241
this post was submitted on 21 Sep 2023
241 points (100.0% liked)
Technology
37699 readers
292 users here now
A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.
Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.
Subcommunities on Beehaw:
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Google's becoming pretty terrible anyway, it only seems to return pages that are selling things. I've switched to Kagi at this point and it seems to work better, it's subscription only, but you know you're the one paying for it and that means that you're the end customer.
Why not duck?
Because last time I checked they just used Bing anwyay, while Kagi runs their own indexer.
Yes but why is that better. For censorship you mean?
It's better because Bing may still have selling ads as a priority when building the indexer. If you're not the one paying, you're the product.
You do know it's not an either- or situation, right? You can be both.
That's a good point.
It changes the question from "why not use duck" to "what does duck really add to bing"
@eltimablo @throws_lemy @xilliah @rastilin what it removes from bing: tracking, and personalized results. I believe it also adds the bang search, which few if any other places have.
Well they have a sensible business model and can provide another stream of income for Bing from users it otherwise wouldn't reach.
Duck duck go is practically broken. I switched to startpage which worked alright until I got a VPN, then I just started using bing with better results. So it is somehow worse than bing even. Duck ignores my quotes and minuses and such things.
I recently switched to kagi, too. Couldn't be happier.
New Kagi user here too, been very happy so far. Though it turns out I do a lot of searching and blew through the 300 searches in the $5 plan in like 2 weeks...
Make an effort to use bangs and I bet you'll stay under the limit. Edit: bang searches don't count towards the limit
Knowing I wanted a result from a certain site but using the search engine to get there was a (bad) habit I brought over from Google.
!imdb barbie
!w mattel
There's even custom bangs, which is something DDG doesn't give you: !libgen some book
@Byter
DDG claims 13.5k existing bangs, and here's a form to add a new one https://duckduckgo.com/newbang
@SoftestVoid
But they don't allow bangs for sites that do illegal things like copyright infringement. Libgen was my example.
@Byter allowing illegal stuff *and* taking money doesn't bode that well for their longevity.
Custom bangs are private to the user. It's not dissimilar to saving a bookmark in your browser, except your bookmarks are hosted by someone else.
It doesn't have to be about legality either. Maybe you like a service that is being protested by DDG for whatever reason.
I just signed up with them, too. They were able to get me a link to the age of a small, nondescript lava flow near my town on the third hit. (5000 years old! A youngster!) All the other search engines gave me unrelated crap.
I have a hard stop set up for when I hit $10, so I'll switch tiers if it comes to that. 😅
I don't necessarily like paying for search, but I couldn't take ad-driven search any longer. Big waste of time getting through the chaff.
I wonder if the verb Google will stay with us when its origin is lost in history
I'm sure it'll still be in the paper. 😉