If you haven’t switched to duckduckgo yet what convinced me was when @amsomniac showed me the !bangcodes
Basically if you start a ddg search with something like !ebay or !wiktionary it searches that site directly after being anonymized through ddg’s server. So rather than have different search engines in my browser I select it’s just !w for Wikipedia or !translate for google translate
You can even do !g and do an anonymous untracked google search
@shel @amsomniac does ddg proxy those? i thought it just redirects you into the destination's tracked results page
@bonzoesc @amsomniac with google it runs it through encryption I believe? Nadya told me if you do it that way you aren’t tracked and I trust her
@shel @amsomniac neat; i just tried a !g and discovered that my paid account has search history disabled regardless
@shel @bonzoesc @amsomniac sorry, that's not really correct. '!g' lands you on encrypted.google.com - they (Google) know that you did the search - there is nothing anonymous in that.
@shel @amsomniac It's so good. I switched 2 years ago, never looked back. Plus, browser integration is 🔥 !
@shel @amsomniac I use this ALL THE TIME. Especially !yt for YouTube.
@shel @amsomniac Bangs are awesome. I sometimes worry DDG isn't as "secure" as Startpage, since it's still US-based, but it's so much more user friendly and using !bangcodes is really handy.
@shel @amsomniac One I use often is !yt
@shel @amsomniac and the best part is they're user-submitted so there are ones for basically every site out there! (Except for lewd ones for some reason). Even super obscure ones! And if there isn't one for a site you use, you can submit it and there will be :)
@vantablack @amsomniac !e621 when?????
@amsomniac @shel yup!
duckduckgo is the pirates best friend:
!libgen searches a currently active libgen mirror
!tpb searches a currently active thepiratebay URL
!demonoid searches demonoid
there's probably more I don't know of.
@popefucker @amsomniac @shel Is there one for Sci-hub?
@shel @amsomniac @popefucker A small amount of searching reveals that yes there is:
!sh
@shel @Terrana @amsomniac
…and you can search for bang codes with '!bang searchterm'
@shel @amsomniac yeah it's cool, but search results that are not in english suck :(
@shel this is life changing knowledge
@shel @amsomniac I did NOT know that and I use DDG daily (and sometimes have to resort to google, so that hint alone is worth it)!
@shel oh and qr <string> is great for making quick qr codes
sexual harassment (non-graphic) Show more
sexual harassment (non-graphic) Show more
@shel @amsomniac I've been using ddg for a while now!
@shel @amsomniac I've been looking up !bangcodes and enjoying myself. Though I found out "!answer" is yahoo answers and now I'm just screwing around. Can I blame you?
@shel @amsomniac Dang, this is supercool. Why did they hide this coolity? More to point, how did I miss it? Need to dig way deeper. Anybody got any good links toward a deep dive?
@shel Wow. Didn’t know this. Have to try it right away
@shel Well. The search results page returned by Google and YouTube still collects your IP address, apparently
@shel @amsomniac I totally agree. bangcodes made me appreciate all theuseful site specific searches that are out there & made me think about the web a lot differently.