After using DDG for years, I sometimes try Google when DDG does not seem to deliver. Every time I am disgusted by the sheer amount of crap it shows me. Videos, shopping, news etc. I'll take DDGs clean result list over that any time! (And usually, Google has the same results as DDG anyway)
I made the exact same experience. Sometimes when I can't get satisfying results I try to use google, but in most cases the results are even worse. Googles search results just don't make any sense to me by now.
There is one feature that google has which I can't find a good alternative for: Reverse search of images. Hands down, that's a good one, Google.
And it's much better than google's. Google will only find same image (different resolution or very minor changes), yandex finds similar images in general. That said google's image search has some use because google's index is still bigger than yandex's. (For people who prefer English interface https://yandex.com/images/)
We've done this song and dance 1000 times: Someone says "DDG is bad" or "DDG is good" and all of the replies are basically "No, DDG is <opposite>".
Let's try something new: Let's give examples. I'll go first:
Let's say I have a nebulous recollection that there is a wifi module with "NRF" in the model number. If I search for `nrf wifi` on both Google and DDG, which do you think provides better results?
Let's look at the top URL hits from both (this is in an incognito window, with ublock origin on!):
Google:
1) nordicsemi.com (the manufacturer) homepage
2) <manufacturer website> press release
3) <manufacturer website> random Q & A page
4) arduino.stackoverflow.com (question about how to use it)
5) Some blog (someone's guide to using it)
6) nrf.com (National Retail Federation) conference category: wifi and bluetooth analytics (unrelated result, but I can imagine someone going to this conference might google the exact same thing, good thing Google knows to show it...
--- A random box showing questions relevant to the device ---
7) arduino.cc (question about how to use it)
8) <electronics blog site A> (someone's guide to using it)
9) <electronics blog site A> (another page on using it)
10) <electronic parts retail site A> (sells it)
DDG:
1) <electronics blog site A> (someone's guide to using it)
2) <electronics blog site B> (someone's guide to using it)
3) <electronic parts retail site C> (someone's guide to using it)
4) <electronics blog site D> (someone's guide to using it)
5) <electronics blog site E> (someone's guide to using it)
6) <electronics blog site F> (another guide to using it)
7) <electronics blog site G> (someone's guide to using it)
8) arduino.cc (question about how to use it)
9) <manufacturer website> random Q & A page
10) <manufacturer website> another random Q & A page
As you can see, Google seems to prefer authoritative sources (the manufacturer, the conference that coincidentally has the same name and category), while DDG seems to prefer blogs and how-to guides. I won't say which is better, that's entirely subjective.
That would be funny, but there are other examples like that. Pick any community towards the "right" and you will probably get the same result. i.e. search 'reddit dark enlightenment'
Biden doesn't return results on google, which is interesting. But it doesn't seem to be because google doesn't like reddit. It typically returns results even for niche sub-reddits.
"reddit sorcery of the spectacle" works, for example.
However "reddit married red pill" doesn't (works on DDG).
There must be some kind of censoring going on. Maybe Donald Trump and Biden are somehow influenced by elections. But this wouldn't explain the others.
So here is an interesting one, I’d just searched import plugins for Wordpress, and the top result from Google is a 5 year old review website, while DDG gives me one from this year. The latter being more relevant to my search.
A simple keyword match, even if weighted, is no longer enough. The engine needs to grok the context of a query. Chances of someone's using a generic query to find a blog instead of a vendor's site are basically zero.
As you said it depends on the context, I agree, but thus the chances someone's using a generic query to find vendor independent resources like blogs are not zero. With regard to the given example "nrf wifi", I'd prefer DDG's results as I usually know the manufacturer of the hardware I work with but often search for solutions to problems in context of that hardware.
Furthermore depending on familiarity with domain names it's possible to deduce the manufacturer's website from GP's 9th result on DDG.
I've fully switched to DDG. I still bounce over to google maybe 5-10% of the time, but to me that's a pretty big win. 90-95% of the time I avoid being tracked by google at the cost of 5-10% of the time wasting a few seconds skimming results on ddg before jumping to google.
Actually, this in anecdotal, but i believe most of the cases where ddg lets me down are when the query is VERY specific. More general searches seem to have no diff between google and ddg results.
Not only has DDG become better, especially for regional/localized searches, Google has become worse.
What Google has done is to prioritize mainstream sources over correct matches. In the old days you could get a match for small unknown blog on the first page, today it is very rare for me that I get that. It is usually mainstream sources on the first page, except when the search is very technical like programming.
