In the Google antitrust trial, defaults are everything and nobody likes Bing::US v. Google kicked off this week in the District of Columbia as the Justice Department and Google squared off over the dominant search engine.
I really hate saying this because it pisses me off, but I primarily use DuckDuckGo, which is based on Bing, and I sometimes have to switch over to Google because the search isn’t as effective. Especially if I want to put something in quotes, which DuckDuckGo doesn’t even seem to recognize. Their image search is not as good either.
I don’t want to use Google at all. I hate that it’s still necessary sometimes for a decent search.
And yes, I realize that a lot of Google searches suck too. But I still shouldn’t have to ever go there. Especially not for something as simple as that.
I default to DuckDuckGo as well. I don’t really like it, and I certainly don’t trust it any more than I do any other for-profit organization. I just wanted something that isn’t Google, Amazon or Microsoft.
It’s really quite fruitless though. Maybe 80% of my searches end up having a !s or !g (really just for variety…) thrown in, as Google’s results are just better.
DDG image search spits out porn as often as it does something relevant. I can change content moderation options if I want to reduce it, but I don’t have to do that with Google.
Kagi has caught my attention lately. I’m going to try it and see if it feels good value for the money. I’m not opposed to paying for search, but this does feel expensive (I say that having no idea of the true cost of running a search company). Obviously, privacy is out the window as it’s paid for and linked to an account. But as I feel I’m not really getting that anywhere else either, I’m more hoping that it will just provide good search results.
Just use startPage its basically privacy focused google
I do, via the !s bang. I was thrown off of using Startpage exclusively after the System1 acquisition. Since then, I’ve also experienced more downtime with Startpage than I find acceptable. It is nice getting the Google results via another interface though.
https://www.privacytools.io/private-search is a good place to keep an eye on privacy tools like search engines
Unless we want Google to complete the “Death Star” and totally control the Internet, I think using services based on their products still perpetuates Alphabet dominance of the web. I use Firefox based browsers and search engines like DDG and Brave that don’t depend on Google’s code base to exist.
I don’t blindly stand behind any of these companies, but I believe DuckDuckGo is privately held, so it doesn’t have shareholders clamoring for the greediest and most deceptive business practices like Alphabet and Microsoft. I know Brave is controversial, but lately their search engine has been working well as backup for DDG, so I can avoid Google all together.
Also when looking for “breaking” news. Google has more users and can “pump up” important news in results faster than Bing which is displays outdated info due to userbase disadvantage.
Not in Canada, where everyone is blocking news because they don’t want to pay our journalists.
I thought it was Australian thing
Google is almost useless as a search engine and i haven’t used it for over a year.
It’s getting more common to get pages of word soup result, sites that just contain a huge dump of scraped Reddit comments.
I tried to search a torrent from rutracker in duckduckgo. Got no results, then tried Google with
search term site:rutracker.organd the first result was what I was looking for.Strange considering you would expect things to be other way around.
I’m seeing comments like this all the time and I’m always baffled. I’m using DuckDuckGo as a main search engine but I have to fall back to Google quite often because DuckDuckGo is just worse for me. And any other search engine I tried was even worse that that. It’s true that Google results don’t feel as accurate as they used to, but I genuinely haven’t found better alternatives. What do you recommend?
It could be that you and I are searching for different subjects. I typically am looking for parts for something, and various parts suppliers (cars, industrial equipment, forklifts) have SEO’ed themselves to the top of the list even though they dont have what you searched for.
I see. For me it’s mostly programming stuff. As long as the issue in question isn’t very obscure then DuckDuckGo is doing fine. However, if it’s mentioned in a single 5 year old GitHub issue then Google is pretty much the only chance to find it in my experience.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
But this trial kicks off two years after a district judge found Apple could maintain its locked-down iOS ecosystem and two months after Microsoft won a ruling letting it buy Activision Blizzard, continuing a rapid consolidation of the games industry.
They also painted the allegations as disingenuous complaints from fellow tech companies who couldn’t compete fairly: in Apple’s case, the Fortnite publisher Epic, and in Microsoft’s, the rival console maker Sony.
In opening arguments, Schmidtlein showed instructions for switching from Google to another search engine, comparing it to the days of slotting in software floppy disks or downloading programs over dial-up internet.
Rangel was one of the few non-Google employees to make an appearance on the witness stand in the first week, arguing in a presentation that search engine defaults produce a “sizable and robust bias” toward the preselected option.
The first week of testimony hasn’t fully explored this yet, but one of its prime examples is lax privacy standards — if Google had to seriously compete instead of buying its way into your search bar, Dintzer said, it might have to do a better job of safeguarding your data.
The Justice Department is expected to make its case over the rest of September and early October, and we’ll likely hear from a bevy of current and former Google employees, including CEO Sundar Pichai.
The original article contains 2,120 words, the summary contains 224 words. Saved 89%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
