It feels like Google search is already curated. At home I cannot find academic articles which appeared in the search at work, because my girlfriend trained the home's recommendation engine on searches for cute cat pictures and domestic things. In DuckDuckGo, at least I know I will be able to find the same results for the same search terms no matter where I am.

Wow, I agree. Lately I've noticed search sometimes just pops in websites just because I visited it from a previous search, relevancy be damned! and it suuuuuucks.

I seem to be able to find a much more limited selection of content than I used to in the past. It used to be that even obscure search queries turned up something useful, but now you either get nothing or the same old big or commercial sites. There has to be tons of content out there that Google just can't seem to find anymore.

There was a discussion about exactly that here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19604135

Ironically I could not find this link via DDG, but it was the first hit on Google.

Matbe it’s cuz google knows you frequent hacker news....

I used site:news.ycombinator.com on both engines

Use a VPN in a private VM.

Use a VPN in a private VM so you can use Google and get decent search results?

Is your response satire?

I want to believe it is.

What can I say? I mean, it works.

Using Google via VPN services, there are many other users. Occasionally someone's been a jerk, and Google gives you the stinkeye. But then you switch to a different server.

I added "private VM" in case OP was sharing a machine with his girlfriend. But really, it's always prudent to use VPNs from dedicated VMs. Because that compartmentalizes tracking. And using VMs also simplifies managing machine state. You can use a fresh clone for each session, for example. Or boot from a static image.

I like DDG and StartPage, for sure. But sometimes I just gotta use Google.

It’s not, I do something similar. Google results are just that much better for certain content I have found

Or, duck duck go with the g! prefix, if you really must use google with bubbling turned off (instead of a reasonable alternative).

DDG isn't magic. It doesn't bubble you on its own results (or at least it claims not to), but it can't change how external providers behave.

Sadly, in this day and age, a good, usable search engine that does not enclose you into your own bubble is magic.

Using !s will proxy through Startpage, so you get Google results through an actual search proxy instead of just going to Google (I don't think !g "un-bubbles" anything).

Or, you know, you can just create a separate user in the OS. Or even just create a separate browser user profile (for Chrome, Firefox has it as well)

I recall thinking, a long time ago, "You never see ads for Google stuff on TV. That's because what they make is so much better they don't need to advertise them."

I think you can mark the spot where the business folk took the reins from the engineers by the date of their first TV ads.

I don't watch TV ads, but a giant Chromebook ad is now cycling on the billboard next to my office.

I really wish more jurisdictions would ban billboard ads.

Why though? Becauss Google uses them?

No, I've been against billboards long before Google started using them. IMO they're visual blight that don't serve any positive function.

What about ads in general?

What about them? Other than ads in public spaces, which I think shouldn't be permitted, they're avoidable.

I agree. I used to be a fan. They were explicitly not evil, gave lots of open source stuff away for free, made lots of other free services.

Turns out they were just making us dependent on them, and now that they've got us, they do whatever they want. We need to make ourselves less dependent on Google. Move away from GMail, use Firefox, DuckDuckGo, OSM, federated social networks, etc. I don't have a good replacement for Android yet, as iOS is just another walled garden. Similarly, Facebook is no replacement for Google+. We need stuff to be opener, not dependent on another company. For email, you need to own your own domain, so you can easily move from one provider to another.

god I tried. DuckDuckGo just does not work as well as it needs to. It gets touted as a turn key google search replacement but it’s simply not. 4 times today, I searched 5+ different ways for something after poor results, each thing took one search to find on google. Granted, maybe I am just more familiar with how to get the most out of googles search, maybe it has such a vast profile on me that it understands what I want i am looking for. Either way, i am pretty close to caving and it’s sad

You can use the !SP operator before your DDG search to invoke StartPage, which uses Google results. I mean, it's the same thing, just it doesn't look like you're using Google search ;)

Even better, with same results: use !s as a token anywhere in your search string :)

LineageOS [0] is also worth a look, it's like Android without all the un-uninstallable Google spyware. No play services, no need to log in to a G account to use the device, no G apps (but you can install them separately if desired), no background data harvesting, etc.

The open source MicroG project [1] takes things a step further by acting as a drag-and-drop replacement for Google Play Services. It provides a FOSS location provider backend, allows the device passes SafetyNet checks (Snapchat/Pokemon Go/online banking), and generally makes for a seamless mobile experience.

I've been using both for ~6 months now and the only noticeable difference is GPS taking a few seconds longer to get a satellite lock. Definitely worth a shot if you're interested in de-googling your Android.

[0] https://www.lineageos.org/

[1] https://lineage.microg.org/

>I don't have a good replacement for Android yet

It might not suit your needs, but I've been happily using SailfishOS for the past four years.

> SailfishOS

Descended from MeeGo, I see. I hadn't heard from it yet, but I'll have a look.

... use the contact pages on web sites you like that use AMP- to stop using AMP.

They use AMP to get ranked higher by Google. We need to stop using Google Search if we want sites to stop using AMP.

Search is increasingly worthless for certain terms. They are things I can't find anymore even with refining the search query.

Basically it's good for anything geo or <your language> related but everything else is getting worse.

I guess not all search is profitable, perhaps there gradually "optimising" on financially profitable search, so only crawling sites that relates to content for users that bring then in money, only returning SERP items that bring in money? Obviously they need their search to be broadly useful too, but many searches probably have no financial benefit for them??

It can't be for lack of crawling - my little ad-free forum which hasn't seen more than a couple concurrent users for years is crawled daily by Googlebot.

You can go in the google searchmaster’s console and tell them to scrape you less frequently, save some bandwidth.

They were good for a long while too. Like, long enough that you started to feel it might last forever.

I’m really not sure why they felt the need to change a winning strategy...

Search was curated a long time ago, friend. Now is the time for a true search contender, imo.

And now Microsoft is becoming a crowd favorite.

This must be the dystopian future we were warned about.