This becomes even more apparent for Google’s affiliate YouTube where you can search for the exact title and it doesn’t show up on the first page. Related videos is also broken.
What drives clicks on YouTube today is the very curated home page for a user. This was not how YouTube used to work.
These factors has changed how we, at least for me, consume content. In the old days you found small independent sources much more easily, which meant that it was up to you to make a judgment if that source was interesting or not. Today it is the opposite, "here is a clip that has been viewed 20 millions times before you, enjoy!". This has made the web much worse.
One thing that Google do better is grouping result from same source, like here is all matches from Reddit, this has two main benefits. First it easy to view that group separately. Second is that you can view more matches on the first search page.
I have had the polar opposite experience. After many unsuccessful trials of DDG in past years, I recently switched my default engine to DDG about 2 months ago on all devices (desktops and mobile). Since then, I have been pleasantly surprised. I would say I end up prefixing !g (to redirect to a Google search) once every 200-500 queries. For the remainder, the DDG results page is such a welcome change from Google’s, which basically has gradually morphed from its original 10 links only into a glorified link farm run by a surveillance megacorp.
A year ago StartPage sold a majority stake to, what essentially is, an advertising and marketing company - System 1 Group.
Not necessarily a bad thing, but I have zero trust that these new owners will not succumb to some common and oh-so-effective shenanigans to improve their ad performance in the StartPage search results. That's like selling a rehab facility to a drug cartel. A match made in heaven.
I really like Bing these days. Google has sanitized it's results so much that anything interesting is gone. Things off the top of my head: finding technical docs via searhing pds, "Index Of" listings, adult content (not even meaning porn, per se) - NSFW forums to come to mind (just look at how many subreddits are set to nsfw now), forums, etc etc
Have you tried the comparison within the last year? You will probably find that while DDG Search is still just as bad as you remember, Google Search is no longer much better. I use Bing quite a bit, too, which is even closer in quality to Google Search.
My problem with bing, and I could be wrong for it, is I’m not looking to replace one data mining company with another. I’d much rather give a smaller, up and coming, company my searches.
That an endless cycle. You give your time and money to a 'smaller' company (thinking they're not as evil), but soon they become big corporations and start doing the same kind of things. :)
I switched search engines several times, had no problem with it. If you're afraid of abstinence syndrome, you can rotate them: monday - searx, tuesday - qwant, wednesday - mojeek, thursday - duck, friday - yandex, saturday - ecosia, sunday - gibiru.
I totally agree. Depending on which field I'm working on I know right away when to skip DDG entirely. Makes me sad I wish I could skip google but unfortunately there are a lot of topics where DDG misses the mark.
This is so weird to me. I use DDG on my home computer, but Google at work, so I have experience with both.... and they're basically indistinguishable to me.
I use DDG as my default and it gets me 90% of the way there. Sometimes when I search for programming syntax and I know there is one canonical answer that should be the top link, DDG doesn't show up but google does. My !g bangs have become rare now. Becoming used to a new search engine was worth the trade in privacy in my opinion.
You can use Google Search and tell Google not to log your search history or use the data for advertising purposes. See my comment [1] for how to turn on these privacy controls.
> not to log your search history or use the data for advertising purposes
People already know/feel that when Google states that it will not do something with people’s information but it does not say what it does... well, that doesn’t feel very comfortable. In fact, it’s so uncomfortable, that people avoid asking what does Google do with that not logged or not for advertising data. On mobile, being the only alternative a device that costs about 5 months of my work, I may not what to know the answer for that questions too and just hope for the best
I have the exact opposite experience. I find DDG's searching to be much better than Google's - which has turned to garbage. Having said that, I've noticed the quality of DDG's search results have dropped quite a bit in the past couple of months. Don't know what could be causing that.
I'm in the EU and it works great. I rely on it for my daily tasks and have no problems finding local services there. In fact I have already paid thousands Euros in contracts to local businesses I've discovered via Runnaroo.
Occasionally I still have to scroll down to click "Search on Google". I wish that link would be in the page top rather than bottom, especially for the picture search (where it is almost impossible to click as more results get shown as soon as you scroll down). It would also be cool if they would add a link to search with the local country-specific search engine (i.e. zoznam.sk, seznam.cz, yandex.ru etc.) for those located in respective countries.
Location and local results are separate settings so that you can have global results without changing location. In case of pizza you will probably want to narrow down your search to city instead of country. Pretty sure it's impossible to break japanese search, when I search for ドミノ ピザ dominos.jp is the first result.
I consider that a feature. I really do not want my search results to depend on where in the world I am searching from. If I am looking for something regional, I can always add country name or "site:XX" to the keywords. But ultimately it is me who decides that I want a regional result.
