I'm undecided about DDG with regard to its relevance for my search behaviour. It seems that it requires reevaluation on at least a yearly basis. Practically speaking I rarely use it despite being very data privacy conscious and sympathetic with its goals.
But what I can say is that I turn to Bing and Yandex on a regular basis because they are simply better for some searches.
Bing is great for image search. Yandex is great for finding streamed movies, p* and reverse image search.
Generally speaking Google seems to handicap itself by two forces: censoring content (for moral and legal reasons) and monetary optimization (like preferring click bait content over actually useful content).
Over the years my approach towards protecting my data moved away from aiming for anonymity (DDG, Tor, OSM) towards pseudonymity and data distribution over competitors. F.x. neither Fastmail, nor Dropbox, nor Telegram, nor Firefox, nor Office 365 etc are perfect but at least I don't have all my data on Google and the rest of it on Facebook.
Sadly Google is rolling out or maintaining mostly unrivalled products like Search, Maps, Android, Youtube. I try to mitigate this by using separate fake Google accounts for youtube.com and google.com (via Firefox Containers) and LOS. Also I add an obstacle into the mix with uBlock Origin. Of course they can figure that out but if everybody does it then this would significantly increase costs. Also it's completely transparent for me - not adding any effort.
So, at the end of the day it seems that the fight for my data became some sort of guerrilla war fare.
> Generally speaking Google seems to handicap itself by two forces: censoring content (for moral and legal reasons) and monetary optimization (like preferring click bait content over actually useful content).
Not sure if promoting click bait is Google's intent. But pretty much all SEO is geared towards Google. No one really targets SEO towards Bing and Yandex so it's easier for them to rank by other parameters.
Monetization certainly is Google's intent but I don't think pure click bait pages are beneficial to Google in the end.
There are several large sites which are famous for poor UX and content quality which consistently rank high on Google. Like Pinterest, w3schools to name a few. That has been talked about here on HN also many times. Those are too prominent and obnoxious to assume Google Search isn't aware of it.
But what I can say is that I turn to Bing and Yandex on a regular basis because they are simply better for some searches.
Bing is great for image search. Yandex is great for finding streamed movies, p* and reverse image search.
Generally speaking Google seems to handicap itself by two forces: censoring content (for moral and legal reasons) and monetary optimization (like preferring click bait content over actually useful content).
Over the years my approach towards protecting my data moved away from aiming for anonymity (DDG, Tor, OSM) towards pseudonymity and data distribution over competitors. F.x. neither Fastmail, nor Dropbox, nor Telegram, nor Firefox, nor Office 365 etc are perfect but at least I don't have all my data on Google and the rest of it on Facebook.
Sadly Google is rolling out or maintaining mostly unrivalled products like Search, Maps, Android, Youtube. I try to mitigate this by using separate fake Google accounts for youtube.com and google.com (via Firefox Containers) and LOS. Also I add an obstacle into the mix with uBlock Origin. Of course they can figure that out but if everybody does it then this would significantly increase costs. Also it's completely transparent for me - not adding any effort.
So, at the end of the day it seems that the fight for my data became some sort of guerrilla war fare.