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Comment by allenskd | Hacker News Reader

It's been 2-3 years since I switched back to Firefox ever since I cut around 90% of Google out of my life, sadly I still can't find a good search engine where I don't spend more than 5 mins trying different keywords to get the results google gives me.

Out of all the browsers I like that Mozilla were the first to point the finger to the elephant in the room while Microsoft, Google, Opera just turned a blind eye on privacy, although I don't think anyone expects much from Google these days.

Firefox has once again became my default browser on all my devices after like 6-8 years since I last used it. I guess as far as privacy concerns goes, if you are looking for a company/browser that will continue working on protecting you from trackers by default that'd be Mozilla.

Random observations that doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the topic: Firefox for windows is perfect. I actually think it's faster on Windows than on OSX for whatever reason. Playing videos, like using Netflix or Youtube is extremely sluggish on Firefox OSX, but is fine on Windows. I always end up using Safari if I want to watch a video on a higher resolution because the performance drags a lot on Firefox, especially it Netflix's overlay UI you can literally observe it's lagging behind but not in Safari.

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In the past couple of years, search has reverted to late 90s levels of result quality. Google used to get you exactly what you wanted for close to 20 years. Now you have to cross reference several search engines to find something other than terrible blogspam and obvious advertisements disguised as reviews. Search seems primed for disruption again.

I appreciate DDG's privacy focus, but their results are often crap.

This is true. These days, Google does very poorly with the tail, and may not even index a lot of sites...definitely some older sites that are still up just drop out of the index, and cannot be found even with exact phrase searches.

If there was one open source project that I'd support would be an open search, but are there any serious, well funded efforts?

https://yacy.net

https://searx.me/

Try the semantic map of https://swisscows.ch/ While usually DDG is sufficient for my uses i'm noticing falling back more and more often to the swiss cows. This map thing really helps to separate that which is of interest to you, from unrelated things. Be it the same abbreviations used across different fields, names of persons or corporations across history, ...

I'd be very happy if DDG had that, since i'm so used to it. But it doesn't.

I think https://www.qwant.com/ had something very simialar many years ago, but now it's gone, or i'm mistaking it for some other prototype/beta which had that.

> Try the semantic map of https://swisscows.ch/

Was excited to try it more after an initial impression, but this is a no-go for me:

> 1. We promote moral values.

Which of course is code word for "We promote our values". Can't believe we're in 2020 and this is part of a pitch.

I didn't even notice that! OTOH doesn't everybody promote his values in some (hidden) way? At least they say so.

For me it is there, useful, and free to use.

Take it, or leave it, so to speak :-)

They block certain results because of that, and there is no option to disable that. That's a big no to me. How do I know what results do they consider moral enough to show me?

I always use Safe Search when using Google. I've never watched porn and don't plan to start now, so I appreciate that I know my results from this site will be SFW.

They cite “family values” and have an illustration of a heteronormative family on the “morals” page. Does that mean they filter gay-related results? Gay marriage related results? Would you prefer them to filter it?

I have no idea if they do, but it’s foolish to even cause such questions and disambiguation with your brief (which you inevitably do when you do “morals”)

Thank you for the link, the mapping of sub-topics looks interesting and promising. Reminds me of HotBot circa 1995.

I feel the same. Recently I started using Reddit for finding niche topics.

Interesting that I'm not alone in this.

I was recently searching for information on how Slot Machines are programmed. I had questions about the OS that they run, the languages used to program them, information about the random number generators, etc.

There was a reddit post by someone in the industry that answered some of those questions. Unfortunately, it's quite old.

That makes me think, maybe I should write up a blog post about this as I find the answers I'm looking for. I'm certainly not an expert, but the information in search engines is lacking or I'm searching for the wrong things.

The most niche things I search for are typically career-related, so software questions. I'd guess more than 9 out of 10 queries, the result that I am looking for (i.e. the result that helps me) is on stackoverflow, github, or some apache mailing list.

