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Comment by anderspitman | Hacker News Reader

I switched over to DDG a few weeks ago. I slowly regressed to more and more !g usage, and finally switched back to GOOG a couple days ago. Then just an hour ago I searched for "google fiber stadia", because I was curious how well they work together. The main reddit result opened in an amp page (and of course reddit pressured me to install the mobile app). I went back to the results and started scrolling down. I honestly couldn't tell at a glance what was ads, amp, or normal links. I personally feel like I'm in a bit of a no-man's land right now when it comes to search, but I think DDG really has a window of opportunity.

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I found that searching was more difficult nowadays. Result from Google is becoming worse, filling with content farm and ads. In some sense, that gave opportunity to become a better search engine without any technical improvement, but better marketing.

Search "phrases" are starting to return more and more useless results. I typed in some phrase as a question and got back a list of news articles about coronavirus. Can't recall what it was but it had nothing to do with coronavirus.

More and more often it will drop words out of my search; import words. I can't help but suspect it's because it has more ads to show me without the most contextually important bits of my search.

Half the first pages are ads. The next few pages may be shopping results even though I'm not searching for something to buy.

Something.. Happened on mobile. The search results now have a bunch of BS "sections" before the actual search results section! WUT.

Seems to be getting harder and harder to craft the right searches to get good results. I miss the days when people would write articles with headlines of "<topic> sucks". Was so much easier to find counter opinions to stuff :/

I don't know if DDG is better or good enough - maybe I'll start using it.

But I do know that google has gone far downhill. and I think that is partially its fault, and also the fault of the internet as a whole. It's just become such an infested ad machine.

Same boat here. Even for technical searches, which ddg is supposed to be good at, I would routinely find the Google results of much more accuracy and quality. Finally switched back.

Luckily, for the things I search, ads are not usually a problem.

You can use !s in ddg to get google results without google.

I'm redirected to startpage for both !s and !sp from duckduckgo. Is there a setting I need to flip?

Startpage is a privacy-oriented proxy of Google search results.

Weren't they bought by an ad-company recently? I used their anonymous browsing extensively, even if it was slow. I've all but stopped using them now.

Hi - Startpage person here. Sorry to hear you stopped using Startpage. We hope you'll give us another chance. Here's more info on the investment by System1/Privacy One: https://support.startpage.com/index.php?/Knowledgebase/Artic...

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://www.startpage.com/blog/company-updates/welcome-priva... 3) We're pushing out more info via our blog & social than before, giving greater insight into how we make money (https://www.startpage.com/blog/privacy-awareness/advertising...) and how we keep your search private (https://www.startpage.com/blog/privacy-awareness/how-does-st...)

Does that bring up Startpage results?

Use !sp for that

Yes

I tried DDG half a year ago when I also switched back to Firefox, but didn't like the results at the time, so I switched to Startpage. Then for the past couple weeks, Startpage has been having technical issues, so I tried out DDG again. And it's nice. Like I don't even think about it. I'm actually impressed

Hi! Startpage person here. Sorry to hear you've been experiencing issues with Startpage. You can always reach out to us via social or our support page: https://support.startpage.com/index.php?/Tickets/Submit/Rend.... It helps us let our team know of any issues that may affect users at large.

FYI: We're rolling out new privacy features this year. We hope you'll give us another chance. Thanks!

Similar. DDG just wasn't quite as good, and Google is getting too sleazy.

There's also Qwant. I've been using it a for a while on PC and found it to be not bad. On Android I kept running into no results a few times, I don't know what that was about.

Mobile Google search is atrocious for my preferences. I pretty much avoid it entirely at this point.

Try using a google mirror instead, like Startpage. The google results without the spying.

Startpage is in bed with an advertising company.

Startpage is a search engine so it doesn't really sleep, hence no need for a bed or any bed-sharing. And we don’t collect or share your personal information.

And yes, we announced last year that System1/Privacy One invested in Startpage. Rest assured, 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. More info on the investment: https://support.startpage.com/index.php?/Knowledgebase/Artic...

Google is an advertising company, so Startpage isn't any worse.

There are other choices, such as SearX, DuckDuckGo, and Ecosia.

Recommended read: "Detailed tests of search engines: Google, Startpage, Bing, DuckDuckGo, metaGer, Ecosia, Swisscows, Searx, Qwant, Yandex, and Mojeek" [1]

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

DuckDuckGo works with the CIA so whatever.

Whataboutism 101.

There are more options than these two.

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