Table of contents
🤖
AI-generated summary
Google takes up an insane amount of space in our digital lives. It knows us better than our own GP, and it’s unsettling. That’s why, in my quest to “de-Google” myself, I change my search engine at least once a month. By default I use Google like 80% of people — I try DuckDuckGo , but I can never stick with it for more than a day…
I systematically use the Google bang “!g” to compare results. I get paranoid when I can’t find what I’m looking for. As soon as I run a search on DuckDuckGo , I can’t help running the same one on Google to check I haven’t missed anything. It’s made all the easier by DuckDuckGo’s bang — just prefix your search with “!g” and you’re off to Google.
There’s no publication date shown next to results, and I like being able to see whether an article is recent or ancient before clicking on it. It might seem trivial, but when I search on Google I always check the article’s publish date to pick the most recent one. On DuckDuckGo that’s not possible for one simple — and bad — reason: it just doesn’t show it in the results list. You have to click through to the article, and if the author didn’t bother displaying the date on their page, you’re out of luck.
I use Google Shopping more and more. When I tried looking up the price of something on DuckDuckGo, I couldn’t find a single price comparison site in the results! In the end I had to go to Google to find the price I was looking for.
I love being able to set whatever theme I want. I’ll admit, launching a search on Google in the evening and landing on a white results page burns my eyes. On this point DuckDuckGo is great — I always set it to the dark theme, much easier on the eyes. Combine that with Safari’s “Reader” mode in dark style, and you can go from the search page to the article without ever leaving the dark theme.
Have you managed to give up Google Search? I read an article about replacing Google with Qwant — I’ll leave you to read it here 👈.