A search engine just for software, that crawls a whitelisted set of platforms and provides more relevant results (github's search is very poor, for example) would be perfect. Google seems to be the "best" at this right now, so while I use DDG to search most of the time, when I'm working I end up routing most of my queries to Google.

Somewhat tangential, but the word "niche" made me think about this.

you should build this! building a search engine today is no doubt an uphill battle, but the move toward more specialized platforms feels inevitable as there gets to be more and more of the web to index, search, and discover.

site:github.com | site:stackoverflow.com keyword

I use reddit for reviews of products. There's usually some subreddit for that company or line of devices.

Hard to tell what's authenticate or not in Amazon and even blog reviews found on Google.

I wonder how much of that is technology, and how much is actually inherent to the privacy.

Google collects your data to show you ads, but it also uses that to inform its search algorithm. Exactly how it does so is deliberately opaque, but it's no surprise that it knows that you probably mean the local restaurant rather than the one in Indiana by the same name -- and even that you mean that restaurant despite having mistyped it as the name of a different restaurant.

There is assuredly more to it than that, and it's not really a surprise that it can give you better search results if it knows who you are. Whether that's worth your privacy is up to you -- though many people don't really make that choice consciously.

I tend to blame the tech (or lack of indexing-resources) since often it's not finding something I'm sure exists despite plenty of exact keywords.

To use the restaurant example, I'd be putting in the city-name explicitly.

To me, the main source of the problem is that Google (and other search engines) began returning different results for different users:

https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/4/18124718/google-search-re...

So instead of returning a canonical list of the best results for a given subject, they use the copout that people want to see different things. IMHO this has led to problems like politicizing science to cover "both sides" when there is actually consensus. It's institutionalized ignorance.

I agree that search is primed for disruption though. The endgame for search is an artificial general intelligence (AGI) that acts as an oracle to answer any question put to it better than any human. Search is just a query over a very large search space, and is the basis for rational thought (or at least human memory). What we have today is more like a library of books where the user is forced to learn the categorization system and perform the librarian's job manually much of the time.

I've always thought that google had a conflicting business model - on the one hand search brings people in, but on the other it competes with ads. The better the search, the less useful the ads. Given this, google might be indirectly incentivized to only have search good enough to be better than competition, but not the best. Not saying they're actively doing that, but seems like something.

Try to use https://yandex.com/ (Russia) or https://beta.cliqz.com/ (Germany), results are much better than DDG.

Using Yandex for privacy reasons is quite possibly best joke I've ever heard.

Recommending Cliqz that is owned by Hubert Burda, a global media conglomerate which couldn’t care less about your privacy, and where every player is sorely focused on getting a bite of Google’s cake, is also hypocrisy.

I mostly agree, although I think that isn't totally clear yet. I only mentioned Yandex because they're the most egregious example. They are significantly worse than Google in user privacy and general evilness, which I don't think you can clearly say about Cliqz, if only because they haven't mattered enough to have the chance to abuse real users.

> In the past couple of years, search has reverted to late 90s levels of result quality.

The problem is that despite google doing that (I wouldn't be as hard as you, but there was definitely a decrease in quality), they're still SO far ahead of everyone else ...

Just goes to show exactly how far ahead of the competition they were all that time.

Bad DDG results are a myth at this point. It was true a couple of years ago. But they’ve improved a lot and last few months I rarely use google as a fallback.

I've also seen DDG improve over the years but there are still cases where I can't find some obvious things I'm looking for. Unfortunately I can't provide an example. Sorry.

In that case I fallback to Google which is usually helpful even though I have the feeling that it's getting less good.

In the end, my default search engine is becoming Wikipedia... (Mostly kidding, of course, even though I rely to Wikipedia for an increasing number of searches.)

It also sometimes "corrects" queries, forcing one to click to rerun the original query as intended. This very infuriating.

If you put the term in quotes, it disables the correcting of your term.

