Having said that, people who actually use torrents regularly know their way around Google and other web-based search engines, and this move, therefore, should have little or no effect on that particular demographic.

I would love to subscribe to netflix, hulu, hbo, etc but all my favorite TV shows are always on different networks. I wouldn't mind paying for the service (but not for 3 of them), but the online streaming mirrors are really good at what they do.

Bing just works. Its has significantly less bias than google which is why I always use 2 search engines.

Now we've been without any TV or streaming services for about six months, and relying on a Kodi box and my collection of ripped DVDs.

We spend more time together as a family.

It only works if there are enough seeders, otherwise I have a seedbox that I FTP into for watching some movies I haven't seen yet.

Chris Bell is someone who I heard talk recently on a podcast about this. He makes documentaries and discussed how hard it is just to break even making a documentary because of how Netflix/HBO/etc structure deals and vendor lock in.

Edit : To me "piracy" of music was a new idea : free access and distribution of digital contents, because we technologically can, and it doesn't kill anyone

Where are the 2 years or older, 4 years or older options at the other end of the scale or let me specify two actual dates.

Sadly I often need to search for older content - DDG are least worst, but they're all poor to hopeless at it.

Asking, because last time I tried using it for more than a handful of queries, I ended up jumping back to using Google because searching for obscure programming error messages seldom led anywhere useful.

DDG has their own cralwer[1], so it would appear it also gets its own search results, even if may get some search results from other search engines.

[1]: https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckbot

> In fact, DuckDuckGo gets its results from over four hundred sources. These include hundreds of vertical sources delivering niche Instant Answers, DuckDuckBot (our crawler) and crowd-sourced sites (like Wikipedia, stored in our answer indexes). We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we source from Bing, Yahoo, and Yandex.

So DuckDuckBot is not used for any normal indexing. All actual search results are from Bing, Yahoo and Yandex.

So their bot is only for instant answers, and DDG is really just a metasearch engine? I'm a bit disappointed by that.

Might as well change to Searx then. It's also "just" a metasearch engine, but at least it's fully free/libre.

I wonder if there are any well-established free search engines that do their own crawling?

> Bing and Google each spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year crawling and indexing the deep Web. It costs so much that even big companies like Yahoo and Ask are giving up general crawling and indexing. Therefore, it seems silly to compete on crawling and, besides, we do not have the money to do so. Instead, we've focused on building a better search engine by concentrating on what we think are long-term value-adds -- having way more instant answers, way less spam, real privacy and a better overall search experience.

I googled this, but couldn't find the "!" operator as a google operator. What does "!g" do in search? Or are you trying to say "I end up leaving Google for half my searches" which is not only shorter, but more clear than what you said.

Edit: Ah, that makes more sense, thanks guys. I completely misinterpreted that comment in two different ways.

Non-javascript: https://duckduckgo.com/bang_lite.html

I find it better than Google for code / technical searches, and all things work related

I find it better than Google for historic or old content as Google barely acknowledges such content is possible any more. Admittedly DDG is "least worst" in this respect but it hasn't entirely thrown the results out with the obsession with recency and update frequency (I consider this to have essentially ruined Google). Google were better at this and dated searches in their first 2 years than now.

Google then ruined themselves further by feeling it can overrule my keywording attempts and gives a page of results featuring no result with the must have term. Adding insult to injury they proceed to heavily promote brands over small companies and blogs, or anything really.

Once a week I'll try !sp and not find what I need on Google either. The rare times I want video search Bing is orders of magnitude better than Google.

Right now I end up on SO or a handful of other forums depending on the subject.

Might be worth a shot if you say you get better results faster!

TL;DR I mostly find what I need quicker with least faffing around changing terms to try and fight them "knowing best".

Google shot themselves in the foot when they removed code search, and "improved" results by constantly knowing better with synonyms and other semantically linked results. It rather broke code searches and led to more of the wrong language turning up instead. Language reference and standard library type searches they do just fine at.

Google spoiled it for the obscure and code when even + and - modifiers and advanced searches became optional. They felt able to give a page of results with only one result having my must-have term. Makes searching for a specific release hellish - not everyone integrates latest and greatest v9 the week of its release. No, I really do want v7. I never fathomed the rationale of that change for anyone.

DDG do the least additional messing with my search terms with helpful expansion, pluralisation and so on. DDG got a little worse at obscure error searches when they started on some "oh you also meant" games fairly recently. They still do the least of this. There's still occasional cases where the content simply isn't there - but they're far better than say a year or two ago.

