I have been using DDG for years. I inadvertently used google for a search (damn browser defaults) and i was genuinely difficult to find something relevant with the amount of ads cluttering it up.

Yea I’m always amazed when I inadvertently search via Google for something these days.

Yeah, whenever I end up on google for whatever reason I get a nag screen to try to trick me into agreeing to their tracking crap (with no easy way to say "fuck off, no") and it seems to come back very frequently. I use ddg pretty much exclusively now.

There are Firefox extensions that hide the ads which make a huge difference to search quality.

I fall back to !g when I don't find what I'm looking for. It happens too often for technical things. And Google is the only one that handles "verbatim searches". At least I'm splitting my trail of data between two companies.

I hear people say this but I haven't even desired to use a !g for several years now (good riddance). I wonder if it is for certain types of tech.

I found an example right now.

I looked on DDG for _ubuntu turn on a usb disk after it was switched off_ and it didn't return anything related to the query. I added !g and Google gave me [1] as the second result.

[1] https://superuser.com/questions/1626369/power-off-external-d...

It’s common for “ambiguous search terms” similar to “python database”.

I’d bet that an experienced ddg user might have workarounds for this kind of thing. I’ve certainly found adding a few extra terms gives me what I need.

Will they stay reasonable? "DuckDuckGo gains revenue via advertisements and affiliate programs."

Today I'm quite skeptical of any business that doesn't have a proper business model. I've seen it too many times: offer nice free things until you have enough users, and then start squeezing. Bait and switch.

At this point I'm more interested in internet search that isn't reliant on the goodwill and dignity of a private company.

> Today I'm quite skeptical of any business that doesn't have a proper business model.

But they have? DDG was founded 13 years ago...

And "bussiness model": https://wikiless.org/wiki/DuckDuckGo?lang=en#Business_model And: https://www.nichepursuits.com/how-does-duckduckgo-make-money...

I've been using Brave search. It's actually a change for the better, too.

Brave search is crap. It feels like DDG when it first launched. I want to like it, but the index it uses is old. I often get links that don't work.

I use Brave and ddg (depending on browser). Brave is only worse when it comes to location specific searches, otherwise for general searches I'm agnostic between the two.

Still fallback to !g bangs on every couple of days.

I've gotten several results were the link is no longer valid.