This works rather well with DDG (I've been a happy DDG user for many years now).
On the other hand, I understand that I'm probably a minority in this, most people just want their search engine to essentially read their minds and they do not want to think about it too much.
Sorry, I actually meant "with Japan selected", I also appreciated to be able to choose rather than it being automated, but now it does not seem to work anymore.
One problem with most of the comments here that are claiming one is better than the other is that the "quality" of search results is still a very subjective term. I wish just like DxOMark Score for mobile cameras, there is a Search result quality index that makes us take more informative decisions (not sure how feasible is that though).
P.S. - I realize even DxOMark scores and ranks may be disputed, but that's still one (close to objective) index and it's used just as an example here.
>But DDG is bad.
not necessarily. Depending what you searching. I do find looking for tech documentation, google performs better. Then use something like startpage.com (google proxy) for that. Something I find that google is censoring them, and I can find it on DDG more.
In the end it is all about having good search engine options.
What I don't like about DDG is that they use bing. Hope they start using their own search now that they are getting big.
This is so weird to me to read. I've DDG for years, and I'm not sure whether their results have gotten much better, or I've trained myself to "search the DDG way," or both, but I find what I want in almost all cases. When I (rarely) don't, I try a !g search, and have never gotten better results. Not in years.
I believe you, I'm just saying that's not my experience at all.
Meanwhile, I struggle to give up GDocs and remind myself to use Zoho instead.
I got into the Neeva alpha recently and within the first few days I've noticed it is on-par with Google for what I search and need information for. Check it out here https://neeva.co
They can't expose such a feature, at least until they're sure that their results are better than Google's in most cases (otherwise it'll be like shooting themselves on the foot).
Besides, a userscript that does what you want could be written very easily I guess.
> They can't expose such a feature, at least until they're sure that their results are better than Google's in most cases (otherwise it'll be like shooting themselves on the foot).
Perhaps, but here I am: a potential DDG user who is instead using Google because of this missing feature.
They could of course put a nice privacy warning next to the Google button. Or they could label it "!g" to avoid using Google's name.
> Besides, a userscript that does what you want could be written very easily I guess.
I thought of making a "!g" bookmarklet, but I wouldn't know how to deploy it on mobile (Firefox).
Do you (or anyone else who finds Google significantly better than DDG) search Google as a logged-in user, and is perhaps this the reason you find their results to be better?
I never log in, since I mainly use the only sign-in-mandatory service, Gmail, on my phone. DDG and Bing suck balls compared to Google, sadly. Google has been worse too over the years .
The past few years, I'm sure I've wasted a lot of time searching on the net, looking for relevant articles while Google spouts out BS.
Thanks. This Google vs. DDG discussion keeps coming up and I'm baffled by the strong opinions because to me, the two seem about the same. But I'm never logged in to Google and I set my browsers to aggressively expire cookies so I'd imagine I'm not getting any personalized search results.
DuckDuckGo's results are a compilation of "over 400" sources,[8] including Yahoo! Search BOSS, Wolfram Alpha, Bing, Yandex, its own web crawler (the DuckDuckBot) and others.[3][8][9][10] It also uses data from crowdsourced sites, including Wikipedia, to populate knowledge panel boxes to the right of the results.[10][11]
The Wikipedia article makes it sound like their search results are from "over 400" sources and their own bot. That's just for the widgets and Instant Answers.
Their own Sources page makes this distinction more clear:
"To do that, DuckDuckGo gets its results from over four hundred sources. These include hundreds of vertical sources delivering niche Instant Answers, DuckDuckBot (our crawler) and crowd-sourced sites (like Wikipedia, stored in our answer indexes). We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we also source from multiple partners, though most commonly from Bing (and none from Google)."
That adds more time since the query is sent to DDG and then bounces the browser to Google. For searches where one prefers Google, using it directly (which is easier in Firefox for me) is a better option.
The latency is fairly negligible, to me at least. Plus if you're already searching in DDG it's faster to input !g than to go to Google. Also I think it's nice to give them that info where they could be done better.
What’s even the point of using !g to go to google it just redirects me last I checked so it’s still giving you your personalized searches (thus not a solution for privacy.) Am I missing something here?
I wonder if they log those searches. To be clear: in a privacy-friendly way. It would be a treasure trove to them as they basically get statistics on which searches do bad on their engine. Focus on the most '!g'd search term, and then just work down the list.
"""We also save searches, but again, not in a personally identifiable way, as we do not store IP addresses or unique User agent strings. We use aggregate, non-personal search data to improve things like misspellings."""
