"It all started with a realization: Most the things I search for are easy to find. Did I really need the all-seeing, all-knowing algorithms of Google to assist me? Probably not."
"As a result, I’ve had a fairly tedious but important revelation: I search for really obvious stuff. Google’s own data backs this up. Its annual round-up of the most searched-for terms is basically a list of names and events: World Cup, Avicii, Mac Miller, Stan Lee, Black Panther, Megan Markle. The list goes on. And I don’t need to buy into Google’s leviathan network of privacy-invading trackers to find out what Black Panther is and when I can go and see it at my local cinema."
"I had, based on zero evidence, convinced myself that finding things on the internet was hard and, inevitably, involved a fair amount of tracking. After two years of not being tracked and targeted, I have slowly come to realize that this is nonsense."
Every user is different. What is appealing to the author may not be appealing to the reader. The author was searching for obvious things. HN readers and commenters may have more difficult searches.
Outside of HN, it appears there is a very large quantity of users who search for the same "obvious stuff".
As a HN user and commenter, I've found DDG just fine as a daily driver (switched nearly 2 years ago). I do occasionally have to fall back to Google, but most of my searches are served just fine by DDG.
Agreed that every user is different. I think the overall verdict is that DDG is certainly not as good at Google on an overall number-of-people-always-satisfied scale, but it does quite a good job for most people.
Yea I’m the same way, switched a long time ago, probably about two years like you and haven’t really had to look back.
Maybe it’s because I mostly browse with private pages, never sign in to Chrome, always deny requests for location, etc and my results were never particularly tailored to me in the first place?
I can’t remember the last time I “!g”’d actually. Maybe what I’m searching for hasn’t been particularly daunting and mainly consists of jumps to Mozilla’s JavaScript docs lately.
"As a result, I’ve had a fairly tedious but important revelation: I search for really obvious stuff. Google’s own data backs this up. Its annual round-up of the most searched-for terms is basically a list of names and events: World Cup, Avicii, Mac Miller, Stan Lee, Black Panther, Megan Markle. The list goes on. And I don’t need to buy into Google’s leviathan network of privacy-invading trackers to find out what Black Panther is and when I can go and see it at my local cinema."
"I had, based on zero evidence, convinced myself that finding things on the internet was hard and, inevitably, involved a fair amount of tracking. After two years of not being tracked and targeted, I have slowly come to realize that this is nonsense."
Every user is different. What is appealing to the author may not be appealing to the reader. The author was searching for obvious things. HN readers and commenters may have more difficult searches.
Outside of HN, it appears there is a very large quantity of users who search for the same "obvious stuff".