching the Google account, since I use it for stalking a couple of geeks on g+ and do use the chat with close friends. Of course XMPP would work here.

With cellphones I found the new Nokia dumbphone with wifi hotspot and without Android (no Playstore, either) pretty much Perfect For My Needs™.

> De-Googled Android is possible but it isn't a great experience

All I need from Google is the push notifications, so microG provides a great experience for me…

I didn't have much option but to switch to DDG this week. Every Google search from our domestic IPv6 range is receiving the 'suspicuous traffic' blocking page from Google with its demands to complete unending CAPTCHAs. I used to receive one every few weeks, now they're constant [0]

I've found DDG ok so far but need to dig into how to do literal searches.

But since the only Google product we used was Search, it was indeed quite easy to switch away.

[0] seems to be triggered by a combination of having JS disabled on google.com and rapidly refining searches based on the displayed results, without clicking them. Basically Google thinks we're robots because their search results are inadequate.

I use DDG as default, and Google when DDG's results don't have what I'm looking for. The upshot is I use DDG 80-90% of the time.

I try, really hard… but for me its nowhere near 80-90% successful, particularly for anything particularly new -- I find the results tend to be much older. `!g` has almost become a default reflex.

Same here.

You really need to be more explicit with your queries and remember that Duck Duck Go has no concept of who you are as a person. Searching for "babel" in Duck Duck Go and Google yield different results (for the first three results). Google knows I'm a software engineer and that I'm probably looking for "babeljs", Duck Duck Go doesn't.

Google's spoiled us.

It's much noticeably worse at locality. Trying to find the happy hours times for a bar around the corner? Good luck on DuckDuckGo.

...well, of course it's worse at locality. It doesn't track your location. It fundamentally can't do locality without not being DuckDuckGo.

Well, then it is fundamentally less useful then?

in theory I could include my location in a search query to get relevant results without having it stored indefinitely, correlated with past locations and other data, and packaged up and sent off to other interested parties.

maybe if I could guarantee that one positional sample was completely independent of anything that would allow it to be correlated? seems tough.

They started offering local results on their searches, I opted out so I don’t know how well it might work.

[edit] provided link https://duck.co/help/privacy/anonymous-localized-results

Hopefully, providing market share to other providers will eventually fund them enough to close the gap a little bit or even just help them approach the statisfice level for more people.

Totally happy DDG user here. Never had any issues using it and the results usually seem to be pretty spot on - in the very rare occasion where it doesn't you just put !g in the query and it goes to Google.

Now with modern Firefox (+ uBlock and privacy badger) you can do a lot of your standard web browsing without using Chrome or Google search or Google AdWords servers

I'd say probably at least 80% of my search queries are "mainstream", and DDG is absolutely fine for those. As others have said, if I can't find what I want on the first page I just do "!g my query" and I'm on Google's. Hardly a compromise.

> And there's also that one thing, that's kinda hard to avoid because there is no direct equivalent, what's it called, ho yes: Android.

I mean... iOS. But I suppose it's not a direct equivalent.

I just switched back to Google.com from DDG yesterday. I told my girlfriend, “well, I tried that other search engine, and it’s just not good enough”.

“Exact same thing you said two years ago”, she said. :-/ I’ll probably try in another two.

DDG just always left me wondering. If the result wasn’t there, it felt like it should have been ... so, !g I go, crawling back like a fool. What’s the point?

For anything location specific — here in Australia — forget it. Google dominates.

You just have to learn to be more specific. Stick "Australia" on the end of your queries. Google excells at this precisely because you've allowed it to spy on you and study your habits. Using DDG effectively requires a minor habit shift.

I'm not going to do that every time I'm out on my iPhone and I want to know the closest [x]. It's just not realistic.

It just seems like you're fishing for excuses now. Typing in the name of your city or something is not even a little bit hard.

What's so unrealistic about a trade-off where you gain massively in privacy and freedom and lose the 1 second of typing "Countryname".

> as soon as you leave mainstream queries.

This is the key point - I'm sure DDG or Bing or any other search engine is just as good as Google for typical/mainstream searches, but every time I try to switch to another search engine I'm always reminded how much better Google is at retrieving relevant search results for obscure queries.

Just curious what exact queries you have to to Google for?

One example I've found where Google excels is when I'm troubleshooting a technical issue and paste a snippet of an obscure-looking error message into the search box. Many times when I've been using DDG I would get little to no results, but the same search in Google would yield usable results. This erodes my confidence in DDG and so even for simple searches I'm never sure I'm getting the best results with DDG.

You don't need a Google account to use an Android phone, and you can turn off most of the Google stuff.

I don't even have an active Google account.

It's been a while since I looked into it but, last I checked, the only way to pull that off is with a rooted phone and a custom ROM. Is that what you're on? Seems every time I attempt to do that, the ROM I want to use isn't available for the phone I have or it's future is very uncertain.

I hear you. I think most phones/chipsets are supported by lineage, but it's really hard to know which image to download...

I've been using CopperheadOS and very happy with it. Android + updates w/o anything G in sight... Only downside is that only a select few phones are supported, but if you're getting a new phone you should consider one of the supported models.

No, just start with a new phone, and never get a Google account. You can then remove most Google stuff, install F-Droid, and download open source replacements.

I'll wipe my phone right now if it's possible, but last I remember, it wasn't possible to get to the homescreen without logging in to a Google account, unless you use a custom ROM. I already have F-Droid and the only Google app I have is Maps, I'll give that up. I have Gmail right now, but I use it through K-9.

What I did was to power up the phone from cold start with no sim card or WiFi. That gets you "Log in with Google account" or "Later". "Later" gets you past that, and you can then deactivate the "First time setup" app, so you don't get the message again.

You can proxy your google search via startpage.com.

How does that work? Why doesn't Google block their proxy/scraper, use captchas, etc. as they do on Tor?

They have an agreement with Google. Not sure if money is involved, but google's sponsored links are still shown.

You might want to try https://www.startpage.com/ (which uses Google search anyway ...)

or may be https://www.qwant.com/

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