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Comment by iSnow | Hacker News Reader

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

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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 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.

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

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