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Comment by CaptainZapp | Hacker News Reader

Firefox is fine and DuckDuckGo is good enough by now.

Firefox has the added bonus that it doesn't implement a two tier cookie system. Of which one tier cannot be deleted.

This, in combination with the new and improved "sign-in-convenience" convinced me that Google is exactly as dirty as any other tech company and should be avoided like the plague, wherever possible.

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I keep hearing this, but I'm constantly disappointed by the results I get on DDG. Eg, The first page of DDG shows (old) forum posts while Google shows a couple project sites on GitHub and some relevant stack overflow answers.

I'm sure some is personalization, but I've also compared results in incognito and Google is still better. I really want to like it, but I'm not going to sabotage my ability to efficiently find things.

To be honest: It works for me > 98% of the time.

Usually if the search is highly generic then Google definitely fares better and there's always the !g bang if DDG is not good enough for a specific search.

Thinking out loud here, trying to articulate a notion (complaint).

My two major search use cases are 'technical' (work related, programming, one of my projects) and 'location-based'.

(As a not quite sober news junkie, I'm trying reduce my 'events' search activity.)

Both DDG and Google work fine for technical stuff. Because I already know where to look, how to ask. YouTube is surprisingly (delightfully) great for my DIY projects (eg how to tile my bathroom).

Location based searches still drives me nuts. Both Apple Maps and Google Maps routinely give me ridiculous results. For the love of digital, why aren't closer results ranked higher?

So I end up using Yelp to find local stuff. While I like its 'update search results' as a navigate, their map UI/UX widget is terrible.

I'd probably leave my laptop home if I felt competent using mobile for location-based searches. Now, I'm lugging it every where, and regret it when I don't.

My experience has been the opposite of yours; DDG gets me better, and in particular more up-to-date search results recently.

This is my experience too.

But I hardly ever used Chrome, and wasn't signed in when using Google most of the time. I suspect they don't have a complete profile to improve their results.

Still I would take somewhat worse search results over handing out all of my web usage any day :)

DDG search results are even worse in other languages then English. I have been trying for couple of years to use DDG and finally have given up. Pity.

Firefox is fine? It’s the best browsing experience thanks to Tree Style Tabs unless you are a lambda user and you only have 3 tabs open at all time.

And even lambda users pile up tabs when they browse

What's a lambda user? Sounds like I might be one. I only keep a few tabs open at a time.

In terms of browsers that would be someone who only go on HN, reddit, facebook, gmail and linkedin. In other words HRFGL.

how do you get lambda out of hrfgl?

lambda user = average user. I don't know if the author of that message is french, but in french we use that expression quite a lot. It's meant to be used as a sort of "plug in any user" sort of variable, as in "for the user lambda" or "for the user x" sort of thing.

gotcha. That's helpful.

Thank you very much! I didn't even know such a thing existed.

I'll download the extension tonight and give it a shot.

Gecko still feels weird, I don’t think it’ll ever catch up to WebKit or Blink.

Worth noting that Opera is still an option, and built on Blink...

Keep in mind that Opera was bought by a consortium of Chinese companies.

Containers are a killer app for me. Having a separate workspace for each project I am working on, or work role, vs personal browsing reduces both clutter and distraction dramatically. I still use Chrome for some things (select boxes seem to not be handled well in firefox, or sites don't implement them properly which can be annoying, and FF still feels a little slow at times compared to Chrome), but I use Firefox as much as possible.

> Firefox is fine and DuckDuckGo is good enough by now.

I finally made the jump to Brave and DuckDuckGo, but replacing Gmail, Google Photos, and Google Voice is going to be hard. Gmail will be the hardest since it's attached to so many of my online accounts.

I've been thinking about switching from Gmail myself. I think they have a feature where you can forward all of your email from your Gmail account to your new email address, so you can use that during the transition. Then think of any online accounts that you really need to keep (there aren't many), and change your sign-in email for those.

Perhaps I'll do that this weekend; better now than never.

To avoid this problem in the future, get your own domain. If you want to use GMail you can, you just have to create a GSuite account then edit your DNS to point your mail to Google's servers. If later, you want to move off Google, you edit your DNS MX record to point to a different host.