I'm actually confused if this site was created ironically.
* "Google search is malicious, send the same data to Russia with Yandex instead."
* Apparently Google Chrome is a search engine.
* "Google doesn’t care about users’ privacy that much. It collects your data and uses it for their own purposes." Might just be me, but this reads like a throwaway essay written by an 8th grader.
* The site uses Google Analytics.
Despite the clear lack of quality in this article, it seems like this type of post does well on HN simply because "Google == bad" is such low-hanging fruit.
It perplexes me that people are more worried about a foreign power with little direct interest in you and no meaningful control over your life having a small chunk of their data than the government they live under.
It isn't really surprising when those foreign powers are actively hostile not only to your country, but to fundamental moral principles you hold dear.
To be clear, it's definitely not at all better in any meaningful sense for Google/the US government to have your data. But sometimes it's about the principle of the thing.
Sometimes I wonder how some random low quality article gets bumped up so fast, and then I think it's about keywords, but that doesn't explain the upvotes. Are people upvoting articles without reading both the article and the comments? I get the no-article part where you skip to the comments but if the comments shit on the article, why upvote?
> Are people upvoting articles without reading both the article and the comments
Absolutely. It is much less of an issue here than on, say, Reddit. But lots of people upvote posts because it sounds interesting, not because they have gone through it and determined it to be high quality.
I can't believe when sites are doing this. Dogfooding, or leading by example, is the bare minimum I expect, when someone is trying to show an alternative or a moral highground.
If you want to keep using Google services, here are some Google Alternatives Alternatives:
1/ Google Search, YouTube, Maps: visit https://myactivity.google.com/activitycontrols to turn on auto-deletion or turn off search history, location history or YouTube watch history. This page also allows you to turn off ads personalization. There are many security and privacy controls on https://myaccount.google.com/, turn them on however you see fit.
2/ Chrome: visit chrome://settings/syncSetup to turn off Chromesync, disallow Chrome sign-in, disable automcomplete searches and URLs, etc. You can also change the default search engine to something else, but see point 1/ if you want to use Google Search. Use Incognito mode more often.
3/ Gmail, Photos, Calendar, Drive, Docs: "we don’t use information in apps where you primarily store personal content—such as Gmail, Drive, Calendar and Photos—for advertising purposes, period." [1] In other words, Gmail, YouTube or Search ads are not targeted or personalized using your emails, photos, events, docs, etc.
Disclosure: I'm a Google's security engineer, advocating for and contributing to some of the aforementioned security/privacy controls.
For point 2/ if you are unwilling to switch to Firefox and want to keep using Chromium based browsers take a look at Ungoogled Chromium.
I switched from Firefox to Ungoogled Chromium after a long time because of atrocious UI/UX on macOS. However I am stuck with Google pushing Manifest v3
LOL no. Try using Google Maps logged out on an Android phone for more than a week. Google will find a way to reconnect you to the default Google account on the device.
An even better test:
- get an Android device (say, a OnePlus 6T)
- create some contacts on the phone, and add a few events in the default calendar
- open the Play Store (required to get many of the most popular apps)
- you're required to logged into a Google account
- log in and try to not have your contacts and calendar events uploaded to Google's servers.
That is not possible, because
1. you must be connected to the Internet in order to log into a Google account (obvious)
2. Google does not let you enable or disable the sync for a particular item before starting uploading everything
3. Google will enable the sync for all possible items (starting w/ contacts) in the background, and you cannot switch screens fast enough to prevent that.
This must have been the default for most Android devices for a decade now. They keep collecting billions contacts details without users' explicit consent, which is 100% illegal.
> Companies like Google get huge fines when they break their promise -- even accidentally.
Source?
Facebook has used phone numbers given exclusively for 2FA purposes for targeted advertising and got away with merely a slap on the wrist considering their revenue.
Facebook also collected data for years from their trackers but only relatively recently started exposing that to users (with their "Off-Facebook activity" page), which means that for 2 years they were in breach of the GDPR by not allowing people access to their own data and incriminated themselves (by now providing that webpage which proves they've collected this data for years). They are yet to be investigated & fined for this.
GDPR and privacy regulation enforcement is still a complete joke.
it's unfortunate that the webpage is so misleading. for example, about email, it says:
" Google and its partners have access to all your information and they can collect data, they can display ads inside your inbox, and the contents of your inbox are shared with random third parties. "
the proof they link to is an article about cases where the gmail-user gave permission to those third-party apps to read their gmail-email. so, no "random third parties", no "partners". if you remove those parts from the argument, what remains is an email provider that also displays ads next to your email.
