[Lifesnoozer]

Recently switched over to DuckDuckGo on all my devices. Tried to do the same thing several years ago and found it didn't really work out, but this time around it is so much better, both when it comes to speed and results.

If anyone has doubts because they tried it years ago, I'd say go for it again.

[benbenhu]

And don't forget to use the bangs that can allow you to check other engines results fast if you need.

For people afraid of getting off google, you can always search something like '!g my-search', it works the same for youtube(!yt), google image(!gi), or even hackernews(!hn)

And of course the best bang is the 'I am feeling lucky' one (!), i.e.: 'hackernews !'

[Freak_NL]

    !ud → Urban Dictionary (what do you mean, she's 'office cute'?)
    !wen → Wikipedia English
    !w.. → Wikipedia (two letter language code, e.g., 'nl')
    !wikt Wiktionary

So many useful bangs.

[the_duke]

So many bangs for you duck!

[pvdebbe]

The best bang for your duck

[fenwick67]

Just a plain !w gives me English Wikipedia.

Usually if I need a certain engine I just guess the bang and it's usually supported and correct. !gm for google maps, !tineye for tineye, !wayback for the wayback machine...

[Freak_NL]

They are pretty predictable. I just tried !osm madagascar on a whim, and it opens OpenStreetMap, as expected.

Setting DuckDuckGo as the search engine for your browser's address bar means all these bangs work right there whenever you open a new tab.

[smnrchrds]

It depends on language settings. I have set DDG region to Canada and language to Canadian French. As a result, !w redirects mne to French Wikipedia.

[qweqweqweqw]

I, too, switched to DDG, but sadly my most used bang is !g because in 1/3 cases DDG doesn't find what I am looking for.

[chuckledog]

Does DDG learn from what people !g for?

[l1feh4ck]

I would place my bet on that. That would be a query they need to work on.

[SeanDav]

I would sincerely hope not! i.e. Tracking.

[dredmorbius]

If that information isn't personalised in any fashion and the data are retained for a minimum period, I'd be OK with sorting out what types of queries aren't satisfied on DDG itself.

[dredmorbius]

    !hn does something or another

[0x4a42]

Some might be less useful tho, try:

!ddg google

Or if you are feeling lucky:

!!ddg google

:)

edit: typo

[Fiaxhs]

It's worth noting that the !g bang redirects you to encrypted.google.com, it's more secure but results are often different from a regular www.google.com search. It bugged me for a while not knowing why some queries returned unusual results. ( more here https://duck.co/forum/thread/2880/remove-the-encrypted-subdo... )

[sd8dgf8ds8g8dsg]

www.google.com uses encryption too these days.

You are linking to a ~5 year old thread that is discussing the state of things well before google switched everything over to ssl.

[thisacctforreal]

For a while I believe the difference was specifically that encrypted.google.com exclusively used PFS SSL cipher suites

[inetknght]

> linking to encrypted.google.com not only is not necessary but it prevents local search results from being displayed. e.g. no google.ro search results, only google.com

I can only see this as a good thing. If I want local search results, I'll add local qualifiers like "USA", "Texas", "Houston"

[stefantheard]

That was an odd one to read, being in Houston. I thought somehow you added wildcards that were auto filled with the users location, I then realized that I'm an idiot.

[zeven7]

You could also do searches for yourself like "Stefan" and "Theard" and even type your password in like "* * * * * * * *".

[kyrias]

A lot of JavaScript things have been buggy for me with encrypted.google.com as well. For example the Google timer cards and such often just won't start at all, while they'll work fine on the regular google.com.

[l1feh4ck]

It's a sad fact that regular google results are sometimes better than encrypted.google.com. It is like regular google knows what "I" want.

[thomastjeffery]

The difference isn't the encryption, but the fact that Google tracks your searches to give you "better" results.

[shpx]

I added bangs to google by defining custom search engines with a one or two letter prefix in chrome://settings/searchEngines

Now if I type "h my-search" into the omnibar, it goes to google.com/search?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+my-search which gives me only Google search results from HN.

This is using google's algorithm (not the search bar built into whichever website like DDG) which is still the best, especially if you constrain it to one domain name. I also don't have to type the "!"

The prefix messes up google's text prediction. I guess no one from the chromium team is using this feature, since it would be trivial to fix.

