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by byuu 2482 days ago
I've always written off Duck Duck Go in the past, but lately after not being able to find relevant info on Google, I've been giving them a go and have been rather impressed. Especially on image results, which are way nicer to use and give you direct image links. Plus they don't obfuscate all the URLs with tracking redirects, so I can copy a link without visiting a page (that might redirect the URL on me again.)

There's still some things they miss, and my main complaint with DDG is it's too aggressive in taking the search you asked for and substituting in results it thought you meant. I suspect that problem comes from their upstream providers like Bing, which has similar issues.
4 comments
thirdtry 2482 days ago
I start with DDG now, and switch to Google if their results are not good enough. 90% of the time its fine. Google intentionally broke image search, and their top search results are getting very bad. Its as if my question was "show me links to as many ads as possible that might be related to my search terms." Do Google advertisers realize I see their ad when it matches only one of my search words? If they read more than one of my words, they know that was a wasted advertisement.
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icebraining 2482 days ago
> Especially on image results, which (...) give you direct image links.

Google removed that after pressure from the copyright lobby (they got sued by Getty). It'll happen to DDG too if they ever become big enough.

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byuu 2482 days ago
Oh, I wasn't aware of the lawsuit. That's ridiculous. Well in any case, I wrote a Userscript to restore direct links to Google image results, and also to filter out spam site results (cough e...-e...com), if anyone were interested: https://byuu.org/other/script/google

Middle-clicking or control-clicking will load the original images.

Bing direct links images as well so they'd probably go after Microsoft well before DDG, so I think we're safe. But I can always do the same for DDG if need be.

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saidajigumi 2482 days ago
Agreed. I've given DuckDuckGo a try a few times in the past, and it never stuck. With the latest rounds of Google-being-Google, I gave DDG another go and so far haven't looked back.
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BMorearty 2482 days ago
The thing I've been enjoying since switching to DuckDuckGo on mobile for the last couple months is not having to deal with AMP.
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