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Comment by sfotm | Hacker News Reader

"they offer real value services without which you can't survive a day on the web"

This is just not true.

There are viable competitors in about every space that Google is in. Use local documents and sync via a different storage provider. Alternate email providers exist. The only place where they have a distinct advantage is search, and even then, DuckDuckGo is usually enough (and if it's not, just pass a !g flag).

YouTube is also a thing, but I've never felt that having an account really gave me anything over just bookmarking channels.

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Bing is good in search, I switched to bing after google search showed a result directly in the top of search results after parsing an amazon shipment email. I realised they are tracking too much. Every company who depends on ad will do or eventually do that unless there are regulations in place. As a user it's up to you how much you want to share your data with third parties and advertisers.

use startpage.com google search without the tracking

Well - there are competitors but they aren't nearly as good. Usage and popularity of these alternate products tell a story.

Unfamiliarity also goes a long way. I recently switched to DuckDuckGo. In the beginning I would compare my search queries with results from Google.. found there wasn't all that much difference.

+1 for DDG. I’ve been experimenting with it as default in Safari and it’s so similar I often find myself wondering “when did google change their layout?”

I just heard someone mentioning above that it was based on Google, which I wasn't aware of.. I will do a search on that :)

checkout startpage and searx as well. better results than DDG

For the HN crowd, this may be an option. The general public doesn't really care about privacy, and is not going to use DuckDuckGo or any other service whose primary selling point is privacy. The best search engine will win the market, and the best search engine will tend to be the one that can generate the most money to invest in its service.

Even if someone comes in and beats Google at some point, they will do it by hiring a massive number of talented people and buying large quantities of data centers and servers. Those things can only be paid for through advertising and tracking, as few people will directly pay for search services. I suppose a socialist/communist government somewhere in the world might have the resources to build a search engine of Google quality that doesn't rely on advertising, but they would have their own hostile agenda - that would be far worse than having to put up with Nike trying to sell you some shoes while you search.

I got a number of people to switch to DuckDuckGo by sending DDG query url's to them: "Hey, there is a ton of info on this subject!" (sends DDG query)

DDG uses Google.

If they grow too big Google will just switch them off..

Exactly why Google needs to be reined in.

Curious if there is a source for this; I was just looking at this the other day and couldn't confirm they use Google but they did state that they use over 400 sources. Thx

DDG, in fact, uses Bing. [1][2]

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/duckduckgo/comments/4lgda4/duckduck...

[2] https://www.ghacks.net/2016/07/01/duckduckgo-yahoo-partnersh...

Sure, I agree that switching email providers or cloud storage services solely for the sake of privacy isn't going to be something that the average person will do.

I was just objecting to the sentiment that opening a Google account is a requirement for being productive on the internet.

I stopped using DDG a few days ago, when I noticed the !g flag is not encrypting traffic to google anymore, it just redirects to google.com. Do you know what is up with that? Using startpage now.

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