[shpx]

Here are the ones I actually use.

w https://www.google.com/search?&q=site%3Awikipedia.org+%s&btn... first result from wikipedia

h https://www.google.ca/search?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+%...

r https://www.google.ca/search?q=site%3Areddit.com+%s reddit

y https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=%s youtube

m https://www.google.ca/maps/search/%s google maps

b https://builtwith.com/?q=%s add "b " to a url to find out what tech is being used

wo https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%s wolfram alpha

i https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=%s google image search

g https://github.com/%s "g upspin/upspin" to jump to https://github.com/upspin/upspin.git

br https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-core/blob/master/Formul... read homebrew formula

c https://caniuse.com/#search=%s

[forapurpose]

That also works with bookmark keywords in Firefox. The setting is in each bookmark's properties; it takes variables (I leave it to the reader to look up the syntax).

[notspanishflu]

It's better to use the '!s' bang. Is like using '!g' but with more privacy because uses startpage.com

[itsnotvalid]

Then what's the difference between using !g and startpage.com ?

[dhimes]

I didn't realize google allowed this kind of thing.

[NuDinNou]

More bangs at https://duckduckgo.com/bang

[toxican]

I tried switching to DDG a few years ago, but I found myself using !ge more often than not, so I wasn't really sure what the point of using DDG was. For my needs, DDG's results are pretty mediocre. Which is a shame, becuase I'd rather support them over Google.

[jerf]

Your needs a few years ago, or your needs now? As benbenhu says, it has gotten a lot better. Lately I've found that when DDG doesn't have the thing I want and I stick the !g in, Google doesn't necessarily do any better, which implies that it's just a hard search.

[bleuarff]

I second that. I rarely use the !g bang (no need for that, DDG has the anwsers), but when I do I don't get anything more significant.

[Brakenshire]

Would be interested to hear what search engines people here use. I feel the promise of DDG is the ability to match your search engine to your purpose. Maybe if you want to search for a particular code snippet you can use a search engine that is friendly to programming syntax. Or if you want more lateral results, you use a search engine with an unusual algorithm. But I haven't yet been able to find alternatives, if they exist.

[dispo001]

https://yacy.net

[Zhyl]

The 'I'm feeling lucky' one is great.

'<Song name> !' or '<song name> youtube !' takes you right to it.

I'd love a feature that opens the first result on a search engine like wikipedia does by default. Biggest use case for me would be imdb but there would be others.

[deltaprotocol]

Well, lucky you!

DuckDuckGo has that by using a backslash, a space and a search term (\ bed intruder youtube) or an exclamation a space and the search term (although I believe the former is the official way now). I use it all the time, it's like a superpower.

[roryisok]

I've been a happy ddg user for months now but never knew about this, thanks!

[a_dev_1234]

I'm tired of people mentioning !g. If you want to use google, just use google. Stop using duck duck go just to search google, and then say "but duck duck go is better" lo. no it isn't. clearly.

[striking]

It's a way to wean yourself off of Google or quickly see results from a different perspective. There's nothing wrong with it, it's just an easy way out for people who don't trust ddg just yet.

[makapuf]

That and its a Good way To help ddg (recording used search queries) and getting google results

[godshatter]

If you want to use google, but don't want them to connect you to your search terms and connect you to their ecosystem and track you some more, then use DDG and !g.

Now that I've learned that !a works for amazon.com and duckduckgo.com gets affiliate revenue that way, then that's how I'll search amazon from now on. Need to boost up the underdog that cares about privacy, because google surely doesn't.

[FabHK]

With DDG as my default search engine (Safari, macOS & iOS), I can (in the rare cases that I need to) easily and quickly search on google or startpage or other sites (by appending !g or !s in the search box).

If you're on Google as your default search engine, it's not so convenient to see other engine's results (plus you're being tracked all the time).

[unethical_ban]

Yeah, if someone is just going to search Google all the time. If one is going to use DDG most of the time, but then pivots, it's worth noting. I use DDG to get to Wikipedia, Amazon, Google Images, and sometimes Google (for technical searches).

[pkhagah]

It's not about using duckduckgo to search with google. I use it when duckduckgo results aren't good enough, instead of typing everything in google again. I have been using it less frequently recently.

[epicide]

When I tried it years ago, I would search DDG first, then use !g if I didn't get what I wanted. I ended up using that a lot, so I switched back to Google.

