On the other side, DuckDuckGo is becoming pretty reasonable. I now only need to flip back to google for some hard to search technical topics. DDG also brings up a ton more of the old internet, you get way more variety in the search results.
I’d bet that an experienced ddg user might have workarounds for this kind of thing. I’ve certainly found adding a few extra terms gives me what I need.
I looked on DDG for _ubuntu turn on a usb disk after it was switched off_ and it didn't return anything related to the query. I added !g and Google gave me [1] as the second result.
[1] https://superuser.com/questions/1626369/power-off-external-d...
Today I'm quite skeptical of any business that doesn't have a proper business model. I've seen it too many times: offer nice free things until you have enough users, and then start squeezing. Bait and switch.
At this point I'm more interested in internet search that isn't reliant on the goodwill and dignity of a private company.
But they have? DDG was founded 13 years ago...
And "bussiness model": https://wikiless.org/wiki/DuckDuckGo?lang=en#Business_model And: https://www.nichepursuits.com/how-does-duckduckgo-make-money...
Still fallback to !g bangs on every couple of days.