Another thing you can do is use alternative browsers. On mobile I use Firefox Mobile, which has the benefit of allowing extensions, so you can install uBlock Origin! That makes a gigantic different in mobile web performance. On my laptop I've been using Safari as my main browser because it consumes far less memory, and it seems to handle mountains of tabs a lot better than Chrome.
But yeah, saw that I had south africa enabled. Still makes little sense but explains a bit why the result is so weird.
Except scientific articles. I've yet to find a service that comes anywhere close to Google Scholar, which I think is the most successful of their products for my use case.
Sometimes though, I do have problems finding what I'm looking for (when it is obscure) so I pre-pend !g in front, but generally it's not much better ...
The only options are: Google, Bing, AOL, Yahoo, Ask.
To get DDG you'll need to use a different browser like FF.
I actually blocked Chrome on my phone and started using FF once I noticed that Chrome was updating itself even though I was requiring manual updates. Play Store and Google Play Services do the same thing, but don't have a good alternative for them,
Yahoo's search business was always odd... They had their own search, then switched to search powered by Google. Then they purchased Overture, which owned AlltheWeb and AltaVista. Overture had originally purchased AlltheWeb from FAST, who had pivoted into the enterprise space, and later got bought by Microsoft and integrated into SharePoint.
> AOL & Yahoo is really Bing What? I don't get that -- I don't know about AOL, but I thought that Yahoo does its own crawling (their Slurp bot)
For searches in specific domains it is better to use bangs. For example prefixing with !py shows results from python manual.
Here's more about it: https://duckduckgo.com/bang
[0] https://hn.algolia.com/?query=cucumber%20chef%20salad&sort=b...
Upd: and https://github.com/asciimoo/searx
Liking it so far, really liking being able to attach my domains natively to my inbox
I get the idea behind AMP but it's just far too late to the game for Google to be pushing it so heavily. Back on 2G internet I used Opera Mini, I don't use that now because I just don't need it anymore
AMP is so much faster than 90% of websites 90% of the time I can see why Google push it so much.
AMP pages don't work offline just as much as regular internet
For example this mobile speed test puts theverge.com at 21 seconds to load! That matches my experience. You can't tell me AMP is as slow as that. It's not even close.
https://gtmetrix.com/reports/theverge.com/Qli1RH8u
In my experience AMP pages load in 2-3 seconds, even with bad signal.
I was a heavy user of address bar search prefixes, but it's amazingly convenient to not have to think about it until the very end of a query (or even add it in the middle).
The !commands allow you to search more specific sites directly - if I know I want Wikipedia, which I often do, I can just type !w and search it directly. Similar for other things like IMBD, Wolfram Alpha, etc. It's just a convenience.
You can also search Google using a command, which is sometimes necessary when you're really crawling the depths of the internet for something old or weird, but nine times out of ten the straight DDG results will get you where you need in my experience.