Sounds like they have changed a lot since then, so I'll probably give it another shot.

[imwally]

But then you can’t use bangs anymore. I think the idea is that Google is there if you need it while still retaining the benefit of using bangs. So, it’s the best of both worlds.

[malnourish]

It's completely valid to use that when you are searching for something local. Something that ddg shouldn't really do.

[grepthisab]

Same here. Tried a while back and didn't really take. I found myself Googling most things after DDG'ing them. Tried again recently because I love the mission, and it's working much better. Usually what I want is in the top few results, although Google still does a bit better with search result quality. I see myself using it as my main search engine at this point.

[graphitezepp]

I only miss google as a DDG user when DDG doesn't have a tool google has to give you an automatic result, i.e. when trying to look up some unit conversion ratio like lb to kg. But when you know that is what you want there is always !g.

[AdamSC1]

Hey graphitezepp,

We do have some of those tools, at DuckDuckGo they are called "Instant Answers."

For example the query: "2 lb to kg" will bring you to this results page https://duckduckgo.com/?q=2+lb+to+kg&ia=answer

You can see all our Instant Answers here: https://duck.co/ia

If something isn't triggering for you - let us know with the feedback tool on the site!

Disclaimer: DDG staff.

[thehashrocket]

If you could get a "within the past year" search filter it would make me the happiest developer in the world. :)

[autotypo]

And a CC-filtered image search.

[crusty]

+1 (million) It's one of the few things that takes me back to Google (others being !gi & !gm).

Get that 'in last year' filter already, DDG. I think I've complained about this through feedback before.

[jxcl]

Do you know about the `units` command?

  $ units
  Currency exchange rates from www.timegenie.com on 2017-08-24 
  2980 units, 109 prefixes, 96 nonlinear units
  
  You have: 5 lbs
  You want: kg
  	* 2.2679619
  	/ 0.44092452
  You have: 100 furlongs
  You want: meters
  	* 20116.8
  	/ 4.9709695e-05
  You have: 100 miles/hour
  You want: meters/second
  	* 44.704
  	/ 0.022369363
  You have: 2 kiloisraelnewshekels
  You want: picodollars
  	* 5.5271109e+14
  	/ 1.8092635e-15

[marcosdumay]

I like `qalc` a lot:

    > 5 pounds to kg
    5 * pound = approx. 2.2679619 kg

    > x^2 + 8*x = 4
    ((x^2) + (8 * x)) = 4 = approx. x = 0.47213595 or x = -8.472136

And so on.

[iainmerrick]

I didn't know about that! Strange interface, though -- why isn't the first response just "2.27kg"?

[jxcl]

Because a kg goes into 5 lbs 2.2679619 times, and 5 lbs goes into 1 kg 0.44092452 times.

[iainmerrick]

The first number is the one I want, pretty much 100% of the time, and I hardly ever need 8 digits of precision.

[dredmorbius]

Units absolutely rocks. It can do quite complex calculations as well, and you can add to the units it knows.

[mattlondon]

+1

I also tried it a few years ago but was disappointed by the speed - at a time when the google search responses came back "instantly", the latency of DDG was noticeable and not good-enough.

Fast forward to 2017 and that appears to have been solved and the results are as fast as google are from what my brain/eyes can tell anyway - I would not be surprised to find out that google was faster if you timed it. In the past 6+ months I've been using DDG, I've only ever found the need to switch back to google once (and that was image search)

[otakucode]

I've had DDG as my primary search engine for I'd guess at least 5 years if not more. It's extremely rare that I ever need to use anything else. I do wish there was a way to tell Yummly to go to hell whenever I search for recipes, though.

[SevereOverfl0w]

I use this script to hide domains I hate from search results: https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/1682-google-hit-hider-by-d...

(Title is google, but works for ddg amongst other things also)

[tqkxzugoaupvwqr]

You can exclude keywords by using the minus sign, e.g. “-yummly”. This excludes all search results that contain yummly.

[james_pm]

I saw this feature request submitted the other day via the subreddit. Here's hoping! https://www.reddit.com/r/duckduckgo/comments/70rent/enhancem...

[RUG3Y]

Same here. Two years ago DDG just wasn't cutting it. Today, I'm just fine with it.

I especially like how programming questions usually provide a top result from Stack Overflow, a lot of times I don't even need to click the link to see the answer I'm looking for.

