autotldr@lemmings.world
on 21 Sep 2023 19:25
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This is the best summary I could come up with:
The U.S. Department of Justice argues that Google has smothered competition by paying companies such as Apple and Verizon to lock in its search engine as the default choice — the first one users see — on many laptops and smartphones.
Even when it holds the default spot on smartphones and other devices, Google argues, users can switch to rival search engines with a couple of clicks.
DuckDuckGo still sells ads, but bases them on what people are asking its search engine in the moment, a technique known as “contextual advertising.” That focus on privacy helped the company attract more users after the Edward Snowden saga raised awareness about the pervasiveness of online surveillance.
It gained even more customers after Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica scandal opened a window into how personal information extracted from digital services can be passed around to other data brokers.
But Lehman said machine learning has improved rapidly in recent years, to the point that computers can evaluate text on their own without needing to analyze data from user clicks.
During the exchange, U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta drew a laugh by asking how internet searches would answer one of pop culture’s most pressing questions this week: whether superstar singer Taylor Swift is dating NFL tight end Travis Kelce.
The original article contains 637 words, the summary contains 212 words. Saved 67%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
The_Helmet_Stays_On@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 21 Sep 2023 20:15
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Good bot
givesomefucks@lemmy.world
on 21 Sep 2023 19:34
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But Weinberg testified that getting users to switch from Google was complicated, requiring as many as 30 to 50 steps to change defaults on all their devices, whereas the process could be shortened to just one click on each device.
Full disclosure, been using Duck Duck Go for a while but…
30 to 50 steps? On a Samsung it’s one click from the address bar to select a search engine and then another to select Duck, Google, yahoo, or bing.
The way it’s worded they’re adding steps for like 10 devices together.
And for it to be a single click, all the options would have to display every time you click the address bar, which would make it look like a 90s web browser.
I’m all about Duck, but that reeks of bullshit because they know most politicians don’t know as much about the internet as a 9 year old does.
VelociCatTurd@lemmy.world
on 21 Sep 2023 19:38
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Step 1. Pickup the phone
Step 2. Look at the screen
Step 3. Power the phone on
Step 4….
IzzyData@lemmy.ml
on 21 Sep 2023 19:47
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That does seem like an exaggeration, but there is truth in the power of defaults for the mainstream audience.
lustrum@sh.itjust.works
on 21 Sep 2023 20:04
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Pixel phones it’s harder:
Change fucking launcher… The google bar is always there, cannot be removed and it’s always google.
hypelightfly@kbin.social
on 21 Sep 2023 20:14
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You're talking abut the search bar at the top of the first home screen right? It's always google but it can be removed.
That should be fixed for sure, it's annoying. Personally I use firefox anyway so I change it to the firefox search widget which uses your firefox default.
lustrum@sh.itjust.works
on 21 Sep 2023 20:25
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You can’t remove it on a pixel without changing launcher or root. It’s at the bottom. It’s not a widget
Do people even use that? I’ve literally never. Even if I want to search something, I’d rather just use my browser where I have tabs. Relatedly, why don’t more apps have tabs? Like apps for Reddit or Lemmy. Literally none that I ever tried have tabs. I know they don’t perform that great, but not even an option?
passepartout@feddit.de
on 21 Sep 2023 20:54
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This fucks me up to no end. I love this phone but that fucking search bar made me switch the launcher. I also love the Pixel launcher (if it wasn’t for that search bar), so I run the alpha release of Lawnchair. Problem is, there is no proper release bc there is not enough manpower to develop it.
Alph4d0g@discuss.tchncs.de
on 22 Sep 2023 04:11
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Pixel owner here. Changed to Nova launcher on day one. No search bar on my home screen and DDG is my default search engine.
Delusion6903@discuss.online
on 23 Sep 2023 19:51
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I use Firefox and DDG on my Pixel but I do keep a small Google option for those (usually location based} particular searches
<img alt="" src="https://discuss.online/pictrs/image/8f732ff7-8311-4d76-a175-5d146d45a479.png">
Delusion6903@discuss.online
on 23 Sep 2023 19:40
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Other launchers are better anyway. But it does become another big step for those that never leave defaults.
30mag@lemmy.world
on 21 Sep 2023 19:54
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You only need one shitty device that has “30 to 50 steps” to say “getting users to switch from Google was complicated, requiring as many as 30 to 50 steps”.
adeoxymus@lemmy.world
on 22 Sep 2023 05:44
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How come that one shitty device has a range of steps rather than a single number of steps?
I would guess that it involves rooting the device or flashing a custom ROM but I don’t know for certain.
avidamoeba@lemmy.ca
on 21 Sep 2023 20:06
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How many clicks does it take to change the search on the home screen?
givesomefucks@lemmy.world
on 21 Sep 2023 22:49
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I didn’t know anyone uses those…
But aren’t they widgets? I don’t even know if you can change it, you might have to use a different widget
StandingCat@lemmy.world
on 21 Sep 2023 23:30
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Is that part of the problem?
EnglishMobster@lemmy.world
on 22 Sep 2023 02:46
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I have a Pixel. The Pixel Launcher that comes stock on the phone has a Google search thing that is not removable except via switching to another launcher. It looks like a widget, but you can’t remove it. It exists on every “panel” of the screen, below the app shortcuts.
I do use it quite a bit when making searches, but only because it’s there already and can’t be removed. If I could remove it, I would.
It’s supremely useful if you want to use Google search. If you don’t on the other hand… 🥲
hypelightfly@kbin.social
on 21 Sep 2023 20:08
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I have a phone with stock android 13, which would be the same experience as a Pixel or other stock android phone.
Here's the process for me:
Tap chrome
Tap vertical ... menu
Tap settings
Tap search engine (it's the top option under basic settings and visible without scrolling)
Tap DuckDuckGo (or bing or whatever)
Definitely not 30-50 steps on a phone setup by Google. Only real complaint is it can't be changed from the search field itself.
lustrum@sh.itjust.works
on 21 Sep 2023 20:33
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Nope. The pixel phones have a Google widget on the homescreen that cannot be removed.
I have a pixel and it would be those steps +
Open Google play, find a launcher, find a new search provider. Set new launcher as default, insert new search provider widget. Probably missed a few steps.
junderwood@lemmy.world
on 21 Sep 2023 20:40
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Yeah, that was my experience as well as a Pixel user. That said, it didn’t take too long to just finally switch to Firefox, Nova launcher, and Duck Duck Go. Mostly painless, and I’m over 40 👴
lustrum@sh.itjust.works
on 21 Sep 2023 20:43
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I’ve done all but the launcher. The gestures became super choppy with another launcher (nova).
I have put a FF search bar above the Google one and I just ignore it.
KSPAtlas@sopuli.xyz
on 21 Sep 2023 21:47
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I personally use kiss launcher, bit of a different paradigm to regular ones but i like it
I’ve been using Niagara on my pixel 7. It takes a bit to get used to, but is so much cleaner. Add that with a browser other than chrome, and duckduckgo. Works pretty well.
octoperson@sh.itjust.works
on 21 Sep 2023 20:20
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If I hold down the home button on my phone, it launches the stupid Google Voice Search thing. Try as I might, I can’t find any way to remap that function.
schmidtster@lemmy.world
on 21 Sep 2023 20:31
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For each browser on your phone* for the default on your phone*
I have 3 browsers on my phone for various stuff. If each is 5 steps, that’s 20 steps just to change them on my phone alone. People have multiple phones, multiple tablets, multiple computers…….
cyborganism@lemmy.ca
on 21 Sep 2023 20:42
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My Samsung phone automatically reverts my favourite browser to the Samsung browser all the time without asking.
Dawn@lemmy.world
on 21 Sep 2023 22:20
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Interesting, I’m using an s20fe for around 3 years now, and haven’t had it happen once, was using an a50 before that, and don’t remember it happening there either
cyborganism@lemmy.ca
on 22 Sep 2023 02:11
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I have an S20 regular and it does it constantly. It’s annoying.
Yeah, what the fuck is that number? Are we just straight up lying in court now?
I decided to see how long it would take me to find out how to change it with no help. Took about 30 seconds. In mobile Chrome, it’s basically the first setting on the settings page. So the steps are (1) open chrome, (2) hamburger menu, (3) settings, (4) search engine. Even if I have to count turning my phone on and opening Chrome if it wasn’t on my home page, it still wouldn’t even add up to 10 steps.
I checked Firefox and it has one extra step. There’s still a search option literally at the top of the settings, just it goes to a page with multiple search related options (default search engine is still at the top). The fact that it worded it as “default” also made me immediately realize you can tap the Google icon in the address bar to choose another option, which must be what you used. 2 steps in that case.
cypher_greyhat@lemmy.world
on 21 Sep 2023 19:41
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Google’s search results are absolute garbage lately. It pushes the most advert-heavy spam sites first.
DuckDuckGo has more reliably been giving me the technical documentation I was looking for in the past year.
pjhenry1216@kbin.social
on 21 Sep 2023 19:50
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If I recall correctly, DuckDuckGo uses Bing's search database (not search itself, just the database).
PeleSpirit@lemmy.world
on 21 Sep 2023 19:52
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They say that’s a myth, that they have their own search engine and database.
givesomefucks@lemmy.world
on 21 Sep 2023 19:55
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It might be a myth, but it would probably be the best search engine.
Bing is too good, they’re trying to capture market share and likely operating it at a loss. But if people leave Google, it’s most likely because they dont want tracked. And Microsoft is probably at best just as bad as Google.
A go between that anonimizes the results would be exactly what people want.
So I wasn't totally right in that it doesn't all come from Bing, but it largely does.
PeleSpirit@lemmy.world
on 21 Sep 2023 20:00
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I was going off of an interview he had, that’s interesting.
hypelightfly@kbin.social
on 21 Sep 2023 20:01
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Their own CEO admits they are required to allow Microsoft tracking in their "privacy" browser due to the contract for search. They use Bing for search, it's not a myth.
For non-search tracker blocking (eg in our browser), we block most third-party trackers. Unfortunately our Microsoft search syndication agreement prevents us from doing more to Microsoft-owned properties. However, we have been continually pushing and expect to be doing more soon.
The first half of the first page is all ads now on Google. It’s utter shit - the things it’s a lot better at than DDG is NLP, being able to understand questions, and anything news related. If you know exactly what you’re searching for though, using the old style of search words works great on DDG
Sentient_Modem@lemm.ee
on 22 Sep 2023 16:20
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What does NLP stand for?
PoolloverNathan@programming.dev
on 22 Sep 2023 17:18
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Most likely Natural Language Processing - being able to understand what you’re searching for
Neato@kbin.social
on 21 Sep 2023 20:45
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When I built my PC last year I decided to just let Edge and Bing go for a bit instead of immediately downloading another browser or changing the search engine. I can count on one hand the number of times I needed to enter in Google.com to get a different or better result. And almost every one of those was because I wanted a google maps results and not whatever weird maps MS has.
Sendbeer@lemm.ee
on 21 Sep 2023 20:58
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I used to be able to search for a tracking number by Google and it would link to the correct delivery tracking service. About 1-2 months ago Google stopped doing this and just gives no results. Why would they stop linking you to FedEx or UPS? Who knows, but my wild ass guess is since Google was not able to link “related” sponsored links along with it they just removed the functionality. They are just actively making their service shittier anytime something minor doesn’t dish out a shitty ad along with it.
I’ve gone on to using Kagi and DDG. Rarely do I miss Google search.
