No user gains anything by it, this actually helps phishing sites. Oh, and it happens to help Google's AMP effort, which can now pretend to be the original site even more effectively. Time to get everyone to use Duck Duck Go, and to get rid of those Google CAPTCHAs which are an even bigger data harvesting operation than search.
Seriously to all people thinking there is no alternative give it a try, I switched my family and they don’t see a difference.
I use DDG as a default search engine for a while, but fell back to google search often, because I felt that Google results are better. At some point i enabled a stylesheet which made DDG results look like google's. And the search results improved significantly. I stopped using Google search for anything other than Google maps.
Still it’s worth it for the better website design, avoiding AMP, and the general impression that you’re not interacting with a malevolently intentioned entity.
I use DDG as the default and have been doing so for many years. I still have to add !g every time I search for violin related questions. The results are often just not relevant at all.
I think DDG still has a long way to grow to be a 100% replacement for Google outside the tech and science community.
What I assume people do is they click on the python 2 docs then change the version on the python website. So, from bings perspective it looks like people want the python 2 links. It always frustrates me and makes looking stuff up longer than needed.
For example, I tried searching for "python lists" in my address bar (DDG is my default) and I got all sorts of garbage.
Next, I typed "!py lists" and the browser immediately opened this page for me: https://docs.python.org/3/search.html?q=lists
So that works really nice if what you need is Python's native docs.
But there's more to "bang" syntax usage, now totaling over 13,000 bangs: https://duckduckgo.com/bang#bangs-list
Once you start remembering the DDG bang operators things get much smoother. Also, one more thing, DDG has a cli client that is pretty awesome if you live in the cli like I do.
However, it's still usable and you can resort to google when a search query isn't working.
DDG has better results than Google for most has cases, and Bing has better results for just under half of use cases.
Not a huge performance difference but it's there.
I guess the stark quality difference I've experienced made me assume everyone had a similar experience.
I'm glad people find ddg useful, I want it to grow (I'm using it despite the fact that I personally find the results inferior)
Virtually all my searches are resolved by DDG. I should also mention that statistically speaking my searches are not particularly complicated, and many are searching for an article or tidbit I had seen before or something where I pick wikipedia as the result.
Most of the time I find whatever I am looking for directly on the results page like movie review, ratings, actors, related movies and many other things. It shows prices of a product on different stores directly and also related products. No other search engine does this. Bing is almost there except it does not show product prices in my country.
It's a default with Brave browser, and I've decided to give it a go. That was about a year ago when I first started to use Brave. Back then, some search results were poor, especially localised ones, so I've decided to use Google.
Now it's much better, some results are even better than google where better SEO trumps more relevant results. Also, Brave has this nice feature where typing `:g<tab>[search term]` uses google for that one serach term. I use it if am not able to get good results with DDG.
Can we launch a class action lawsuit against Google if they harm people by limiting consumer choice, and force us to be tracked everywhere using reCAPTCHA v3 and various other methods?
Keep in mind that not sending your data to Google is not a real option, there are several government services, health care providers and utility companies using reCAPTCHA, you personal data either gets harvested by Google, or you're barred from accessing essential online services.
What can EU and US citizens do to initiate an investigation into Google's data harvesting practices?
Make this concept popular and even the layperson will understand what Google is doing to them.
Eventually, like previous major computer companies, its monopoly will weaken, and it will have to play a bit nicer.
I was arguing that Google/Alphabet is subject to the same forces that brought down the reign of other dominant companies in the software industry like IBM and Microsoft* . Eventually Google's reign will crumble too, and probably for the same reasons.
Our actions, albeit small can push in that direction, just like small actions helped to bring down others. Choosing other computer providers made IBM unable to extend its practices to minicomputers and left them vulnerable to MS. Linux played a role in denying server marketshare to MS. Popular opinion aided the antitrust cases against both MS and IBM - it is not commonly known these days there was a massive antitrust case against IBM which lasted even longer than the MS case.
* Note that both of these companies still exist and are very wealthy. I for one, do not seek to abolish Google - just to limit their ambitions to something that can coexist with others.
> Keep in mind that not sending your data to Google is not a
> real option, there are several government services, health
> care providers and utility companies using reCAPTCHA,
> you personal data either gets harvested by Google,
> or you're barred from accessing essential online services.
Using italics by putting asterisks around the quote seems to work reasonably well.
Thanks, I'll try it.
Once upon a time, Congress used to write and pass laws to protect Americans from egregious abuses of power like this. Of course, that time is long gone.
Do you honestly think removing URLs from search results is an "egregious abuse of power?" This is the company that buys credit card transactions from Visa et al. and associates them with your maps and and history for the benefit of advertisers, and you're complaining about them removing a design element 95% of people probably don't care about?
