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Comment by aminozuur | Hacker News Reader

Unpopular to say but extremely popular to do:

I'm happy to sacrifice some of my data, in order to get top notch search results.

Funny thing there is that the quality of Google Search results have absolutely dropped off a cliff for me in the last two years. I'm finding frequently that duckduckgo provides more relevant results with a better UI and faster loading times.

That could be so, I'm willing to give DDG another try. But I use google for stock information, flight updates, to calculate "what date is it 18 days after July 13", and many other weird questions that Google answers instantaneously.

Google's gotten so good with all that, that they've got me by the balls.

https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=what+date+is+it+18+days+aft...

https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=%24GOOG+stock&ia=stock

DDG does a great job with instant answers. You can learn more about the sources at their docs [1]. PS. There are more features than just IA. You can check here [2].

[1]: https://duck.co/ia [2]: https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/features/i...

For me. I just pipe it to DDg.

If, for any reason, I want google. I just append !g to the search.

For example I prefer google when searching restaurants or brick and mortar places with a phone number. dDDG piggy backs on Yelp which isn’t great sometimes and out of date. So I just revert to piping it to google.

Interestingly IT/devops/languange related searches have marketdly improved with DDg and I can get consistent results (ie using the same search string later). Google will often give me random garbage from places that are regularly unhelpful like Microsoft’s answers pages etc.

I tried DDG and Bing and only go back to Google.

If you search anything that has a political interest, it is better to use DDG but everything else Google does it better.

Same here. The “SEO” space is way too aggressive, and while Google does a pretty good battling it in general, the searches that are not top-level mainstream consistently have a lot of noise.

The last time I used Google those "top notch" results meant at least 5 links to pinterest and various other sites that are basically unusable to unregistered users.

With DuckDuckGo I don't get results tailored to my profile, but with a bit of time I got a pretty decent intuition what keywords have good chances for quality results. In the beginning I jumped back to Google for some tricky searches, nowadays I don't even bother because I know the results will most likely be even worse.

The thing that finally drove me off google wasn't data privacy, but how terrible it got in the past few weeks alone. It's started serving me crazy numbers of captchas whenever I'm on my VPN (personal server that I run), one after almost every query. I normally go through them with Buster, but after doing that maybe twice in a few minutes, it forces me to do the visual one.

Add to that how much google search results are these days already, and it's just not worth it anymore.

Yeah Google is unusable over a VPN. The amount of captchas is crazy. Even on corporate connections with cookies blocked it can get antsy because it can't track you well enough.

You can't really 'sacrifice' data. A more technically correct phrasing would be "I'm happy to reveal some data about me in return to get top notch search results".

But even that obscures the most important considerations: what does "some data" mean, and to whom are you revealing it? So if we make it a bit more verbose (but still keeping to the facts), it's more like: "I'm happy to reveal my browsing and purchasing history to unknown third parties, in unknown juristictions around the world, in order to get top notch search results." If you're happy to do make that trade, great, but I'd argue it's not such an obviously good deal as you make it sound.

I like to start with DDG and then add a !g to the search if I’m not getting what I need.

Good news: you don't need to anymore.

I used DDG for a couple of years and I was recurrently reverting to Google. Since I changed to Qwant, I only use Google when looking for images. (I'm in Portugal, in other locations might be different).

Qwant is awful for spanish, and I contacted them about some issues and they just ignore you, despite being a rather small company.

I'm using DDG now.

Maybe I'm missing something but there's a severe lack of a good image search engine. Relevant results, privacy, decent UI - pick one. It's a huge technical (and financial) challenge, but still - Google is very far ahead there despite its tireless efforts to make the UI an excellent example for the problems of modern web design.

I feel that Google Search results in most cases display the results of the companies that have invested in gaming the search engine. It is not always the best results that I am looking for.

For past year or so I have been using reddit as a search engine when looking for suggestions on products, services etc.

Google - mostly for google maps local results.

And DuckDuckGo for anything else.

Understood. DDG can be wonky at times. But just in case, you might want to give this interview/discussion a listen.

Moi? I start with DDG. If I feel I need a second opinion, I'll try Google.

https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/segments/living-und...

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