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Comment by fady | Hacker News Reader

A+ DDG! I have been using DDG (duck duck go) since Gabriel created it in 2008. It’s been my default search on all my devices. When I need to route searches through Google, I do, as Google is still king at knowing and giving you the exact results you want, whereas DDG, gives you great results, with a different algorithm on the type results plus the added security of what DDG is about. They don’t track you. They don’t save your searches. I don’t use apple maps as i use android, but I like that DDG continues to go against the grain and choose privacy over comfort.

Lastly, I know the bulk of my searches go through DDG so I don’t have to think about what I searched, on what devices, was it on a public net, was VPN enabled?? etc etc.. What are you thoughts? Do you use DDG?

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> Google is still king at knowing and giving you the exact results you want

Not for me, it's not. The quality of Google search results for me has been falling for years now. These days, DDG and Google are about equally good on that score.

I suspect that it's because Google tries to tailor my search results to what it thinks I'm looking for rather than just giving me the results I actually asked for, and it's really, really terrible at it.

Totally. I find that most of my Google searches are not relevant. It started to go down hill once they started pushing ML on search. Google is a marketing platform and no longer a search engine.

Out of curiosity, why would Apple's privacy statement on searches be any different than Google's?

I do not know specifically as I have not read Apple Maps policy but to choose Apple Maps over Google Maps says a lot. I use google maps personally. Apple maps is getting better, but it's not google maps. So one can assume, the choice to choose apple over google means, IMHO, is that with Apple Maps they do not track as much as google would/does. Apple stance on privacy, publicly, has been pretty good. Tracking is everywhere and DDG still is sticking to their privacy first method.

Lastly, I love that I can dump random searches from my weird brain into DDG without the feeling that I'm giving some random machine, data that at some point can tell someone what I may want or do or have searched. Everyone knows what you're doing on the toilet, everybody poops, but we still close the door for privacy.

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