If you're thinking you can just use a custom domain as a login email everywhere, think again cause that comes with its own risks. A guy did this and ended up losing control of his accounts since a DNS is probably less stringent on security as well, the Googs itself. TLDR: Someone hacked him by calling the DNS for his domain name and taking over his email.

https://medium.com/@N/how-i-lost-my-50-000-twitter-username-...

These are the easy changes. It's much harder to move away from their ecosystem if you're using gmail as your primary or only e-mail provider.

Gmail is really the only thing keeping me in the Google tent. Switching my address after over a decade of use is nigh-impossible. I also use Chrome for development because the debug tools are superior, but everything else Google is an easy switch for me.

No it's not. You get a new email, set all incoming mail from the old one to forward to the new one, tell the people you are in contact with about the new email, and then just change the email on the services you use when you use it. Don't go around to all the services at once. Just the next time you open up GitHub, change it, next time you open up your online bank, change it, and so on. And after a couple of years, shut down the old one. It's not hard at all.

Yea this is what I did. Little by little. If you make a plan, and are dilligent you’ll be totally off @gmail.com in under a year. Make sure you switch to an email address on a domain you control, not @some_other_cloud_service.com that you’ll want to switch off of later.

Indeed, its not hard. I went through it this summer. However, I switched from a personal domain to a fastmail domain. Why? My domain registrar fucked me over.

At that point, I had used my personal domain for close to 10 years when suddenly it stopped working. I contacted them and they said that it was put on hold because I hadn't paid the yearly expense. It would cost 16 times the normal cost to get it back, or I could wait a couple of months until it was released and see if I was able to buy it again at the normal rate before it was taking by someone else. I asked what they meant by expense? I usually get a reminder from them on email a month before due date, every year for the last 10 years, but my latest expense reminder from them was dated a year back. They explained that they have had trouble sending out reminders for this particular TLD for a while now. I asked why they hadn't contacted their users about these problems, to which they replied that it's my own responsibility to get the expense paid in due time, and that the reminders are just a friendly reminder, nothing more, nothing to be relied on, and I have to pay 16 times normal cost or it will get released in a couple of months.

I decided that I was not going to pay that, and that I wouldn't be using them as a domain registrar again. Luckily I wasn't that happy with the domain anyways and have never been. I have been fiddling with ideas for a new domain name for years, but have yet to find one, so it wasn't that big of a loss. But I sure as hell think it's shitty service from my domain registrar.

What domain registrar was that?

http://gratisdns.dk

It's a bit weird to say it's not hard at all after describing a multi-year effort.

But see, it's not a multi-year effort. It's at most a couple of hours spread over a couple of years with 99.9% of the effort put in today and the next couple of days.

This is how I did it twice over the years.

>Switching my address after over a decade of use is nigh-impossible.

This is why you should have your own domain. You can switch providers trivially.

Doesn't work in all cases.

Here's my story: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18130832

I wouldn't say it "doesn't work". I would say "Be extremely careful in renewing your domain on time". I do think what your registrar did is lousy, but when it came to domains, lousy is what I expect. There are plenty of stories out there like yours

Easy to say now. But when gmail first came out and I snagged an address, the last thing on my mind was "this company could become evil in 15 years, I should set up my own domain and route to it from this new email service." I'm currently looking into making the switch, but it's going to be painful. Finding a good domain these days for personal email is also challenging.

>But when gmail first came out and I snagged an address, the last thing on my mind was "this company could become evil in 15 years, I should set up my own domain and route to it from this new email service."

It was already in my mind when Gmail came out. Some months prior to their launch, I got my own domain. I was already sick of free online providers - be it email, photos, etc. I'd had to move multiple times due to their either disappearing or suddenly asking for money. So even though I always liked Google, and still do, I never allowed myself to believe that things won't change.

Regardless, the past is the past. The key point is not to make the same mistake going forward.

This is why it’s best to have one layer of indirection: in this case a personal domain that lets you move between providers. Same thing as running your site from mygreatcompany.com instead of geocities.com/mygreatcompany.

Same here. Bought a personal domain about 10 years ago as piece of mind. Does the job and my registrar handles e-mail forwarding including catchall which is handy for throwaway addresses

That's what I'm considering now, but I'm concerned that I'll forget to update my credit card information or make some other minor mistake with the registrar and lose my domain.

I get hassled via email for months leading up to a renewal, and even if something goes wrong there's a grace period. It's really not a big deal.

