I used to be a fan of Google. They were the good ones, the open ones. Ha! I’ve feel like they played the long sucker game. How times have changed. Even Android feels like a ruse. And Chrome. And maps.
The last thing will be search. At some point it’ll be curated for my own good.
To be fair, Everyone has to make a living, but be honest don’t take people for suckers of make them into suckers.
It feels like Google search is already curated. At home I cannot find academic articles which appeared in the search at work, because my girlfriend trained the home's recommendation engine on searches for cute cat pictures and domestic things. In DuckDuckGo, at least I know I will be able to find the same results for the same search terms no matter where I am.
Wow, I agree. Lately I've noticed search sometimes just pops in websites just because I visited it from a previous search, relevancy be damned! and it suuuuuucks.
I seem to be able to find a much more limited selection of content than I used to in the past. It used to be that even obscure search queries turned up something useful, but now you either get nothing or the same old big or commercial sites. There has to be tons of content out there that Google just can't seem to find anymore.
Using Google via VPN services, there are many other users. Occasionally someone's been a jerk, and Google gives you the stinkeye. But then you switch to a different server.
I added "private VM" in case OP was sharing a machine with his girlfriend. But really, it's always prudent to use VPNs from dedicated VMs. Because that compartmentalizes tracking. And using VMs also simplifies managing machine state. You can use a fresh clone for each session, for example. Or boot from a static image.
I like DDG and StartPage, for sure. But sometimes I just gotta use Google.
Using !s will proxy through Startpage, so you get Google results through an actual search proxy instead of just going to Google (I don't think !g "un-bubbles" anything).
I recall thinking, a long time ago, "You never see ads for Google stuff on TV. That's because what they make is so much better they don't need to advertise them."
I think you can mark the spot where the business folk took the reins from the engineers by the date of their first TV ads.
I agree. I used to be a fan. They were explicitly not evil, gave lots of open source stuff away for free, made lots of other free services.
Turns out they were just making us dependent on them, and now that they've got us, they do whatever they want. We need to make ourselves less dependent on Google. Move away from GMail, use Firefox, DuckDuckGo, OSM, federated social networks, etc. I don't have a good replacement for Android yet, as iOS is just another walled garden. Similarly, Facebook is no replacement for Google+. We need stuff to be opener, not dependent on another company. For email, you need to own your own domain, so you can easily move from one provider to another.
god I tried. DuckDuckGo just does not work as well as it needs to. It gets touted as a turn key google search replacement but it’s simply not. 4 times today, I searched 5+ different ways for something after poor results, each thing took one search to find on google. Granted, maybe I am just more familiar with how to get the most out of googles search, maybe it has such a vast profile on me that it understands what I want i am looking for. Either way, i am pretty close to caving and it’s sad
You can use the !SP operator before your DDG search to invoke StartPage, which uses Google results. I mean, it's the same thing, just it doesn't look like you're using Google search ;)
LineageOS [0] is also worth a look, it's like Android without all the un-uninstallable Google spyware. No play services, no need to log in to a G account to use the device, no G apps (but you can install them separately if desired), no background data harvesting, etc.
The open source MicroG project [1] takes things a step further by acting as a drag-and-drop replacement for Google Play Services. It provides a FOSS location provider backend, allows the device passes SafetyNet checks (Snapchat/Pokemon Go/online banking), and generally makes for a seamless mobile experience.
I've been using both for ~6 months now and the only noticeable difference is GPS taking a few seconds longer to get a satellite lock. Definitely worth a shot if you're interested in de-googling your Android.
I guess not all search is profitable, perhaps there gradually "optimising" on financially profitable search, so only crawling sites that relates to content for users that bring then in money, only returning SERP items that bring in money? Obviously they need their search to be broadly useful too, but many searches probably have no financial benefit for them??
It can't be for lack of crawling - my little ad-free forum which hasn't seen more than a couple concurrent users for years is crawled daily by Googlebot.
The last thing will be search. At some point it’ll be curated for my own good.
To be fair, Everyone has to make a living, but be honest don’t take people for suckers of make them into suckers.