On the other side, DuckDuckGo is becoming pretty reasonable. I now only need to flip back to google for some hard to search technical topics. DDG also brings up a ton more of the old internet, you get way more variety in the search results.
I have been using DDG for years. I inadvertently used google for a search (damn browser defaults) and i was genuinely difficult to find something relevant with the amount of ads cluttering it up.
Yeah, whenever I end up on google for whatever reason I get a nag screen to try to trick me into agreeing to their tracking crap (with no easy way to say "fuck off, no") and it seems to come back very frequently. I use ddg pretty much exclusively now.
I fall back to !g when I don't find what I'm looking for. It happens too often for technical things. And Google is the only one that handles "verbatim searches". At least I'm splitting my trail of data between two companies.
I looked on DDG for _ubuntu turn on a usb disk after it was switched off_ and it didn't return anything related to the query. I added !g and Google gave me [1] as the second result.
It’s common for “ambiguous search terms” similar to “python database”.
I’d bet that an experienced ddg user might have workarounds for this kind of thing. I’ve certainly found adding a few extra terms gives me what I need.
Will they stay reasonable? "DuckDuckGo gains revenue via advertisements and affiliate programs."
Today I'm quite skeptical of any business that doesn't have a proper business model. I've seen it too many times: offer nice free things until you have enough users, and then start squeezing. Bait and switch.
At this point I'm more interested in internet search that isn't reliant on the goodwill and dignity of a private company.
I use Brave and ddg (depending on browser).
Brave is only worse when it comes to location specific searches, otherwise for general searches I'm agnostic between the two.
Still fallback to !g bangs on every couple of days.