When I first tried DDG a few years ago I was !g or !sp all the time and it was barely worth the effort. Now I very rarely go near Google and don't feel I'm losing out.

I'd recommend giving it another try if you haven't recently.

This was my usual experience as well. But a few months ago, I started using tor-browser for laptop and orfox browser for mobile (equivalent of tor-browser, but for android) as my main browsers and couldn't use google search with them (search blocks tor).

I started using using ddg for almost everything and was surprised how good it was. I could launch firefox to use google, but almost never did it (except to use apps from G suite). I wonder also if in my latest previous attempts, I wasn't most of the time using "!g" because I wasn't trusting ddg results.

A while back i decided to put more effort and try to survive with !so, !gh, !hn, !r, !w, and a couple more depending on the context.

DDG may not give exact results in less than a second, but i believe that blindly giving priority to the fastest result is a critical issue, in many areas.

For the very niche topics, i basically maintain myself lists of sites.

I still use !g as fallback or when i'm too lazy. And also for pentest reconnaissance, i have a hard time seeing how to do it without Google honestly (which is scary).

Page load of DDG is not quite good indeed, but i don't mind let it a few seconds.

I have a Google CSE for the sites I have subscribed in RSS reader. It provides results that I could never get with straight Google search. Curious to know what your sources are like if you don't mind?

TBH, i mostly do all of that just because i don't want to be stuck deeper in the Google web, but that's more of a philisophical issue. I could easily live without all the DDG stuff, but not (yet) without all the Google stuff.

On the phone I switched back to google as default as inserting the !g was a horrible experience to go through every time I wanted to look something up quickly.

- No geo prioritization. If I'm searching for things in (city I'm current in) I don't care for sites from companies located in (city in the US/Canada with the same name).

- You write "X in Y" (generic example) and autocomplete tries to "fix it with "Z in Y" thanks but I really mean "X in Y". Or sometimes it tries to fix it with even more unrelated things (though sometimes it makes sense).

A geo-bubble is a filter bubble.

A filter bubble is building a story of previous searches to get more relevant results.

So the first time you search 'Python' on Google with no history it might prioritize snakes or the computer language, but after some clicks it will know better how to prioritize

Now, DDG correctly detects the country I'm in, but even with that set the results are weird and not always relevant.

Filtering my results based on my location is still a filter bubble. Filtering it based on anything, and not just showing me exactly the same results as everyone else who searched the same query is the definition of a filter bubble.

People who don't want to be bubbled use DDG. It's a big part of the reason it exists, and you want that changed. What you actually want is another search engine, which is probably Google since they have the most functional (in the sense of utility derived by the end user) filter bubbles.

Fotbolls vm

Football World Cup

The former gives you the correct site with the channels listed as the first answer but the second one doesn’t even have the channels on the first page.

It also detected that I'm in Poland and asked me if I want to switch to polish Google and filter results in polish language.

Somewhat strangely, when I use Qwant, I often get better results than Google. This is of course anecdotical evidence and I do not use Qwant all the time (creature of habit, and so on).

So it’s not just for pirate sites.

an extention that tries to find free legal hosted version of publications when you're reading, say a springer page (you'll see a green icon on your screen right's side).

It’s good in combination with DuckDuckGo though, instead of the `!g` bang, you can do `!sp`

For books, I generally use Worldcat for search (DDG !worldcat), then hit http://b-ok.org (!b-ok).

For copyright-unconstrained works, Beatrice's old shop, The Internet Archive, is pretty awesome.

Archive.is often bypasses paywalls.

Whether you’re pro or anti piracy, replacing that content with malware & scams does not make the world a better place.

I'm pretty confident they'd like to but it's a tricky problem. Based on this article, they're downranking based on number of legit DMCA requests - the good sites will generate a lot of signal on that front. The bad/malicious sites won't.

The malicious/scam sites usually come and go quickly, so it's hard to learn which ones they are - if you figure out one site is a scam, and a new one pops up.

A real solution would require being able to make an automatic judgement about whether a site is bad/malicious based on the content of the site, but that's really hard, and it's really bad when you get false positives, so you have to be super conservative about it.

So if one side is powered by human ingenuity assisted by algorithms, you need both on the other side, not one or the other. It was the folly of Google to think they could get by using algorithms alone, and the immensely complex, human tweaked, secret soup that Search has become is the result.

