Byebye, Google. Hello, DuckDuckGo.

[kane_magus]

It's been a long time coming, but finally, I have changed my browsers' homepages and startup pages for the first time in probably over a decade. It used to be Google (and before that, it was Yahoo, and I think maybe AltaVista briefly, before it got bought by Yahoo shortly after I switched to it from Yahoo, annoyingly), but now I'm going to be

Comments

[dmjewelle]

I'm aware that Google has been storing our personal information, but I'd like to know what's made you disappointed with Google?

[kane_magus]

The straw/camel's back moment was a relatively minor thing, really: yet another instance in a long, long line of instances of Google's search engine assuming things that it should not be assuming and, worse, assuming incorrectly. I was doing a search for a quote[1] that involved the word "refuse," as in the verb. In several of the results, though, I was seeing the word "garbage" highlighted (with neither hide nor hair of the word "refuse" to be seen, otherwise), meaning that Google assumed, wrongly, that I meant the noun "refuse" and, as such, it had incompetently decided to give me results with unwanted synonyms for that. If it had just given me results with the noun form of "refuse" in them, that still would have been slightly annoying, but I would have mostly had no real problem with that, since at least it still would have been returning the actual word that I'd typed into search. But, yeah, when Google was giving me both figurative and literal "garbage" in this case, that's when I just rolled my eyes, sighed, and finally

[dmjewelle]

Now that you mention it, I used google to look for stuff the other day and it insisted I was using colons wrong. Shame it's ridiculously aggressive on correcting others.

Meanwhile, how has DuckDuckGo been treating you?

[kane_magus]

As far as I am aware, Google pretty much completely ignores any and all punctuation, except insofar as how those symbols are used as specific operators. If you try to use them any other way, you're pretty much SOL.

As for DuckDuckGo, it's not perfect either and I've run into an occasional issue I've had to work around via using operators and such, but that's going to be true of any search engine. But so far at least, it hasn't been regularly acting like it knows what I want to search for better than I do and as such hasn't given me much at all in the way of irrelevant garbage results like Google so often does.