IMO, correction is a feature. I'm more likely to typo a search term (especially on mobile) than to actually be looking for something with a deliberate mispelling or strange set of letters/numbers.

I switched to DuckDuckgo a few months ago, and never looked back. The results used to be far inferior to Google's - but they seem to have caught up recently. If you haven't tried them out within the last couple of months, I strongly recommend that you give them a chance.

I switched to DuckDuckGo, made it maybe two weeks, and finally gave up and switched back to Google. Their search results are still vastly inferior to Google.

I'm still struggling. Out of principle I've set my default search engines (desktop/mobile) to DDG, but all too often I'm using the '!g' tag to get back to Google. Especially with programming-related queries I just don't get close to what I want in DDG. Google always seems to have the right information the first time. It's unfortunate, because I keep trying to use DDG as much as possible, but the quality just isn't there for me.

It may depend on your particular field of search. I have been using DDG for quite some time and pretty often I need to use !g due to the low quality of the results on DDG only to realize I'm presented with equally bad results from Google. It's possible that for my regular searches DDG is good enough, and the more targeted ones are just too difficult.

Somebody here taught me the !s bang. That sends you to startpage.com. startpage uses google's index but they don't store your data.

>they don't store your data

This might have changed because they've been bought by an ad company

Startpage was acquired by targeted ad company System1 in December 2018 (but neither company announced the acquisition until November 2019, for some reason).

https://restoreprivacy.com/startpage-system1-privacy-one-gro...

All true points, but I'd rather risk being tracked by a company that would be completely cratered even more than they've already been by being bought by Privacy One than just go straight to the devil himself, so I use the !s and just mentally treat it as if its a slightly better form of !g rather than before where startpage was all the benefits of Google search without most of the drawbacks.

Hi - Startpage person here. Just FYI: We don’t collect or share your personal information. The Startpage founders continue to run the company as before and they have control over the privacy components of Startpage. With this investment, we hope to further expand our privacy features & reach new users. You may have already seen some of these new initiatives taking place. 1) Unfiltered News Tab launched in November: https://www.startpage.com/blog/product-updates/launching-unp... 2) Privacy Please! Newsletter launched in last month: https://startpage.com/blog/company-updates/welcome-privacy-p... 3) We're pushing out more info via our blog & social than before, giving greater insight into: How we make money - https://startpage.com/blog/privacy-awareness/advertising-res... How we keep your search private - https://www.startpage.com/blog/privacy-awareness/how-does-st...

Can you give an example search that doesn't work for you?

I'm teaching Kleene's Recursion Theorem. This morning I tried "exercises for recursion theorem" in both. DDG's first page results were not useful, Google's were.

From earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19043565

"ED survivor" is a tricky term to search for. Is "ed" an acronym or the name Ed? But still the first result gives you an instagram link about eating disorders and body dysphoria. Since you were trying to figure out what this term meant, I'm assuming you could figure this out from context.

I'll give you that the results aren't great[0] and that Google's results were __MUCH__ better here, but it did get you to the answer you wanted with the first link. Maybe we search different, but at least in my experience I don't frequently have results like this. Rarely do I reach for "!g" and usually when I do the searches are so niche that Google struggles too.

[0] https://imgur.com/a/HvFTGT1

Excuse me? I didn't get an answer in the first link; there wasn't something pointing me towards the answer in any of the results on the first result page.

Incidentally, nowadays I'm using DDG much more than back then. I don't know whether the search results improved or whether I calibrated myself so that I know better how to phrase my searches. I'm still using many !g, but only maybe half of the time.

No? I don't have a list handy, and I’m not the QA department for DDG. The point is - and yes, this is somewhat subjective - I found the quality of the results inferior to Google, and grudgingly switched back after a few weeks of disappointment.

You're certainly not alone, but I've had such a wildly different experience. I switched to duckduckgo primarily because I preferred the search results. The privacy aspect was just a bonus.