In all seriousness, curation is one of the most valuable skills a human can provide; I do sometimes wish it was easier to find curated content on the internet, but that isn't really what a search engine does. It is something that eg HN and Reddit provide.

The closest we have to curated content is the relatively recent "awesome" lists.

I hope my feeling of relative safety is justified, but I'm not a security expert(?).

PS: Before anyone gets upset that I use such services, I'm not a heavy "pirate" by any measure. When I needed it I purchased software like Adobe Creative Suite or Jetbrain IDE licenses without hesitation. I only use it for things I don't really need and only use once, such as checking out a TV series (I very, very rarely watch anything, relying on specific Youtube and Twitch content instead, leaving two - one came with the apartment rent, one with the Internet - cable TV subscriptions unused).

I just use incognito and adblock. My impression is that whenever there's a remote code execution bug in chrome it becomes big news (ex: Meltdown/Spectre) so usually I can just trust the browser sandbox. Surely anyone with an exploit that can break the sandbox would use it on high value target rather than wasting it on the mass and having it get patched quickly?

I think I've become complacent since it's been more than a decade since I've gotten a virus/malware just from clicking a link.

I'm worried that I probably would not even know when/if I have any malware unless the malware detection actually manages to detect it. I think lots of malware tries to remain inconspicuous and not draw attention to itself, only using your machine as a gateway or data source. Even though I know TCP/IP inside out and could inspect my network traffic, there is soooo much stuff going on in today's PCs that I have no intention of even trying.

I would not even know where to start if I had to inspect my operating system. I remember many years ago when a friend's laptop was always buys and created lots of network activity, it was obvious and easily confirmed that it had become a source of spam emails. I think a lot of malicious code is quite a bit more sophisticated and careful now, plus, the much increased bandwidth and raw PC power most people have available lets the same activity go unnoticed that 10 years ago might have had noticeable effects.

That means I think that not noticing any malware nowadays is not proof of absence of malware when the base rate is included, i.e. if we assume a low number of infections assuming no malware gets it mostly right only because of the that, not because we have a reliable way to detect it. If the base rate changes and our assumptions about infections don't change that would be a sign that our own ability to detect infection does not play a role in how we get to our assumption. It would be an interesting study to compare measured infection rates with how safe users felt (if it is the same user population for both). AV vendors and Microsoft might be able to do that.

The dangerous ones are precisely the ones you don't know about.

If you want to be properly paranoid, you should consider getting a VPN. If you're not hiding your IP address, hiding all the rest is of limited utility. A VM doesn't really provide much meaningful anonymity - if someone wants to prosecute you for piracy they'll start by finding the IP address that was downloading/sharing the stuff (that's publicly visible).

On the other hand, it's pretty likely that this sort of paranoia is totally unnecessary - piracy prosecution against individual downloaders has been historically a PR nightmare for the groups doing it, and more or less everyone seems to have given up on that particular approach.

Still, if you want to be paranoid, a VPN will do a lot more for you than a VM and some add blocking.

For real anonymity, Tor is a much better option. Especially if used from a distribution like Tails.

Streaming pirated content is exactly as illegal as downloading in Germany and also the whole EU.

Here is a source: https://www.focus.de/digital/praxistipps/anwalt-zu-eugh-urte...

The illegality-of-streams question is not really relevant unless you are a premium account customer of a portal the authorities might get access to, or any streaming website they might get access to. They have no (legal) way to find streamers if they have no access to the server and/or whoever is hosting it or owns it. They get (non-VPNed) torrent downloaders because it's legally possible to find out which IP addresses download and/or offer a given file.

https://www.chip.de/news/Illegales-Streaming-auf-kinox-to-so...

In the past I did download torrent file videos - only to watch them exactly once or never. I got caught and paid the "Abmahnung" - so what. I stopped because I don't really need it. My need for such video content is very low. Usually I watch 10-30 minutes of movies, even "block busters", and then I'm too bored to ever watch the rest. For example, I still did not watch Game of Thrones past the end of the very first season.

How is a user supposed to know, for all anyone visiting a website knows it's licensed.

Anything on Netflix might be unlicensed, I have no way to tell, same with any random site. If I can find it, that means a large media corp can, so surely one must assume if they didn't get it taken down (sites are blocked and taken down all the time, blocked at ISP level) then it must be OK with the large rights holders.

And of course we know that even stuff from MPAA can be copyright infringing. There's no way for users to establish if something is properly licensed because license are secret.

