[barfbagginus]

I've used the duck duck Go for over 90% of my searches for The last 5 years, as a part of a boycott against Google. I estimate I have withheld about 75,000 searches from Google in that time, or about $8,000 in revenue.

I fall back on Google only when absolutely necessary. And these days I almost never have to fall back on Google (<1% of searches).

When I do fall back, the results are invariably crap. Quality has degraded so much that it almost never gives me a better result than duck duck go did. Often when doctor go fails I don't bother with Google at all.

Even GPT4 driven Bing queries will give better results than Google now - mainly because GPT4 can filter spam, and has gotten a lot better about hallucinations.

I absolutely love to see it.

[skydhash]

Maybe because when I started fiddling with computers (around 2009), I only got like 1 or 2 hours of internet connection (cybercafes), so I had to find books and other types of offline information, I’ve never relied on Google Search or others that much. Even today, I treat them more like a bookmark database. If I can’t remember some specific terms to get to the page I need, I don’t even bother searching for it.

I’ve also started to hoard a stash of links and pdfs. And I have Dash for languages and framework documentation. Too many SEO farms for Python and HTML/CSS/JS.

[barfbagginus]

Re: link and PDF hoarding

Consider using zotero to expand and organize your library of references, if you don't already use it or something like it. It does great for PDFs, but it also captures and stores local copies of websites. Also lets you create bibliographies.