The only time I ever find myself using the !g escape hatch is when I'm searching something brand new (e.g. a breaking news story). Duckduckgo has a recency filter but it seems to take them a few days to ingest the content.

Same here. I'm still using duckduckgo on my private devices (phone and home laptop), at work I'm using google. I suppose the reason this works for me is at work I need GOOD results, thus google search there. At home I just need a search now and again, so duckduckgo is good enough for this.

So, my private life stays my private life with duckduckgo. And at work — I don't really care what google does to my "js shortest path algorithm"-kind-of results history.

Same. I'm about 70% DDG and 30% Google right now. Honestly, with "!g", I'm okay with it. Even though I don't get 100% privacy, its better than 0% privacy.

I switched to DuckDuckGo a number of years ago and while yes, their results have become better there are times in my line of work where I've had to use !g search item as Google still seems have to have the best results sometimes.

Granted this is maybe once or twice in 3 - 4 months I end up using !g prefix.

Another helpful thing that can be done with Firefox is to add google.com to a container. One of the things google does that I really dislike is personalized search. Having a container specified for it lets me use the browser more naturally without having to open a private session.

You can also configure firefox to never leave private mode—I can’t endorse this enough.

Do you know if there's a way to get it to work with containers? Often, I'll use a container to remain logged in to a site and white list its cookies. It'd be good if non-container pages were in private mode by default.

Have been using Ecosia and I have to do a `g` search pretty much daily. Though the use Bing underneath, so maybe it's worth giving DuckDuckGo a try

> I still can't find a good search engine where I don't spend more than 5 mins trying different keywords to get the results google gives me.

I always hear this but myself have never had problems with DDG. I'm curious what you search for.(am I the odd one?) Image search is TERRIBLE, but web search I have no issues with. I actually like how DDG works with programming questions, how it gives the SO result on the side.

Whenever I try Google I never end up getting better results. But that may be because I've been off them for years and so they can't provide any advantage.

It's.... a bit hard to define my current workspace. I do software development but a lot of that development is on legacy applications using some obscure API, perhaps a super old version of a known open source project that nobody uses anymore, or simply dealing with an application written two decades ago in C and I have to know specific things.... and I'd have to say searching on Google is just handy when it comes to this.

It's not easy to describe I guess. For my normal "John Doe" usage I have no problems using DDG. But when it comes to work where I need to narrow it down the best I can I guess Google will always come to the rescue (but not always, haha.... nothing like dealing with undocumented libraries).

I wish it was just language-specific behaviors at least I know there's always plenty to search on but... it's a little bit of everything.

I find image search on Google to be terrible due to whatever it is that Pinterest is doing. It is awful trying to find something and repeatedly stumbling into their crapfest.

Thats why I do my searches with -pinterest.com in the search.

big fat disclaimer: I'm about to start working at a competitor to DDG

However I've found that DDG has a really hard time when you have minor typos in your query, or when it includes really common words

When I type in semi-remembered song lyrics into Google, I'm usually able to find the song. I haven't had the same luck with DDG (one example of semi-remembered lyrics I tried to look up was "streetlight reflect piss streets". DDG doesn't give anything useful. If you add the word "lyrics" to the query, it gives you a list of maybe a dozen songs about lights and even some songs about urine, but not the one I was looking for. Even without adding the word lyrics, Google's first result is an infobox saying "Fat Cats, Bigga Fish|Song by The Coup", with the full lyrics and some links to listen to it.

I also had a hard time trying to look up info on DDG regarding Google employee benefits. Maybe that's intentional :)

At one point, the top search result for "Google vision plan" was a link to google.fr/maps (DDG actually gives some useful results now, but it didn't when I looked previously)

Another interesting query to compare for me was "subaru outback gate OR garage opener"

DDG just gives links to Lowes, Home Depot, Walmart, and other places to buy garage door/gate openers. The first Google result is a video for how to teach a Subaru Outback how to open a gate/garage (which is what I actually wanted). Maybe I'm just used to the level of vagueness that lets Google give me useful results, which isn't explicit enough for DDG?