Instead I watch Youtube: lectures, documentaries, courses and music. Reading Arxiv papers is stimulating and interesting. Streaming anime can replace US shows quite well. Don't need US entertainment after all.

It's Romanian IIRC.

Torrents and pirate sites are actually fairly safe. You can always double check the SHA hash signature of the file you download as well with the official source.

I don't endorse pirating at all and usually pay for all my software though. Its just all my favorite TV shows are across multiple networks. I would pay money for a netflix that encompasses every TV show based on my usage. Such a service doesn't exist though.

The popular trackers (such as ptb) remove content very easily. It is getting really hard to find tv shows on the net.

What we need is a completely anonymous distributed solution.

We won't need google then.

If anyone is interested https://github.com/Tribler/tribler/wiki link contains more information.

I'm surprised I didn't hear of this project before.

Thnx for mentioning us btw! With 13 years running and our bandwidth token for Bittorrent (no ICO) it seems we're the only team left doing innovations. All other p2p teams seem to have died in the p2p winter.

1) Install Firefox Nightly

2) Install uBlock Origin add-on

3) Enable Duck Duck Go as default search engine

4) Enjoy

I am still looking for a good replacement for Gmail.

Some people are OK with giving their PII like phone numbers to them, then Google is a good choice for them.

For me, it is not. Their schizophrenic registration system that SOMETIMES demands your phone number was the last straw.

And they were at least working on a VPN service too, last time I checked.

If you miss the dark DDG theme: https://userstyles.org/styles/95276/duckduckgo-lite-dark

iCloud email

I've been using it for half a year now, and the only gmail features I miss (their spam filtering and automatically prioritizing mails) are those that require them to read your mail. Which I like that they cannot.

Which is a massive limitation.

But if you really need it, you can use the ProtonMail Bridge together with your favorite email client. For me the tradeoff of having my emails stored encrypted by default without much hassle is worth it.

For example, there is a website that allows to watch Japanese TV from abroad (quite expensive by the way). How one can be sure that they are not paying to scammers?

So, such things are clearly on a par with terrorism or murder -- I'm sure they'll be arresting Google execs forthwith. /s

Basically, you're wishing away a number of huge problems, including (1.) that copyright attaches at the time of creation, while the owner of that copyright is often multiple steps removed from the act of creation and determined by complex legal arrangements; (2.) copyright ownership for a particular work may differ depending on political jurisdiction; (3.) copyright ownership is not the same as distribution rights, which also may vary based on political jurisdiction; (4.) it's not clear how fair use could be accommodated in such a system. It would also have the effect of favoring larger entities with more copyrighted works; i.e. Disney would have a better chance of navigating this system than an independent creator would.

But yeah, when I was looking for a proper way to purchase, all I found was pirate versions.

Maybe your complaint is really that their appeals process is too opaque or difficult. There I agree, but I don't fault them for stopping short of perfect on their AI classifiers.

EDIT: Evidently you can right-click and view image. I thought that wouldn't get me to the original image since the image as presented in search is smaller in resolution than what Google says the image really is. Either way, in DDG the image actually links to the damn image and not to the site where the image supposedly maybe appears on.

If DDG / Bing become big enough, they too will be forced to stop their practice.

https://9to5google.com/2018/02/09/google-images-features-get...

The case with linking is far from settled.

Legal or not, I don't care though. But I do look forward to highly anonymized p2p networks with useful services and software we can rely on by the time the lawmakers have made the internet useless.

Having said that, I think Goggle is just hiding behind the lawsuit threats.

https://github.com/bijij/ViewImage

I hope they wise up and improve as I actually would rather have 2-3 highly competitive search companies rather than just 1.

Instead, first left-click the thumbnail to open the larger image preview. Then right-click the large preview image and select "open image in new tab". You will get the full image.

If anyone has an example where this doesn't work, I'd be curious to see it. It works every time for me.

Works only for some sites. If the large preview is a stretched thumbnail of that picture, then "open image in new tab" will not get you the full image but the thumbnail.

That happens when the large picture hasn't yet loaded. If you wait it usually will load.

From what I've seen, there is a large contingent of Google who doesn't want to provide unfettered access to information. Rather, this contingent wants to socially engineer everyone for the better using their power.

Wouldn't these people need to be specifically from the search team, and not Google in general (which would have almost no control over search)

That's really the main leverage studios have over Google right now: "either remove the stuff we tell you or you'll no longer get access to the content you want from us."

