Pro-privacy search engine DuckDuckGo hits 30M daily searches, up 50% in a year
After everything that has happened in the last few weeks I've completely moved away from Google.<p>1. I retired my ~15 year old Gmail account and registered with Fastmail<p>2. I moved away from Chrome to Firefox on both my laptop and phone<p>3. I stopped using Chrome's password manager on iOS in favor of 1Password and Firefox Lockbox<p>4. I've mostly stopped using the Google search engine and now using DDG and Bing if I have to.<p>Part of what helped me transition away from Google to DDG was skinning DDG to look like Google[0]. The first few days were really tough and I kept finding myself going back to Google about 80% of the time. I thought that the search results were remarkably poorer. I considered that it might just be anxiety of <i>not</i> using Google affecting my view, so as an experiment I decided to theme DDG to look like Google... and it worked. I stopped going back to Google and suddenly the searches became better.<p>I still use the !g bang for about 20% of my searches, and there are things that Google does so much better that I use quite often (for example searching a store name and it brings up all the local ones with information on what time they close etc, or if you were to write "tengo dolor de estomago en ingles" it would bring up an interactive translation box and so on) but for general searches I've more or less completely moved away.<p>[0] <a href="https://userstyles.org/styles/153678/duckduckgooglymoogly" rel="nofollow">https://userstyles.org/styles/153678/duckduckgooglymoogly</a>