Switching to duckduckgo
In the late 90s, google became popular for one reason: because they had a no-nonsense frontpage that loaded quickly and didn't try to play with your mind. Well, at least that was my motivation for switching. The fact that they were using a revolutionary new search algorithm which changed the way you search the web had nothing to do with it, but was a nice extra.
Over the years, that small hand-written frontpage has morphed into something else. A behind-the-scenes look at the page shows that it's no longer the hand-written simple form of old, but something horrible that went through a minifier (read: obfuscator). Even so, a quick check against the Internet Wayback machine shows that the size of that page has increased twenty-fold, which is a lot. But I could live with that, since at least it looked superficially similar.
Recently, however, they've changed their frontpage so that search-as-you-type is enabled by default. Switching that off requires you to log in. So, you have a choice between giving up your privacy by logging in before you enter a search term, or by having everything you type, including any typos and stuff you may not have confirmed yet, be sent over to a data center god knows where. Additionally, at the first character you type, the front page switches away to the results page, causing me to go "uh?!?" as I try to find where they moved my cursor to. This is annoying.
Duckduckgo doesn't do these things; and since they also don't do things like combining my typing skills, phone contact list, calendar, and chat history to figure out that I might be interested in a date, I'm a lot more comfortable using them.
So a few days ago, I decided to switch my default search engine in chromium to duckduckgo. It still feels a bit weird, to be using a browser written by one search engine to search something on another; but all in all, it's been a positive experience. And the fact that wikipedia results are shown first, followed by (maybe) one ad, followed by other search results, is refreshing.
We'll see how far this gets us.
Hello,
I read through the blog entry and found a lot to agree with. I have been using duckduckgo search for about a year now and find that I am unable to do without it. Their focus on privacy is not really what had drawn me but it is certainly a nice extra. I also found out that duckduckgo donates a large percentage of their profits to open source. I believe iceweasel now includes duckduckgo as an option as of debian testing which is great.
I just wanted to share my thoughts. Though I do not dislike google it is great there are viable alternatives to keep us from having to put all of our eggs in a google basket.
Sam
Been in DDG for a few months.. seems totally fine for now..
In the end, we'll still have to get rid of the client-server model and decentralize even search engines.. Power corrupts.. DDG will go Google at some point..
DuckDuckGo Search
ddg() { ${BROWSER:-lynx} "https://duckduckgo.com/?kp=-1&kl=wt-wt&kb=t&kh=1&kj=g2&km=l&ka=monospace&ku=1&ko=s&k1=-1&kv=1&q=$*" }
Most browsers (dillo being the exception I know of) will even accept spaces in the query string (hence just using "$*") and automatically convert that to + or %20, so you can just type "ddg mksh rocks" on the command line. Or "ddg zombie architecture"… ☺ (huh, m68k is not in the top ten there? we need to fix that!)
I have started using Wikipedia as my "first" search engine, since I find that more often than not, Wikipedia happens to be where I end up. I also use DuckDuckGo as my "next" search engine.
Google is very creepy. We've had that discussion.
But Google has also become less and less useful to people using the search engine to ... well "search". Their "helpful" automatic spellcheck and permutation-finder may be helpful to people looking for the obvious, but not to me. The answer to what I'm looking for is almost never on the first or the second page. And I really do mean to spell things the way I do, or to combine the words I happen to combine.
I find myself relying less and less on "web-wide" search engines and more and more on site-specific ones. Like Wikipedia, IEEE and others. The web has become a mess and search engines that try to search all of it are inevitably being drowned in content produced by "social" idiots.
It's easy enough to replace the spaces: ddg () ( IFS=+; ${BROWSER:-sensible-browser} "...&q=$*"; )
(Note the replacement of {...} with (...) to avoid changing IFS in the interactive shell.)
Yeah, done the same here 2 months ago. (check out the goodies, if you have not yet)