I’m just sad i lost his screenshot that showed what duckduckgo looked like before the update :( kinda makes my posts in this thread pointless. Anyway for the record the old search results screen used more screen space, had less white space and i preferred it, although i do concede the new ‘google like’ options for images etc is good, just make it smaller and take up less screen real estate (seriously, look at the huge band of beige/grey it takes up! You just need some ‘button’ space for this function).
But yeah Duckduckgo is pretty much always my future of search cause it ain’t about the spying thing etc. Please don’t make it ‘dumb’ like all the windows 8 and mobile GUI influence that is currently going around, maybe they learn this in design school currently?
Ok starlight offered to put his screenshot back, showing the older duckduckgo search look etc, which was decent of him, but i went ahead and wanted to post a photoshop version of my preferred look with a comparison of the old look also, and you can compare with the new look from the previous page:
This is the old look search result:
This is the Photoshop one i knocked up to show what i would like the new duckduckgo to look like on my screen:
I like not having huge white space all over the place, and i like having the new functionality for image search etc. I figure keep those icons ‘thin’ to not take up space when not in use and maybe just shunt the text serach results down to show the banner thing when activated, but not before? Something like that.
So I’ve been trying out DuckDuckGo for the last week or two, because I figure that privacy is good. Figured I might as well zombify this topic to talk about it.
It was pretty easy to change my Chrome settings to use DuckDuckGo, though it wasn’t one of the default choices. Just had to go into the Manage Search Engines to add it to the choices, then select it in the drop-down.
What I’ve learned is that DuckDuckGo is noticeably less useful than Google for my purposes. It tends to put much older articles on top unless I use the option to limit searches to the last day/week/etc. It’s not nearly as good as detecting if I misspell something as Google is. A couple of times, I’ve not found much of anything when I do a search, then went back to Google and found what I was looking for almost immediately. And when I search for a place and it shows me a map, I can’t do simple stuff like click on the place marker to get details.
It’s interesting to learn what I’m getting from Google in exchange for all that tracking they do. Basically, a better search service. I’ll probably switch back to Google as my default and just let 'em have my search history.
I started using DuckDuckGo about 2 weeks ago. I have to admit, so far I’m really impressed. Everything I’ve searched for has yielded Google-like results so far.
Haha, I clicked the link to read about bangs, and the top one in their example pic was ‘!a’, which immediately brought to mind “Iä! Iä! Cthulhu fhtagn!”, which seems appropriate when talking about Amazon.
I’ve been using it for about a year as my default browser on desktop and mobile. It finds 90% of what I want, though often further down the page than Google. I also just switched off of Gmail, which is delightful. I grew to detest the Gmail UI over time.
I switched to hey.com. It has VASTLY reduced the junk and cruft that gets put in front of my eyeballs. It’s not free, and being new, there are some design quirks and kinks, but I love it so far. I really appreciate the screening feature and auto-blocking of all trackers and spy pixels.
Right now, all of my other addresses forward to it. After 6 months or so, I’ll shut the others down. I’m not interested in migrating my old mailboxes.
It’s good enough for me - I don’t search through my email a lot. Essentially, it does the following:
Do you want to receive email from this person or not? Yes/No
If Yes, where should the email go? Options are the “Imbox,” which puts it in the main view, basically Inbox, the “Paper Trail,” which is meant for receipts and other transactional email (shipping notifications, etc) or the “Feed,” which essentially creates a dynamic Instagram-style feed for you out of those emails.
Do you want to get a notification when This person emails you?
4 It strips all tracking code/pixels from all emails.
You can easily change that per email or per address. You can also create tags that are auto applied to contacts. It also will group together emails in the same subject, even if they aren’t in the same chain, if you want it to.
Like I said, it has some warts to iron out, but it’s the first time that email has felt new to me since the launch of Gmail and now, 99% of the stuff I used to receive is pushed to the Feed or simply screened out.
As I’ve gotten older, I’ve been trying to remove the 10,000 “paper cuts” of digital distraction so that I can reclaim my attention. It just makes me happier as a person. I’m happy now to pay for services that enable this, even when there are free alternatives. What I enjoy so much about hey.com is more that it enables me to have far greater peace of mind than anything about the product features themselves, but I guess that was the point of it all along.
So let’s say you you regularly shop from a company that also sends a lot of junk email. I sometimes want the junk email so I don’t want to delete it, but I don’t want to know every time I get one either. The company uses the same email address for shipping notifications and spam. Can Hey deal with that intelligently? As in notifying me of shipping, but putting spam in the feed?
I just deal with this with rules. Everything is moved to a folder and marked as read, but I have to go looking for shipping notices.
I would push it all to the Feed where you can quickly scroll through and if you see the shipping notice, open it. You can also just go to the contact and it lists all emails from them, or you can go to files, where it aggregates files in a files browser view.
My understanding is they have more robust rules on the near-term roadmap. Like I said, it still has some warts because it is a brand new product. Anyhow, there’s a free 14-day trial, so you could try it out if you want. I’m not trying to sell it here. The service is great for me, but I realize it may not be for a lot of people.
(Edit: Also @LeeAbe they explain way better how it works here than I do.)
Thanks Clay. It does look neat, and everyone who uses it seems to really like it. But $99/year, I just don’t know if email is a big enough problem to pay that much.
So the duckduckgo email went to open beta (anyone can use), But it’s not email, it just forwards to another email account? But it does strip a bunch of tracking stuff before forwarding it? But it’s still tied to another email account it looks like. To log back in I had to enter a phrase sent to my email account. I knew duckduckgo was going to have an email service but I thought it was gonna be an actual email service.
Anyone used this back when you needed an invite? Does it really seem to help?
You may be surprised to learn that 70% of emails contain trackers that can detect when you’ve opened a message, where you were when you opened it, and what device you were using. If that isn’t creepy enough, this email data can be used to profile you, including to target you with ads, and influence the content you see online. Ever open an email and see a related ad about it soon thereafter? Yup, blame email trackers. This data about you is also usually sent directly to third parties, most likely without your consent.
I’d heard of this a year or so ago, but thought it was going to be an actual email service. Still seems nice enough for those who want to increase online privacy as much as possible.
