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Comment by hyeonwho4 | Hacker News Reader

It feels like Google search is already curated. At home I cannot find academic articles which appeared in the search at work, because my girlfriend trained the home's recommendation engine on searches for cute cat pictures and domestic things. In DuckDuckGo, at least I know I will be able to find the same results for the same search terms no matter where I am.

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Wow, I agree. Lately I've noticed search sometimes just pops in websites just because I visited it from a previous search, relevancy be damned! and it suuuuuucks.

I seem to be able to find a much more limited selection of content than I used to in the past. It used to be that even obscure search queries turned up something useful, but now you either get nothing or the same old big or commercial sites. There has to be tons of content out there that Google just can't seem to find anymore.

There was a discussion about exactly that here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19604135

Ironically I could not find this link via DDG, but it was the first hit on Google.

Matbe it’s cuz google knows you frequent hacker news....

I used site:news.ycombinator.com on both engines

Use a VPN in a private VM.

Or, duck duck go with the g! prefix, if you really must use google with bubbling turned off (instead of a reasonable alternative).

DDG isn't magic. It doesn't bubble you on its own results (or at least it claims not to), but it can't change how external providers behave.

Sadly, in this day and age, a good, usable search engine that does not enclose you into your own bubble is magic.

Using !s will proxy through Startpage, so you get Google results through an actual search proxy instead of just going to Google (I don't think !g "un-bubbles" anything).

Use a VPN in a private VM so you can use Google and get decent search results?

Is your response satire?

I want to believe it is.

What can I say? I mean, it works.

Using Google via VPN services, there are many other users. Occasionally someone's been a jerk, and Google gives you the stinkeye. But then you switch to a different server.

I added "private VM" in case OP was sharing a machine with his girlfriend. But really, it's always prudent to use VPNs from dedicated VMs. Because that compartmentalizes tracking. And using VMs also simplifies managing machine state. You can use a fresh clone for each session, for example. Or boot from a static image.

I like DDG and StartPage, for sure. But sometimes I just gotta use Google.

It’s not, I do something similar. Google results are just that much better for certain content I have found

Or, you know, you can just create a separate user in the OS. Or even just create a separate browser user profile (for Chrome, Firefox has it as well)

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