this post was submitted on 17 Jan 2024
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Privacy

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[–] [email protected] 92 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (4 children)

Everybody with basic reading abilities already knew that "incognito" is just "not saving stuff locally". Sites can track you regardlessly. With any browser.

[–] [email protected] 38 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (2 children)

99.99999% of users don't know this... People who work in IT knows it and that's about it.

This is also why Google search is still popular too, people don't know about any alternatives and are afraid to use something else even. They don't even know why they may want to use something else. It's ridiculous.

[–] TrickDacy 7 points 11 months ago (3 children)

Google search is still popular because it works the best for most people. Bing and the others pretty much suck.

I know I'll get downvoted but it's true. I try to use DDG where possible, and I'm not paying for Kagi. It's quite expensive and I'm not too sure I'd like it. Half the time DDG doesn't find something Google easily finds.

And yes I know Google is worse than it was like 3 years ago, but DDG results are way worse.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

Fyi: this also depends on local factors and the kind of stuff your looking for.

In my experience ddg is awful which is strange cause its powered by bing results while Bing result are ok, on par with google for searching and finding websites/services

Startpage wich is deanonimized google works great on premise but its unusable If you want to find local services/stores or governments sites. (It makes total sense though, its the tradeoff of sharing location data). At some point the top result was a starbucks on the other side of the planet and i had actually provided the settings with my nationality and main language.

Google remains king when it comes to digital shopping, results list almost all the major local retailers for me. Bing seems to pick favorite more selectively.

In all seriously of late the tools ivebeen the most happy with are:

  • wikipedia search
  • wolfram alpha
  • gpt-4 (with healthy skepticism)

I seem to be naturally moving away from search engines in favor of just a few bookmarked sites where the real content is. Most of the internet that i havent seen is either not my thing or feels dead

[–] TrickDacy 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Right, yeah it does depend. In general though, DDG is just bad about half the time for me in general. Do you know if startpage has a !g kind of directive like DDG? I may have to give that one a shot if so.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

Not sure, but if you use Firefox this functionality comes by default and is customizable.

you can add other search engines shortcuts trough add-ons https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/startpage-private-search/?utm_source=addons.mozilla.org&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=search

[–] TrickDacy 1 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

I just tried a search on startpage that gave me a lot of issues on DDG last night. Immediately found what I needed! Thanks!

[–] [email protected] 6 points 11 months ago (1 children)

When did you try DDG? I'm newer to it and have heard it get alot of grief but I've never had much issue.

[–] TrickDacy 0 points 11 months ago

Pretty much daily. On my phone it is my default search engine but it often doesn't work out for me.

I gave up with that plan on desktop and reverted back to google as default since it seems especially bad at finding software solutions, and I'm doing most of those searches for my job and side projects on my desktop.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Well I used the Kagi free trial and loved it, and now I'm a very happy subscriber. It's better than everything else, and it's not owned by shitty big tech as a bonus. :)

[–] TrickDacy 0 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I need to give it a shot I suppose. Thanks for this response.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Yeah you get 200 free searches I think, enough to see if the results are better for you. You can also raise or lower or remove certain sites in the results so you can get rid of the sites you never want to see.

I love their listacles format too when searching for best movies or car reviews etc.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 11 months ago

Yeah, but "not knowing" is not (entirely?) Google's fault.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

Yes, often misunderstood, you do the same with Cookie Autodelete or Site Bleacher extensions.