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Comment by Timucin | Hacker News Reader

I believe having privacy puts the user at disadvantage since DDG doesn't keep your history or track who you are. i.e. Google knows definitely knows I am a developer and shows the tech related things first even when I search for super generic words. That's why people think DDG doesn't do a good job but I think it does if you can be more specific.

Yet I agree it's not better than or equal to Google when it comes to image search. I guess Google is doing a better job on classifying images.

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I believe privacy, to me as a user, is a huge advantage. I have been using DuckDuckGo for years now and I when I run into something I can’t find on it, which happens sporadically, I use !s to jump to anonymous google results on start page and it turns out I can’t find it with google either. So either DuckDuckGo has gotten better or I have gotten better at telling it what I want, or both. Either way, I don’t feel that privacy puts me at a disadvantage.

Oh, no. Don't get me wrong. I wasn't trying to say privacy is bad, I was trying to say Google has a clear advantage since it knows more about the user. Don't think it's worth to compromise your privacy though.

Another advantage of Google is having the vast resources they have but again, it works because they know who you are.

I also agree with what you said. People just need to be more specific with their search and yes, DDG is going better by the day.

>I believe having privacy puts the user at disadvantage since DDG doesn't keep your history or track who you are. i.e. Google knows definitely knows I am a developer and shows the tech related things first

One way to compensate is to be very specific.

Ex: "python programing language string slice" not just "python slice".

Most people have (without consciously thinking about it) learned to treat search terms as labels on a venn diagram with the center being the search results.

To get the most out of DDG search like it's 1999 - be specific and use operators

https://help.duckduckgo.com/results/syntax/

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