Gaming My several months with DuckDuckGo search engine

[FAST6191]

For a giggle a thought I would swap over to DuckDuckGo as my primary search engine, as opposed to Google. No particular reason but just one of those "try these things". For those unfamiliar they positioned themselves as a privacy concerned general purpose search engine similar to Google, Bing, Yahoo or the like. As part of it I deleted Google from the browser as well so could not flip back. Privacy in this instance is not a great selling point for me but might be for some.

Had a great time. Didn't find myself reaching for an alternative during it.

Right click and link/image grab in image search actually works without needing a script to stop the stupid auto replace or visit the site in question.
Can find channels, concepts and sites that were blacklisted because they offended someone's sensibilities along the line and thus don't appear in general Google any more, or the internal engine unless you go direct (to be fair I don't have an account so use bookmarks and visit things manually), as well as other video sites and the like. Quite nice being able to search for things I want to read about without having Google or the others pretend to be my father.
Results generally pretty good -- I search for all manner of things from news (though I seldom use news search) to old tech articles to science journals to patents to local restaurants to government websites (US and UK mostly) to shopping websites...
I usually find myself having to refine a search a whole bunch of times, don't know if I did it more or less with this one but hey.
Not as nice as an external alternative to internal gbatemp search but I actually like the internal engine and it still gets most things I want.
Image search generally did what I needed, and was not littered with spam if I put CC0 in the engine to get myself some nice to use imagery.
Usually pretty fast. Tended to spit things back at me relevant to the UK rather than US.

If it has been a while since you last gave it a go I might actually suggest it.

https://duckduckgo.com/

Fancy search operators
https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/syntax/

Chrome
https://help.duckduckgo.com/desktop/chrome/?redir=1
Firefox
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/duckduckgo-for-firefox/
Pale Moon has it by default
Edge
https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/desktop/microsoft-edge/
Safari
https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/desktop/safari/

Would install it for a client or my grandad as well.

 

[PityOnU]

Doesn't DuckDuckGo simply redirect your searches through another search provider? My understanding is it acts as a proxy, thus making it harder for whatever underlying search provider it is using to track your searches specifically. Again, based on my understanding, it used to use Google by default, but now uses Bing.

As such, does it really display results that are "blacklisted" on whatever underlying search provider? Based on my understanding, I can't see how it would. Unless it was routing all of your queries to a "more open" region that gave more/better results than your current one.

All that being said, based on (my understanding of) how it works, it is a service that I would actually recommend to others as it can obfuscate a little bit of your browsing habits while adding basically zero inconvenience to your online experience. Although ads on sites will still allow the big companies to track you easily (rendering the stated "privacy" goal entirely moot), a service like DuckDuckGo will at least help to give you closer to "unbiased" search results, hopefully reducing some of the echo chambers everyone is ending up in nowadays.

 

[Lostbhoy]

Great overview @FAST6191. I've been thinking about the same thing for a while... More so with mobile as I'm fed up with Google chrome taking up so many resources and storage space.

Might give this a go for both!

 

[tech3475]

One issue I've found with DDG is that it can be slower for newer content e.g. last 24 hours.

 

[FAST6191]

Doesn't DuckDuckGo simply redirect your searches through another search provider? My understanding is it acts as a proxy, thus making it harder for whatever underlying search provider it is using to track your searches specifically. Again, based on my understanding, it used to use Google by default, but now uses Bing.

As such, does it really display results that are "blacklisted" on whatever underlying search provider? Based on my understanding, I can't see how it would. Unless it was routing all of your queries to a "more open" region that gave more/better results than your current one.

All that being said, based on (my understanding of) how it works, it is a service that I would actually recommend to others as it can obfuscate a little bit of your browsing habits while adding basically zero inconvenience to your online experience. Although ads on sites will still allow the big companies to track you easily (rendering the stated "privacy" goal entirely moot), a service like DuckDuckGo will at least help to give you closer to "unbiased" search results, hopefully reducing some of the echo chambers everyone is ending up in nowadays.

Might have been at one point (there were such services as well that got variously popular) but today they have their own crawlers, scrapers, weighting algorithms and whatnot from what I can see (claims by them, apparent search results, my logs from my websites).

Most of the results appear different to Bing if doing comparisons there as a quick test.

If I am searching for more outlandish things that the censors on youtube seem to take out, render invisible from most searches and whatever other moral panics they have had over the years (see youtube safety patrol as it applies to people playing with machine tools -- they do way more than just mess with the political section and slightly edgy gaming channels*) then I appear to get those too.

*though many of those also appeared on bitchute, rumble and some other alternatives which is nice but probably a different topic there.

 

[Alexander1970]

For a giggle a thought I would swap over to DuckDuckGo as my primary search engine, as opposed to Google. No particular reason but just one of those "try these things". For those unfamiliar they positioned themselves as a privacy concerned general purpose search engine similar to Google, Bing, Yahoo or the like. As part of it I deleted Google from the browser as well so could not flip back. Privacy in this instance is not a great selling point for me but might be for some.