All in all a decent effort at providing some Google alternatives. However, if the focus is on privacy I would not even recommend any services that are not specifically privacy-focused (IMO), even with a disclaimer. I would encourage anyone to self-review any services listed.
Godaddy is offered as a domain and website host, when they have been known to inject JavaScript tracking code unbeknownst to the user [0].
I really like keyword searches in Firefox's navigation bar. They are like lower latency and faster DDG "bangs". What I found is that most of my searches are better served by direct searches on Wikipedia and Stack Overflow. For Linux and software trouble shooting, using Google is better, but at least there's less "privacy surface area" than doing everything through Google.
There's also so much SEO-spam on Google/Bing that I find it easier to just do site:reddit.com or look up the top rated posts/comments on HN from Algolia. The latter works really well, so thank you all committed HN users! :)
Sadly, keyword searches are being deprecated in Firefox Desktop, and are already not implemented in latest Firefox for android.
There is a plan to extend custom search engines with that functionality, but it is not clear if it can be a full replacement.
I tried to find a link to the discussion where Mozilla took this decision, but apparently the decision process at Mozilla is not very open, or it’s documentation is scattered among too many systems.
From that it looks like bookmark keyword searches will be auto-migrated to a new user interface in about:preferences that will allow users to create their own "custom search engine", which seems to imply it will have all the features necessary to do what bookmark keyword searches can currently do. Without knowing anything about this change prior to reading your comment, on the surface this seems like a good thing to me since it sounds like it will be a lot more discoverable and usable to your average user than bookmark keyword searches currently are.
Thanks for posting! I hope that the conversion from bookmark to custom search engines will work with Firefox Sync. That has been a killer feature for me of the bookmark keyword searches. I've probably had the same keyword searches in my bookmarks for more than ten years, and Sync reliably puts them on every FF instance. Like magic! :)
it's mind boggling how many features they keep removing. vivaldi has the same search feature but i liked how firefox let you add/edit directly from the bookmark and also how the same shortcuts would work on the mobile browser.
the only thing stopping me from going back to vivaldi at this point if the containers feature
Question: Does anyone have a good list of alternatives for the tracking and synchronization bits Google provides, except where you control them instead of Google?
I actually rather like having my search history available to me, along with my location history, and my YouTube watch history. But, like many folks, I'm wary of this information being shared with others without my consent (or when my consent is non-optional).
Is there a better solution for looking up my own search history than syncing my Firefox history across multiple devices and querying the URLs directly? Is there a good Android app for automatically storing my lat/long, mapping this to nearby locations from OSM, and syncing it to, say, a simple self-hosted database? Or possibly a good tool for syncing YouTube (or, better, all video) view histories across multiple devices like TVs and phones without logging in? None of these things seems like it is overly technically challenging, but it feels like a hole in some of the Google alternatives list I've seen.
https://www.betterinternetsearch.com is a new startup out of Scotland which is interesting. Their approach to monetisation is rather radical. The product works well but the mountain to climb is vast. Google’s moat is deep.
I am still using it, because I think that Google services are generally highly secure (in terms of theft/hacks/breaches/etc), although they might not be the safest in terms of encryption.
However, I am using it with Cryptomator[0]. What this tool does it to encrypt your data/files/etc and store them in the chosen cloud. It's quite convenient, if you have several devices. I highly recommend it.
If you want to use Cryptomator, please check if your cloud storage provider supports WebDAV, otherwise not every feature will work, like android or so.
You can also use this idea with something like KeepassXC so that you can have a password manager in the cloud without having to pay.
> There are other alternatives to Google Chrome like Apple’s Safari and Microsoft’s Edge but many of these have serious privacy issues.
Really? I don't anything about Edge, but what serious privacy issues does Safari have? It doesn't send data back to Apple as far as I can tell. I can use ad blockers and tracker blockers with it. Or when they say "some of these" do they mean "one of these two?"
I do not sync any of my data to iCloud beyond Contacts and Calendar, so I would presume my browsing history is safe. Plus I always browse in Private mode, so it doesn't keep a history anyway. But I guess most people probably don't take those precautions so for them it could be a method of leaking data. Thanks for the insight!
It's a fantastic service. Offers webdav storage, calendar, contacts, notes, and more. I really like that you can also use sieve[1] for filtering your email.
JMAP[2] is really cool too, the documentation on it is quite great. It makes me want to do some cool things with it, like Julia Evans[3].
