this post was submitted on 13 Aug 2023
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No more anti-consumer than Google saying that "the internet is best experienced in chrome" every time you open YouTube or Google search.
Well, they also mangle/limit the Google Search on Firefox for Android. If you change your useragent to Chrome, it will show just fine, so it's not issue with Firefox, it's deliberate.
DDG has better results anyway
Google's results these days are shit. The other day I googled an exact terraform resource and included "terraform" in my search query. The first result should've been the page for that resource in terraform's documentation, but that page wasn't in the results at all. What was there was a blogspam copy of said page.
Google has stop paying attention to it's own search commands. I can +search term in my search and it will still bring up the same results it brought up in the previous search that made me include the + in the first place, even when I know results with that term exist.
Also if it decides you've typo'd, it often no longer gives you the option to search for the exact thing you typed. It used to say "did you mean __________?" and you could click a link to search for the exact word it thins you mistyped. It now often doesn't give you that option anymore.
Doesn't DDG just use Bing?
No, they operate their own crawlers.
Per https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/sources/:
Oh interesting. I've seen their crawlers in my server logs, didn't know they were using it to augment Bing.
Yeah, I forget about that until I get a new phone and have to reinstall that extension..
Just gives you a limited interface. The menu on left side is completely gone, voice search is missing, Google Lens is missing, you can't search by tags.
This add-on fixes it by changing useragent to Chrome when browsing Google: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/google-search-fixer/ which makes Firefox contribute to Chrome marketshare.
Weird to think now that Google used to have Customized Firefox search page.
Don’t you think it’s different if Google says this on their own sites vs Microsoft showing this when visiting their competitors?
Both isn‘t good. But I feel like one of those is clearly worse.