Everybody with basic reading abilities already knew that “incognito” is just “not saving stuff locally”. Sites can track you regardlessly. With any browser.
99.99999% of users don’t know this… People who work in IT knows it and that’s about it.
This is also why Google search is still popular too, people don’t know about any alternatives and are afraid to use something else even. They don’t even know why they may want to use something else. It’s ridiculous.
Google search is still popular because it works the best for most people. Bing and the others pretty much suck.
I know I’ll get downvoted but it’s true. I try to use DDG where possible, and I’m not paying for Kagi. It’s quite expensive and I’m not too sure I’d like it. Half the time DDG doesn’t find something Google easily finds.
And yes I know Google is worse than it was like 3 years ago, but DDG results are way worse.
Fyi: this also depends on local factors and the kind of stuff your looking for.
In my experience ddg is awful which is strange cause its powered by bing results while Bing result are ok, on par with google for searching and finding websites/services
Startpage wich is deanonimized google works great on premise but its unusable If you want to find local services/stores or governments sites. (It makes total sense though, its the tradeoff of sharing location data). At some point the top result was a starbucks on the other side of the planet and i had actually provided the settings with my nationality and main language.
Google remains king when it comes to digital shopping, results list almost all the major local retailers for me. Bing seems to pick favorite more selectively.
In all seriously of late the tools ivebeen the most happy with are:
wikipedia search
wolfram alpha
gpt-4 (with healthy skepticism)
I seem to be naturally moving away from search engines in favor of just a few bookmarked sites where the real content is. Most of the internet that i havent seen is either not my thing or feels dead
Right, yeah it does depend. In general though, DDG is just bad about half the time for me in general. Do you know if startpage has a !g kind of directive like DDG? I may have to give that one a shot if so.
Pretty much daily. On my phone it is my default search engine but it often doesn’t work out for me.
I gave up with that plan on desktop and reverted back to google as default since it seems especially bad at finding software solutions, and I’m doing most of those searches for my job and side projects on my desktop.
Well I used the Kagi free trial and loved it, and now I’m a very happy subscriber. It’s better than everything else, and it’s not owned by shitty big tech as a bonus. :)
Yeah you get 200 free searches I think, enough to see if the results are better for you. You can also raise or lower or remove certain sites in the results so you can get rid of the sites you never want to see.
I love their listacles format too when searching for best movies or car reviews etc.
I can imagine a reasonable user who doesn’t look into it beyond the old warning text being aware that incognito’s purpose is to not store browsing history and therefore assuming that somehow impacts Google’s ability to know where you’ve been. Like, they might know it doesn’t stop trackers but assume not having the history logged means it’s not there for Google to take. Or speaking more generally, they could’ve taken it to mean “we won’t track you, but we can’t do anything about others doing so.”
I wouldn’t say it just relied on basic reading abilities, as you could easily be misled if your mental model for how tracking and data collection works was just a bit off.
Everybody with basic reading abilities already knew that “incognito” is just “not saving stuff locally”. Sites can track you regardlessly. With any browser.
99.99999% of users don’t know this… People who work in IT knows it and that’s about it.
This is also why Google search is still popular too, people don’t know about any alternatives and are afraid to use something else even. They don’t even know why they may want to use something else. It’s ridiculous.
Google search is still popular because it works the best for most people. Bing and the others pretty much suck.
I know I’ll get downvoted but it’s true. I try to use DDG where possible, and I’m not paying for Kagi. It’s quite expensive and I’m not too sure I’d like it. Half the time DDG doesn’t find something Google easily finds.
And yes I know Google is worse than it was like 3 years ago, but DDG results are way worse.
Fyi: this also depends on local factors and the kind of stuff your looking for.
In my experience ddg is awful which is strange cause its powered by bing results while Bing result are ok, on par with google for searching and finding websites/services
Startpage wich is deanonimized google works great on premise but its unusable If you want to find local services/stores or governments sites. (It makes total sense though, its the tradeoff of sharing location data). At some point the top result was a starbucks on the other side of the planet and i had actually provided the settings with my nationality and main language.
Google remains king when it comes to digital shopping, results list almost all the major local retailers for me. Bing seems to pick favorite more selectively.
In all seriously of late the tools ivebeen the most happy with are:
I seem to be naturally moving away from search engines in favor of just a few bookmarked sites where the real content is. Most of the internet that i havent seen is either not my thing or feels dead
Right, yeah it does depend. In general though, DDG is just bad about half the time for me in general. Do you know if startpage has a
!gkind of directive like DDG? I may have to give that one a shot if so.Not sure, but if you use Firefox this functionality comes by default and is customizable.
you can add other search engines shortcuts trough add-ons https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/startpage-private-search/?utm_source=addons.mozilla.org&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=search
I just tried a search on startpage that gave me a lot of issues on DDG last night. Immediately found what I needed! Thanks!
When did you try DDG? I’m newer to it and have heard it get alot of grief but I’ve never had much issue.
Pretty much daily. On my phone it is my default search engine but it often doesn’t work out for me.
I gave up with that plan on desktop and reverted back to google as default since it seems especially bad at finding software solutions, and I’m doing most of those searches for my job and side projects on my desktop.
Well I used the Kagi free trial and loved it, and now I’m a very happy subscriber. It’s better than everything else, and it’s not owned by shitty big tech as a bonus. :)
I need to give it a shot I suppose. Thanks for this response.
Yeah you get 200 free searches I think, enough to see if the results are better for you. You can also raise or lower or remove certain sites in the results so you can get rid of the sites you never want to see.
I love their listacles format too when searching for best movies or car reviews etc.
Yeah, but “not knowing” is not (entirely?) Google’s fault.
I can imagine a reasonable user who doesn’t look into it beyond the old warning text being aware that incognito’s purpose is to not store browsing history and therefore assuming that somehow impacts Google’s ability to know where you’ve been. Like, they might know it doesn’t stop trackers but assume not having the history logged means it’s not there for Google to take. Or speaking more generally, they could’ve taken it to mean “we won’t track you, but we can’t do anything about others doing so.”
I wouldn’t say it just relied on basic reading abilities, as you could easily be misled if your mental model for how tracking and data collection works was just a bit off.
If you assume Google doesn’t track you in any context, you’re not a reasonable user.
It’s not unreasonable to be ignorant. Particularly about technology which most don’t understand
No.
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Yes, often misunderstood, you do the same with Cookie Autodelete or Site Bleacher extensions.