Raiderkev@lemmy.world
on 21 Sep 2023 21:48
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I do this all the time for work. It still works for me when I put a FDX trk # in
Not sure what I am doing wrong, work is when I discovered problem. This is what happens when I try to search in android. Doesn’t work on my work pc or on mine. Maybe it is a Firefox thing?
EDIT: YUP. Tried it with chrome and DuckDuckGo browser and ups tracking search works fine. Wonder what’s going on with Firefox preventing it. Don’t think it’s an extension because doesn’t work in Firefox focus either and my work pc doesn’t have any addons.
hypelightfly@kbin.social
on 22 Sep 2023 05:01
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User agent. Google wants you to use Chrome. You can spoof the user agent in Firefox to get the same results.
kmkz_ninja@lemmy.world
on 22 Sep 2023 10:01
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Google search is less than useful nowadays. Google assistant seems to be Google’s inbred idiot cousin. DDG doesn’t seem to be any better. Most of my searches give the same clickbait results that google does.
Honestly, outside of Google Maps, is there any legitimate value to any google product? Is there a single search engine that is brave enough to give 0 results and also literally parses what you’re asking instead of valuating against what the advertisers want you to see?
I dream daily of Google imploding, and every single investor at that useless company going immediately bankrupt and destitute for the disgusting, addled, brain-malware they push.
amju_wolf@pawb.social
on 22 Sep 2023 10:49
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Kagi looks neat but they’d have to have absolutely amazing results if they want me to pay for them, which I doubt they have… And sorry, but paying $10/month for a fucking search engine (where the actual cost per user is negligible and profit scales with number of users extremely nicely) is just insane.
I guess Google would make at most about $1/month off of ads from me… if I didn’t block them. I’d be willing to pay that, maybe up to $3 for a really good service. But this is just insane, and continues the trend of “oh you like a service that’s not complete crap? I guess you should pay an order of magnitude (or several) more than what’s necessary to provide that service, because fuck you, what can you do?”
If I had to pay for every service like that I’d probably spend $500/month just for that and then they’d still figure out that hey, we can still put ads in and make a little bit more cuz why not, what are they gonna do?
AVengefulAxolotl@lemmy.world
on 22 Sep 2023 13:26
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You are not wrong, but Kagi is basically still a baby. They started maybe like last summer or so? And already decreased their prices twice (well, relative prices.) I think if we give them some time there will be a good priced tier for everyone.
P.S. Search engine is not the only thing they have.
shortwavesurfer@monero.town
on 22 Sep 2023 16:08
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Their lowest plan is $5/mo for 300 searches.
wholeofthemoon@lemmy.world
on 21 Sep 2023 22:31
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Weird, I stopped using DDG because it was useless for troubleshooting IT stuff.
cupcakezealot@lemmy.blahaj.zone
on 21 Sep 2023 23:04
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Good thing about DDG is you can just add a simple bang to search another site right from the results
cypher_greyhat@lemmy.world
on 21 Sep 2023 23:52
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Depends on what you’re doing. I look up Linux admin stuff. DDG points to the Arch Linux wiki which is solid, even for non-Arch Linux stuff. Google points to random sponsored blog tutorials that are sometimes outdated or the author doesn’t have a full understanding of what their copy-paste terminal commands do.
Recently I used google to look up a Kotlin coding thing. It pointed to every source except the official Kotlin documentation.
cupcakezealot@lemmy.blahaj.zone
on 21 Sep 2023 23:03
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I love searching for something on Google and have the entirety of the above the fold be sponsored results
AgentGrimstone@lemmy.world
on 21 Sep 2023 23:27
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My favorite is when I ask how to do something in Google Slides and Google gives me answers on how to do it in Google Docs. So helpful. Not at all frustrating.
cupcakezealot@lemmy.blahaj.zone
on 22 Sep 2023 01:30
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or how every answer is a youtube video like just put it all on a page i can skim and read
amju_wolf@pawb.social
on 22 Sep 2023 10:50
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That’s largely a problem of “modern internet culture” than anything. Resources locked behind proprietary crap like Discord “servers” is a big issue, too.
ComradeR@lemmy.ml
on 21 Sep 2023 23:37
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I miss the 2000s/2010s Google. Now I need to endlessly scroll down the page in an attempt to find something barely useful.
DuckDuckGo has been giving me poor results lately - especially when I look for news, everything is a redirect to Bing now - so I instead use Brave Search. It’s kind of disappointing since DDG had always worked great for me
xTechDeath@lemmy.ml
on 21 Sep 2023 19:48
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DuckDuckGo just sounds so stupid. I refuse to use it
pjhenry1216@kbin.social
on 21 Sep 2023 19:49
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It's worth the weird name if you care about maintaining privacy rights.
lemann@lemmy.one
on 21 Sep 2023 19:59
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I personally use DuckDuckGo, but if you’re just after avoiding handing your searches over to Google there are other more “palatably-named” alternatives like Startpage, OneSearch, Ecosia etc.
xkforce@lemmy.world
on 21 Sep 2023 20:07
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Oh no theyre lost the business of those distracted by tinfoil. Whatever will they do?
hedgehog@ttrpg.network
on 21 Sep 2023 20:11
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I assume you’re not using, and have never used, Google (a silly sounding, misspelled math term that sounds like a sound a baby would make), Bing (sillier yet), Yahoo (it sounds almost as ridiculous as “Google” and their early advertising only made it worse), Yandex (what is it, a cleaning product or a search engine?), Baidu (sounds like a name from a children’s show), Seznam (sounds like a sauce), Brave (literally the same name as a children’s movie), Searx (someone tried to be cool by replacing “ch” with “x”… c’mon), or Qwant (bless you!). I’m curious, though… which search engine do you use?
BrianTheeBiscuiteer@lemmy.world
on 21 Sep 2023 20:35
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Found the one remaining webcrawler user.
TheAnonymouseJoker@lemmy.ml
on 21 Sep 2023 22:18
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I use the cleaning product and the cool guy suffix website.
The cleaning product sure lifts a lot of things out of the cracks 🏴☠️
TheAnonymouseJoker@lemmy.ml
on 22 Sep 2023 16:56
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Absolutely, also the old and obscure blogs, and the non-English websites of the world. Basically it is what Google was 10-15 years ago, and since it is not western, no DMCA fuks given, and they will not gimp their products – search results and reverse image tools.
BubblyMango@lemmy.wtf
on 22 Sep 2023 04:48
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But on Google Pixel for example, you have no trivial way to get rid of the google search bar on every pagw on your home screen, and the global phone search also always uses google for the web results. This can only be changed by replacing the launcher or OS. this is not a fair competition. Google are abaolutely abusing their ability to control the platform.
slacktoid@lemmy.ml
on 21 Sep 2023 23:59
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DuckDuckGo CEO apparently is just another CEO. I’ve been an early adopter that’s been using their search engine long before there were apps or a browser.
What’s stopping people from using DDG isn’t switching to DDG, it’s getting absolutely dogshit results 90% of time. As an advanced user I know I can prefix my search with “!g phrase” to use Google instead of DDG. The sad fact is that despite the ad-ridden result page and tracking, Google is still lightyears ahead in providing relevant, and especially timely results for a user that is both tech-savvy and critical.
They need to improve their product, users will follow a good adfree search engine, that’s a given. Only a fraction of users will put up with degraded results in order to search without tracking.
I sincerely hope they will get their tech up to par. And that their browser on mobile reaches feature parity soon. (as a Z Fold user, DDG browser doesn’t have tabs. Brave, Vivaldi and Firefox does).
The new kid on the block needs humility and good tech, not shittalk. Fuck that CEO,. he’s undermining something very promising and important.
PP_BOY_@lemmy.world
on 22 Sep 2023 00:15
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I’ve never had a problem with DDGs search results that simply rephrasing my query didn’t solve. What are you all searching for that Google’s results are “light-years ahead” of DuckDuckGo’s? (Honest question)
CO_Chewie@sh.itjust.works
on 22 Sep 2023 00:19
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I agree. Honestly anytime I’ve resorted to having to use Google for something I feel the results are even worse than DDG.
MotoAsh@lemmy.world
on 22 Sep 2023 00:22
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Not OP, but I get completely trash results on a ton of technical questions no matter how I phrase it. Not a specific example, but if I’m having an issue with some niche distribution of Linux that requires a specific fix, it’ll instead insist on showing me the massive pile of results for the normal distros instead of the couple of links containing the answer I want.
For as shitty as Google has gotten, it’ll at least give you the one or two better hits before piling on the generic results.
It’s like DDG changes the query to get more results whereas Google will just run the damn search even if they stuff the results with ads and tracking.
Daft_ish@lemmy.world
on 22 Sep 2023 01:10
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The only thing I goto Google for is when I’m looking for local attractions. With Google maps being native everything is just smoother. Also, Google reviews are much more relevant with whatever duckduckgo has integrated (yelp?). Just my 2 cents.
I offset any inconvenience with how Google is not much of a search engine but more of an ad company. Also, I disabled all Googles data scavenging shit and I can’t even load the site without getting hit with a captcha. As someone who saw Google rise from the librarians favorite search engine, when a cable modem was life changing, it’s devastating to see it become everything that’s wrong with the internet.
amju_wolf@pawb.social
on 22 Sep 2023 10:42
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Oh right, don’t get me even started on DDG using fucking Apple maps which are complete garbage in my region. Why can’t they support OSM? :/
sonnenzeit@feddit.de
on 22 Sep 2023 03:32
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In my recent experience Google still delivers better results for tech troubleshooting queries. “linux drivers for acer e15 card reader” at least points me to some semi-relevant pages on Google that could lead to a solution or more ideas where to look while ddg throws a lot of generic stuff that is only faintly related.
Edgelord_Of_Tomorrow@lemmy.world
on 22 Sep 2023 01:08
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Until recently I would have agreed 100%.
But Google’s search has turned to dogshit since it’s started trying to be smarter than it is, and DDG is now giving me results on par with old Google - that is, a list of exactly what I was searching for on the first try.
DDG isn’t the only alternative to Google. I use Kagi and love it. The results IME are definitely better than Google’s.
shortwavesurfer@monero.town
on 22 Sep 2023 16:04
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I just signed up for kagi and so far i like what i see. I am still in my 100 search trial though.
not_amm@beehaw.org
on 22 Sep 2023 02:35
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I always see people saying Google provides better results, but to me it’s awful. I don’t even use DDGO anymore, but Google only shows ads and SEO optimized results that look AI generated. Is this common or am I just an isolated case?
paris@lemmy.blahaj.zone
on 22 Sep 2023 03:35
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I only ever hear people say the opposite. The comment you’re replying to is I think the first time I’ve seen someone say google is better than ddg in the wild. I keep feeling like I’m going crazy when people say ddg is better than google. Google is the only search engine capable of actually finding the results I’m looking for. Half the time it feels like it’s reading my mind.
I genuinely don’t know what people are searching for that yields better results on ddg than google. Every time I’ve gotten someone to give me an example, the thing they supposedly couldn’t find was the first result.
not_amm@beehaw.org
on 22 Sep 2023 04:33
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I gotta say I’m pretty good finding stuff, but i swear Google makes it more complicated for me. In DDGO I only need to change words, in Google I need to filter out half the results to get something human.
But that was when I used to use DDGO, I now self-host SearXNG and only use DDGO for simple searches and when using my phone.