I also came here to suggest fastmail - it's been great overall, and the killer feature that allowed me to transition to it smoothly was that they offer email snoozing, which I use to manage my schedule and when to deal with emails, etc. That was the great feature of inbox that I felt I couldn't leave until they killed it and sent me back to gmail (whose interface I don't like, and I want to de-google as much as possible, so it fitted together well).
Can anyone explain to me why exactly startpage.com is not listed? - They also list other meta searchers which have ads. I know some of the rumours about startpage but not mentioning it at all made me wonder what are the criteria for the list or whether I've missed something very bad about starpage (such that it becomes obvious to not list it)...
This site is disguised as something it's not when if you look at it, they're just an affiliate farm. Case in point - look at vpn reviews - they only mention those where they also provide an affiliate link.
I was addicted to Google News. Until I realized that the news only shows to me what it wants to show. I do not see apnews, Reuters, and lots and lots of sites that I want to. I can customize google news, then it becomes a curator. So I have started deliberately moving away from news, and using the individual sites.
I use Gandi for domains however I think people should be aware of this episode of outrageous unprofessionalism from them before deciding whether to use them or not https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22001822
They've been nothing short of professional for the decade and a half I've used them for domains. However, I would not recommend them for anything other than domains. I kinda wish they would drop the other products to be honest, but I guess they must make good money from the upsells.
https://tld-list.com or any other multi-TLD multi-registrar search is going to give you a better price than if you only go to a single registrar to get a domain.
Is there a good open replacement for point of interest search in the mapping space? This is the main thing I end up switching back to Google Maps for. Open Street Maps is good if I already know my address ahead of time, but at least the Android incarnation (Osmand+) has a search UI only a mother could love. Even if that worked consistently, it seems to just not have more than half of the businesses nearby. Am I missing an option somewhere?
You're not missing an option - OSM simply doesn't have great POI coverage in the US yet. If you have 15 minutes free, register at osm.org and add some POIs for your local area!
I tend to imagine that year-2005 Google search is a tutorial-level web app today. Was Google search 15 years ago really bad by today's standards?
With my biases, I remember that Google search was pretty good by 2005 (and much more predictable and configurable than nowadays). Why is there almost no competition and innovation in this space, apart from rebranding Bing search as Duck Duck Go?
I don’t think so. If there are 5 billion pages on the internet, one could have a compressed 1KB-per-page index of the entire internet on a single consumer-grade computer in their bedroom in 2020. Size of the web should not be an issue, in my opinion :(
I feel like all that's ever talked about here as bad about search is privacy. But what about good results? Google search results have an extremely heavy commercial bias. What would the internet look like without that? I would really like to have a say in how the ranking algorithm works. If I could, for example, exclude results from the Alexa Top 100k with a toggle, I bet I'd find interesting content a lot easier.
Most "privacy-centric" search engines I've seen – especially DDG – do not approach this, probably since they use Bing results, which is just as inflexible and SEO-able as Google. Has anyone had a good experience with a search engine that implements a novel crawler and/or ranking algorithm?
I've been trying Yandex for some searches lately, and it's results seem a little less commercially catered, but there are indeed some serious privacy concerns with it [0].
I have been holding a belief lately that a nonprofit search engine that scrapes & ranks in a way that is not commercially-driven is the single most important missing piece of digital infrastructure... anyone share this view?
Changing the search provider wouldn't matter. The commercial nature of Google's results has almost nothing to do with Google and almost everything to do with SEO. Search results are far too valuable a piece of real estate for rankings to not be correlated with money. I guarantee you the army of marketers and full time SEO ninjas at Conde Nast will always figure out a way to get their content past your "no corporations allowed" filter.
I'm advocating for a ranking algorithm aligned to the benefit to the users, instead of the marketers. I think you're not appreciating Google's ranking algorithms lending a hand to the popularity of SEO. Their rankings are certainly not objective.
As for "far too valuable of a piece of real estate"... I feel like that's an unimaginative view trapped in the commercial state that we're in. Perhaps if Google had beat Wikipedia to online encyclopedias, but had pumped theirs with ads, we'd be saying the same thing about the far too valuable real estate of online information.
I don't think that an algorithm "designed to the benefit of the users" is nearly as straightforward as you think it is. We didn't get into the current situation because Google deliberately chose to make their algorithm friendly to marketers; we got here because marketers competed with each other to rank up in search results, effectively reverse-engineering Google's algorithm in an effort to exploit it. This would happen to any search algorithm that was widely adopted enough that marketers started trying to optimise for it.
(Google has deliberately slanted their news results towards mainstream sources in an attempt to suppress political messaging that they consider unacceptable, but it's not clear whether this is having an impact on the specific problem of commercial results drowning out other sources.)
