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Comment by todd3834 | Hacker News Reader

While I haven’t de-Googled I do mostly stick to Apple products because of the quality and advantages of the ecosystem.

I’m more interested in using the best product for what I want to do. While that is sure to be subjective it feels like Apple is the best to me.

That being said, I’m not able to stick to DDG. Every time I do a search and I don’t find what I’m looking for on DDG I think, “I bet Google would have found it”. However when I’m on Google and I don’t find what I’m looking for I think, “I just didn’t write a good query”. That mental hurdle is hard to get over.

Safari vs Chrome is another one where I choose Google. The web developer tools for the browser and the integration with Node/V8 seem so much better. If I were not a developer I imagine I could prefer Safari but it’s too hard to pretend when it’s what I do all day.

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> Every time I do a search and I don’t find what I’m looking for on DDG I think, “I bet Google would have found it”. However when I’m on Google and I don’t find what I’m looking for I think, “I just didn’t write a good query”. That mental hurdle is hard to get over.

Same here. It doesn't help that 80% of the time I'm having the former issue, I copy the query to Google and the top hit is perfect, a hit which didn't even show up 30 results down on ddg.

I should try copying the other way, but Google does seem objectively better (doesn't stop me trying to use ddg and only go to Google manually as a fallback).

I use DDG nearly exclusively, and writing better queries is definitely workable. I just throw a couple more keywords and I usually find what I need.

Google does a ton of personalization of search results, whereas DDG doesn't, so it's not really a fair comparison. I've found that, with my better queries, StartPage (anonymous Google results) isn't much better, so the difference is likely Google getting to know you better.

The only personalization they can do is based on my region (IP address), user agent (all the better if "crop image" gives me Linux results), and the fact that this is the only data they have on me. There are no cookies or localStorage. Unless they do browser fingerprinting (which I hope would be big news and would legally have to be in their privacy policy, so I'd know about it), it can't be that custom. I'm quite convinced google search really is just that much better.

The country localisation gets in the way as often as it doesn't for normal usage, but given that I use ddg by default, many of the queries I use Google for are the ones I actually want localised. (Ddg is even worse at searching in other languages, which gets slightly better if you manually change the search language on the results page, but not much.)

I'll give startpage a try. I thought Google blocked (or at least CAPTCHAd) third parties from using the search without paying for every query (their search api is super expensive), so I didn't look for a proxying service before. Thanks for the tip :)

Same for me. I prefer Apple hardware because I still consider it the best tool (maybe with the exception of the MBP keyboard). I won't go into debates with others about my choices (here in Europe most people prefer Windows laptops and Android phones). However I can't ditch Gmail, Chrome and Google Search. They still offer the best service :/

I've looked ProtonMail, Firefox, and DDG so far. ProtonMail and DDG feel like a downgrade in features, but they're good enough and I like the biggest feature they offer: privacy. I legitimately like Firefox better than Chrome.

The last Google product I'm having trouble ditching is Drive. I like accessing spreadsheets everywhere, including my phone, and I find LibreOffice less intuitive, and self hosted LibreOffice Online sucks. I'm looking at OnlyOffice, but the resource requirements make hosting on a VPS expensive, so I'll have to get a machine set up locally if I want to do it (and all the headaches that brings with exposing it to the world through my ISP).

I'm also on Google Fi, but I'm not too attached to it. If the Librem 5 ends up being as awesome as they promise, I'll likely leave for something else, like Ting (I used them for a couple years).

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