I guess Google needs constant use to give something better(?, which would be another reason for me not to use it hehe
PersnickityPenguin@lemm.ee
on 22 Sep 2023 14:41
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Lol, yeah right? I feel the same way most of the time. On top of that, I’m in Google’s beta AI thing so usually I just get a summary of whatever the hell I’m searching for right at the top and I don’t even have to look at any of the actual results what I’m looking for data.
straycat@lemmy.blahaj.zone
on 22 Sep 2023 03:54
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My experience has been similar to yours. It’s disheartening.
Google results are garbage compared to 10 years ago, but they’re still miles ahead of ddg.
blind3rdeye@lemm.ee
on 22 Sep 2023 03:33
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I often don’t find what I want in DDG; and I then try !g to look for it with Google… and Google doesn’t find it either.
In my experience it is very rare for Google to help me with a search that DDG failed with. As for the converse, I wouldn’t know - because I never search Google first. Why wouldn’t I? They’re evil.
That said, I will point out that I don’t use a google account, and I block most google-related cookies. I know that some people find Google gives better results due to its personalised results; and obviously I’m not ‘benefiting’ from that. So it is believable that you get better results from Google than I do, due to it knowing more about you, and thus guessing what you might want to see.
AeroLemming@lemm.ee
on 22 Sep 2023 04:32
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In my experience, DDG has less relevant results than Google most of the time, but will occasionally end up being way better than Google if you’re looking for something that goes against corporate interests. It’s a lot easier to find free movie sites and whatnot on DDG.
amju_wolf@pawb.social
on 22 Sep 2023 10:40
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I used DDG as my main for about half a year recently (and also a few times in the past). I always eventually end up back with Google. Don’t get me wrong the results aren’t that much better; but they’re definitely marginally better, at least for me. The personalization helps, too.
This time I had a brief detour using Neeva for a while and I was really happy with it; was kinda like a better DDG; but that got defunct so I ended up with Google again in the end and I just don’t see a way out.
I made the switch a week ago. For two days at work, I always used Google, DDG and ecosia(uses bing) at the same time to compare the results. They are the same most of the time for the first 10 to 20 results. There’s sometimes a blogpost that one engine shows that the other doesn’t, but that post never made a difference.
When DDG does not get me helpful results, I can still ask Google to help out.
Mikina@programming.dev
on 22 Sep 2023 12:21
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I’ve switched to DDG almost a year ago, and I never had issues with my search results. Quite the contrary, every time I tried using !g because I simply wasn’t finding an answer, the Google was ad-ridden bullshit full of promoted pages without relevance to what I was looking for.
I guess I’m just used to DDG quality of results, but I never felt like it’s as bad as you say.
Rubanski@lemm.ee
on 22 Sep 2023 15:02
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I am with you. I don’t know what this guy’s about about the search results of Google. A couple comments above people were complaining about the terrible results googles ad driven engine spews out. Also saying he’s so tech savvy and needs the Google “quality”, somehow not knowing !g just completely circumvents the benefits of DDG
I work in IT and use the search engine around 100 times a day in order to find specific answers to specific edge cases. DDG results are just too generic most of the time.
That depends very heavily on what your searching for.
If you’re a programmer or similar, like the poster you’re replying to appears to be, then you absolutely will find DDG crap compared to Google.
I use DDG as my primary search engine, but if I have a tech question, I usually skip it and go straight to Google.
Mikina@programming.dev
on 23 Sep 2023 10:06
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I work part-time as a game developer, and part time as a pentester, so I do search for technical questions quite a lot.
Hmm, now I wonder whether I’m just used to it. I haven’t used any other search engine in more than a year. I’ll have to compare the results more, but as far as I remember every time I couldn’t find what I needed on DDG and resorted to !g, the Google results were even worse.
PersnickityPenguin@lemm.ee
on 22 Sep 2023 14:36
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Yeah, I e had worsening search results from DDG over the past 6+ months. I’ve set it to my default browser, but I often have to switch because the results are not specific enough compared to Google.
And now Googles AI results are a huge time saver.
Sanctus@lemmy.world
on 22 Sep 2023 00:41
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Its the easiest thing in the world. I degoogled everything in my life in like 2-3 days after work. People aren’t switching because the bulk of the world’s populace likes the centralization and using the popular option. They just want to use what everyone else is.
I think if you were to ask “most people” about which search engine they prefer, they wouldn’t really understand the question. I remember in highschool a teacher asked someone what operating system they have at home, and she replied “I think it’s Microsoft Office”.
Tech people tend to severely overestimate non-tech peoples’ understanding of tech.
TeddE@lemmy.world
on 22 Sep 2023 02:02
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Counterpoint: tech literacy is irresponsibly low for a modern developed world that now requires it for everyday operation.
ItsMeSpez@lemmy.world
on 22 Sep 2023 03:14
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Both of these things can be true at the same time.
1847953620@lemmy.world
on 22 Sep 2023 04:03
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owatnext@lemmy.world
on 22 Sep 2023 04:17
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I am lucky my husband likes to learn about this sort of stuff. When we started dating he barely knew the difference between Mac and Windows. Now he uses Linux. Granted, I have to install it, but he keeps on top of maintenance.
Lazylazycat@lemmy.world
on 22 Sep 2023 10:54
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Seriously, most people don’t even know you can go into browser settings, let alone change your default browser there.
amju_wolf@pawb.social
on 22 Sep 2023 10:36
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Migrating email alone is a huge pain. To be truly independent you need your own domain in case whatever provider you choose goes to shit. Any decent one will cost money. Now, most people don’t even know what a domain is, let alone where and how to buy it and use it for email. They also have to pay that mail provider, configure everything and migrate their old emails and forward their old mail. Oh and now they also have different logins everywhere, and because they probably don’t have a password manager either they need to get one or just have different logins for different things.
That’s … a gargantuan task. for an average person - even if you provide them with a rough outline of what they’d need to do they probably wouldn’t be able to do so without help.
Also, as a side note, what do you use for watching videos? What phone do you have? What maps do you use? It’s not so easy to “de-google” completely.
RogueBanana@lemmy.zip
on 22 Sep 2023 11:04
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Migrating emails isnt that hard if u dont set yourself a deadline. Some services like proton offer migration and forwarding from google and you can just slowly update them as you use it. I myself got tutanota and anonaddy and going through my bitwarden entries updating different alias for everything for the past couple days. Still gonna keep the gmail accounts around for emergency but will slowly disassociate from it.
Takes a while but you can just stick with updating them when you do use it if you dont have the time or feeling lazy. For an average person who doesnt value privacy, they have no reason to move out of google anyway so gmail will always be the popular one unfortunately.
Mikina@programming.dev
on 22 Sep 2023 12:18
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This is how I did it. Set up a Protonmail account with my own domain, and set all my Gmail emails to forward there. I set up a special folder for all forwarded mail, to remind myslef that I should change my email on that service, and every time I logged somwhere or received an email from an important service I use, I made sure to change my address there.
It has already been several years, but I think I’ve managed to replace it everywhere within a few months. I haven’t seen a forwarded email in months, so I think I’m finally done.
SnowdenHeroOfOurTime@unilem.org
on 22 Sep 2023 11:03
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I made a list of the Google services I needed to replace, replaced a couple of them, but ultimately that list had dozens of items on it and I’m too tired already to complete it
It is not easy. This comment must be satire?
For example have you tried navigating in a car with a navigation app besides Maps? I don’t have an iPhone and the ones I’ve tried so far suck. I mean, I think Waze isn’t even all that good and Google owns even them now.
I tried Mapquest recently for the first time in 18 years. It was astonishing just how terrible their app and directions were.
I would gladly pay a few dollars a month for an alternative to Google Maps or Waze, but it’s like no company even wants to try and compete with Google and Apple maps.
Mikina@programming.dev
on 22 Sep 2023 12:32
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While I don’t believe you can degoogle that quickly, because some of their services take quite some time to properly switch, such as email, in the end it’s not too hard, but just takes time and some work.
Changing email is easy, if you don’t mind it being a slow process. Just forward your google email, and start slowly replacing any service you notice in the following months/years to your new address.
Google Drive is harder to replace, I went for just running a NAS with Nextcloud, which takes care of most of Google Drive/Docs/Calendar stuff. If self-hosting isn’t your cup of tea, Proton is slowly setting up usable google alternatives - they have Drive and Calendar IIRC.
Now for phone, that’s the hardest task. You wouldn’t help yourself by getting an IPhone. While it would de-google you, there’s basically no point in switching google for apple. Getting android to be usable for stuff like banking, MFA and other bullshit you need your phone for while being degoogled is hard, due to the bullshit Google Services. The only solution I found is to either just go with dumb phone with an obscure OS, or just get a Google Pixel and run GrapheneOS.
Maps are another issue, but thankfully we have a local mapy.cz , which is a pretty OK alternative to Google maps for our country, and I guess they even work worldwide. I don’t drive a car, so I don’t really need it that often.
The only remaining Google service I use is GCloud VPS, because I have some websites running there on the free instances that I’m too lazy to move. But I’m slowly migrating it to Amazon. Not that it would help much, anyway. And also Youtube, but I’m trying to go through the alternative front-ends as much as possible.
EmperorHenry@discuss.tchncs.de
on 22 Sep 2023 21:42
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I don’t believe the creator is actually a bigot. There’s been too many false bigotry accusations going around and now it’s a “boy who cried wolf” type situation
Not the point. Crypto injection links shouldn’t be sneakily added into a “privacy” oriented browser.
However, you never provided any proof that DDG censors and sells user data. You’ve made big claims, but didn’t back them.
davehtaylor@beehaw.org
on 22 Sep 2023 04:16
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Brave is malware made by a company run by a fucking bigot who used his millions to try to strip people of their human rights. They are not your friend
EmperorHenry@discuss.tchncs.de
on 22 Sep 2023 21:40
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I don’t believe the creator is actually a bigot. There’s been too many false bigotry accusations going around and now it’s a “boy who cried wolf” type situation
davehtaylor@beehaw.org
on 24 Sep 2023 20:08
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Brendan Eich literally spent millions of dollars to push for the passage of Prop 8 in California, which would have banned same-sex marriage.
That’s the literal definition of a bigot.
EmperorHenry@discuss.tchncs.de
on 26 Sep 2023 03:38
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Again. There’s been way too many false bigotry accusations going around.
Big tech, namely google, has quite a few a reasons to smear the creator of brave in an attempt to get people to stop using it.
davehtaylor@beehaw.org
on 26 Sep 2023 12:39
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Not false. He admitted it and was forced to out of Mozilla because of it. It was a massive scandal.
EmperorHenry@discuss.tchncs.de
on 27 Sep 2023 00:54
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Does he still think that way?
davehtaylor@beehaw.org
on 27 Sep 2023 05:32
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Why do you seem so invested in the fact that well-known bigots might not actually be bigots?
When people tell you who they are: believe them.
No one is throwing “fake” bigotry accusations at anyone. And if you believe they are, then you also are a bigot. Period.
EmperorHenry@discuss.tchncs.de
on 27 Sep 2023 05:54
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Why do you seem so invested in the fact that well-known bigots might not actually be bigots?
Because there’s too may false bigotry accusations going around for me to believe any of them anymore. I’ve already said that multiple times. Why do people keep asking me that same question?
Think about it. Google wants people to use chrome and to stop using adblockers. Brave is a chromium-based browser that has adblocking, tracker blocking and fingerprint randomization all on by default, but made better when those things are set to aggressive.