Had a great time. Didn't find myself reaching for an alternative during it.

Right click and link/image grab in image search actually works without needing a script to stop the stupid auto replace or visit the site in question.
Can find channels, concepts and sites that were blacklisted because they offended someone's sensibilities along the line and thus don't appear in general Google any more, or the internal engine unless you go direct (to be fair I don't have an account so use bookmarks and visit things manually), as well as other video sites and the like. Quite nice being able to search for things I want to read about without having Google or the others pretend to be my father.
Results generally pretty good -- I search for all manner of things from news (though I seldom use news search) to old tech articles to science journals to patents to local restaurants to government websites (US and UK mostly) to shopping websites...
I usually find myself having to refine a search a whole bunch of times, don't know if I did it more or less with this one but hey.
Not as nice as an external alternative to internal gbatemp search but I actually like the internal engine and it still gets most things I want.
Image search generally did what I needed, and was not littered with spam if I put CC0 in the engine to get myself some nice to use imagery.
Usually pretty fast. Tended to spit things back at me relevant to the UK rather than US.

If it has been a while since you last gave it a go I might actually suggest it.

https://duckduckgo.com/

Fancy search operators
https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/syntax/

Chrome
https://help.duckduckgo.com/desktop/chrome/?redir=1
Firefox
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/duckduckgo-for-firefox/
Pale Moon has it by default
Edge
https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/desktop/microsoft-edge/
Safari
https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/desktop/safari/

Would install it for a client or my grandad as well.

My damn Laziness and Convenience to constantly only using Google...

Thank you,my Friend,NOW I finally made it and changed my standard Search.
(...and now maybe the Day is near I also finally use Linux....)

 

[PityOnU]

If I am searching for more outlandish things that the censors on youtube seem to take out, render invisible from most searches and whatever other moral panics they have had over the years (see youtube safety patrol as it applies to people playing with machine tools -- they do way more than just mess with the political section and slightly edgy gaming channels*) then I appear to get those too.

*though many of those also appeared on bitchute, rumble and some other alternatives which is nice but probably a different topic there.

Censorship on various social media/hosting platforms has been a hot topic in recent months, and in my own (albeit limited) musings on it I am having difficulty coming up with an appropriate solution to it.

Most of the major platforms are controlled by private companies operating in a capitalist system, so they are (ostensibly) making decisions which maximize/safeguard their profit. If they are censoring a large enough group of people/school of thought, that should present an opening in the market for some other providers to come in and fill the gap. Nothing like that seems to be happening from what I can see.

Of course, there is always the option for overreaching government regulation of these various providers to enforce some vision of equality, but quite frankly, if I have to choose between an arbitrary content policy enforced by a private party and an arbitrary content policy enforced by the government, I will almost always choose the former.

Difficult question, to be sure.

 

[Ryab]

For a giggle a thought I would swap over to DuckDuckGo as my primary search engine, as opposed to Google. No particular reason but just one of those "try these things". For those unfamiliar they positioned themselves as a privacy concerned general purpose search engine similar to Google, Bing, Yahoo or the like. As part of it I deleted Google from the browser as well so could not flip back. Privacy in this instance is not a great selling point for me but might be for some.

Had a great time. Didn't find myself reaching for an alternative during it.

Right click and link/image grab in image search actually works without needing a script to stop the stupid auto replace or visit the site in question.
Can find channels, concepts and sites that were blacklisted because they offended someone's sensibilities along the line and thus don't appear in general Google any more, or the internal engine unless you go direct (to be fair I don't have an account so use bookmarks and visit things manually), as well as other video sites and the like. Quite nice being able to search for things I want to read about without having Google or the others pretend to be my father.
Results generally pretty good -- I search for all manner of things from news (though I seldom use news search) to old tech articles to science journals to patents to local restaurants to government websites (US and UK mostly) to shopping websites...
I usually find myself having to refine a search a whole bunch of times, don't know if I did it more or less with this one but hey.
Not as nice as an external alternative to internal gbatemp search but I actually like the internal engine and it still gets most things I want.
Image search generally did what I needed, and was not littered with spam if I put CC0 in the engine to get myself some nice to use imagery.
Usually pretty fast. Tended to spit things back at me relevant to the UK rather than US.

If it has been a while since you last gave it a go I might actually suggest it.

https://duckduckgo.com/

Fancy search operators
https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/syntax/

Chrome
https://help.duckduckgo.com/desktop/chrome/?redir=1
Firefox
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/duckduckgo-for-firefox/
Pale Moon has it by default
Edge
https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/desktop/microsoft-edge/
Safari
https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/desktop/safari/

Would install it for a client or my grandad as well.

The reason I use it as my main search engine is how it never gives results biased towards you and doesn't attempt to track every last thing you do.

 

[AkikoKumagara]

When I want to find results for search queries that Google either blocks or doesn't scrape, DuckDuckGo is always my first choice. While I don't particularly like using it as a primary search provider, I definitely could live that way if I had to. I just like Google's Image Search better, to be honest.

