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Comment by guilhermetk | Hacker News Reader

After a few failed attempts to migrate from Google as my default search engine due to poor results, a couple of months ago, I decided to give DDG another try. Been using daily since, I don't even remember what Google is. Not sure if the service did improve that much or what, but I'm glad I could move on. Youtube, you are next.

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I must be in the minority here, but even after trying ddg exclusively, I find myself doing !g all the time, to the point where I just switched back.

I do many technical searches throughout the day, and ddg falls short basically every time. Google is always closer to the mark with my search intent, with for example, deep links to stack overflow answers that ddg misses.

My experience is the same, I eventually just switched my default search to Startpage

I've read so many people say this, but it does not match my experience at all.

I use DDG 100% of the time, and maybe retry on another search engine a couple times per month.

There's clearly some difference, but I don't know what it is:

- Search topic (my searches are mostly tech-related, but other family members are also happy on DDG)

- Query style (I may be a bit literal/keyword-inclined, but others are more conversational)

- Location?

I honestly find it interesting people have trouble with duckduckgo. Although, the one thing I have found lacking is their exact phrase search. For exact queries I end up having to add !g the query. Otherwise, I find myself rarely needing to use google.

Exact phrases, even when quoted?

Yes, when quoted.

> I don't even remember what Google is

If DDG has such severe memory-related side effects, I'm not sure I want to switch.

I started using DuckDuckGo, and one day I woke up and all of my email was on Fastmail instead of Gmail. No memory of switching, but all of my contacts were moved over. My accounts were using Fastmail aliases.

I called up my siblings and asked, "where did you get this email address, why are you emailing me here?" And they just said, "what are you talking about, you've always been on Fastmail." I have no idea what's going on. Sometimes I'll go to update my system, and I'll be using Pacman instead of the normal Debian package manager. Then the next day it will switch back. Sometimes I'll search for things online, and I won't find the result I'm looking for, but then a day later I'll get a physical letter in my mailbox with the answer to my question written on it.

So anyway, long story short, I decided to switch Bing instead and so far that's had only minor side effects.

I think something improved, I used to switch back and forth probably used 80% Google, but know I now use DDG about 80% of the time.

This rate of use is strikingly similar to mine[1].

[1] I made a small add-on for firefox which tracks DDG usage and lists the usage stat.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ddg-stats/

DDG was pretty much evoled to the point where if doesn’t yield a good result, most likely neither will Google.

I would love some ideas for how to get rid of YouTube. What do you have in mind?

As a first step you could try alternative frontends. On the web invidious¹, on Android I suggest NewPipe.

As a next step you could try out entirely different platforms. I personally find Peertube very appealing, because it federates with ActivityPub, which I already use and love. There's also LBRY, but I don't get how it works, so no opinion on that. It seems to have more well known publishers on it though.

¹ AFAIK they don't (may not?) have an official instance. But there is a public list here: https://github.com/iv-org/documentation/blob/master/Invidiou...

What will you move from YouTube to?

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