People who become aware of brave start using brave and stop using chrome.
google is constantly manipulating results for certain search queries to push an agenda. They do the same shit on youtube by selectively enforcing the rules, elevating garbage channels and demoting good channels.
So why wouldn’t google come up with some bullshit about the creator of brave being a bigot to get people to stop using it? Lots of people are smeared in worse ways for doing even less.
What does being a bigot have anything to do with developing a search engine or a browser?
Mozilla has also gone woke, dwelling into politics instead of developing a browser.
davehtaylor@beehaw.org
on 24 Sep 2023 20:09
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gone woke
The fact that you unironically use the phrase “gone woke” means discussion with you is pointless.
Can’t provide any actual arguments so you just block people you disagree with? Not like I expected much logic or sense from someone such as you.
butsbutts@lemmy.ml
on 22 Sep 2023 04:36
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ok ill try using duckduckgo again
cloudy1999@sh.itjust.works
on 22 Sep 2023 05:47
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I installed a custom launcher that’s close to the stock one on my Pixel 3 specifically to make it possible to remove the Google Search widget. Now I have a Firefox widget that points to DDG.
If any are interested, the launcher is Lawn Chair, and it can be installed via F-droid.
Asudox@lemmy.world
on 22 Sep 2023 07:44
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That launcher is abandoned
Overlock@sopuli.xyz
on 22 Sep 2023 08:23
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Well, it’s only maintained through dependency updates
cloudy1999@sh.itjust.works
on 22 Sep 2023 08:38
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It’s true (and it feels a bit dusty), but it’s still meeting my needs. I hope it’ll get picked up again or perhaps another project will replace it.
Dontfearthereaper123@lemm.ee
on 22 Sep 2023 10:57
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Last update was from more than one year ago, last I checked. Has it been updated since?
Dontfearthereaper123@lemm.ee
on 22 Sep 2023 15:21
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Still more recent than 4 years ago
Mikina@programming.dev
on 22 Sep 2023 12:22
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If you have a Pixel, why not go all in with grapheneos.org?
cloudy1999@sh.itjust.works
on 22 Sep 2023 12:52
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I like the ‘ground up’ approach they mention that doesn’t rely on insecure ‘adversaries’. I’ll check it out soon.
Resolved3874@lemdro.id
on 22 Sep 2023 13:38
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I e been debating switching the graphene for weeks weeks now. But I just know I’m gonna end up installing Google play services on it and completely defeat the whole point of the OS. I’m probably gonna buy the pixel 8 when it comes out so once I have that I’ll put graphene on my current phone and see how I like it.
Mikina@programming.dev
on 22 Sep 2023 13:52
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I’ve just switched to it literally yesterday, and while you will probably not avoid Play Services, being able to install it into a different profile that’s only limited to the few apps that need it is nice.
Also, just the fact that on Graphene Play Services do not have the special privileges as on any android phone, and are subjected to the same limitations as any other app (which are even stricter on Graphene) helps a lot. It also means that even if you end up just running the play services at all times, they can’t do as much as they can on other android phones, and the data they can access without your explicit permission is really limited. So, even that helps by a lot.
Resolved3874@lemdro.id
on 23 Sep 2023 19:35
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This is actually great to hear. I’ll probably still ending up holding off until I have a spare phone to test with just because wiping my phone and redoing everything just isn’t something I’m up for right now though. Thank you very much for the info.
moody@lemmings.world
on 22 Sep 2023 14:01
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Play Services is sandboxed on Graphene and is treated as a regular app, so you can actually disable most of its features, including network access.
helmet91@lemmy.world
on 22 Sep 2023 08:16
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I’ve just tried to search for ‘tank man’ and also ‘tiananmen square’ with DuckDuckGo’s image search, and both of them returned the picture we all know, that dictator Winnie the Poop doesn’t wanna see…
ExLisper@linux.community
on 22 Sep 2023 12:23
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But you didn’t say you expect them to show you the foto. You said you wanted them to issue a statement or something. So the issue was not lack of functionality but not taking a stance. Now that I pointed out how silly it is you’re changing it to “it’s a poor service”. Nice…
DDG does have better results than Google. I’ve not used the latter for years and was surprised by the bad quality of results when I used it once accidentally last week.
Exactly my thoughts as well. You need enable your country, though.
sunbeam60@lemmy.one
on 22 Sep 2023 08:58
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It depends and that’s why both your answers aren’t quite the full truth.
If you are a deep resident of the Google ecosystem (maps, Mail, android etc.) Google’s results are second to none. That’s because Google knows exactly what you care about and what is relevant to you. They know where you work, where you are, what you talk about etc etc.
With all that knowledge google can optimise both ads and answers to you almost perfectly.
If you’re not a deep resident, ddg is better - their results have to work harder, so to speak, because they don’t have your every waking thought to hand as a relevancy scale.
So, yeah, if you give Google everything they make money off it and keep you dependent on them.
Sounds like a dealer, right?
AfricanExpansionist@lemmy.ml
on 22 Sep 2023 13:51
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No, I mean that DDG doesn’t provide summaries or skip to the section of video Tha answers your questions. Google has some great features
I am a regular DDG user but it depends what I’m searching for. I also use Qwant
pineapplelover@lemm.ee
on 22 Sep 2023 16:11
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Yeah brave has a bit of an upper hand on that front but I switched to ddg recently because of news on brave’s ceo being a not nice guy.
LillyPip@lemmy.ca
on 22 Sep 2023 07:30
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Daily reminder that unregulated capitalism hurts all of us.
SocialMediaRefugee@lemmy.ml
on 22 Sep 2023 15:18
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Laziness or not giving a damn is a choice
phoenixz@lemmy.ca
on 22 Sep 2023 15:25
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Agreed!
Nice to -for once- see someone else who recognizes that capitalism in itself isn’t a problem as long as it is very well regulated and doesn’t immediately go “Communism is the answer!”
AlmightyTritan@beehaw.org
on 22 Sep 2023 15:53
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I always look at people who jump to “Communism is the answer” just have issues with properly articulating what they feel and just jump to a reactionary catch all comment.
I myself don’t like a lot of flaws with the core tenants of capitalism, so I often find myself saying reactionary shit like “capitalism bad” sometimes too.
I think this goes for a lot of discussion on economic models. There’s a lot of nuisance to it, and I think so many folks range somewhere between knowing nothing and knowing enough to be dangerous, but lack the energy, time, patience, or skill to really get it across online.
Often we see people posting about stuff so frequently because of a frustration with the current system, so unless it’s like a bad faith argument I mostly just tune it out, or go “hell yeah” in my little monkey brain depending on if it’s something I agree with slightly.
millie@lemmy.film
on 22 Sep 2023 20:27
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It’s not reactionary to say that capitalism is bad. Capitalism is literally terrible. Not commerce, capitalism. Buying and selling things isn’t wrong, but extracting and consolidating surplus labor from the working class is.
AlmightyTritan@beehaw.org
on 24 Sep 2023 12:03
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No, you’re right. I’m saying it’s reactionary to write only “Capitalism is bad”, and nothing else. Mostly because in terms of a discussion it makes it hard to keep talking about why capitalism is bad with such a broad statement. This is just the opinion of one dude on the internet who thinks of comments in a very specific way, and I get that others agree probably fine with broad comments of that style.
chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 22 Sep 2023 20:29
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What worries me about it is that since for various reasons a lot of people just don’t have it in them to spare any thought on the question of how the economy works, they buy into rhetoric about economics being a fake conspiracy where supply and demand isn’t real and actually all economic problems are trivial and only require putting the bad guys in their place. The frustration is justified but stuff like rent control just doesn’t work and you can see why it doesn’t work if you’re willing to honestly think about it.
AlmightyTritan@beehaw.org
on 24 Sep 2023 12:15
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You say “Rent Control” doesn’t work, but having seen locations with rent control, and living in a place without it I fundamentally disagree with that statement.
In any economic model, housing is a basic need for humans. While rent control isn’t a solution, I don’t think it’s ever intended to be one. It is a stop gap, or a step implemented in a larger plan. It’s basically regulations for combating price fixing.
If you live in a place fraught with renoviction, the act of using a renovation as an excuse to evict people and charge more for the same thing, then the person who has been forced back into the market does not have to become homeless.
To another point, I don’t think rent control would prevent development of new housing either, as landlords aren’t the only folks who buy properties, even though it’s almost financially impossible to buy a house in certain inflated markets these days no matter who you are.
chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 24 Sep 2023 19:55
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While rent control isn’t a solution, I don’t think it’s ever intended to be one
The rhetoric I see around it paints it as a solution, and there are people who say with full sincerity that supply and demand is capitalist propaganda.
renoviction, the act of using a renovation as an excuse to evict people and charge more for the same thing
This whole dynamic is only surface level. The excuse doesn’t matter; if the whole market can get those prices, it’s because of the number/means of people seeking housing vs the supply. It will happen with or without an excuse to smooth things over. There are plenty of very run-down places in high demand low supply areas that cost huge amounts without any such aesthetic justification.
I don’t think rent control would prevent development of new housing either, as landlords aren’t the only folks who buy properties, even though it’s almost financially impossible to buy a house in certain inflated markets these days no matter who you are.
It demonstrably has prevented and does prevent the development of new housing, among other market distortions, and afaik this is one of the few things economists broadly agree on. To your point, maybe it would be possible that over time, eventually, all rental apartments would be converted into condos etc. as a market response to rent control. But given the demand specifically for rentals (for which there is then artificially reduced incentive to meet), and the difficulty you mention for most people actually buying a home outright, it’s easy to see why in practice there will be an extended, possibly indefinite, period where housing supply will be suppressed by the policy. One reason it could end up indefinite is that homeowners as a voting class have an incentive to protect the value of their properties, and that often means passing regulations that in practice constrain housing supply. When most voters are renters, this is less of a problem.
The way I see it, looking at housing markets as being “inflated”, as if the prices were the result of some trick of greedly landlords, is completely wrong and missing the bigger picture. Real estate is a wealth asset, a store of wealth, and all of those are skyrocketing in dollar terms beyond official measures of inflation, as part of a process of wealth being transferred away from the majority of the population and the value/negotiating power of labor declining. If people only look at their personal situations and false ideas of what prices “should” be and what is subjectively “fair”, they miss this bigger picture and overlook solutions that could actually work.
Which, in the case of housing, is more housing.
IHaveTwoCows@lemm.ee
on 22 Sep 2023 19:12
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The key is “very well regulated”, starting with the ban of corporate lobbyists and abolition and criminalization of PAC donations.
COMMERCE in itself isnt bad. Leveraging money and power to extract resources and value without actually creation anything of value-i.e. Capitalism- is very, very bad.
Make a product and sell it? …good.
Perform a service for money?..good.
Buy wholesale, sell retail?..fine.
Steal natural resources, fund political coups for resources, start wars for resourcces, force destruction of oroduct or allow corporations to hoard resources to corner a market?..BAD
I’m sorry but your definition of capitalism is incorrect.
Leveraging money and power to extract resources and value without actually creation anything of value-i.e. Capitalism- is very, very bad.
Yeah, it’s something that capitalism as currently is (mostly in the US) allows, but that isn’t the basis of what capitalism is.
I fully agree with you that capitalism needs very strick limits to not be abusive, but it’s still a hundred times better than communism, something that too many people here propose as the final great solution
IHaveTwoCows@lemm.ee
on 25 Sep 2023 20:33
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Actually I think the problem is capitalists entering into forums and insisting that any regulation of capitalism is communism by default. It’s not a case of one or the other, but there is absolutely no way to reform the system from within its current structure. We would have to first abolish any and all corporate lobbying and criminalize the submission of donor checks to legislators, and then repeal any and all tax breaks and pro corporate laws and regulations passed since 1980.