[artem_dev]

Actually Google provides the top programming answers from SO, Quora etc places. DDG just uses this.

[mattmanser]

I've been using it for the last 6 months.

The problem is, whenever you can't find something in DDG, you assume it's because it's DDG, and search again with !g. Meaning I end up requerying 40% or so of my searches using !g (prefixing your query with !g redirects your query from DDG to encrypted google)

Here's some example queries I ended up !g yesterday that had much better results in google than DDG:

reduce kendo javascript file size - For me, the useful result was number 2 in google. In DDG it was number 11 ("Only What You Need | Kendo UI Getting Started").

ptr overwatch - PTR is the test patch of the game overwatch. It's regularly changed. The correct result "Overwatch PTR Now Available - August 29, 2017" is number 1 in google, in DDG the blog post August 12th is not available (well, correct from my perspective)

I tend to find anything speculative DDG is fairly terrible at. For example yesterday I was googling about trying to identify the source of some weird animation CPU cycles I was seeing in Chrome Performance Profiler, I didn't really get to the bottom of it, but I ended up ditching DDG and doing all the queries in google because I would otherwise have ended up searching everything twice.

I'm also getting quite frustrated with the "instant answer" functionality, it's generally terrible. One of the most annoying ones is the SO instant answer that just utterly sucks, you can't see the code, it usually cuts anything useful in half, and takes up a HUGE amount of space meaning on a laptop you've got to scroll to start seeing the results. I just want to be able to turn it off, but because they don't track you they don't offer that functionality.

Also the maps one is really bad. I almost always want directions, but clicking the map takes me to a really nonfunctional, bare-bones map that doesn't have directions and then I have to click another button to actually get the directions. There's a drop down where you can choose your map type, but it definitely doesn't work as expected, I just want it to always embed a google maps instead of whatever they're doing.

Basically UX ain't DDG's strong point.

Ironically, if you DDG: "turn off certain instant answers duckduckgo" it comes up with terrible search results and no answer. If you "!g turn off certain instant answers duckduckgo", the top result is at least relevant.

I also find the entire bang thing to be a gimmick. Who wants to use !r when !g with "reddit" at the end will always get you better search results, reddit's own search is abysmal (as is !so).

EDIT: I'm being overly negative, after all, I haven't actually switched back, like I did last time I tried to use DDG. So it's definitely worth a go, but I don't think it's ready for your Mum to use. Also, I have Bing on my phone's Chrome to avoid AMP, and it's actually quite good.

[Lifesnoozer]

DDG is definitely behind Google still, although it's come really far in a few years. I agree with most of what you're writing, but personally I'm okay with it not replacing 100% of my searches yet, got to start somewhere and I feel this is an acceptable point to switch at.

[FabHK]

Weird, I find myself reverting to Google (or rather Startpage, !s) maybe once or twice a month, when I don't find satisfying results on DDG. And I'd say that in many if not most cases, I don't find good answers on Google then, either.

And I quite like using bangs, e.g. !w for Wikipedia or !i for images, rather than having to go to the initial search results on the search engine and then clicking again.

Finally, I like that on DDG, you can just arrow up/down through the search results, and then open one with enter (or cmd-enter to open it in a background tab), without reverting to the mouse.

[pault]

If you use chrome, check out the vimium extension. It maps most browser actions to vim keys and makes mouseless navigation super easy.

[j_s]

QuteBrowser "is a keyboard-focused browser with a minimal GUI." https://qutebrowser.org/

You know you're onto something when the #1 documentation link is a key binding cheatsheet!

[Vinnl]

Actually works well on Firefox 57 (soon to be released) as well :)

(And those on older versions can use VimFx until 57 is released.)

[akvadrako]

You always find what you are looking for, except twice a month? That means you aren't looking for very difficult things.

I don't ever find what I want a few times most days and need multiple sources/queries quite frequently.

[FabHK]

Or rather I've given up the assumption that Google has significantly better results.

[notspanishflu]

When I don't like the DDG results, I use the '!s' bang instead of '!g'.

That means more privacy because uses startpage.com

[StavrosK]

I have a rather better experience than you. Yes, DDG isn't as good as Google in programming queries, but it's good everywhere else, and I like knowing that most of my searches aren't tracked. That's worth having to retry a few searches once in a while.

