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Comment by scumbert | Hacker News Reader

Unironically switch to Bing

I hear Duck Duck Go is pretty good these days. I tried their image search after Google removed a feature I liked and it had a feature I didn't even realize I wanted.

DuckDuckGo is mostly Bing.

They have a bunch of own infrastructure and data these days (I have read they don't use Bing at all now).

Besides: It's cleaner, faster, has often useful instant answers (random, 10011001 in hex, 1 btc in xmr, 40 stones in kg), bangs (!g for Google, !gh for GitHub, !yt for YouTube, !w for Wikipedia) and actually respects your privacy.

I think this feature could be much improved an expanded, but the location context switch is a really cool thing as well.

> I have read they don't use Bing at all now

Got a link I can take a look at?

> We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we also source from a variety of partners, including Verizon Media (formerly Yahoo) and Bing.[0]

Yahoo is also powered by Bing last I checked.

[0] https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/so...

Here’s one: https://trypap.com/

>and actually respects your privacy.

According to who?

DDG is a privately-owned, for-profit corporation, whose code is closed source and doesn't undergo independent audits or validations of privacy.

Their only selling point is privacy, so I feel like they have an incentive to keep their only lifeline going. If they break their promise it’s essentially the end of their business as they don’t have anything else compelling.

Most other companies can get away with violating your privacy because they have something nobody else has (either because their product is so good or because of network effects) so you have no choice but to keep using them. DDG doesn’t have that luxury.

> If they break their promise it’s essentially the end of their business as they don’t have anything else compelling.

I'd love to give them credit but without transparent proof of security, all I read here is "they are very motivated to hide any selling of data that they are doing.

Which further begs the question as to why they haven't taken steps to validate something so valuable to them. Even Google open-sourced Chromium.

DDG is just a reskin of Bing (and Yandex search). They don't have anything to lose if they violate your privacy - they can just pop up again under a different name.

This only incentivizes them to maintain this image until they hit critical mass, hurt competitors (Google), or come up with compelling reasons to use them. After all, half the discussion below is how Google used to not be evil but now is; what is stopping DDG from changing their tune later?

Not saying they can’t turn evil later on down the line when they do get big, but at the moment it’s (IMO) a non issue. They would lose their entire business (whatever little they have) immediately if they did so and presumable make less money out of the attempt than they make right now by respecting user privacy and only offering content-targeted ads. For now I’m happy to trust them - this can of course change in the future.

It's not, it's one of the selling points. Ignoring the privacy thing there are still plenty of reasons to use it, besides it just being a non-dominant player, which is an inherent plus in my book.

I switched to DDG from Google because of AMP. Now I use DDG because the results seem often more relevant.

Unironically this.

I switched at work because Google thought our proxy was evil or something, then I switched at home just because, and I honestly haven't missed Google at all.

The only thing that strikes me as obviously worse (maybe?) is that Bing isn't very good at guessing what you mean when you misspell something badly.

Bing is great too because it encourages competition in the search space.

Funny, that google UI change finally pushed me to set DuckDuckGo to default search provider in my work computer. Few times I have been little bit dissapointed with search results and did another search in google, but mostly ddg is pretty smooth experience. So, thanks google for that UI change.

Personally I learn from DDG’s failures and am able to predict whether DDG is going to be good enough or if I need to add the “!g” shortcut so it automatically redirects me to Google, saving a few seconds in the process.

Hopefully one day DDG becomes good enough that I never have to do that, though with the recent developments it’s more likely that Google will become worse enough to make current DDG be good in comparison as opposed to DDG actually becoming better than Google. Sad times for sure.

For physical ailments, I use Brave + incognito (and search with DuckDuckGo), then manually look for webmd hits and such. Still, I have this feeling that 5 years later, I'll be reading about our ISPs ratting us out to insurance providers.

Other suggestions welcome.

I did, first for any search that might include political bias, due to results' censorship, but then I accidentally discovered that programming related searches and other technical searches are often better in Bing too.

>> but then I accidentally discovered that programming related searches and other technical searches are often better in Bing too.

They have gotten terrible at Google because the results are all ads. Any technical article explaining what an expert may want to know is not part of a corporate product page and therefore has no monetary value for anyone (Google included) to push it up in the results. Ask how to implement something and you'll get a bunch of results for products that implement that thing already.

Yeah I had to stop using Google entirely because I just couldn't find anything relevant to what I actually wanted to know. They've worked so hard to make the results relevant to someone with like 1 year of experience that the results are no longer actually relevant to someone who wants to go deeper or know more or who already knows everything on the first page of results but needs more information than a magic library.

To be honest the Internet has gotten significantly less useful as a repository of information as it has aged, to the point where I now have to order books if I want to learn anything new in my field.

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