 

[FAST6191]

Censorship on various social media/hosting platforms has been a hot topic in recent months, and in my own (albeit limited) musings on it I am having difficulty coming up with an appropriate solution to it.

Most of the major platforms are controlled by private companies operating in a capitalist system, so they are (ostensibly) making decisions which maximize/safeguard their profit. If they are censoring a large enough group of people/school of thought, that should present an opening in the market for some other providers to come in and fill the gap. Nothing like that seems to be happening from what I can see.

Of course, there is always the option for overreaching government regulation of these various providers to enforce some vision of equality, but quite frankly, if I have to choose between an arbitrary content policy enforced by a private party and an arbitrary content policy enforced by the government, I will almost always choose the former.

Difficult question, to be sure.

There are alternative providers for video cropping up -- seems bandwidth, storage and whatnot have finally caught up to allow the smaller types a chance to do something without big boy tech budgets nor money to burn just to have the service. Forums and discussion seem to be happening as well, despite best efforts of some places to categorise them as dangerous (though we are still far from proper hardened and distributed setups that are hard to take down).

I am not sure they are making decisions to maximise or ensure profits and incomes. People want to watch it. Don't seem to "OMG I am leaving and never coming back" and actually do it. To that end slicing off portions of your audience seems like a bad play from where I sit.

The problems with algorithms doing the biased bit arguably get solved instantly if you allow the would be user to tell it to do one and just feed me plain results as an option. Can still even have their curated setup that way too if it is so wanted.
As far as far reaching then following on from above the general distinction between platform (there to serve content) and publisher (has an editorial mission and desire to promote certain ideas and behaviours) seems like a reasonable one. If things went for that approach rather than some "take the perks of a platform and a publisher and the downsides of neither" approach then that would be nice.

 

[PityOnU]

I am not sure they are making decisions to maximise or ensure profits and incomes. People want to watch it. Don't seem to "OMG I am leaving and never coming back" and actually do it. To that end slicing off portions of your audience seems like a bad play from where I sit.

I agree. But all those companies have shareholders to answer to, so, I mean, it must not effect profits that much, right? I can't imagine all the shareholders/bigwigs are the nanny-state type, just from the POV of statistics. It does make you wonder what's going on there.

I actually have a lot of personal money invested in these tech companies because their stock has done nothing but boom over the past decade or so.

The problems with algorithms doing the biased bit arguably get solved instantly if you allow the would be user to tell it to do one and just feed me plain results as an option. Can still even have their curated setup that way too if it is so wanted.

I really like this idea, and if a very targeted legislation could be passed to require services to give users this option, that'd suit me just fine.

As far as far reaching then following on from above the general distinction between platform (there to serve content) and publisher (has an editorial mission and desire to promote certain ideas and behaviours) seems like a reasonable one. If things went for that approach rather than some "take the perks of a platform and a publisher and the downsides of neither" approach then that would be nice.

Eh, broad legislation and the carte blanche that comes along with it in terms of "what is suitable" seems like a bad move to me. Just look at how well that DMCA thing worked out! Additionally, if a government entity is given control over determining what is "biased/unbiased" w.r.t. site content, especially when that same government entity has broad powers over the site if they are determined as being "biased," sounds like a recipe for disaster. Handing over way to many rights to a system with limited checks of power.

 

[KiiWii]

I use DDG to resolve “feeling lucky” style look ups that google won’t (without a redirect) on my FRMCHK tool: https://defaultdnb.github.io/

This means you effectively get the first most relevant result based on the query string you give it.

Linking directly to the PSN store: It works perfectly.

 

[Alexander1970]

The different Search Results between Google and Duck are really .......scary.....
But for how long ?
.... you should think about which Search Engine you should use in the Future .....

 

[colebob9]

I've been using DDG for a few months as well! I've noticed the search results aren't always up to Google's standards, but for 99% of things it seems to get the job done.

 

[cearp]

I've been using it for many years now, even if sometimes I use "!g" to get to google, just the fact of the easy shortcuts like:
"!wiki Heil Honey I'm Home" or "!jisho 血振" or "funny dogs !gi"

 

[Julie_Pilgrim]

Bangs are my favorite DuckDuckGo feature, I love using them

 

[FAST6191]

Now over a year on. Still using it as primary. Still dodges google's bizarre censorship and finds me what I want/gets out of my way.

Only real problem I have had is it seems to index gbatemp clones fairly frequently, usually after any relevant from the main site but still enough to note.

 

[AncientBoi]

@Alexander1970 is my search engine. He's great.

 

[universal_eternity]

I normally use DuckDuckGo, but as much as I dislike Google, I still need to use it from time to time: for search of very recent content or to search for some niche things where DuckDuckGo doesn't return any results.

For image search, I found that I prefer Bing over both, Google and DuckDuckGo.

 

[ChiefReginod]

I go back and forth between DuckDuckGo and Startpage. Once in a blue moon I'll use Bing.

Google's results are generally trash now unless you're looking for really basic things. Their algorithms aren't exactly tailored for accuracy anymore.