[cyberpunk0]

Same problem here! For development searches Google typically blows ddg out of the water but I still love ddg for general search. I didnt know about the !g :D

[cosarara97]

> Also, I have Bing on my phone's Chrome to avoid AMP, and it's actually quite good

You can also use google on Firefox for Android. No AMP there.

[jstanley]

Same story here.

And since I regularly browse via a Digital Ocean VM, the lack of CAPTCHAs on DuckDuckGo is refreshing as well.

[morganvachon]

"And since I regularly browse via a Digital Ocean VM"

Do you mean using a DO VM as a VPN, or via X11 forwarding to your desktop over SSH, or actually browsing on the DO VM's desktop using VNC? I've done all three in the past as experiments in private browsing, and the latter is too laggy to be comfortable.

[jstanley]

The first one.

[sethrin]

> And since I regularly browse via a Digital Ocean VM

If you don't mind my asking, why? And by which method do you usually accomplish this?

Edit: Thanks for explaining the CAPTCHA issue.

[SCHiM]

Why? Maybe he/she wants to bypass data collection in his/her country. Or desires more privacy, or something else.

How?

ssh -D 8080 digital-ocean-vm-here.tld

Now port 8080 on your local machine is a socks proxy for your vm.

Google is really tor/proxy/anonymous user unfriendly. Requiring users to solve as many as four or five CAPTCHAs (seriously fuck you google).

[dx034]

> Google is really tor/proxy/anonymous user unfriendly. Requiring users to solve as many as four or five CAPTCHAs (seriously fuck you google).

They're like this for a reason. They didn't implement complex detection of proxies to annoy users. Just to keep everyone out who's not supposed to use their search.

[striking]

Yeah, people like to try and crawl Google. So they're keeping robots out.

But it's actually really nice to be able to pull a result or two from ddg by crawling, or to be able to use a VPN without having to solve a zillion captcha.

[Steeeve]

I run into those captcha's occasionally and generally reconnecting to a different VPN makes them go away. I always assume they are tied to bot activity coming through the same IP or range. I've scraped google in the past (years and years ago) and from what I recall you end up hitting the captchas after a set number of results in too short a period. Back then it was a pretty standard SEO activity, but it's usefulness was minimized when google started localizing results.

[kuschku]

Which is funny, because those people can easily circumvent these measures, and crawl Google anyway.

The only one hurt are the users.

[r3bl]

> And what do the CAPTCHAs have to do with it?

Have you ever tried using Google's search over a VPN / Tor / public proxy? They're even worse than Cloudflare was with their CAPTCHAs).

> Why?

Probably to avoid fuckery by the local ISP and/or government.

> And how?

I'm assuming he meant OpenVPN or something, but I might be wrong.

[kronos29296]

It is quite for common things but searching uncommon ones always throws it off. Searching for research publications in a specific domain or just haskell or some thing like just returns 1good result with 10 bad ones. So I use !g for those.

Also the autocorrect really throws my search terms off while Google does is right most of the time.

[barrkel]

Interesting: autocorrect on Google is almost always wrong for me. Every day, I need to add quotes to maybe 20 of my search queries.

[kronos29296]

Interestingly ddg requires quotes for me atleast twice a day. Still I have to use Google for stuff like Google scholar. So !g is pretty common for me.

[dredmorbius]

If you're searching for scholarly material:

    !scholar <terms>

[Steeeve]

I use it as my default, and I find that at least once a day I ad a g! to my query to go to the google results. I started maybe a month and a half ago and at this point I have a decent instinct as to when I'm going to need to go to google.

The privacy aspect was the driver for me, but it wasn't enough to make the switch all this time. The privacy aspect coupled with an easy way to get google results when I need them is. While I've known they had the bang queries for a long time, it was actually a youtube search result that finally made me shift. I forget what it was, but I was searching for something for my kids and it looked like my activity had polluted the results. That has been a problem for quite some time and this particular instance was enough for me to make the change. It was a harmless, but I really don't like the idea that my activity will potentially bleed into that of my family, and frankly I get irritated when their activity bleeds into mine. DuckDuckGo doesn't replace youtube search, but it was more of the general principal. I tried working with different accounts over the years, but it's not easy to switch on all platforms and if you've ever tried entering a 60 character password on a playstation, you know why that's a non-starter.