IHaveTwoCows@lemm.ee
on 22 Sep 2023 19:17
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Also: the stock market and hedge fund architecture is an absolute sham and should be criminalized. Virtually none of it is about entrepreneur startup money; all if it is about creating value out of thin air with nothing to support it. It collapses and destroys our economy on a regular, nearly predictable basis and results in greater wealth disparagement as the whales grab up all the collapsed wealth
Capitalism in itself is very much the problem. There is no positive aspect to the extraction of surplus value (“profit”), hoarding the vast majority of it into the hands of the wealthiest “private” property owners.
I use DDG as my primary search engine, but I find myself repeating searches with Google so often, I wrote a userscript to add a “Search with Google” link to the top of the DDG search results.
octochamp@lemmy.ml
on 22 Sep 2023 22:43
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I’ve seen a lot of chat recently about Google search quality tanking and it’s made me realise that I haven’t re-searched a DDG query in Google for a really, really long time. when I first started using DDG as my main a few years back, I would repeat searches in Google probably 25% of the time? but I honestly can’t remember the last time I had to now. Been at least 6 months!
unfortunately, I do that often. Even when using meta search engine which sources to google, Google UX and results are simply better but sometime feeling is just not rationale
regarding duckduckgo, it is simply too long to type and people rarely configure their browser, especially on mobile.
so yeah, in a sense, Weinberg is right. At the very least, a choice should be provided on first run but you can’t force people to be curious.
BurnedDonutHole@lemmy.ml
on 23 Sep 2023 08:45
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I agree. At least in my experience Google does a better job when it comes to search engine. I use DDG as well but when it comes to searching specific things Google beats it unfortunately.
RustedSwitch@lemmy.world
on 23 Sep 2023 10:54
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Sure, but I think there’s still benefit to what the other person did. Search DDG by default, and then if you don’t see good results, it’s one extra click for the google search… vs mousing, clicking, 2 keystrokes…
SocialMediaRefugee@lemmy.ml
on 22 Sep 2023 15:19
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I could switch but I don’t see any need to. The lockin from apple apps and google play apps is far stronger.
Shellbeach@lemmy.world
on 22 Sep 2023 18:17
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I’ve been using freeadblocker browser after stumbling on it (with DDG as a search engine). Does it have anything to do with Google/chrome? I’m confused, because I’ve been using it for so long and it blocks all ads so I guess I don’t know why no one is using it unless it’s some Google stepchild I don’t know about and I’m still googled without knowing it.
ladybug@mander.xyz
on 22 Sep 2023 18:22
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lckdscl@whiskers.bim.boats
on 22 Sep 2023 19:01
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Hmmm, that isn’t open source, I don’t know if one can trust it. Why does a browser need in-app purchases? Try Mull or Cromite.
Edit: from the description, it uses Brave Search (to answer you question), so it doesn’t send to Google your queries. But I’d be careful with an app with a bunch of SEO keywords in its description.
Loudergood@lemmy.sdf.org
on 22 Sep 2023 22:01
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And so many red flags like a free VPN (so they route all your traffic), “powered with AI technology” (what for?), not open source…
A browser is a very sensitive piece of software, you trust it with a lot of personal data. Don’t use a random one like this one.
FIST_FILLET@lemmy.ml
on 24 Sep 2023 13:27
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that’s DuckDuckGo and “Names Database” CEO*, folks. PLEASE do not look to this man as a beacon for anything privacy-related, even when he says something true.
Okay, sure. I agree that this is an unfair advantage. But like, I’ve been using DuckDuckGo for a while and the best thing about it is the ability to easily search other search engines. Their own actual search engine isn’t exactly great.
Mostly using it makes me realize how much time Google saves me by already having my location and search history. I still don’t trust them and it isn’t what it was a few years ago, but it’s the actual quality of their search that’s keeping them on top.
Also like, why does clicking a thumbnail in video search not take me to the video? Dumb.
threaded - newest
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The U.S. Department of Justice argues that Google has smothered competition by paying companies such as Apple and Verizon to lock in its search engine as the default choice — the first one users see — on many laptops and smartphones.
Even when it holds the default spot on smartphones and other devices, Google argues, users can switch to rival search engines with a couple of clicks.
DuckDuckGo still sells ads, but bases them on what people are asking its search engine in the moment, a technique known as “contextual advertising.” That focus on privacy helped the company attract more users after the Edward Snowden saga raised awareness about the pervasiveness of online surveillance.
It gained even more customers after Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica scandal opened a window into how personal information extracted from digital services can be passed around to other data brokers.
But Lehman said machine learning has improved rapidly in recent years, to the point that computers can evaluate text on their own without needing to analyze data from user clicks.
During the exchange, U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta drew a laugh by asking how internet searches would answer one of pop culture’s most pressing questions this week: whether superstar singer Taylor Swift is dating NFL tight end Travis Kelce.
The original article contains 637 words, the summary contains 212 words. Saved 67%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Good bot
Full disclosure, been using Duck Duck Go for a while but…
30 to 50 steps? On a Samsung it’s one click from the address bar to select a search engine and then another to select Duck, Google, yahoo, or bing.
The way it’s worded they’re adding steps for like 10 devices together.
And for it to be a single click, all the options would have to display every time you click the address bar, which would make it look like a 90s web browser.
I’m all about Duck, but that reeks of bullshit because they know most politicians don’t know as much about the internet as a 9 year old does.
Step 1. Pickup the phone Step 2. Look at the screen Step 3. Power the phone on Step 4….
Step 0 put hand in pocket
That does seem like an exaggeration, but there is truth in the power of defaults for the mainstream audience.
Pixel phones it’s harder:
Change fucking launcher… The google bar is always there, cannot be removed and it’s always google.
You're talking abut the search bar at the top of the first home screen right? It's always google but it can be removed.
That should be fixed for sure, it's annoying. Personally I use firefox anyway so I change it to the firefox search widget which uses your firefox default.
You can’t remove it on a pixel without changing launcher or root. It’s at the bottom. It’s not a widget
Yep. I wasted hours on that. Worst thing is that it is combined with the app and setting search.
iPhone.
Settings > Safari > Search Engine
I can change the browser search just as easily on a pixel. Just the default device search is always Google.
Same with iOS
Do people even use that? I’ve literally never. Even if I want to search something, I’d rather just use my browser where I have tabs. Relatedly, why don’t more apps have tabs? Like apps for Reddit or Lemmy. Literally none that I ever tried have tabs. I know they don’t perform that great, but not even an option?
This fucks me up to no end. I love this phone but that fucking search bar made me switch the launcher. I also love the Pixel launcher (if it wasn’t for that search bar), so I run the alpha release of Lawnchair. Problem is, there is no proper release bc there is not enough manpower to develop it.
Pixel owner here. Changed to Nova launcher on day one. No search bar on my home screen and DDG is my default search engine.
I use Firefox and DDG on my Pixel but I do keep a small Google option for those (usually location based} particular searches <img alt="" src="https://discuss.online/pictrs/image/8f732ff7-8311-4d76-a175-5d146d45a479.png">
Other launchers are better anyway. But it does become another big step for those that never leave defaults.
You only need one shitty device that has “30 to 50 steps” to say “getting users to switch from Google was complicated, requiring as many as 30 to 50 steps”.
How come that one shitty device has a range of steps rather than a single number of steps?
I would guess that it involves rooting the device or flashing a custom ROM but I don’t know for certain.
How many clicks does it take to change the search on the home screen?
I didn’t know anyone uses those…
But aren’t they widgets? I don’t even know if you can change it, you might have to use a different widget
Is that part of the problem?
I have a Pixel. The Pixel Launcher that comes stock on the phone has a Google search thing that is not removable except via switching to another launcher. It looks like a widget, but you can’t remove it. It exists on every “panel” of the screen, below the app shortcuts.
I do use it quite a bit when making searches, but only because it’s there already and can’t be removed. If I could remove it, I would.
It’s supremely useful if you want to use Google search. If you don’t on the other hand… 🥲
I have a phone with stock android 13, which would be the same experience as a Pixel or other stock android phone.
Here's the process for me:
Definitely not 30-50 steps on a phone setup by Google. Only real complaint is it can't be changed from the search field itself.
Nope. The pixel phones have a Google widget on the homescreen that cannot be removed.
I have a pixel and it would be those steps +
Open Google play, find a launcher, find a new search provider. Set new launcher as default, insert new search provider widget. Probably missed a few steps.
Yeah, that was my experience as well as a Pixel user. That said, it didn’t take too long to just finally switch to Firefox, Nova launcher, and Duck Duck Go. Mostly painless, and I’m over 40 👴
I’ve done all but the launcher. The gestures became super choppy with another launcher (nova).
I have put a FF search bar above the Google one and I just ignore it.
I personally use kiss launcher, bit of a different paradigm to regular ones but i like it
I’ve been using Niagara on my pixel 7. It takes a bit to get used to, but is so much cleaner. Add that with a browser other than chrome, and duckduckgo. Works pretty well.
If I hold down the home button on my phone, it launches the stupid Google Voice Search thing. Try as I might, I can’t find any way to remap that function.
For each browser on your phone* for the default on your phone*
I have 3 browsers on my phone for various stuff. If each is 5 steps, that’s 20 steps just to change them on my phone alone. People have multiple phones, multiple tablets, multiple computers…….
My Samsung phone automatically reverts my favourite browser to the Samsung browser all the time without asking.
Interesting, I’m using an s20fe for around 3 years now, and haven’t had it happen once, was using an a50 before that, and don’t remember it happening there either
I have an S20 regular and it does it constantly. It’s annoying.
Huh, must be a region thing
Yeah my last few phones were Samsungs, same with my parents and friends and none of us have ever had that issue. In the US
wE hAd aN uPdaTe bUG tHAt ACCIDENTLY cAuSeD sOmE tHInGs tO rEseT
Yeah, what the fuck is that number? Are we just straight up lying in court now?
I decided to see how long it would take me to find out how to change it with no help. Took about 30 seconds. In mobile Chrome, it’s basically the first setting on the settings page. So the steps are (1) open chrome, (2) hamburger menu, (3) settings, (4) search engine. Even if I have to count turning my phone on and opening Chrome if it wasn’t on my home page, it still wouldn’t even add up to 10 steps.
I checked Firefox and it has one extra step. There’s still a search option literally at the top of the settings, just it goes to a page with multiple search related options (default search engine is still at the top). The fact that it worded it as “default” also made me immediately realize you can tap the Google icon in the address bar to choose another option, which must be what you used. 2 steps in that case.
Google’s search results are absolute garbage lately. It pushes the most advert-heavy spam sites first.
DuckDuckGo has more reliably been giving me the technical documentation I was looking for in the past year.
If I recall correctly, DuckDuckGo uses Bing's search database (not search itself, just the database).
They say that’s a myth, that they have their own search engine and database.
It might be a myth, but it would probably be the best search engine.
Bing is too good, they’re trying to capture market share and likely operating it at a loss. But if people leave Google, it’s most likely because they dont want tracked. And Microsoft is probably at best just as bad as Google.
A go between that anonimizes the results would be exactly what people want.
You mean that they just don't frontload ads on results?
https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/sources/
So I wasn't totally right in that it doesn't all come from Bing, but it largely does.
