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So, while China has put Google on hiatus, I use “bing” (fuck.) while I’m downloading torrents and don’t bother to configure VPN for specific traffic. I noticed something:
I was looking up a youtube video to paste to someone, specifically from True Romance with Christopher Walken and Anthony Hopkins, and Google always brings up all the youtube clips I search immediately without question — maybe because they own Youtube – however, Bing excludes any link. So I tried some SPECIFIC youtube search on bing, in this case, “youtube young turks” – again, excluded. “youtube <anything>” – nothing. Bing. Fuck bing. Where are my youtube search results. I disconnected my torrents, connected vpn, and searched my youtube results just because Bing…sucks.
I was using bing for a few months, especially on my phone, where it’s not practical to have a VPN open all the time. What I’ve found is that Bing is total garbage and almost never finds exactly what I’m looking for (unlike Google which is amazingly accurate and precise, even with sentence-long search criteria).
I recently switched to DuckDuckGo, which is a quickly-growing search engine that competes with Google on privacy by not storing any user data. The design of the search engine is beautiful and although it isn’t as precise as Google with long tail search criteria, it works much better than Bing. Theres a DuckDuckGo app which I have installed on my home screen now which I use when searching for random things.
Before settling on DDG I tried some other search engines like Yahoo and found them to not be any better than Bing (Yahoo is actually powered by Bing – go figure).
I was recently forced to switch to Bing as well. One time I searched for my hometown’s wikipedia so entered “wikipedia xxxxxxx” in the search bar. The wikipedia page was the 4th hit. The 3 first results were just random maps/tourist pages. Lol.
This is a continuous pain in the ass when it comes to navigating Chinese webpages, I’d love to know the real motives behind barring google services (albeit intermittently), since it flies in the face of supporting international trade. I’ve switched to using the Bing translate plugin, which is ample enough for any banking etc. online, but damn does Bing suck generally.
I tried to use bing when Google doesn’t work in China, and you never get what you want from bing. Never ever. What a fuck.
This is a continuous pain in the ass when it comes to navigating Chinese webpages, I’d love to know the real motives behind barring google services (albeit intermittently), since it flies in the face of supporting international trade. I’ve switched to using the Bing translate plugin, which is ample enough for any banking etc. online, but damn does Bing suck generally.
Let’s be honest, promoting fairness or international trade is something that China laughs at. They care about growing the domestic economy and enriching Chinese businesses. One of the ways they do that is by blocking foreign competitors from doing business in China, opening the door for domestic copycats like Baidu to make billions of dollars. Barring foreign competitors enables inferior domestic rivals unfettered access to the largest and potentially most lucrative internet market in the world.
Expats in China are probably a significant portion of the Bing user base. Who else would possibly even have a reason to use Bing?
Let’s be honest, promoting fairness or international trade is something that China laughs at.
No shit. Huawei being a case in point. At the same time though, screwing with a backbone of services that quite literally help foreign interests navigate the whole of China is something that commonly infuriates me for it’s heinous short-sightedness.
I have no doubt that’s set to continue.
No shit. Huawei being a case in point. At the same time though, screwing with a backbone of services that quite literally help foreign interests navigate the whole of China is something that commonly infuriates me for it’s heinous short-sightedness. I have no doubt that’s set to continue.
Yup. Everyone needs to have a VPN in China at this point if you want to access the internet.
internet.
I’ve been using smart DNS for a while now, since various VPN protocols have been suffering DPI this year.
Go China.
I use Bing and Yahoo sometimes too when I’m can’t be bothered to connect to the VPN. I think Bing has improved a lot. At least with search engines you can change around and use what is available, not so with email (ie. Gmail!).
I’ve been using smart DNS for a while now, since various VPN protocols have been suffering DPI this year. Go China.
please explain
Since Google likely isn’t coming back and I don’t want to have to have a VPN constantly running on all devices, I definitely recommend switching to duckduckgo.com. I changed it to the default search engine on my phone and laptop (with this Safari extension) and it works great. Happy to no longer be using Bing and I actually find Duck.co to be roughly equivalent to Google in terms of accuracy. The fact that you don’t need an account and they don’t store any user information are nice perks.
I definitely recommend switching to Duck.co. I changed it to the default search engine on my phone and laptop (with this Safari extension) and it works great.
I’ve done the same, also using a Mercury (browser) extension on my phone. It’s a clean & concise search engine that’s been great to use so far.
What is Duck.co? I’ve just glanced at it. It doesn’t seem like a search engine?
You’re right, I posted the wrong URL, sorry about that. I edited the post above, and this is the correct URL: duckduckgo.com
It operates in essentiality the same way as Google, just without all the bloat. It has a particular focus on privacy and not using cookies or other things to track what you do.
When I used duckduckgo I often end up with a ton of different-language results.. maybe it just depends on what I’m searching for. I used to often go to the google.XX country that would better find the results I was looking for in many cases, rather than google.com which would use my IP’s current country.
I see in duckduckgo settings they have a ‘region’ option, though. Maybe that helps..
Maps works OK, sometimes. The maps and the GPS usually work, but putting in search terms will often just hang (I have Baidu Maps as a backup). Google Hangouts and Google Play Store don’t work without a VPN, currently.
Maps works OK, sometimes. The maps and the GPS usually work, but putting in search terms will often just hang (I have Baidu Maps as a backup). Google Hangouts and Google Play Store don’t work without a VPN, currently.
That’s good to know. Thanks Chris.
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