>and full of ads recently

Are there really people here that don't use uBlock Origin or a different adblocker? I can't remember the last time I have seen an ad on a screen.

Whenever I'm on a new machine I get a momentary glimpse of what an ungodly mess the Web is without adblockers. I'd love to know what percentage of web users employ an adblocker, I suppose as that number increases the remaining users can expect to see an increase in both the volume and visibility (and arguably obnoxiousness) of the ads.

This doesn't stop SEO promotion. However I can't say DDG hasn't occasionally ranked some submarine results higher.

I don’t. I don’t pirate software either^. They are not the same thing, but in both instances sometimes you will negatively impact the little guy’s bottom line. So I don’t do either.

Edit: to clarify. I don’t think any less of any one for doing whatever or me being better than any one.

^there are exceptions. I’m sure if I needed to use Photoshop for a day I’d do something akin to pirating. In this case I don’t think it’s a big deal with Adobe being worth $300B.

> negatively impact the little guy’s bottom line

We are talking about Google here. How is blocking ads from Google "impacting the little guys's bottom line"?

The posts were about blocking ads en mass. Not about blocking Google specifically. It would be incredibly rare for some one to get ublock or something similar and only block multi billion dollar companies.

It's the smaller ad networks and obscure sites that are more likely to have malware sneak into the ads, though, so it's safer to block everything.

Sure. I could have similar or different but nonetheless reasons for software and apps. Maybe somehow getting around a SaaS app. Or for other circumstances like finding random people on the web to split a substack or Stratchery subscription with (the latter happened on Twitter and people were not pleased).

The reason doesn’t change my point. The smaller person is hurt by any of these actions when done to their thing - ad blocking, piracy, workarounds, etc.

I don't use adblockers because I need to see the web as the 'users' see it. When I do use a blocker I always forget to turn it off to do troubleshooting. Eventually I left it off... I'll proxy or incognito or whatever when it need to.

How do you do that? I'm a huge DDG fan and am 99% degoogled, force myself to use DDG every couple of weeks but always end up back at Google, because from my experience it's just miles better. Don't want to hate on DDG though, since there is obviously a massive gap in resources between both projects.

Great thing about using DDG is you can have both.

In my experience DDG is fine for general information but Google is better for very specific information.

But DDG supports !Bang. So you can do "!g" in your search bar for you specific query and it uses Google. Or "!w" to go directly to wikipedia or "!a" to search Amazon.

There's over 10,000 of them https://duckduckgo.com/bang so it's great for whatever sites you frequently look for information on.

And can even do things like complex math equations with "!wa" (Wolfram Alpha).

Point being, using DuckDuckGo as your default search engine doesn't mean you are limited to its' results. Personally I get the best of a lot of worlds by using it.

Yeah the problem about the bangs is that whenever I force myself to use DDG again I will end up using the !sp bang exclusively after around a week and decide to switch back to Google a while after that, because typing !sp after every search defeats the initial idea why I inteded to use DDG in the first place. Until I hate myself for using Google again and switch back. It's an endless cycle I cannot escape :/

so you at least try with no bang first and find ddg search results unsatisfactory? if you default to !sp maybe it would be better to use use startpage as a search engine, is it worse in some way than duckduckgo (excluding obvious diff of bangs)

Yes for some reason I have never considered using startpage as my default search engine and instead went straight back to google. Thanks for the tip. I'll give it a try next time I'm at this stage of the cycle again .... :)

Wow I had no idea about this! Actually going to make me switch back to DDG

They really should market this more, its one of the best features.

or use !sp and use google through a proxy

Personally, I had great results with Searx - a metasearch engine that aggregates results from different engines. It supports DDG bangs (!g uses Google search, !!g redirects to Google search) and language flags (:en uses English, :ru uses Russian, etc)

I used to use the !s bang to get Google results via Startpage, but I find myself doing it less and less.

I don't know the exact timeframe it changed, but I've really noticed the difference around the last few months or so. It feels like it's a lot more common for me to do a search in Google that I would expect to have good results and be genuinely surprised at how every page is total garbage.