Comment by bad_user | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bad_user | Hacker News Reader

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I've got 2 problems with DDG:

1) The results I get in DDG are the same results I get in Bing - which means that DDG is for me just a shell around Bing. And even though DDG is not sending to Bing any cookies with my ID, well, being a power user I can and do use the Incognito/Private mode of my browser. Furthermore, your interests can function like a digital fingerprint, so if Google or Microsoft want to identify you without any cookie whatsoever, they can and DDG does not help.

And the bang shortcuts of DDG are also provided by my browser. I mean, if I'm concerned with privacy, why in the world would I want to send my Google searches to DDG's servers?

2) People saying that DDG's search results are just as good are probably living in the US. Outside of the US, like in Europe, non-Google search results get to be like really, really bad ;-)

> DDG is for me just a shell around Bing

I can't comment on that because I don't use Bing. Perhaps Bing would suffice as a Google replacement then? The "instant answer" type results from DDG probably do not work with Bing.

> Furthermore, your interests can function like a digital fingerprint, so if Google or Microsoft want to identify you without any cookie whatsoever, they can and DDG does not help.

How would that work if GA is blocked and "!g" is used only rarely? Also, I use Tor and DDG is the only search engine that doesn't annoy me with captchas (Google's seem totally broken, often I need to solve multiple captchas for a single query - I wish people would stop linking to Google searches...).

> People saying that DDG's search results are just as good are probably living in the US.

No, I live in Austria. I recall complaining about search results about the time the "filter bubble" experiment by DDG ran, but the situation has greatly improved since then.

I have been using DuckDuckGo for more than 4 years now. I would use google only if DDG does not provide a good result. In the last one year, queries that went unanswered on DDG did not turn up a good result on google either. So for me, DDG has not completely replaced google.

Also, I am not living in the USA.

Try Yandex.

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