DuckDuckGo CEO says Google kills competition through phone deals that make it hard for users to switch search engines
DuckDuckGo CEO says Google kills competition through phone deals that make it hard for users to switch search engines
The federal government argues Google has smothered competition by paying companies such as Apple and Verizon to lock in its search engine as the default.
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He's probably right, but from what I see, the reality is that like 95% of people simply don't care, and the rest will find an alternative.
Thing is, Google is also (still) just better.
I use DDG as my primary search engine, but I find myself repeating searches with Google so often, I wrote a userscript to add a "Search with Google" link to the top of the DDG search results.
I've seen a lot of chat recently about Google search quality tanking and it's made me realise that I haven't re-searched a DDG query in Google for a really, really long time. when I first started using DDG as my main a few years back, I would repeat searches in Google probably 25% of the time? but I honestly can't remember the last time I had to now. Been at least 6 months!
unfortunately, I do that often. Even when using meta search engine which sources to google, Google UX and results are simply better but sometime feeling is just not rationale
regarding duckduckgo, it is simply too long to type and people rarely configure their browser, especially on mobile.
so yeah, in a sense, Weinberg is right. At the very least, a choice should be provided on first run but you can't force people to be curious.
You can add an !g to the start of a ddg search and it'll do the Google search automatically. There are a bunch of websites you can have it do that with. !w for wikipedia, !e for eBay, !a for Amazon, etc
Sure, but I think there’s still benefit to what the other person did. Search DDG by default, and then if you don’t see good results, it’s one extra click for the google search… vs mousing, clicking, 2 keystrokes…
I agree. At least in my experience Google does a better job when it comes to search engine. I use DDG as well but when it comes to searching specific things Google beats it unfortunately.
Small tip, you can just type !g in front of your search and hit enter, ddg will then open it in google.
There are also many other of these shortcuts like !w for wikipedia.