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Comment by reaperducer | Hacker News Reader

I just finished spending two months on DuckDuckGo, and landed back on Google simply because I was tired of searching for so many things twice: once with the original search, and once with g!.

I really want a Google alternative. Maybe I'll try Bing again, too.

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I've been using DDG for a few years now as my primary search engine. I would say 99% of the time I can find what I need (just like with Google), and it's super useful with some of their integrations into stack overflow and related sites.

Regarding the results, after a few years, I found that it's not that DDG is worse then Google -- but it's that I was conditioned on how to optimize Google's results. I believe it's because no search engine uses natural language, instead it's language that we think is natural but our brains have optimized for the engine.

Once I came to that realization, I started optimizing my search for DDG just as I had done for Google.

I often type a programming error message into DDG, fail to find anything useful, type it in Google, find it right away. I don't see how reoptimizing my brain would help in this situation where I'm just typing in an error word-for-word.

Bing is nowhere near Google yet, but I've been using it due to Google rate limiting my VPN. It does seem to pick up answers to programming questions quite well on the usual sites like SO, every now and then I'll have to switch because Bing seems to not index as many pages, and it seems to index at less frequent intervals to Google. Another thing is Google just seems to understand what you want even if you typed it poorly, Bing is bad at this so you end up typing more complete queries.

I've used bing for over a year now, rarely ever going back to google. I'm in the USA, no reference for outside the US...

> I was tired of searching for so many things twice

Yeah I do this as a DDG user. I'm not even sure the google search is adding any value but I end up doing it "just in case".

I would like a way to get two columns of results for each search - one for DDG and one for Google, so that I can compare the two. It might wean me off doing the second search because I can finally resolve whether it's worth it or not.

there were some sites like this. I clearly remember googlegooglegooglegoogle.com that initially let you google in 4 frames, followed by a herd of clones where you could choose how many frames and which search engines to use where. and then there was something like googlevsbing.com that used 2 frames, left and right plus had synchronized scrolling afair. where are they all gone? this internet thing forgets its features faster than me it seems.

edit: also see https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/10-websites-to-compare-google-...

Try Startpage. It proxies Google search results -- basically Google without the tracking.

And how do you know they don't track you? I have a problem with anyone that isn't willing to open source their code.

There is this thing called General Data Protection Regulations for European companies. You can just ask for the information stored regarding you. People have. That's how it is known they aren't tracking.

In other words, they have 30 days to erase your data. So, they can keep customer data for 29 days, sell it and then be in "compliance".

Startpage's published privacy policy goes much further than GDPR to state there is no logging of personal info.

They also seem to be voluntarily registered with the Dutch data protection agency that verifies this.

However none of this will matter to you if you don't a basic level of trust in what an online service states in their TOS/Privacy Policy etc

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