I was going off of an interview he had, that’s interesting.
Their own CEO admits they are required to allow Microsoft tracking in their "privacy" browser due to the contract for search. They use Bing for search, it's not a myth.
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/duckduckgo-browser-allows-microsoft-trackers-due-to-search-agreement/
This is no longer the case as of August last year, they managed to get the terms of the agreement changed pcworld.com/…/duckduckgo-will-now-block-microsoft…
Edit: Duckduckgo’s statement on it spreadprivacy.com/more-privacy-and-transparency/
They still have the disclaimer on the app in the pay store. It was added after they were called out.
The fact that they hid it in the first place is disqualifying for a privacy focused product.
Oh definitely, I’m a bit hesitant about them because of things like that, I just consider them as an “it’s at least better than Google” kind of thing
Yeah, I agree with that. I would never use their browser or other products but their search fits the "at least it's not google/MS".
I even think what the CEO is saying is correct here, Google is doing it's best kill competition.
afaik they use multiple, including bing and their own indexer (duckduckbot afaik)
They literally state this themselves, it’s not a myth.
I can’t find shit anymore, always spam sites angry at my ad blocker or YouTube videos, which are angry at my ad blocker.
The first half of the first page is all ads now on Google. It’s utter shit - the things it’s a lot better at than DDG is NLP, being able to understand questions, and anything news related. If you know exactly what you’re searching for though, using the old style of search words works great on DDG
What does NLP stand for?
Most likely Natural Language Processing - being able to understand what you’re searching for
When I built my PC last year I decided to just let Edge and Bing go for a bit instead of immediately downloading another browser or changing the search engine. I can count on one hand the number of times I needed to enter in Google.com to get a different or better result. And almost every one of those was because I wanted a google maps results and not whatever weird maps MS has.
I used to be able to search for a tracking number by Google and it would link to the correct delivery tracking service. About 1-2 months ago Google stopped doing this and just gives no results. Why would they stop linking you to FedEx or UPS? Who knows, but my wild ass guess is since Google was not able to link “related” sponsored links along with it they just removed the functionality. They are just actively making their service shittier anytime something minor doesn’t dish out a shitty ad along with it.
I’ve gone on to using Kagi and DDG. Rarely do I miss Google search.
I do this all the time for work. It still works for me when I put a FDX trk # in
Not sure what I am doing wrong, work is when I discovered problem. This is what happens when I try to search in android. Doesn’t work on my work pc or on mine. Maybe it is a Firefox thing?
EDIT: YUP. Tried it with chrome and DuckDuckGo browser and ups tracking search works fine. Wonder what’s going on with Firefox preventing it. Don’t think it’s an extension because doesn’t work in Firefox focus either and my work pc doesn’t have any addons.
User agent. Google wants you to use Chrome. You can spoof the user agent in Firefox to get the same results.
Google search is less than useful nowadays. Google assistant seems to be Google’s inbred idiot cousin. DDG doesn’t seem to be any better. Most of my searches give the same clickbait results that google does.
Honestly, outside of Google Maps, is there any legitimate value to any google product? Is there a single search engine that is brave enough to give 0 results and also literally parses what you’re asking instead of valuating against what the advertisers want you to see?
I dream daily of Google imploding, and every single investor at that useless company going immediately bankrupt and destitute for the disgusting, addled, brain-malware they push.
Kagi looks neat but they’d have to have absolutely amazing results if they want me to pay for them, which I doubt they have… And sorry, but paying $10/month for a fucking search engine (where the actual cost per user is negligible and profit scales with number of users extremely nicely) is just insane.
I guess Google would make at most about $1/month off of ads from me… if I didn’t block them. I’d be willing to pay that, maybe up to $3 for a really good service. But this is just insane, and continues the trend of “oh you like a service that’s not complete crap? I guess you should pay an order of magnitude (or several) more than what’s necessary to provide that service, because fuck you, what can you do?”
If I had to pay for every service like that I’d probably spend $500/month just for that and then they’d still figure out that hey, we can still put ads in and make a little bit more cuz why not, what are they gonna do?
You are not wrong, but Kagi is basically still a baby. They started maybe like last summer or so? And already decreased their prices twice (well, relative prices.) I think if we give them some time there will be a good priced tier for everyone.
P.S. Search engine is not the only thing they have.
Their lowest plan is $5/mo for 300 searches.
Weird, I stopped using DDG because it was useless for troubleshooting IT stuff.
Good thing about DDG is you can just add a simple bang to search another site right from the results
Depends on what you’re doing. I look up Linux admin stuff. DDG points to the Arch Linux wiki which is solid, even for non-Arch Linux stuff. Google points to random sponsored blog tutorials that are sometimes outdated or the author doesn’t have a full understanding of what their copy-paste terminal commands do.
Recently I used google to look up a Kotlin coding thing. It pointed to every source except the official Kotlin documentation.
I love searching for something on Google and have the entirety of the above the fold be sponsored results
My favorite is when I ask how to do something in Google Slides and Google gives me answers on how to do it in Google Docs. So helpful. Not at all frustrating.
or how every answer is a youtube video like just put it all on a page i can skim and read
That’s largely a problem of “modern internet culture” than anything. Resources locked behind proprietary crap like Discord “servers” is a big issue, too.
I miss the 2000s/2010s Google. Now I need to endlessly scroll down the page in an attempt to find something barely useful.
DuckDuckGo has been giving me poor results lately - especially when I look for news, everything is a redirect to Bing now - so I instead use Brave Search. It’s kind of disappointing since DDG had always worked great for me
DuckDuckGo just sounds so stupid. I refuse to use it
It's worth the weird name if you care about maintaining privacy rights.
I personally use DuckDuckGo, but if you’re just after avoiding handing your searches over to Google there are other more “palatably-named” alternatives like Startpage, OneSearch, Ecosia etc.
Oh no theyre lost the business of those distracted by tinfoil. Whatever will they do?
I assume you’re not using, and have never used, Google (a silly sounding, misspelled math term that sounds like a sound a baby would make), Bing (sillier yet), Yahoo (it sounds almost as ridiculous as “Google” and their early advertising only made it worse), Yandex (what is it, a cleaning product or a search engine?), Baidu (sounds like a name from a children’s show), Seznam (sounds like a sauce), Brave (literally the same name as a children’s movie), Searx (someone tried to be cool by replacing “ch” with “x”… c’mon), or Qwant (bless you!). I’m curious, though… which search engine do you use?
Found the one remaining webcrawler user.
I use the cleaning product and the cool guy suffix website.
The cleaning product sure lifts a lot of things out of the cracks 🏴☠️
Absolutely, also the old and obscure blogs, and the non-English websites of the world. Basically it is what Google was 10-15 years ago, and since it is not western, no DMCA fuks given, and they will not gimp their products – search results and reverse image tools.
Baidu means “100 times” in Chinese and originates from a classic Chinese love poem…
Bing says what?
Ker-ching! 🤑
Bullshit. It’s not that hard in the least bit to change search.
Agreed, but the plebs don’t know or care.
But on Google Pixel for example, you have no trivial way to get rid of the google search bar on every pagw on your home screen, and the global phone search also always uses google for the web results. This can only be changed by replacing the launcher or OS. this is not a fair competition. Google are abaolutely abusing their ability to control the platform.
Im just here to watch the slimeballs duke it out.
DuckDuckGo CEO apparently is just another CEO. I’ve been an early adopter that’s been using their search engine long before there were apps or a browser.
What’s stopping people from using DDG isn’t switching to DDG, it’s getting absolutely dogshit results 90% of time. As an advanced user I know I can prefix my search with “!g phrase” to use Google instead of DDG. The sad fact is that despite the ad-ridden result page and tracking, Google is still lightyears ahead in providing relevant, and especially timely results for a user that is both tech-savvy and critical.
They need to improve their product, users will follow a good adfree search engine, that’s a given. Only a fraction of users will put up with degraded results in order to search without tracking.
I sincerely hope they will get their tech up to par. And that their browser on mobile reaches feature parity soon. (as a Z Fold user, DDG browser doesn’t have tabs. Brave, Vivaldi and Firefox does).
The new kid on the block needs humility and good tech, not shittalk. Fuck that CEO,. he’s undermining something very promising and important.
I’ve never had a problem with DDGs search results that simply rephrasing my query didn’t solve. What are you all searching for that Google’s results are “light-years ahead” of DuckDuckGo’s? (Honest question)
I agree. Honestly anytime I’ve resorted to having to use Google for something I feel the results are even worse than DDG.
Not OP, but I get completely trash results on a ton of technical questions no matter how I phrase it. Not a specific example, but if I’m having an issue with some niche distribution of Linux that requires a specific fix, it’ll instead insist on showing me the massive pile of results for the normal distros instead of the couple of links containing the answer I want.
For as shitty as Google has gotten, it’ll at least give you the one or two better hits before piling on the generic results.
It’s like DDG changes the query to get more results whereas Google will just run the damn search even if they stuff the results with ads and tracking.
The only thing I goto Google for is when I’m looking for local attractions. With Google maps being native everything is just smoother. Also, Google reviews are much more relevant with whatever duckduckgo has integrated (yelp?). Just my 2 cents.
I offset any inconvenience with how Google is not much of a search engine but more of an ad company. Also, I disabled all Googles data scavenging shit and I can’t even load the site without getting hit with a captcha. As someone who saw Google rise from the librarians favorite search engine, when a cable modem was life changing, it’s devastating to see it become everything that’s wrong with the internet.
Oh right, don’t get me even started on DDG using fucking Apple maps which are complete garbage in my region. Why can’t they support OSM? :/
In my recent experience Google still delivers better results for tech troubleshooting queries. “linux drivers for acer e15 card reader” at least points me to some semi-relevant pages on Google that could lead to a solution or more ideas where to look while ddg throws a lot of generic stuff that is only faintly related.
Until recently I would have agreed 100%.
But Google’s search has turned to dogshit since it’s started trying to be smarter than it is, and DDG is now giving me results on par with old Google - that is, a list of exactly what I was searching for on the first try.
DDG isn’t the only alternative to Google. I use Kagi and love it. The results IME are definitely better than Google’s.
I just signed up for kagi and so far i like what i see. I am still in my 100 search trial though.
I always see people saying Google provides better results, but to me it’s awful. I don’t even use DDGO anymore, but Google only shows ads and SEO optimized results that look AI generated. Is this common or am I just an isolated case?
I only ever hear people say the opposite. The comment you’re replying to is I think the first time I’ve seen someone say google is better than ddg in the wild. I keep feeling like I’m going crazy when people say ddg is better than google. Google is the only search engine capable of actually finding the results I’m looking for. Half the time it feels like it’s reading my mind.
I genuinely don’t know what people are searching for that yields better results on ddg than google. Every time I’ve gotten someone to give me an example, the thing they supposedly couldn’t find was the first result.
I gotta say I’m pretty good finding stuff, but i swear Google makes it more complicated for me. In DDGO I only need to change words, in Google I need to filter out half the results to get something human.
But that was when I used to use DDGO, I now self-host SearXNG and only use DDGO for simple searches and when using my phone.
I guess Google needs constant use to give something better(?, which would be another reason for me not to use it hehe
Lol, yeah right? I feel the same way most of the time. On top of that, I’m in Google’s beta AI thing so usually I just get a summary of whatever the hell I’m searching for right at the top and I don’t even have to look at any of the actual results what I’m looking for data.
My experience has been similar to yours. It’s disheartening.
