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Comment by dont__panic | Hacker News Reader

Agreed, with one caveat: DDG image search, in my opinion, is far superior to Google Images because it still allows you to right click -> save image and right click -> open image in a new tab (and it actually opens the image, not the page that contains the image).

Google Images has been deteriorating every year for over a decade now.

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About Google Image, it stopped doing direct links as a result of a lawsuit by Getty Images. How does DDG get away with it?

Another advantage of DDG/Bing is the ability to really turn off safe search. Unlike Google, it will not try to guess if you want nudity or not based on your search query, resulting in weird situations where you have to look for porn in order to get "anatomically correct" pictures.

In Google you can manually turn off safe search too https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/510/filter-expli...

That forces it off no matter what your query is.

I, err, only know this because of anatomy class homework.

Google filters out what it thinks are pornographic results for non-pornographic queries even if SafeSearch is explicitly turned off.

How do you know?

By searching for adult webpages I know exist, and not finding them until I add an adult word to the search query so they're not filtered out.

They should have just stopped displaying Getty Images in results. They're scam artists anyway, claiming to own public domain historic photos and selling them for a thousand bucks a piece.

DDG has a better image search b/c Bing has a better image search and the grand majority of DDG results are just scraped Bing results.

It's probably not scraped, FWIW--Bing has a paid API:

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/bing/apis/bing-web-search-ap...

(Can't find a source indicating that they're using this, but I'd be surprised if they weren't.)

they're probably using it. with the volume of traffic they're using, and the fact Qwant and every other 'private' search basically uses Bing results, paying for API access makes the most sense.

If that's the only thing holding you back from Google Images, this is a useful extension:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/view-image/jpcmhce...

(not arguing for GI over DDG or any other image search, just pointing out that those UI issues -- which were coerced by publisher lawsuits, not Google's own preference -- can be trivially fixed with extensions)

I'd also like to avoid using Google Search when possible to support alternatives.

Sadly, your link is a Chrome extension, and as a Firefox user, it doesn't really resolve my problem at all.

I don't use Google but as far as I can tell the behavior is very similar on both sites. (right click -> open image in new tab) on Google links directly to the image like DDG, though some are links to a data URL or cached versions of removed images on encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com

Exactly. The view file button is also very useful.

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