> We didn't get into the current situation because Google deliberately chose to make their algorithm friendly to marketers.
This isn't quite true. Google has changed its search results in recent years to cut out content from more than a decade or so ago. You can no longer find the content even if you search for the exact strings in the website. If you have your own old site, it is easy to see from the logs that the Google Bot is still crawling the old pages, it just doesn't index them any more.
There are many instances where the most relevant content to return for a search would be from a website from the early millennium, but Google refuses to show that, while Google will show a big commercial website from more recent times even if the result is less relevant to the query.
Good point; this is in addition to their other missteps and contributes to the problem. The early web was less commercial, so phasing out old results pushes ever harder for commercial results over others.
I didn't know about it, so big thanks. That for sure will be a useful tool. However, that was only one example of what I'd like to be able to do. I'd also really like visibility into the ranking algorithm and to be able to tweak the criteria it prioritizes to suit the interests of my search.
There's also Almonit (I'm one of the creators), which is a decentralized search engine that looks like a Google alternative, but it only searches decentralized websites, so it's not.
almonit.eth.link/
Almonit is based on IPFS and it would actually be interesting to make a real Google alternative based on the idea of IPFS.
I used to use Google Business but they stopped the free plan so then I tried out ImprovMX and that sucked. Recently found a startup Forwardemail.net and its free and super easy to use! (I use it to forward emails from my Shopify store and website to my outlook mail)
Currently shopping for an email host. For 2-3 accounts, Protonmail is pretty pricey, compared with tutanota... I've heard good things about protonmail, but does anybody have experience with tutanota or any of the other alternatives listed?
ProtonMail and Tutanota don’t primarily support IMAP (well, ProtonMail does as an option with an additional “bridge application“).
Take a look at Posteo.de (if you’re fine with no support for custom domains) and mailbox.org and runbox.com if you want custom domain support.
If you’re fine with the provider being in the U.S. and want a cheap solution for multiple domains, then mxroute may be good. It also has some very cheap plans and offers going on (check the lowendtalk.com forums).
Curious: Why not sign up for a web hosting provider that provides email as well? Dreamhost right now has a discount for $4/mo if you sign up for one year. Otherwise it's $9/mo in general. You get unlimited user email accounts. And you get web hosting should you ever want it.
Their email interface may not be great, but I download using IMAP anyway. And you could install your own preferred web interface on the shared hosting you'll have.
I guess my feeling was that an email-only provider would have better service than a web hosting provider where email is more of an afterthought. Also, while a shared host is comparable in price with fastmail or protonmail - if I went with tutanota or a similarly priced offering, it's about 1/3 the price (for 3 accounts).
It is likely true that an email only provider may have more features. In my experience, the support Dreamhost has provided me whenever I needed it has been exemplary. However, yes, mail is a low priority for them, and I think they focus on just providing the basics (secure, no frills email). They do have a spam filter, but I don't use it.
If you just need the basics: Email addresses, with stuff like SMTP and IMAP support, Dreamhost is more than adequate.
I use mailbox.org. They offer encryption and I believe have a focus on privacy. best part is 1 euro a month, but that is for their basic package which I think should be enough for most people.
Edit: I only use 1 email account with them though, don't know how they go for multiple.
The pricing model changed a few months ago for the worse, IMO. And Migadu just gave one month’s time for users to switch from the previous free tier (with a footer ad) to a paid tier. During a worldwide pandemic with debilitating effects on many people, this was a move that wasn’t thought through. I’d personally not trust Migadu to care much for customers based on trying it in the past and seeing this move unfold.
Pandemic hit everyone, including us, that is why we cannot afford to subsidize free users anymore.
The new paid tier is ~$1.6 monthly or about 5 cents a day, which is affordable in every corner of the planet. We also never refused to help those that by some chance cannot afford it.
In case you happen to see this late reply, I do not have a problem with moving to completely paid plans since "free" costs you money and time. But the short notice of one month during a time like this was really not thought through at all from the users' perspective. Unless you were going bankrupt, this is unconscionable. Your update and rebranding didn't say one word about the short notice and the reasoning behind it.
Also, the lowest paid tier has limitations whereas the next tier after that is a huge jump in price.
For these reasons, I cannot consider Migadu as a trustworthy provider right now.
The notice was actually given in early August, and the change took effect in October. We have extended trial to all that asked for it without problems. We did say in the update what happened.
The lowest paid plan has only limitations in tools for multi-admin, everything else is the same with lower quota obviously, but that is already double what was on the free plan.