Google results are garbage compared to 10 years ago, but they’re still miles ahead of ddg.
I often don’t find what I want in DDG; and I then try !g to look for it with Google… and Google doesn’t find it either.
In my experience it is very rare for Google to help me with a search that DDG failed with. As for the converse, I wouldn’t know - because I never search Google first. Why wouldn’t I? They’re evil.
That said, I will point out that I don’t use a google account, and I block most google-related cookies. I know that some people find Google gives better results due to its personalised results; and obviously I’m not ‘benefiting’ from that. So it is believable that you get better results from Google than I do, due to it knowing more about you, and thus guessing what you might want to see.
In my experience, DDG has less relevant results than Google most of the time, but will occasionally end up being way better than Google if you’re looking for something that goes against corporate interests. It’s a lot easier to find free movie sites and whatnot on DDG.
I used DDG as my main for about half a year recently (and also a few times in the past). I always eventually end up back with Google. Don’t get me wrong the results aren’t that much better; but they’re definitely marginally better, at least for me. The personalization helps, too.
This time I had a brief detour using Neeva for a while and I was really happy with it; was kinda like a better DDG; but that got defunct so I ended up with Google again in the end and I just don’t see a way out.
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I made the switch a week ago. For two days at work, I always used Google, DDG and ecosia(uses bing) at the same time to compare the results. They are the same most of the time for the first 10 to 20 results. There’s sometimes a blogpost that one engine shows that the other doesn’t, but that post never made a difference.
When DDG does not get me helpful results, I can still ask Google to help out.
I agree that DDG’s results suck, but so do Google’s.
They really are both just awful. I’ve yet to find a search engine as good as Google was 10-15 years ago.
I wonder how much of that is Google being worse and you making more complex searches because you’re older
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I’ve switched to DDG almost a year ago, and I never had issues with my search results. Quite the contrary, every time I tried using !g because I simply wasn’t finding an answer, the Google was ad-ridden bullshit full of promoted pages without relevance to what I was looking for.
I guess I’m just used to DDG quality of results, but I never felt like it’s as bad as you say.
I am with you. I don’t know what this guy’s about about the search results of Google. A couple comments above people were complaining about the terrible results googles ad driven engine spews out. Also saying he’s so tech savvy and needs the Google “quality”, somehow not knowing !g just completely circumvents the benefits of DDG
I work in IT and use the search engine around 100 times a day in order to find specific answers to specific edge cases. DDG results are just too generic most of the time.
But once they get better, oh yeah.
That depends very heavily on what your searching for.
If you’re a programmer or similar, like the poster you’re replying to appears to be, then you absolutely will find DDG crap compared to Google.
I use DDG as my primary search engine, but if I have a tech question, I usually skip it and go straight to Google.
I work part-time as a game developer, and part time as a pentester, so I do search for technical questions quite a lot.
Hmm, now I wonder whether I’m just used to it. I haven’t used any other search engine in more than a year. I’ll have to compare the results more, but as far as I remember every time I couldn’t find what I needed on DDG and resorted to !g, the Google results were even worse.
Yeah, I e had worsening search results from DDG over the past 6+ months. I’ve set it to my default browser, but I often have to switch because the results are not specific enough compared to Google.
And now Googles AI results are a huge time saver.
Its the easiest thing in the world. I degoogled everything in my life in like 2-3 days after work. People aren’t switching because the bulk of the world’s populace likes the centralization and using the popular option. They just want to use what everyone else is.
I think if you were to ask “most people” about which search engine they prefer, they wouldn’t really understand the question. I remember in highschool a teacher asked someone what operating system they have at home, and she replied “I think it’s Microsoft Office”.
Tech people tend to severely overestimate non-tech peoples’ understanding of tech.
Counterpoint: tech literacy is irresponsibly low for a modern developed world that now requires it for everyday operation.
Both of these things can be true at the same time.
Fuck you spez
tips fedora
I am lucky my husband likes to learn about this sort of stuff. When we started dating he barely knew the difference between Mac and Windows. Now he uses Linux. Granted, I have to install it, but he keeps on top of maintenance.
Seriously, most people don’t even know you can go into browser settings, let alone change your default browser there.
Migrating email alone is a huge pain. To be truly independent you need your own domain in case whatever provider you choose goes to shit. Any decent one will cost money. Now, most people don’t even know what a domain is, let alone where and how to buy it and use it for email. They also have to pay that mail provider, configure everything and migrate their old emails and forward their old mail. Oh and now they also have different logins everywhere, and because they probably don’t have a password manager either they need to get one or just have different logins for different things.
That’s … a gargantuan task. for an average person - even if you provide them with a rough outline of what they’d need to do they probably wouldn’t be able to do so without help.
Also, as a side note, what do you use for watching videos? What phone do you have? What maps do you use? It’s not so easy to “de-google” completely.
Migrating emails isnt that hard if u dont set yourself a deadline. Some services like proton offer migration and forwarding from google and you can just slowly update them as you use it. I myself got tutanota and anonaddy and going through my bitwarden entries updating different alias for everything for the past couple days. Still gonna keep the gmail accounts around for emergency but will slowly disassociate from it.
Takes a while but you can just stick with updating them when you do use it if you dont have the time or feeling lazy. For an average person who doesnt value privacy, they have no reason to move out of google anyway so gmail will always be the popular one unfortunately.
This is how I did it. Set up a Protonmail account with my own domain, and set all my Gmail emails to forward there. I set up a special folder for all forwarded mail, to remind myslef that I should change my email on that service, and every time I logged somwhere or received an email from an important service I use, I made sure to change my address there.
It has already been several years, but I think I’ve managed to replace it everywhere within a few months. I haven’t seen a forwarded email in months, so I think I’m finally done.
I made a list of the Google services I needed to replace, replaced a couple of them, but ultimately that list had dozens of items on it and I’m too tired already to complete it
It is not easy. This comment must be satire?
For example have you tried navigating in a car with a navigation app besides Maps? I don’t have an iPhone and the ones I’ve tried so far suck. I mean, I think Waze isn’t even all that good and Google owns even them now.
I tried Mapquest recently for the first time in 18 years. It was astonishing just how terrible their app and directions were.
I would gladly pay a few dollars a month for an alternative to Google Maps or Waze, but it’s like no company even wants to try and compete with Google and Apple maps.
While I don’t believe you can degoogle that quickly, because some of their services take quite some time to properly switch, such as email, in the end it’s not too hard, but just takes time and some work.
Changing email is easy, if you don’t mind it being a slow process. Just forward your google email, and start slowly replacing any service you notice in the following months/years to your new address.
Google Drive is harder to replace, I went for just running a NAS with Nextcloud, which takes care of most of Google Drive/Docs/Calendar stuff. If self-hosting isn’t your cup of tea, Proton is slowly setting up usable google alternatives - they have Drive and Calendar IIRC.
Now for phone, that’s the hardest task. You wouldn’t help yourself by getting an IPhone. While it would de-google you, there’s basically no point in switching google for apple. Getting android to be usable for stuff like banking, MFA and other bullshit you need your phone for while being degoogled is hard, due to the bullshit Google Services. The only solution I found is to either just go with dumb phone with an obscure OS, or just get a Google Pixel and run GrapheneOS.
Maps are another issue, but thankfully we have a local mapy.cz , which is a pretty OK alternative to Google maps for our country, and I guess they even work worldwide. I don’t drive a car, so I don’t really need it that often.
The only remaining Google service I use is GCloud VPS, because I have some websites running there on the free instances that I’m too lazy to move. But I’m slowly migrating it to Amazon. Not that it would help much, anyway. And also Youtube, but I’m trying to go through the alternative front-ends as much as possible.
And for browser, I’m using mullvad.net/en/browser. Fuck chromium.
DDG rules
this absolutely wouldn’t happen if there were no regulations - a libertarian
duckduckgo started censoring results and selling user data about a year ago now.
I’ve been using brave search ever since I heard about that.
Brave might not be better.
www.spacebar.news/p/stop-using-brave-browser
I don’t believe the creator is actually a bigot. There’s been too many false bigotry accusations going around and now it’s a “boy who cried wolf” type situation
Source on that?
But I mean, if you prefer anything Brave does, sure.
Brave browser CEO apologizes for automatically adding affiliate links to cryptocurrency URLs
You can disable the crypto stuff very easily.
Not the point. Crypto injection links shouldn’t be sneakily added into a “privacy” oriented browser.
However, you never provided any proof that DDG censors and sells user data. You’ve made big claims, but didn’t back them.
Brave is malware made by a company run by a fucking bigot who used his millions to try to strip people of their human rights. They are not your friend
I don’t believe the creator is actually a bigot. There’s been too many false bigotry accusations going around and now it’s a “boy who cried wolf” type situation
Brendan Eich literally spent millions of dollars to push for the passage of Prop 8 in California, which would have banned same-sex marriage.
That’s the literal definition of a bigot.
Again. There’s been way too many false bigotry accusations going around.
Big tech, namely google, has quite a few a reasons to smear the creator of brave in an attempt to get people to stop using it.
Not false. He admitted it and was forced to out of Mozilla because of it. It was a massive scandal.
Does he still think that way?
Why do you seem so invested in the fact that well-known bigots might not actually be bigots?
When people tell you who they are: believe them.
No one is throwing “fake” bigotry accusations at anyone. And if you believe they are, then you also are a bigot. Period.
Because there’s too may false bigotry accusations going around for me to believe any of them anymore. I’ve already said that multiple times. Why do people keep asking me that same question?
Think about it. Google wants people to use chrome and to stop using adblockers. Brave is a chromium-based browser that has adblocking, tracker blocking and fingerprint randomization all on by default, but made better when those things are set to aggressive.
People who become aware of brave start using brave and stop using chrome.
google is constantly manipulating results for certain search queries to push an agenda. They do the same shit on youtube by selectively enforcing the rules, elevating garbage channels and demoting good channels.
So why wouldn’t google come up with some bullshit about the creator of brave being a bigot to get people to stop using it? Lots of people are smeared in worse ways for doing even less.
What does being a bigot have anything to do with developing a search engine or a browser? Mozilla has also gone woke, dwelling into politics instead of developing a browser.
The fact that you unironically use the phrase “gone woke” means discussion with you is pointless.
Enjoy being blocked.
Can’t provide any actual arguments so you just block people you disagree with? Not like I expected much logic or sense from someone such as you.
ok ill try using duckduckgo again
I installed a custom launcher that’s close to the stock one on my Pixel 3 specifically to make it possible to remove the Google Search widget. Now I have a Firefox widget that points to DDG.
If any are interested, the launcher is Lawn Chair, and it can be installed via F-droid.
That launcher is abandoned
Well, it’s only maintained through dependency updates
It’s true (and it feels a bit dusty), but it’s still meeting my needs. I hope it’ll get picked up again or perhaps another project will replace it.
It is updated on the github
Last update was from more than one year ago, last I checked. Has it been updated since?
Still more recent than 4 years ago
If you have a Pixel, why not go all in with grapheneos.org?
I like the ‘ground up’ approach they mention that doesn’t rely on insecure ‘adversaries’. I’ll check it out soon.
I e been debating switching the graphene for weeks weeks now. But I just know I’m gonna end up installing Google play services on it and completely defeat the whole point of the OS. I’m probably gonna buy the pixel 8 when it comes out so once I have that I’ll put graphene on my current phone and see how I like it.