[blisterpeanuts]

Ditto, for the past month or two. I'd love to get off of Gmail and Google drive, as well, but that's a longer term project.

Main reason: concerns about tracking and privacy.

Secondarily: politics.

DDG so far has been acceptable. As long as they keep their political opinions to themselves, the honeymoon will continue. My love affair with Google, on the other hand, is over. :(

[AdamSC1]

Email is a tough one, but I've been using FastMail.

No advertising, strong privacy policy, based in Australia (a country with a decent privacy track record that we know of).

It's $3/month which is a decent price for liberating a lot of data from advertisers.

The spam filter is playing catch-up to Google so that's a bit of a shock at first, but you can train it up well or use second layer measures like Sanebox.

Disclaimer: DDG staff - but personal opinion.

[criddell]

> concerns about tracking and privacy

When DDG shows an ad, is there no tracking involved in that? For example, if I were to click on an ad (after turning my ad blocker off), does the destination site not get any information about me or specifically what I searched for?

[Zekio]

If you don't send a lot of emails but receive a lot and need many aliases you might wanna check out https://migadu.com

[NaliSauce]

Out of interest: what is the reason/are the reasons that made you switch?

[Lifesnoozer]

I started feeling like I had all my eggs in the same basket. Google has my email, it knows where I want to go and when (Google Maps), it translates stuff for me, and it knows what I search for. While it doesn't really affect me that Google has all this information, I've become more and more uncomfortable with the fact that they do.

So I figured if I had a choice of two search engines, where I get satisfying results in both of them, and one of them doesn't track me, why go for the one that tracks me?

I'd gladly do the same switch when it comes to Gmail, but I really really like Gmail's web interface, haven't gotten over that hurdle yet.

EDIT: I also switched from Google Chrome for pretty much the same reasons.

[StavrosK]

I made the jump to Fastmail.com and couldn't be happier. The UI is very snappy (much faster than Gmail's), the actual notifications and delivery is faster, and it's a better experience overall, for me.

Plus, Google doesn't get to see my mail any more. Ditto for Firefox vs Chrome.

[tallanvor]

I'm a fan of moving away from Google where possible as well, but Fastmail would cost me $500/year with 10 accounts. My G Suite account is one of the original, so I can have up to 200 accounts for free. Granted, it's only 15GB of storage, but even after about 10 years, I only have about 1GB in my inbox, so I'm ok with the lower amount of space.

[StavrosK]

Wow, what do you do with 10 accounts? Isn't checking all of them a hassle?

I have multiple domains and aliases, and Fastmail is much better at those than Google Apps ever was (I also have the free plan but you can never change your initial domain), so I'm much happier.

[tallanvor]

Several accounts are for separating services - AWS has it's own account, for example, so does Dropbox. I use a different email address for forums and such.

A few for friends and family as well. --Friends I can tell to pay for themselves if I need to, but family, not so much.

Edit: As for checking them, most don't get many emails, and every good email app can handle multiple accounts easily, so I get notifications on my phone.

[reaperducer]

I have six. Some of my clients ask me to manage their AdWords for them. Plus, I occasionally need to log in to my wife's Gmail account. (To confirm logins when paying bills, for example. Anything personal, she's smart enough to keep on her own domain.)

[Flimm]

Fastmail give you free aliases.

[ocdtrekkie]

FastMail aliases are great. I've used some for sites I'm more likely to want to cut off access to me, for instance. Whereas [e-mail] gives you sortability, a true alias gives you the easy ability to just shut a site out of access to you.

Another issue I had was that my main email address was already in Google and Microsoft's systems for a couple reasons, and it wouldn't let me set it properly when changing my email address everywhere. So I have google@ and microsoft@ aliases just to work around their account management quirks.

[tallanvor]

The problem with aliases is still that they route to one account, and if it's compromised, there's no separation.

[forgottenpass]

Interesting that you bring up the UI, switching to Fastmail's UI made me start checking/managing my personal email like a responsible adult again.

I could never get over the way using GMail felt like fighting with a sluggish toy version of email compared to desktop outlook (and I'm not really a fan of outlook, either). I just assumed that GMail's interface was the best a webapp could offer: it was the best I'd seen so far and had a no-longer-deserved "who could beat gmail at webmail?" bug in my mind.

I'm kinda surprised fastmail hasn't made larger inroads among the kind of techies that will occasionally bemoan giving their lives over to google.

