If people would focus on content in HTML and CSS for layout and newfad devs weren't shoving 50 jscripts a page down our throat this wouldn't be happening as bad. I plan to make all my future sites librejs compatible, and forgoe js altogether whenever possible.
I've been using uMatrix for over three years and very very few websites don't work with it.
By far the most annoying 'feature' (more of a consequence of the internet) is the way that you can't whitelist HTTPS sub-domains. (Makes AWS Console a pain.)
Does AWS Console have much that needs blocking? Seems a reasonable place to simply turn off uMatrix. You could also simply use a second browser with uBlock Origin for a limited number of sites - I tend to do that for a lot of checkout /payment options where the repeated reloads of whitelisting in uMatrix could be troublesome.
> I'm trying DuckDuckGo, but it's just not as good.
It took me a while of using DDG before I realized how much I had equated "good" with "looks like Google".
What finally hit me, hard, was that I switched the DDG theme to a color scheme designed to look like Google search results, and all of a sudden the results "felt better". Markedly better.
So, I started regularly comparing results, every time I found something that I felt I didn't get the results I expected for. I would search, and then search again with !g. And almost every time I ran into something that I didn't like the DDG results for, the Google results weren't actually any better. (The rare times they were, I reported that, and often it got fixed.)
I use "!s" in DDG to get to Startpage [1] search results. One letter shorter to access the same - no need to type "!sp" when one can just type "!s" instead. :)
This does not work for replacing "!spi" (image search on Startpage) though. Using "!si" does a search on a non-existent subdomain sportsillustrated.cnn.com.
My problem is not the looks, whenever I use !g I'm annoyed how bad it looks. It IS the results. Often when something doesn't have a ton of relevant results, DDG gives the wrong results while !g has what I'm looking for.
In my experience ddg is less contextual. For instance when searching for something that is trending, Google will often give the most expected results even if the search keywords are incredibly vague, while ddg will give more standard results respecting the keywords.
That’s the very reason I switched to ddg, but it bites me back everytime I try to catch up on stuff everybody already knows for days, and need to fallback to !g.
Oh, I'm pretty sure that's why. Unless encrypted.google.com doesn't use that information? Anyway, I'd love to have some way to personalize my DDG results and tell them what to boost. Alas.
How often do you end up at Google though; a few years back I tried DDG for a couple of months but ended up basically always doing !g and so went back to Google.
It depends on what I'm searching for. If its an error code or something a bit esoteric around tech then google usually has better results, but for everyday topics the results are pretty decent, and they feel like they have improved over the years.
I probably do less searching than I used to, but the bang system really helps me search other sites much more effectively. The more common bangs I use are !w for wikipedia, !so for stackoverflow, !imdb, !gh, !tpb, !bm for bing maps, !bi bing images.
!sp for startpage is really nice to use if you want to have the Google results without the tracking.
Edit: looks like this was already mentioned below. Whoops.
I don't have any figures to back this up, but I feel like I use !g about half of the time (it may be 70 or 20% as well since I have no data). I'm not free from Google then, but this reduced my dependency by about 50%, which is still good to take !
I was in the same situation. Switched over again a few months back. I almost always only need to use !g for rare results (and even there it doesn't always help). On the other hand bangs like !mdn (mozilla developer network) and !w (wikipedia) make things much easier.
I use Firefox "awesomebar" keywords so "w" for Wikipedia, etc. (I think Chrome has this too), so I don't gain anything really with DDG's keywords on most searches.
I basically only use Google for movie listings, calculations, and restaurant hours now. The rare times I switch to Google for other searches DDG fails on, Google is no better.
I follow a three step model:
1. DDG
2. If that doesn't help, then use !s to search Startpage.
3. If that doesn't help, then use !g to search Google.
Other than the relevance and quality of search results, there are differences in features across these sites, like date range search, for example. Image search also seems to have more flexibility on Google. I haven't checked recently if reverse image search even exists on DDG or Startpage.
Still better than Google Creep. Change to a search engine that protects privacy too.