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Comment by Andrew_nenakhov | Hacker News Reader

An extract from the Rules of the Internet, 2021 edition:

- don't use Chrome

- don't use Google Search

I tried, but I find each and every Google Search alternative lacking. I frequently have to hunt down some bug descriptions or other stuff related to coding and Google Search is really hard to beat.

Even tried Bing, lol

I'm using ddg on all my devices for ~2 or 3 years now, and it is fine by my standards. YMMV, of course.

Ddg is usually adequate for my needs, but especially with code related searches, I often have to fall back to google.

I’m glad ddg exists, and it’s nice to see them improving over time.

I have this workflow:

- use DDG

- if I can't find it, attach !g to my query and be instantly on Google

- either confirm Google can't find it either

- or found it

this way DDG get important data to improve their technology, I avoid being tracked most of the time and I get the same results for the cost of a few seconds here and there.

Yes, DDG isn't exactly amazing for anyone who used Google before 2009, but neither is the "Google" lookalike we see today ;-)

You can use !s instead of !g and you get the google results through startpage without going to google directly.

Good point! I guess !g is just a old habit that I should upgrade now.

If it is just to avoid tracking, may I suggest using a Firefox container for Google search only?

Have you noticed that the quality of Google Search results deteriorated dramatically lately? Sometimes when I google something I don't even get any results at all. As if they no longer indexed any more obscure sites. On the other hand I know some sites completely disabled robots and are not being scanned, to degoogle themselves.

I don't know about the parent post, but for me Google search results wrt to bug reports / general admin stuff have degraded dramatically in the past 5 years. As in you search for a stack trace and you get beginner tutorials on how to set up something only vaguely related.

If alternatives to Google were better than Google, we wouldn’t have to tell people to use them. The whole point is to use alternatives even though they are not as good, because to aid Google is not acceptable.

In my experience, ddg is often better, but many people have a hard time changing their entrenched habits.

I think you're observing personalized search. Next time it happens, try asking DDG a better question, e.g. include "programming" in the query.

Even ignoring privacy and data collection, I find personalized search problematic. Unreliable across computers / VMs, broken across browsers / OS reinstalls, and most importantly not portable across users, you can't tell other people how exactly you found stuff.

It’s not like it’s difficult. This isn’t the world of IE6, where a bloated Netscape 4.7 which failed to work on many sites was the only alternative. (Kant remember when KHTML - later konqurer - became more usable than Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox)

Oh I loved Konq in the olden days. A single tabbed browser for both file system and web. Loved that thing. khtmlview was also an awesome browser component which I made use of in a few QT projects.

Let's remember that khtml was embraced by Apple and became (forked) the rendering engine in Safari...

I'd respectfully disagree, Netscape (Gecko) had better, more up to date standards. The issue was always folks not testing on other than Internet Exploder.

I actually found that the best way in that (horrible) era was to develop Opera-first. That way the amount of fixes for IE and Mozilla was much less than if choosing any of these two as firstm

It didn't when Netscape 4 (which was pre-Gecko) was a thing. The IE vs NN browser war saw both adopting various incompatible non-standard features - e.g. layers in NN, innerHTML in IE - but the set that IE ended up with was closer to what was eventually standardized as HTML5/CSS/DOM.

That sounds like a ruff time for devs.

Blink

Problem was everyone had IE, websites were written for IE, activex, vbscript, etc

If it worked in Netscape fine, but large numbers didn’t.

On top of that, Netscape was a right resource hog.

Does it matter when they're keylogging my Android phone anyway?

One battle at a time.

There are lots of other keyboards to choose from. Unless you want Swype like functionality, in which case only the GBoard is anything like acceptable performance.

Yes, but obviously, there is more work to be done to secure our human rights, as you point out.

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