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Comment by StavrosK | Hacker News Reader

So switch off them. Fastmail is better than Gmail, Firefox is better than Chrome, DuckDuckGo is pretty good, etc. Even switching some stuff is better than not switching any of it.

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Seriously people, Duck Duck Go is fine for most work-a-day search. I occasionally use Google search for some obscure technical stuff, but that's it.

IME, Duck Duck Go is not a usable alternative - for any 'kind' of searching. And not because it knows less about me: I would copy text directly from a web page and not have it show up.

It's particularly bad for academic journal searches. Since those pages change so infrequently, this points to further shortcomings in the breadth of their search methods. Ostensibly, they are polling 'many' sources, but whatever their strategy, it's not working.

Is there a reason why startpage never gets a look in, but it's always ddg? I get better results with sp.

It's probably just that people have heard of DuckDuckGo and it's good enough to not make it necessary to search for a better performing alternative.

One does not simply switch off Google. https://gizmodo.com/i-cut-google-out-of-my-life-it-screwed-u...

Indeed, I've recently switched from Chrome to Firefox and from Google search to DDG for this very reason. Every little helps.

Heads up. Fastmail is an Australian company under Australian laws. maybe you could try a range of privacy aware email systems (protonmail, tutanota, ...) or roll your own server.

Yeah, it's too bad, because they're otherwise an excellent company.

I run Jive Search so I might be biased: How is DuckDuckGo any more private than Google? They are similarly closed source and just as opaque.

I can do all those things. But what about the 99.9% of internet users who are not tech-savvy enough?

Are you suggesting that Firefox is harder to download than Chrome, Fastmail is harder to sign up for than Gmail, and DDG is harder to visit than Google?

Yes. Google is the default search engine in most browsers. So changing to DDG (i.e. so that queries you type into the address bar use DDG) in fact is harder. And that's not even talking about blocking Google's tracking, not using them for single sign-on, etc.

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