I use Google for maps and I’m still using their email for one account but I hate it. Duckduckgo’s maps are way less useful. I know they’re tracking my every move. I want to normalize leaving my cell phone at home at this point.
This is such an apt analogy. I only use it because I have a couple hundred tabs open in Chrome and I am too lazy to port them all over to FF. Even then, I usually have to be really manipulative to the search algorithm to get what I want from general searches and heaven forbid I want to find something that is even the least but taboo. I just use DuckDuckGo for those searches, though it struggles sometimes too.
I know I need to swap over to FF entirely, but there is just so much, from shifting my PW bank to the hundreds of tabs and thousands of bookmarks. Does anyone know of any FOSS or FF extensions that can smooth that process?
Bit-warden for password manager, FOSS cross platform. FF should import all the bookmarks. I’d save all open tabs to a new bookmark folder before transfer then open that folder after.
Firefox doesn’t need extensions to handle the password and bookmark imports, it can do those automatically. I saw someone suggest you create a folder in your bookmarks that is your open tabs, bookmark each tab as you close them, import passwords and bookmarks, and open that folder for a relatively painless migration.
Do not rely on the built-in password managers to keep your passwords safe. Use a purpose-built one like Bitwarden to generate unique ones, save and complete them, agnostic to the browser. Virtually every stealer out there can easily grab the built-in password db’s content.
I use Google search when I want to buy something, for some reason, it gets good résultats when I want to buy from my country. but if you want reliable results for a product review, you have to look elsewhere.
Duckduckgo is not only privacy centric but now it has better results than Google. Google is floundering in every area of their business lately. Pixel phones still have a very small niche share of the market, their search is garbage, chat gpt is a better AI than bard by miles, and their productivity suite is just as readily replaced by libreoffice or office 365.
Duckduckgo is not only privacy centric but now it has better results than Google.
Its been very hit and miss for me. The engines appear to be optimized differently, but I won’t say the DDG results are “good”. I just get better results when I search both engines than when I rely on one over the other indefinitely.
chat gpt is a better AI than bard by miles
It does very simple things very well, where as Bard just kinda fumbles everything that isn’t geared to its niche knowledge set. But they’re both… not great. ChatGPT still hallucinates routinely. Its output is often verbose to the point of repetition. Anything current-events related or otherwise subjective is… dicey at best.
Its the best of the worst, but 9 times out of 10 I’ll get a better result fishing for answers on Reddit or a topic-specific Discord or a bog-standard search engine if I put in a good fifteen minutes of serious investigation. I’m just weighing that against the instant-but-substandard answer I can get from AI.
Just wanted to chime in and say that I am super happy with my Pixel 7 so far. Easily one of the best phones out there, especially considering the price.
Android is, on the whole, an incredible OS/ecosystem Google has spun up, but at the end of the day, they still need people to use their web services to remain profitable… and primarily, that’s Search.
Although they’re nowhere near marketshare of Apple they definitely haven’t had failure in the Pixels. Every generation I notice more and more people using them rather than the previous niche audience. They’re probably the best all-around Android phones out there for average people, and with the standard pixel 8 being $550 reasonably good value compared to their competition for all but heavy mobile gamers.
I’ve used Startpage for a year or more on my main computer and it works okay.
But if anyone has any tips for a search engine that actually supports queries with boolean logic and such, I’d be all for it. Lately they all seem to just not do that anymore.
I vastly prefer a search engine in the EU, that respects the privacy laws here.
PS: Not disgussing ddg / ddg onion too much, basically because ddg is the long-time default search engine of TB. Most TB users assume ddg is a decent, standard, generic option, esp. its non-JS version.
Yeah, If the search is about something relatively obscure then 50% of the links are random letters and numbers or worse, believable looking links that are riddled with viruses.
What if these are primary places where user generated content lives now? Independent blogs are as good as dead, and social networks are walled gardens, sometimes populated by self regurgitating robots.
What if these are primary places where user generated content lives now?
Plenty of high quality user generated content live on Discord, Slack, and other semi-private information exchanges that aren’t as easy to parse and scrape. Places like Reddit and Stack Exchange and DeviantArt are just the prior-gen iteration of hosting for those conversations. But they’re being overwhelmed with bots, marketing teams, special interest mods, and ideologues to the point that they can only deliver a very niche set of content catering to whomever “owns” the space.
It used to be, I’d start at DDG andwhen I didn’t find my results, I’d switch to Goog. Now I do this, but when I find even worse results on Google, I switch back to DuckDuck because query wrangling on DDG is more worthwhile. The starting results may not always be good on DDG, but they’re often better than Google.
However, very recently I’ve been starting on Searx on doing follow-up checks on Bing, and this has been working pretty well. I know DDG has to show ads, but lately they seem to take up the better part of the first page and aren’t helpful.
Google is completely out of the picture. Their results are just bad.
I have no idea why the best search engine is not mentioned in any of these comments. Maybe it is the same reason why I am not going to mention it either, to stop normies from ruining it.
A hint: they are the only major search engine to not give a flying fuck about DMCA and USA laws. This is also the reason why it is the undisputed king.
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