Google is engaged in using its market dominance in one segment to gain or maintain dominance in others, while suppressing the competition. This is illegal behavior for which Google has been fined several times over the past few years.
Just consider that in past Android versions there was a hard-coded Google search bar on the default home screen that you could not remove. Google has been forced to ask users and offer a set of alternative search engines on devices with recent Android versions. Same goes for Chrome and competing browsers [1].
Right now Google Search detects the Firefox for Android user agent and serves a second-tier search experience for Firefox users on Android. They have been doing this for the past 6 years [2].
[1] https://mashable.com/article/google-browser-search-engine-ch...
Their unethical behavior lead me to quit, divest, and delete all of my Google accounts.
Yes, it very obviously is. Google the search engine, and therefore Google, would never have gotten off the ground if it had hidden URL from the beginning.
> and you're complaining about them removing a design element 95% of people probably don't care about?
If so many people don't care about something so basic and crucial to not being a serf in the information age, then that makes the issue even more important, and Google's behaviour even more egregious.
While there's a chance the EU might do something about the behavior, I think it's safe to say that here in the US the odds of anything pro-consumer happening anytime soon are effectively nil.
There are people who could not register to vote in time because reCAPTCHA has blocked them.
A load of other anti-spam captchas not owned by Google...
300,000 users a month and we don't have any problems. Why do people think this is so critical? Just because TEH GOOGLE convinced us it is in order to push their product?
That doesn't mitigate Google's evil, it makes it worse.
There are a lot of Google employees (and potential Google employees) on HN.
So if "we" includes them, then yes, "we" could do a lot... like not work for Google.
Users also can easily go to another search engine. Why sue Google because users decide not to go anywhere else?
Ease-of-switching puts the onus on the user to recognize corporate violations of anti-trust law rather than upon the company violating anti-trust regulation.
It doesn't really make sense to presume users would or should change their behavior if a provider violates anti-trust law.
So does that mean that Netflix shouldn’t have used its dominance in DVD rentals to get into streaming and just die when another company did? Should Apple not have been allowed to use its dominance in the music/media player business to get into the smart phone business?
Antitrust was traditionally used when a company kept other competitors out. How is Google stopping another competitor from creating a search engine? The fact is that no one is forced to use Google. People can just as easily type bing.com in their browser as google.com.
In fact, the dominant desktop OS, doesn’t have Google as the default search engine and thanks to a consent decree - at least in the EU - Google cant force manufacturers of Android devices to make it the default search engine.
If Microsoft wanted to outbid Google to be the default search engine on iOS devices it could.
> Such conduct constitutes an abuse of a dominant position and hence is in breach of competition law.
> It is not illegal for a company to enjoy dominance in a particular market. However, a company which is dominant in one market can easily use its market power to cement or further expand its dominance, or leverage it into separate markets. [0]
Regarding Netflix and Apple, the answer is "it depends". Cases are determined on a case-by-case basis.
Not sure we disagree (?). My understanding is that Google has a practical monopoly on search. This is not illegal in and of itself. Anti-competitive practices that leverage its dominance in search, however, would likely run afoul of EU and US antitrust regulations. (I'm not an attorney, and My understanding of antitrust law is at the level of layperson. )
[0] https://timesofmalta.com/articles/view/Google-s-abusive-use-...
So they give me thousands of non relevant search results.
Alternatively, you can use Startpage, which uses Google results, but anonymized.
Where did you get your suggestion?
Edit: However, that includes their Instant Answers feature, and the numbers are outdated, it’s 1600 sources, most of which are catering to an specific and tiny niche (like angular.js docs, or a dictionary of accounting terms). Main sources are Bing, Yahoo, Wolfram Alpha and their own crawler (according to Wikipedia).
[0] https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/so...
It's mostly Bing/Yahoo/Yandex rebranded depending on the country.
Bing seems fine to me.
When I got a Surface Pro 4 three years ago, I decided to give Edge a try to see if it would do as my main browser, and left Bing as its default search.
Three years later, I've not felt the need to change that.
And I can't believe that you would get thousands of non relevant results. Please show an example.
But at least with DDG we have to option of quoting the terms. Google is much worse at this in any way you care to measure.
An even better one, something like "30GB at 20Mbit/s !wa" brings you to wolfram alpha and starts the calculation automatically.
I also don't really understand what's wrong with data harvesting, if anyone wants to enlighten me, please do
> I also don't really understand what's wrong with data harvesting If you don't understand why people get pissed when they're forced to get every detail of their lifes put on permanent record by google without a choice to opt out, I can't help you with that. You should probably move to china, I recon you'll like it there.
BTW DDG was very nice during the PSPS recently, as our cell data was extremely slow and DDG was nice and fast on that connection. Relatively speaking.