I wouldn't be surprised to learn that MPAA's board seat on the W3C was sponsored by Google (and Netflix, maybe Microsoft, and a few others).

And now let the down-votes rain in.

This coincided with Android getting a much more restrictive permission regarding removable media (under the label media storage permissions), that made it impossible for non-system apps to write to removable storage (sd cards, usb sticks, etc).

So they are always going to make some people unhappy and the question is who. It used to be people nobody on Hacker News cared about like spammers and click farms (remember them)? But you could still call that censorship or social engineering even then. Isn't getting rid of spam also "using their power?"

Without heavy-duty ranking and spam prevention, would you even use it at all?

So yeah, they have a lot of power, they're getting leaned on by other powerful forces, and we don't need to agree with their choices. But just like a newspaper has to decide on something for its front page (and leave other stuff out), a search engine's gotta rank things.

What happens when these large companies start making people unhappy just because they have the wrong politics? What happens when groups of people within companies like Google start looking the other way when people start to manipulate/SEO page rankings to bury facts and promote their own interpretations of documented facts and science?

It's already happened.

For me, I want pirate sites when searching for piracy and I never want click farm.

Google used to have a simple mission- organize the world information. This means helping you find what you’re looking for. Link farms didn’t do this, they made it harder to find the real thing. If I’m looking for a document and Google knows I want it, and knows the document’s location and doesn’t show it to me, that’s bad. I don’t really care if Google morally doesn’t like piracy, or makes more money by blocking piracy, or whatever. It’s their site, they can do what they like.

But this is why they are worse at their job than they used to be.

One of the reasons I never liked AOL is because their search was like an index through the yellow pages and didn’t use what made the internet so awesome (all the world can connect to each other) and rather was about what was most advantageous for AOL and their advertisers buying keywords.

In older versions of google, one could quote a full error message of almost any type that came up on your computer and get a very good page describing that that error meant. Now that is not the case. Maybe the internet has degraded and this is no longer possible, but I would imagine it would really help out google coders if they had a system of searching the web for error messages that worked (and quite a competitive advantage if it only worked for them).

Not many, it's probably the highest guarded secret in the company as far as products go.

It seems like you would to test with this to assess quality.

The fact of the matter is, the "Steamification" of mainstream media is almost complete. iTunes, Steam, Youtube Music, Spotify, Netflix, Prime.

In the future we will be able to stream new movies, possibly infinite variations created on the fly by AI.

Imagine an AI that has watched every possible recorded moving pictures and is able to conjure up entire new story plots, characters, and visuals on their own that caters exactly to the viewer.

Also its harder to download torrents now so I naturally just pay for it if I really need it. The only way I would torrent something is if it was not available for purchase.

I suspect most folks searching really do want a legit copy.

If I want to find content that falls off the back of truck, I know where to look. But the people using Google to find content, are likely looking for legitimate content. I actually appreciate searching for a movie on my phone using Google and seeing at the top all of the legal places I can easily get content. Especially if one of those links are a service I already subscribe to.

I personally stopped pirating music when iTunes Music came online. It was much easier to pay $0.99 for a song than to scour Napster,Kazaa, Limewire, and the rest of the p2p software. Now with Apple Music, Spotify, etc. why bother pirating music?

I subscribe to Netflix,Hulu with no commercials, DirectvNow and Amazon Prime. I could find most of the content on pirate sites, but why would I bother? I would much rather just pay $65 a month (well actually I get Netflix free via T-mobile so $55/month).

Movie Pass was too restrictive and too much of a hassle to bother with, but I have no reason to pirate new releases anymore now that AMC has AMC Stubs A+. I signed myself and my wife up for the subscription the day it became available. A movie is now a cheap date night when we just want to get out of the house and do something.

There's no way to build a legal "everything in one platform" service, just because of the logistics of trying to find rightsholders, and deal with ones who may be outright hostile (think of all the TV/movie firms who are desperate to bootstrap their own streaming services, rather than just being another section inside Netflix's catalog).

For a lot of services, we've seen "it doesn't have everything, but it has 90% of the most popular things" and that's been good enough. But is it really? I suspect a significant number of customers will gradually return to piracy-- at least as a supplement-- as the legit catalogs get exhausted and their tastes reach for more and more obscure stuff that's not available anywhere else.

I suspect the only real solution would be some sort of mandatory licensing-- let the platform owners scoop up everything and just submit a royalty to some escrow system based on how often it's consumed.