Basically I get more done faster with google search, however much I hate the goog panopticon. I’ve also switched to Apple News and Maps so I’m very much trying to dump goog, but search is where they still really excel.

I do wish I’d come back to Firefox sooner though, absolutely love it post quantum.

I switched to google and instantly grabbed some ones from 2019

This happens way too often, and I like to think not because of personalized results.

And when I do use !g results (especially tech related) are not that good ! Maybe because Google have not enough info to set me in the correct "bubble" ?

DDG does the job for me.

Just to be contrarian... maybe there's some useful signal there about why you might prefer technologies without so much churn.

If anyone here is at Adobe, please for the love of god hammer it into the heads of your PMs to do three or four sprints dedicated only to resolving bugs and crashes.

Stop using Google, everyone! It's not necessary and you'll be tracked far less. Plus you're helping to save what is left of the web from one of the most odious attacks on it ever.

Citation needed.

Last I checked, most news sites still throw dozens of ad networks and tracking beacons on their pages. If they use Google Analytics, Google Fonts, Google Maps, or other Google web APIs, Google still tracks (or has the capability to) many of your movements across the web.

I'm not against making incremental changes to my own life, but there's no clear value in doing this yet.

I'm not personally as worried about being tracked by Google APIs, but UMatrix will still block the majority of them -- even Youtube embeds and many Google fonts. That means you get to choose which sites are allowed to load those APIs, which is a huge improvement over just giving Google access to everything.

Honestly, while fingerprinting is still a huge concern, blocking the majority of Google's tracking on 3rd-party sites is pretty easy, since Google tracking is served from consistent domains.

The remaining pain points are stuff like reCaptcha and AMP, which are obviously a big problem, but are not used universally enough to erase the privacy gains you'll get by switching off of Gmail and Google search.

If you're already running a (good) adblocker, you will genuinely be tracked less if you switch off of Google. There are ways to mess that up and erase those gains (cough running stock Android with default settings cough), but it's very feasible for most tech-literate people to reduce Google tracking right now.

There is lots more that could be done but small, incremental changes do add up over time.

I’ve had the same experience. I’ve wondered what the cause of using !g less is.

Is it because I’m giving google less and less of a diet so it’s ability to cater to me is eroding?

Or perhaps DDG is just truly getting better?

Or is there a subtle feedback loop between man and search engine where we learn how to search better and better given a certain tools behavior?

Would love to hear what others suspected.

I mainly use DDG, but whenever I have to go to !g, I find I get better results if I phrase it like a brain damaged lunatic who can't spell and didn't start thinking about the query until two words in. I believe it keeps Google happy, if you throw it a little bone by letting it second-guess your query. Make it feel all smart and artificially intelligent, so it gives you the good results.

In DDG I usually just enter some keywords.

Older G users also rely on it but to a lesser extent. Having a couple weeks of appending !g when a search query does not match eventually hits the spot where "hey, they actually don't know what I'm thinking now".

When using DDG a couple of years back, I noticed that after a while, throwing in a !g became my default so I figured I might as well switch back to Google. Don't get me wrong, I'd love to love DDG but for my searches, I would simply have to revert to Google too often.

That some techies avoid Google, won't kill AMP. That does not mean I am against it, I use DDG as default engine and fall back to Google only if I tried different queries and scrolled down and still can't find it, and I recommend DDG to everyone. But this question is about killing AMP, which this won't significantly help towards unless we can get non-AMP search engine market share a lot higher than it currently is.

Google is a data-led org, where metrics are king. If AMP’s metrics go the wrong way it’ll be dropped.

Google just has a really good results, it’s not that they’re customized for me.

It's not just academic journal articles either: their results are, by and large, less complete - it's what initially led me to do the experiment in the first place.

People go with what their “expert” friend recommends all the time. If I want to buy a car, I ask a friend who is super into cars for advice, if I want a blender I ask a foodie friend. The same effect can help promote other technologies.

Change the default search provider on every family computer you do tech support for.

That gets us up to 2 or 3%.

That + ease of doing backups and migrations on an unlocked device.

Similar setup here, but recently switched back to iOS. It's a shame that extension support is impractical because of WebKit.