Were I smart, I'd set up a calendar reminder each year for my most important domains.

Your experience sounds like the start of stories I keep seeing on HN about people and companies losing their domains. I just saw this one today. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18130832

Using Firefox and DDG daily for personal use. I'm looking to switch off of inbox/gmail, google calendar, etc. but haven't settled on an alternative yet. I've made heavy use of the snoozed notifications in inbox. Any recommendations?

I recently switched to FastMail.com from google. They have email, calendar and contacts syncing and works really well.

https://www.zoho.com/ has a lot to offer. I use nextcloud for calendar and contacts.

I've been using FastMail for several years now. The reason I switched was specifically to move away from Google's services and I'm glad I've made the switch. I have recommended FastMail to people over these years and whoever has switched has stayed with them and is pretty glad with them from what I hear.

I recently switched to Firefox and DDG, and am pleasantly surprised and seriously impressed. Obviously, DDG is not as powerful as Google. But it has been more than good enough for me so far.

DuckDuckGo is mostly a skin on Bing search results. By using it, you're saying you trust Microsoft more than Google. If that's your intent, cool, but you're not really getting away from the big tech companies by doing this.

Where is the open source internet search platform?

There’s an open source P2P-based distributed search engine called YaCy.

Check searx https://asciimoo.github.io/searx/

Does using DDG give Microsoft your personally-identifiable data?

To be clear, it does not.

I thought they just partner with Bing for ad results - not that their search was a skin of Bing. Wikipedia supports the ad partnership but also doesn't say anything about Bing being responsible for their search results. And on the few tests I've just done searching both, I see similar but not exact results. Do you have a source for this claim?

See my reply to NeedMoreTea.

Duck Duck Go uses search result API's from various venders, including Bing- that is mentioned in the history section of the Wikipedia article. (Originally they used Yahoo's search API, and Yahoo of course changed to using results from Bing). They also have their own web crawler.

DDG claim otherwise https://duck.co/help/results/sources

DuckDuckGo gets its results from over four hundred sources. These include hundreds of vertical sources delivering niche Instant Answers, DuckDuckBot (our crawler) and crowd-sourced sites (like Wikipedia, stored in our answer indexes). We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we also source from a variety of partners, including Oath (formerly Yahoo) and Bing.

That links "more than 400 sources" to https://duck.co/ia which in turn links to https://docs.duckduckhack.com/#improve-a-live-instant-answer saying "DuckDuckHack is in Maintenance Mode". But https://docs.duckduckhack.com/welcome/how-ias-work.html suggests that these sources are for things displayed at the top, which I see super rarely.

Yahoo gets their search results from bing, so that's the same thing. So this supports my claim.

DDG also uses Yandex and Baidu search results in relevant regions:

https://thenextweb.com/apps/2013/09/26/dolphin-browser-goes-...

> By using it, you're saying you trust Microsoft more than Google

I do. They make inferior software imo, but seem a lot less suspicious.

Depends upon the software - you can pry Excel from my cold dead hands.

G Suite has definitely come a long way, but the Office suite of apps are absolutely the gold standard.

Hardly. DuckDuckGo claims not to share my information or searches with Microsoft. I trust DuckDuckGo (not Microsoft) to keep their word.

The fact that DDG sources information about the internet from Microsoft is unimportant. I'm concerned about my personal information, not large scale manipulation of search results.

In that case you could use http://www.startpage.com - it's a wrapper around Google, and your information isn't shared with them.

I would use this if it weren't so darn slow.

I've tried searx instances as well, but couldn't find one that functioned consistent to my liking.

Recently I deactivated Javascript on Startpage (with uBO) and surprisingly it suddenly loads fast.

Believe it or not they are injecting all kinds of ad related JS.

I am even questioning their sincerity, since the page is badly optimized for usage.

Meh, if DDG takes off MS will likely either cut them off or charge, leading to DDG needing to run their own search. If they can do that is unproven, and if running a web-wide search engine with DDG's business model is profitable is unproven too. I agree it's irrelevant to users medium-term, but if you're happy with DDG you kind of have to hope they don't become too successful.

I'm pretty sure DDG is already paying them. Maybe they'll raise their rates, but DDG has other sources and has their own crawler, too, so I think they will do just fine.

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