I’ve just switched to it literally yesterday, and while you will probably not avoid Play Services, being able to install it into a different profile that’s only limited to the few apps that need it is nice.
Also, just the fact that on Graphene Play Services do not have the special privileges as on any android phone, and are subjected to the same limitations as any other app (which are even stricter on Graphene) helps a lot. It also means that even if you end up just running the play services at all times, they can’t do as much as they can on other android phones, and the data they can access without your explicit permission is really limited. So, even that helps by a lot.
This is actually great to hear. I’ll probably still ending up holding off until I have a spare phone to test with just because wiping my phone and redoing everything just isn’t something I’m up for right now though. Thank you very much for the info.
Play Services is sandboxed on Graphene and is treated as a regular app, so you can actually disable most of its features, including network access.
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<img alt="" src="https://programming.dev/pictrs/image/3c2d3a15-24e7-46c3-b147-88877fbff6b3.jpeg">
Do you use DDG China™ or something? This all comes up when I search for it, no censorship
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I’ve just tried to search for ‘tank man’ and also ‘tiananmen square’ with DuckDuckGo’s image search, and both of them returned the picture we all know, that dictator Winnie the Poop doesn’t wanna see…
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Seriously? It’s a search tool. Does absolutely every piece of software you use have to be 100% aligned to your world view? This is getting weird.
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But you didn’t say you expect them to show you the foto. You said you wanted them to issue a statement or something. So the issue was not lack of functionality but not taking a stance. Now that I pointed out how silly it is you’re changing it to “it’s a poor service”. Nice…
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Maybe if they made DDG give better results, I wouldn’t use Google quite as much
DDG does have better results than Google. I’ve not used the latter for years and was surprised by the bad quality of results when I used it once accidentally last week.
Exactly my thoughts as well. You need enable your country, though.
It depends and that’s why both your answers aren’t quite the full truth.
If you are a deep resident of the Google ecosystem (maps, Mail, android etc.) Google’s results are second to none. That’s because Google knows exactly what you care about and what is relevant to you. They know where you work, where you are, what you talk about etc etc.
With all that knowledge google can optimise both ads and answers to you almost perfectly.
If you’re not a deep resident, ddg is better - their results have to work harder, so to speak, because they don’t have your every waking thought to hand as a relevancy scale.
So, yeah, if you give Google everything they make money off it and keep you dependent on them.
Sounds like a dealer, right?
No, I mean that DDG doesn’t provide summaries or skip to the section of video Tha answers your questions. Google has some great features
I am a regular DDG user but it depends what I’m searching for. I also use Qwant
Yeah brave has a bit of an upper hand on that front but I switched to ddg recently because of news on brave’s ceo being a not nice guy.
Daily reminder that unregulated capitalism hurts all of us.
Laziness or not giving a damn is a choice
Agreed!
Nice to -for once- see someone else who recognizes that capitalism in itself isn’t a problem as long as it is very well regulated and doesn’t immediately go “Communism is the answer!”
I always look at people who jump to “Communism is the answer” just have issues with properly articulating what they feel and just jump to a reactionary catch all comment.
I myself don’t like a lot of flaws with the core tenants of capitalism, so I often find myself saying reactionary shit like “capitalism bad” sometimes too.
I think this goes for a lot of discussion on economic models. There’s a lot of nuisance to it, and I think so many folks range somewhere between knowing nothing and knowing enough to be dangerous, but lack the energy, time, patience, or skill to really get it across online.
Often we see people posting about stuff so frequently because of a frustration with the current system, so unless it’s like a bad faith argument I mostly just tune it out, or go “hell yeah” in my little monkey brain depending on if it’s something I agree with slightly.
It’s not reactionary to say that capitalism is bad. Capitalism is literally terrible. Not commerce, capitalism. Buying and selling things isn’t wrong, but extracting and consolidating surplus labor from the working class is.
No, you’re right. I’m saying it’s reactionary to write only “Capitalism is bad”, and nothing else. Mostly because in terms of a discussion it makes it hard to keep talking about why capitalism is bad with such a broad statement. This is just the opinion of one dude on the internet who thinks of comments in a very specific way, and I get that others agree probably fine with broad comments of that style.
What worries me about it is that since for various reasons a lot of people just don’t have it in them to spare any thought on the question of how the economy works, they buy into rhetoric about economics being a fake conspiracy where supply and demand isn’t real and actually all economic problems are trivial and only require putting the bad guys in their place. The frustration is justified but stuff like rent control just doesn’t work and you can see why it doesn’t work if you’re willing to honestly think about it.
You say “Rent Control” doesn’t work, but having seen locations with rent control, and living in a place without it I fundamentally disagree with that statement.
In any economic model, housing is a basic need for humans. While rent control isn’t a solution, I don’t think it’s ever intended to be one. It is a stop gap, or a step implemented in a larger plan. It’s basically regulations for combating price fixing.
If you live in a place fraught with renoviction, the act of using a renovation as an excuse to evict people and charge more for the same thing, then the person who has been forced back into the market does not have to become homeless.
To another point, I don’t think rent control would prevent development of new housing either, as landlords aren’t the only folks who buy properties, even though it’s almost financially impossible to buy a house in certain inflated markets these days no matter who you are.
The rhetoric I see around it paints it as a solution, and there are people who say with full sincerity that supply and demand is capitalist propaganda.
This whole dynamic is only surface level. The excuse doesn’t matter; if the whole market can get those prices, it’s because of the number/means of people seeking housing vs the supply. It will happen with or without an excuse to smooth things over. There are plenty of very run-down places in high demand low supply areas that cost huge amounts without any such aesthetic justification.
It demonstrably has prevented and does prevent the development of new housing, among other market distortions, and afaik this is one of the few things economists broadly agree on. To your point, maybe it would be possible that over time, eventually, all rental apartments would be converted into condos etc. as a market response to rent control. But given the demand specifically for rentals (for which there is then artificially reduced incentive to meet), and the difficulty you mention for most people actually buying a home outright, it’s easy to see why in practice there will be an extended, possibly indefinite, period where housing supply will be suppressed by the policy. One reason it could end up indefinite is that homeowners as a voting class have an incentive to protect the value of their properties, and that often means passing regulations that in practice constrain housing supply. When most voters are renters, this is less of a problem.
The way I see it, looking at housing markets as being “inflated”, as if the prices were the result of some trick of greedly landlords, is completely wrong and missing the bigger picture. Real estate is a wealth asset, a store of wealth, and all of those are skyrocketing in dollar terms beyond official measures of inflation, as part of a process of wealth being transferred away from the majority of the population and the value/negotiating power of labor declining. If people only look at their personal situations and false ideas of what prices “should” be and what is subjectively “fair”, they miss this bigger picture and overlook solutions that could actually work.
Which, in the case of housing, is more housing.
The key is “very well regulated”, starting with the ban of corporate lobbyists and abolition and criminalization of PAC donations.
COMMERCE in itself isnt bad. Leveraging money and power to extract resources and value without actually creation anything of value-i.e. Capitalism- is very, very bad.
Make a product and sell it? …good. Perform a service for money?..good. Buy wholesale, sell retail?..fine. Steal natural resources, fund political coups for resources, start wars for resourcces, force destruction of oroduct or allow corporations to hoard resources to corner a market?..BAD
I’m sorry but your definition of capitalism is incorrect.
Yeah, it’s something that capitalism as currently is (mostly in the US) allows, but that isn’t the basis of what capitalism is.
I fully agree with you that capitalism needs very strick limits to not be abusive, but it’s still a hundred times better than communism, something that too many people here propose as the
finalgreat solutionActually I think the problem is capitalists entering into forums and insisting that any regulation of capitalism is communism by default. It’s not a case of one or the other, but there is absolutely no way to reform the system from within its current structure. We would have to first abolish any and all corporate lobbying and criminalize the submission of donor checks to legislators, and then repeal any and all tax breaks and pro corporate laws and regulations passed since 1980.
Also: the stock market and hedge fund architecture is an absolute sham and should be criminalized. Virtually none of it is about entrepreneur startup money; all if it is about creating value out of thin air with nothing to support it. It collapses and destroys our economy on a regular, nearly predictable basis and results in greater wealth disparagement as the whales grab up all the collapsed wealth
Capitalism in itself is very much the problem. There is no positive aspect to the extraction of surplus value (“profit”), hoarding the vast majority of it into the hands of the wealthiest “private” property owners.
Free markets don’t have to be capitalist.
Daily reminder that capitalism hurts all of us.
Capitalism isn’t about free markets, it’s about private property and profit extraction.
He’s probably right, but from what I see, the reality is that like 95% of people simply don’t care, and the rest will find an alternative.
Thing is, Google is also (still) just better.
I use DDG as my primary search engine, but I find myself repeating searches with Google so often, I wrote a userscript to add a “Search with Google” link to the top of the DDG search results.
I’ve seen a lot of chat recently about Google search quality tanking and it’s made me realise that I haven’t re-searched a DDG query in Google for a really, really long time. when I first started using DDG as my main a few years back, I would repeat searches in Google probably 25% of the time? but I honestly can’t remember the last time I had to now. Been at least 6 months!
unfortunately, I do that often. Even when using meta search engine which sources to google, Google UX and results are simply better but sometime feeling is just not rationale
regarding duckduckgo, it is simply too long to type and people rarely configure their browser, especially on mobile.
so yeah, in a sense, Weinberg is right. At the very least, a choice should be provided on first run but you can’t force people to be curious.
I agree. At least in my experience Google does a better job when it comes to search engine. I use DDG as well but when it comes to searching specific things Google beats it unfortunately.
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Sure, but I think there’s still benefit to what the other person did. Search DDG by default, and then if you don’t see good results, it’s one extra click for the google search… vs mousing, clicking, 2 keystrokes…
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I could switch but I don’t see any need to. The lockin from apple apps and google play apps is far stronger.
I’ve been using freeadblocker browser after stumbling on it (with DDG as a search engine). Does it have anything to do with Google/chrome? I’m confused, because I’ve been using it for so long and it blocks all ads so I guess I don’t know why no one is using it unless it’s some Google stepchild I don’t know about and I’m still googled without knowing it.
Is that iOS, Android or PC? Do you have a link?
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Android. It seems to be available on Google play ( play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.hsv.fre…) now but I remember having to find the APK elsewhere when I first got it.
Hmmm, that isn’t open source, I don’t know if one can trust it. Why does a browser need in-app purchases? Try Mull or Cromite.
Edit: from the description, it uses Brave Search (to answer you question), so it doesn’t send to Google your queries. But I’d be careful with an app with a bunch of SEO keywords in its description.
Because I can use Firefox.
Seems really fishy.
Quite a few trackers: reports.exodus-privacy.eu.org/en/…/latest/
And so many red flags like a free VPN (so they route all your traffic), “powered with AI technology” (what for?), not open source…
A browser is a very sensitive piece of software, you trust it with a lot of personal data. Don’t use a random one like this one.
that’s DuckDuckGo and “Names Database” CEO*, folks. PLEASE do not look to this man as a beacon for anything privacy-related, even when he says something true.
Okay, sure. I agree that this is an unfair advantage. But like, I’ve been using DuckDuckGo for a while and the best thing about it is the ability to easily search other search engines. Their own actual search engine isn’t exactly great.
Mostly using it makes me realize how much time Google saves me by already having my location and search history. I still don’t trust them and it isn’t what it was a few years ago, but it’s the actual quality of their search that’s keeping them on top.
Also like, why does clicking a thumbnail in video search not take me to the video? Dumb.