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Comment by anonymous_mouse | Hacker News Reader

I suggest trying DuckDuckGo, a search engine that doesn't track you. Same instructions but replace the search url with: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%s

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Unfortunately DDG's results suck. Nobody really cares about Google's 'tracking', people use them because they work.

Interesting, what makes you say that DDG's results suck? I've been using it as my primary search engine for a few weeks now and aside from it not including a map in results unless you give it a very explicit address, I've found it no worse than Google's results.

What address? That's a bug :)

A online buddy of mine submitted http://enjoys.it/duckduckgo/ a while ago but he was "dead"/ghosted on HN right away.

Maybe not for US queries, but they are kinda lacking for the rest of the world.

ghostfish's message is now gray, so I guess he has been downvoted. Can anyone explain why?

My experience with DDG has been very similar to the one cited by aw3c2: I used it as my primary search engine for a couple of months, and eventually found myself always using !g, so I switched back to google.

We've made a lot of relevancy and speed improvements lately. If you have any specifics, we'd love to hear them. A good way is to try it for a week, collect all the ones that suck and send them to https://duckduckgo.com/feedback.html -- we're listening!

No way, DDG results are great. Only about 1 in 10 times do I end up searching again on other engines.

For me it depends.

On programming searches DDG goes better for me (than Google) because it uses the English data. Google insists on using Spanish data even though I disallow results in other languages than English or Catalan.

For other searches, mostly local information but if it's something recent too, Google goes better. So I use DDG at work, and Google at home.

It's not a "search engine". It's a frontend to Bing.

And, presumably Bing tracks users and uses that data to improve its results. When you use DDG, you're just being tracked as "a DDG user" instead of "a Bing user with cookie=0x23987438743". (I don't know if that's true or not, but it's my current understanding of the situation.)

I think the problem with tracking is not the intrinsic action, but rather the fact we call it "tracking". Tracking is the technique you use to hunt and kill animals. Showing Java results to Java programmers and C# results to C# programmers is a little different from that...

No it is not.

I really want to switch to DDG since I prefer it's results to Google but I always miss the time range filter. I know I'm not alone on this and the answer from DDG is that we can sort by date which is far from an alternative...

I trust Google. I have been moving all my data to Google.

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