I've been using DDG as main search engine for 3 years, results for my queries are usually on par with Google in private mode, but if you're looking for results in any other language than English or non-tech stuff it falls behind big G

That's actually my only beef with DDG.

Searches in German (and probably other languages than English too) are pretty fucking horrible.

But on English searches it's my preferred search engine. It's definitely good enough in 98% of all cases and there's always !g if everything else breaks.

So I definitely accept the language limitation. Especially since I know what to expect. The privacy focus more than balances this out.

What I do is to use multiple search engines and specialize my searches.

I use "smart keywords" [1], which work similarly to DuckDuckGo's !bangs [2] and most of the time I noticed that I know what the source I want is — if I want a Wikipedia article, I search with "@w" in front, if I'm searching for a dictionary definition, I search with a "@define", if I want to search for a location I search with "@maps", if I want a StackOverflow answer I search with "@so", etc, etc.

I have bookmarks for such search engines, neatly being synchronized between my Firefox instances (works on mobile too) and I got quite used to them. I prefer my own bookmarks, b/c I can always add custom stuff and b/c I don't want an extra round trip to DDG anyway.

Also DuckDuckGo is fine for English results, I often find that searches yielding bad results on DDG will often lead bad results on Google too. When not finding what I'm looking for, sometimes I search on Google too ("@g"), in order to double check. But you won't catch me searching for very personal stuff on Google — e.g. I'll never search for health advice on Google and even if DDG's results are bad, it's either that versus nothing at all.

I'm also not super strict — we do use Gmail and Google Docs at work and that's fine, but I do prefer native clients for Gmail too and I prefer text files in my Dropbox for my own notes. I also pay for YouTube Premium, because otherwise my son is getting exposed to ads, plus I watch YouTube anyway and I'd rather have the ads-free experience on every device I own.

[1] https://support.mozilla.org/kb/Smart%20keywords

[2]: https://duckduckgo.com/bang

> I still can't find a good search engine where I don't spend more than 5 mins trying different keywords to get the results google gives me.

Right and the TL;DR of my reply is — if I spend 5 mins on DDG or other websites, then I would have spent 5 mins on Google too, because in my experience Google's search results have degraded too — due to spam, plus I noticed the results further degrading after I toggled off the search history in my profile, but that's another discussion.

I find some programming related things hard to find in DDG. Most recently anything related to Deno. I've found some other esoteric corners of programming that are only surfaced with Google.

If I want to search Wikipedia, I just directly search Wikipedia. I have a browser search bar shortcut “w ” for exactly that. So I type “w firefox” and it takes me to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox directly. Similarly for many other sites I use regularly.

Really there’s no point in asking a middle man to do that for you, whether they claim to track you or not.

On the contrary, my experience is that I prefer the Google results even when I want to search in a site that has an internal search engine, such as Wikipedia, StackOverflow and Reddit. Both the formatting and the quality of the results are better in Google.

I was responding to the DDG bangs (e.g. @w) usage. A custom search shortcut is strictly better by achieving the same effect without a middle man.

When I actually need to search Wikipedia, Reddit etc. I do use Google. I only use shortcuts when I know they will take me directly to relevant result(s), e.g. with many Wikipedia pages for well-known subjects.

> Also DuckDuckGo is fine for English results

German as well with the toggle to search German sites.

Which is very helpful because with Google, in spite of some available settings, it's impossible to know what kind of custom/localized results being served.

In DDG, I turn it on (mine is Germany toggle as well) for finding restaurants and local support sites, and turn it off when I search anything programming related. Works well so far. I used the infamous "!g" rarely in the last few months.

I've found Startpage ( https://startpage.com ) to be a good compromise -- it delivers Google search results but proxies it through their servers for privacy / less-Google-tracking.

Another handy thing is that Duckduckgo has a flag for it so you can search DDG first then just add '!s ' in front of your search terms to have the search done in Startpage instead.

