We're reaching the end of an era wherein billions of dollars of investor money was shovelled into tech startups to build large user-bases, and now those companies (now monoliths) are beginning to constrict their user-bases and squeeze for every single penny they can possibly extract. Fair or not.
Now more than ever, it's important for us to step back and reconsider whether we want to be billboards for these companies anymore.
For anyone unfamiliar, some good resources to have when starting your degoogling journey are below:
Privacy Guides - A list of privacy-respecting services you can use.
Plexus - A crowdsourced information bank of service compatibility with degoogled devices.
This random PDF - A study from 2018 detailing data that Google tracks about its' users.
Tried DDG a few times over the years. Sorry, but it just doesn't do it for me. Results were terrible. Google had lots of results and it was just too much effort to keep switching from DDG if it doesn't provide an answer. Because I know Google will.
I have been using DDG as default for probably two years now. I love how I get so few ads and a cleaner experience as well. I absolutely agree Google has better results sometimes and I just use !g at the start of my search to get purely Google results. The search operators are amazing and there are so many!
When using !g, be aware that Google can track that. It's the same as just going to Google. If that matters to you.
Oh yes, I am fully aware of that and thus use it sparingly only in cases where I don't find what I'm looking for on DDG
I'd forgotten all about that 🤦🏻♂️
Will give it another go!
I've been using DDG for some years now and whenever I accidentally end up at. Google these days, I'm confused by the tenor of the results. Google seems to favor products while DDG tends to produce fewer commercial results. Used to be that Google worked fine for technical things but now DDG seems better for me.
Whoogle is what I use. Hosted for free on free tier. Or locally with tailscale. It’s google without the tracking. Same results.
I'll have a look - thanks 😊
I was like this at first before switching to DDG, ended up using it in parallel alongside Google until adjusting to it.
I've found it to be far from a 1:1 replacement to the big G for most people, as you've got to write your search queries differently to get what you're looking for