All good, just that has nothing to do with trust. Trust works both ways. There is no such thing as free lunch, and we have always called the "free" plan "unlimited trial" with clear statement that we can revoke it at anytime.
Google is becoming more annoying by the day.
It has become customary for it to force the user to accept privacy-leaking features by grouping them together with other useful features. This kind of sneaky behavior I don't like at all.
That's a very narrow take on the matter. One can be deceitful with perfect information. In general you can use small prints or psychological tricks and conceal your true aim. If you know that by presenting information in a certain manner leads the user to be more willing to accept harmful conditions, then you're being sneaky even though you're technically being open.
These are good if you're seeking to replace a single Google product, but if you're invested in the Google ecosystem it's a real pain in the ass to stitch together 15 individual alternative products. It sucks.
The list is a bit fragmented. It doesn't really give Nextcloud enough credit. Nextcloud can replace _most_ of google in one shot -- calendar, reminders, contacts, drive, docs, hangouts, maps, photos, and more (https://apps.nextcloud.com/). I think it's not as popular because 1. it's not free (as in beer, but it is free as in speech) and 2. it's kind of fiddly to get up and running. You can either host it yourself or sign up with a provider, but either way it's not super intuitive and nowhere near as polished as what we're used to these days. But, if you're looking to get off of Google and don't want to sign up for 10 different things, Nextcloud is worth a look.
Google Photos is a good example of what makes it hard to switch: I can search for text in the images, object categories, etc. and Google does a half-decent job of finding what I’m looking for (e.g. when checking into a Hotel, I’ve searched for “license plate” to get my car’s license plate number or, if I remember a bottle of wine I liked, I can search “wine bottle” to find the label).
Yeah this is the hardest one to replace for me, too. Nextcloud has a photos integration that has reasonable facial recognition/grouping, but Google photos semantic search is really useful. Part of what makes Google so evil though is that they gave away the photos product for free for long enough to kill off any real competition. There are certainly loads of teams who could do it just as well or better, but not for free. And of course now that there are no viable alternatives, Google will start charging. Typical monopoly behaviour that should in itself constitute a reason to stop using them.
I'll consider Google alternatives when there is a better alternative. Until then I use the best technology. Do we really need these same posts every other week?
"Best" is a subjective measure. For a lot of people being tracked all around the internet is a non-starter. I would also argue that a lot of Google products have stagnated and are not the best on offer anymore. Hey and Protonmail for mail, Notion for docs/keep, and Sync for file syncing come to mind, but of course that's just me :)
This assumes Google is acting in good faith, and I find that hard to believe when Google's consent prompts are intentionally annoying and not GDPR compliant (for reasons outlined in another comment of mine: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25373600) and they used dark patterns like intentionally disabling functionality such as saving specific locations when location history is disabled in Google Maps.
>In what way does google invade your privacy that has made you worse off?
This made me laugh. Let's talk about an example. Imagine the nicest house with all of the features possible. You get to live in the house and enjoy all benefits at not cost whatsoever. Only catch would be that the house would be made of transparent glass and everyone outside gets to see what you are doing at all times. Would you still choose to live in the house? Sure you might, I for one will not because it would make me extremely uncomfortable. It might not directly make me worse off but tracking my every move does not sit right with me.
Using google's service is somewhat like that transparent house except whatever you do on web is tracked, profiled and used against your best interests.
That's a poor example. I think a closer comparison is that the house doesn't have transparent glass but rather sensors that can tell which room you're in, how much time you spend in a room etc. People may be fine with that in exchange for living for free in a nice house vs. living in a rundown shack without tracking.
Every service needs early adopters, perhaps you are not one of them? Nothing wrong with that just as there's nothing wrong with wanting to try new services, more so when not happy with what's on offer.
Google first, since it's personalized. Then check dogpile.com for anything Google might suppress due to its obvious political bias. Works great for me.
In general, punish a monopoly by using a competitor, not by boycotting the monopoly. You're supporting an eventual threat to the monopoly, which monopolists hate, because it erodes their long-term advantage. That's why they spend so much buying up small competitors. They're afraid.
Doing yourself the injury of avoiding the monopoly platform completely is something they would do to punish you if they could, to discourage others from patronizing competitors.
1) trying duck duck go and then immediately re-searching in google to actually get relevant answers.
2) skipping the search bar and going immediately to google when I know DDG just isn't going to work.
Feels like back in the olden days when you had to try Altavista, Lycos and Yahoo to find what you're looking for.
I can live without chrome, calendars, gmail, maps and all the others. But they're still the best at search by a lot.