Also useful thing for iPhone is to set the default search engine for Safari to DDG instead of Google -- I can just type '!s' before my search terms to get Google results without the tracking.

You should know that Startpage has been acquired by an advertising company: https://restoreprivacy.com/startpage-system1-privacy-one-gro...

Search is a privacy vulnerability anyhow; the better it is the more information about yourself you must have surrendered.

Before good search was available the use of bookmarks and bookmark sharing was far more widespread, and discovering new content was somewhat of a social experience.

SearX works very well, as good as Google, according to this comparison (which is the reason I went from DDG go SearX).

[1] https://libretechtips.gitlab.io/detailed-tests-of-search-eng...

But which instance? You have to trust the hoster of the instance, but there seems to be little info on that...

Great point. The SearX documentation addresses your concern here [1] I run my own, for myself only (via WireGuard). Its easy to set one up, for example with Docker [2]. However, I recommend to try it out first. A list of public instances is available here [3]. These lists include Tor entries (if you require anonimity, don't enable JS and use e.g. Tor Browser!), and also mention where they are hosted (if on clearweb). You can try it out there. That being said, one which seems safe (because of the people behind it) is [4]. At least safe to test it.

[1] https://asciimoo.github.io/searx/user/own-instance.html

[2] https://github.com/searx/searx-docker

[3] https://searx.space/

[4] https://search.privacytools.io/

Wouldn't running a private instance be the same as directly queryint google? Like, it queries through the same IP you use, and can build a profile just using that.

The sluggishness with video streaming in Firefox on macOS might be because Firefox supports VP9 so those services will use it to save bandwidth but macOS doesn't provide an API for hardware decoding of VP9 so it happens in software. Safari only supports h264 so that's what gets used and goes through hardware decoding. You can try extensions like h264ify on Firefox (and Chrome) to make it use h264 too.

> Firefox for windows is perfect. I actually think it's faster on Windows than on OSX for whatever reason.

I've found that most crossplatform software runs faster on Windows than on macOS, even when comparing to a better Mac hardware.

One evaluation found that Ecosia is 'better' than Google and Duck: https://www.kylepiira.com/2020/02/07/which-search-engine-has...

Strongly agree with your random observations. Something about Firefox on Mac is just incredibly slow at even basic things like switching tabs. This is on a higher end 2019 15" Macbook Pro. Whereas on Windows 10 it feels just as fast as Chrome.

It is good on Debian flavors of Linux too. I think the issues with Mac OS X are well known and have been worked on for a long time. It used to be image rendering in the past, and it is now other problems with rendering (transparent windows).

DuckDuckGo works for me 95%. If I need local search, I flip that switch (below search-field). There's possibility of advanced searches as well.

Leave the search engine as DDG, and then just preface your searches with !g if you want to cross reference Google

Microsoft used to be very big in highlighting how much more privacy-minded they are. This was a massage pushed to policy makers across the world, and very significantly in Europe. This stopped 100% with the launch of Windows 10; I assume this is because of all the metrics it collects (often unknown to or explicitly against users' wishes).

The only option for privacy-minded search seems to be to use one of the bing wrappers, most notably duckduckgo.

If you want literally Google's results with privacy -- use Startpage.com

no issues on macOS. Older mac maybe?

No problem here either, on a 2015 iMac or 2018 MBP.

I've used FF daily for 20 years on Mac/Linux and never been motivated to trade my security/privacy for a little speedup.

Initially it was FF's ability to block video and invasive JS (w/ or w/o plugins) that was a game changer for me.

Some people just don't get the difference between Privacy and Anonymity.

Care to elaborate? Anonymity is part of privacy, which is part of security.

Security is a multi-perspective problem. Often, false dichotomies are drawn to convince people to give up their own security in order to benefit someone else's security - eg saying "privacy versus security" as if they're in opposition, being personally disassembled and molested at the airport, "national security" in general, etc.

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