Given the increasingly hostile nature of websites, along with the tendency to remove user control, userscripts are not just still relevant but more relevant than ever.
Why use a userscript when you can use a search engine that is not from a spyware company? Like Startpage, Qwant, Duckduckgo or Searx? Alleluia, direct links out of the box.
For youtube, why not give Invidious a try (ok, it has its downs)?
Sometimes, the best solution to "hostile websites" is to not use them in the first place (or use their proxified versions).
That is such a useless and pervasive answer to something cool: why not use these alternatives. _Obviously_ the author/user of these scripts knows that the Internet has more than one thing for each kind, and obviously they chose to use the site they are using but in a different way.
None of the search engines are as good as Google (most of the time) and for video hosting sites it's about the content.
Imagine 20 years ago someone built a device that turns the volume down when ads come on, and the first reply to that is "but the channel I'm watching doesn't show ads". Well, good for you.
Sometimes the best solution to "I want to use this website differently" is to use it differently.
> None of the search engines are as good as Google (most of the time)
Startpage (and ddg I think?) basically provide you googles search results without the tracking. They’re the same quality of results without your google created echo chamber (because google can’t profile your search habits when not using google directly for search)
You’re still giving google money (indirectly) but st least you’re depriving it of your personal data.
IMO it's not about "going back to" anywhere. It's not as if we couldn't use different search engines for different queries.
This all-or-nothing mentality of migrating away from Google (the search engine) seems flawed to me. It's still better for your privacy doing half of your queries using Google, instead of doing all of them.
By the way, no offense intended! We're all free to pick our tools.
DDG ends up working well as the default search for me. The ability to type my query and then decide if I want to use DDG or Google doesn't require me to take my hands of the keyboard. I just add a g! and I'm switched off my default. So it's a great default with an ergonomic way to switch to a different engine.
Google as default requires me to use the browser UX to change the engine, which I believe requires using the mouse or hitting tab or arrow keys. Less ergonomic.
Firefox supports this, go into Settings -> Search and set a keyword for the search engine.
For example, if you set the keyword for DuckDuckGo to "ddg" and Google to "go", then typing "ddg <your query>" into the topbar will search DuckDuckGo, and typing "go <your query>" will search Google.
DuckDuckGo itself supports this. Just start a query with !g to have it routed to Google. For example, "!g search on Google" would bring you to the Google search results page for "search on Google."
DuckDuckGo supports several other commands like this, which they refer to as "bangs."
You can set a keyword for any bookmark. Firefox replaces %s with your query. Simply bookmark the search result page of any website, replace the query with %s and set the keyword for the bookmark.
Doesn't have to be search either. For instance, I use it for the nodejs docs, and npm packages too: "https://nodejs.org/api/%s.html" and "https://www.npmjs.com/package/%s". So I can type "node fs" open the fs docs for node, or "npm fs-extra" to look up the docs for "fs-extra" package on npm.
I've set Firefox its default search engine to DDG. Then if the search results are unsatisfying, I search again but now prepend the search with !g for Google, or !gi for Google Images.
> Non-English Wikipedia articles before the English ones
It was only recently that I discovered that each language’s version of Wikipedia is independently edited, rather than being a translated reflection of a canonical source material; and, therefore, that inevitably there will be “better” or “worse” versions of a page (i.e. more/less content, more/less fact-checking, etc.) depending on the language.
This gulf sometimes turns out to be so large, that it’s sometimes more informative to read a foreign-language Wikipedia article through machine-translation, rather than reading the one in your own language!
(I recall, in the recent HN discussion that linked to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musth, people were pointing out that the German-language article carried a lot more information than the English-language article. That specific discrepancy has probably been since fixed up care of HN readers themselves, but it was eye-opening, especially since the English-language version of the article was phrased in decisive terms like “scientists don’t know X” where the German article instead says “X is caused by Y” citing enough [German-language] studies to thoroughly prove its point.)
I wonder if DDG has just caught onto this trend, and is prioritizing the language of the article that has the most editorial activity. (It would actually be more work to do the opposite, now that I think about it—in raw PageRank terms, there’s always going to be a most-linked-to language-version of a Wikipedia article, and doing nothing means that that version simply floats to the top. Google et al must be doing extra work to group the “same” articles of different language-versions together, assigning them the PageRank of the highest-ranked one in the grouping, while rendering out the link+summary as that of the group-member corresponding to your own language.)
Yeah I was looking up some very straightforward things and I'd end up with non-English wiki pages on the first page, and the English wiki page for the same topic was... I guess maybe on later pages.
A killer feature on Hackernews would be the ability to just point to a common thread like wiki that people could update; so we don't have to scroll through the comments on how people love DDG, but it just doesn't have good results. So instead of every post having a huge comment section on this restating the entire thing over and over and over, we could just link to the wiki that has the discussion on duck duck go.
For me the quality of DDG search results seems to fluctuate over time. In the recent times it’s become worse, and I’ve resorted to going directly to !s (startpage) or !g (google). I take many other precautions in my browsing to thwart tracking anyway.
Translation: you prioritized convenience over privacy.
That's your choice to make and I'm not criticizing your choice, but I do think it's a bit off-base to criticize DDG for this. There's a pretty inherent tradeoff: violating privacy is should allow Google to produce better, more personalized search results if they are at all competent.
I would guess that the vast majority of DDG users don't use DDG because they think it produces better search results. We're using DDG because we're concerned about our own privacy and/or the implications of letting a corporation gather very personal data on every person in our society.
I tried to switch and ended up using both, I use duckduckgo not for privacy but practical reasons: recently google has become extremely irritating for technical searches that are not popular, even for the ones it can find it now autocorrects them by default to "what it thinks you meant", which for technical things like parameter names, command names, APIs etc are always wrong, even though the whole search phrase is extremely descriptive and matchable.
I found that DDG is good for these types of searches (esoteric technical search that might be clobbered by googles dumb "AI" autocorrect or SEO optimization / I cant tell if it's an ad anymore BS that slows you right down), for these you get the result immediately and with one click... but DDG is worse for popular things where the search phrase is less descriptive and more associative.
So now - I use both, DDG by default because it's faster to get to the result with less shit in the way; then back to google for the few popular things...
I think this isn't too bad of a deal for privacy either, everyone assumes you must completely switch a service, but if you only search popular things on google, then you will look just like everyone else, you starve them of specificity.
Startpage: "You can’t beat Google when it comes to online search. So we’re paying them to use their brilliant search results in order to remove all trackers and logs."
Searx is a meta search engine. You can gather results from gogle.
Startpage also shows ads at the top of the search results. It claims not to track the user (similar to DDG, which also shows ads but doesn’t track the user). But there was news about Startpage being acquired a few months ago, and the trust in it has dropped for some people.
I find that it varies by query, and often dry will give better results. Especially if I am looking for something more than a few weeks old, or off the beaten path.
Google will often replace or ignore words in my query and return garbage.
Redirecting away from smile.amazon.com leaves a bad taste in my mouth.