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submitted 9 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[-] [email protected] 210 points 9 months ago

Fuck Google.

Searching a tracking number from Chrome using Google? Finds a package.

Same search on Google from Firefox leads to nothing.

[-] [email protected] 78 points 9 months ago

Hell net neutrality laws might even have relevance if they keep this up.

[-] [email protected] 26 points 9 months ago

It also does that with other unrecognised user agents.

Personally I don't understand why someone would still use Google when duckduckgo has more features and is just as good for searching and in the very rare case it isn't you can easily switch back temporarily by just adding the prefix "!g" to your query.

[-] [email protected] 26 points 9 months ago

I tried duckduckgo for a while and kept coming back to Google for "real" searches at work. It's not as good for searching in my experience. Yet.

[-] [email protected] 37 points 9 months ago

Duckduckgo has become a little better than it used to be... but google has also become a whole lot worse.

[-] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

an

This is the truth. I switched back when I got a new pc at work, and google was way worse.

[-] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

Yeah, I haven't quite found a replacement that is better than google, but the way the trajectories are, it's only a matter of time.

[-] [email protected] 0 points 9 months ago

If you're looking for research papers, duckduckgo (and yandex) is your friend - google is perfectly unusable for that these days.

[-] [email protected] 17 points 9 months ago

The vast majority of times I go back to Google to do a search I find it also returns useless results. I'm not convinced it's any better than duckduckgo. I think it used to be, but not anymore.

[-] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago

I had the same experience. I used switch between DDG and Google when DDG gave results I didn't want. During the pandemic, I remember DDG giving lots of false positives and odd, non-standard web page hits. Like, if I was searching for current COVID advice, it would give me hits from the health department in Bumfuck, Nebraska instead of, say, CDC (and I don't live in Bumfuck, Nebraska). It has really improved since then and now I can use DDG pretty much exclusively. Not having to scroll past a page of Google ads to find my search results is quite glorious.

[-] [email protected] -1 points 9 months ago

The 6 residents of bumfuck Nebraska would like a word with you after their Trump circlejerk.

[-] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

And I would be honored to speak with them!

[-] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago

I think it depends on wether google is eating the cookies or not

[-] [email protected] 10 points 9 months ago

What's your field?

I'm in a DevOps/Cloud Engineer role and DDG works better for me than Google. No ads and somehow fewer of the gpt generated fake help articles.

[-] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago

Same vein, devops/data engineering. Maybe I'll give it another shot, I'd like to get off Google.

[-] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago

Big same. I’ll even bang out to Startpage to try to avoid directly using Google (!sp vs. !g), but that’s not as good either.

I bow to my search overlord Google. Until I try Grasp, Kagi, and SearXNG, and hopefully one of those will satisfy (in particular SearXNG).

Until then DDG remains my default, and I’ll !g half the time :(

[-] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

Did you use Kagi? How was it?

[-] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago

Been using Kagi for a few months. Now that the unlimited tier is $10 it's a no brainer, for me.

[-] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

One of the three on my to-try list, still.

[-] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

I tried it a few months ago and bought it before the trial was over. Took some time to build trust but it’s still on par with google if not better.

(My account probably looks like a shill for them but I swear I’m just a happy user)

[-] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

I also really like Kagi, and their bundle for Ultimate users of the various text AI tools is also very helpful for work.

[-] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

I really want to ditch Google, but DuckDuckGo aint there my brother.

It may work for some simpler/lazy searches, but for real stuff, nah.

The "good" thing is that Google search is going the way of Amazon, so with Google shooting themselves in the foot and DDG catching up a bit, maybe soon they'll level

[-] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

Works perfectly fine for trouble shooting complicated IT problems.

[-] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

I've switched most defualts over to DDG but Google is still better for some things. Feels sort of like the late 99s/early 00s with Altavista, Ask Jeeves, etc.

[-] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

ddg always drops one of at least two troublesome terms. Which is infuriating.

Might have to do with my settings, in which case it is a bug.

Bangs are gold (which is why ddg is my default) but i still sometimes miss exclusions.

[-] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

Isn't ducksuckgo just paying for google search with a privacy wrapper/obfuscation layer on top?

[-] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago

Yes, except for it's Bing search not Google

[-] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

I think they also use Yahoo and their own scrapers too.

Not that it matters of course.

[-] [email protected] 12 points 9 months ago

I get results with DDG

[-] [email protected] 10 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

It's stupid we need an extension to fix this on mobile devices but there's an extension to fix this on mobile devices

this post was submitted on 12 Dec 2023
1191 points (96.6% liked)

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