[StavrosK]

I am really surprised at how fast its UI loads and operates. It feels like a native app in a web where everything else feels like a slug. Major props to Fastmail for this. Hell, even Thunderbird feels slower.

[newbear]

Did you consider protonmail? If so, why fastmail?

[j_s]

This discussion last month includes many anecdotes regarding various email providers:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15029186

[macintux]

I can only speak for my own decision-making process, but I like to pay for my email so that I have greater confidence that the provider will still be in business 10 years from now, and more confidence that my data is my own.

Really like Fastmail.

[newbear]

How does paying ensure the data is your own?

[SAI_Peregrinus]

Protonmail has paid plans.

[imron]

It does every time you send an email to someone with a gmail address ;-)

I also agree that Fastmail is great.

[Vinnl]

Same here, trying to avoid it as much as possible Google now mainly has my email and calendar. I feel like there should be a better option for calendar but I haven't been able to find it yet (probably because I use DDG :P), but sadly, the only thing with a better interface than Gmail is Google Inbox, so...

[chrisper]

The problem is that Google often provides the best service for the buck. But even if money is taken out of the equation some Google services are just the best. Like Google maps or even G suite (this might vary by person).

Hard to avoid them in that case.

[Chris2048]

Any centralized efforts for this kind of thing? I'd like the same..

[louhike]

You went from Chrome to Firefox?

[Lifesnoozer]

Safari at the moment but thinking about going to Firefox

[logan5]

I switched from Chrome to Brave a few months ago. https://www.brave.com/

[MistahKoala]

I attempted it but extension support is not especially user-friendly.

[dreen]

Been using Brave on mobile and it's great, but the UI layout on desktop is awkward so I don't use it there.

[nextlevelwizard]

Anecdotally I'm in the same boat. I use Firefox at work on Linux, but at home (on MacOS) Safari works/looks/feels better than Firefox.

[saiya-jin]

Firefox on Android is vastly superior experience due to one simple thing - extensions. microBlock origin makes web actually usable again on mobile platforms.

[louhike]

Yes, yes and yes. Though some extensions do not work, uBlock works and it's a life savior.

[cormacrelf]

Firefox 57/Nightly! Do it.

[geekme]

I moved from firefox to opera

[bitL]

In my case it was this annoying Google's insistence on telling me what I was actually looking for instead of searching exactly what I wanted, including ignoring "" etc. It became too much hassle, I felt like fighting with windmills, then tried DDG, it did what I told it, results weren't terrible, so now I use it by default and only a few times a week I need to try Google. Maybe for regular folks Google's way is a lifesaver, but for precise search I need it feels like Altavista back when I was a kid.

[flyinghamster]

> In my case it was this annoying Google's insistence on telling me what I was actually looking for instead of searching exactly what I wanted, including ignoring "" etc.

GOD YES! This gets incredibly annoying when searching for version-specific information, considering the differences there can be between version foo and version bar of $DISTRO. Nothing like searching for something specific to CentOS 7 and getting zillions of CentOS 6 and 5 hits.

Google will also helpfully ignore the "Verbatim" option, and God help you if you're trying to search for multiple specific phrases.

Google is looking more and more like Alta Vista in its waning days.

[SubiculumCode]

I like the suggestion functionality for typo correction, but dont like it when Google assumes something other than I wrote. This is bad. It often happens when searching technical stuff. I am not regular Joe and I don't search regular stuff.

[mattkevan]

Recently switched to DDG on my devices and I’m impressed with how much better it is than when I tried a few years ago.

[segmondy]

I did the same too 2 months. If I can't it, I'll give yahoo and bing a chance first before Google. There really hasn't been much that I can't find with the first 3.

[pingec]

I would be very interested in reading on how to best do the migration on various devices, for example Chrome on desktop, Chrome on Android etc.

[SilvaR]

Have they since reduced their dependency on Bing for search results? I feel that, while that's the case, there is no point in switching.

[mitja_belak]

Same here. They used to be fringe back then, now they are quite reliant for everything that isnt really overly specific.

[usuallymatt]

Same here. Had always switched back but this time I'm almost 1 month into using DDG and have no desire to go back.

[whataretensors]

I actually find myself going to DDG after searching on devices that default to Google. The results are much better for a lot of different things. They even have a cryptocurrency tab.